Part of our household practice is not having a television set. This prevents us (especially me) from mindlessly channel-hopping and watching trashy TV just because it’s on. We do watch DVDs and often buy boxed sets of TV shows, and this helps keep our TV watching in the realms of intentionality. It drives me crazy when I visit someone and they have the TV on all the time. I feel like my brain’s going to rip in two because of my attention being split.

One of the other advantages of watching only DVDs is that we’re not exposed to television advertising!

We just finished watching Season Three of Lost. In fact we watched the two hour finale twice. And tonight we’re doing something unusual — going round to my father-in-law’s place to watch the first episode of Season Four of Lost, at the same time as the rest of the world.

I’m really looking forward to seeing the story unfold. Being exposed to 30 minutes of advertising in a two hour period, less so.

While we’re at it, if you’re a Lost fan you may appreciate this Cracked.com article on “Five Questions Lost Writers Need to Answer and Why They Won’t.” I enjoyed it. My wife didn’t. It’s a wee bit cruel and sarcastic, so I guess that says something about our respective personalities!

In October the BBC reported that the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, said he feared biofuels would bring more hunger, and that it was a crime against humanity to divert arable land to the production of crops which are then burned for fuel. At the time the thought crossed my mind that there already is such a diversion of food crops — to farm animals. Vast amounts of grain and other crops that can be eaten by humans are fed to cattle and other animals, with roughly a 90% loss of the calories contained in the original foods.

The article stuck in the back of my mind until the other day, when I spotted a NYT piece, Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler, that summed up better than I could (or at least had time to) the arguments for modern farming constituting an assault on our planet’s ability to feed its citizens:

Grain, meat and even energy are roped together in a way that could have dire results. More meat means a corresponding increase in demand for feed, especially corn and soy, which some experts say will contribute to higher prices.

This will be inconvenient for citizens of wealthier nations, but it could have tragic consequences for those of poorer ones

And check out the photo that accompanied the article:

This is about as far removed from the stereotyped view of cows bucolically grazing on verdant pastures as you could imagine.

There was a time when I could never imagine myself being a vegetarian. Now I can’t imagine ever going back.

Remember that slogan from Microsoft in the 1990’s? I think it was for Windows 95, that much-delayed operating system that seemed in danger of becoming Windows 96. The slogan came up in the context of an excellent article on multitasking. Here’s a quasi-Buddhist extract about “Where to you want to go today?”

…consider that “Where do you want to go today?” was really manipulative advice, not an open question. “Go somewhere now,” it strongly recommended, then go somewhere else tomorrow, but always go, go, go—and with our help. But did any rebel reply, “Nowhere. I like it fine right here”?

And that’s the problem with technolust: it taps into a deep restlessness that is driven by a longing for completeness and connection, yet the objects of our longing can never ultimately take us to those goals. Completeness and connection start by being right here, right now. It’s when we learn to like “here and now” that we find ourselves losing our technolust and finding our happiness.

Scientology has become a hot topic on the news-site Digg.com, mainly because a group of hackers calling themselves “Anonymous” has been using what are called “distributed denial of service” attacks on Scientology websites. DDoS attacks involve continuously bombarding web servers with requests for information, to the point where the web servers are overwhelmed. Diggers love this kind of “hacktivist” vigilantism, and so numerous stories about Anonymous and Scientiology have been appearing in the “most popular” lists on Digg.

I just finished reading a particularly interesting one, a cover story from Time magazine in 1991. It’s a long article but well worth a read to get a sense of the sheer criminality of the Scientology movement. Sure, there’s the routine scamming of individuals, fraud, and tax evasion, but there’s also infiltration of political parties, the theft of government documents, and an astonishingly effective intelligence-gathering operation:

“In my opinion the church has one of the most effective intelligence operations in the U.S., rivaling even that of the FBI,” says Ted Gunderson, a former head of the FBI’s Los Angeles office.

Individuals and private organizations that have challenged Scientology have been harassed and even sued into non-existence. Even government agencies are nervous about taking them on. The article concludes:

As long as the organization’s opponents and victims are successfully squelched, Scientology’s managers and lawyers will keep pocketing millions of dollars by helping it achieve its ends.

The Church of Scientology is, of course, very much still with us. But a sign of Digg’s power is that four hours after the link to the Times article became popular, the 1991 cover story was the fourth most-read story on the Times website.

I’m very excited that Barack Obama won so handsomely in South Carolina. Apart from anything else it’s an amazing sign of change in the US one of the original confederate states would vote so overwhelmingly for a black candidate.

But I also want to see a Democrat in the presidency, and I fear that Hillary Clinton is a figure who attracts such hatred from the right wing is unelectable.

And much as I thought that Bill Clinton’s presidency was a good one, I don’t think this is a good time for the US to be heading backwards. The Clinton presidency set the ground for the Bush presidency, with its disdain for the constitution and the rule of law, and I fear that having the Clintons back in power would merely be a hiatus on the path to an even more undemocratic regime.

But perhaps most of all the Clinton’s campaigning has become sickening to me. This is from Bob Herbert’s column in the New York Times.

…then there was Bob Kerrey, the former senator and another Clinton supporter, who slimed up the campaign with the following comments:

“It’s probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.”

Pressing the point, Mr. Kerrey told CNN’s John King: “I’ve watched the blogs try to say that you can’t trust him because he spent a little bit of time in a secular madrassa. I feel quite the opposite.”

As Herbert said, “Get it?”

This kind of “sliming” is deeply harmful to US culture. I think that Hilary sees Obama as “the enemy” rather than as a political opponent. I don’t think that Obama makes this kind of category confusion — a confusion that arises from an inadequate ethical sensibility. Much of the first half of Obama’s victory speech is devoted to a critique of the Clintons’ campaign. Note that this is not the same thing as an attack on the Clintons, although I’m not sure they would appreciate the distinction.

The latest news on Craig Venter’s genomic hacking seems hyped to me. The news, in short, is “Scientists have built the first synthetic genome by stringing together 147 pages of letters representing the building blocks of DNA.”

In some ways this is quite an accomplishment. He’s managed to make a bigger chunk of DNA than has been achieved before. If it had been made totally by machines I’d be really impressed. But they used machines to make shorter stretches of DNA and ended up using yeast to stitch them together. So I’m impressed, but not really impressed.

The ultimate plan is to strip down a genome to its essential core and to have created a new life form. But as this skeptical article points out, we know that some genes are essential but haven’t a clue what they do.

The whole project reminds me of how I work with the php code that runs this blog. On a fundamental level I don’t understand how it works and I couldn’t create the code from scratch. But I can tinker with it by altering it, adding bits of code from elsewhere, or deleting bits that do things I don’t want to be done. But it’s all hacking. I still don’t really know what I’m doing. Sometimes I kill my blog by editing something crucial. And I think Craig Venter’s work is like that. They don’t know how the yeast managed to stitch the shorter DNA sequences together. They don’t know how the genes they created work. It’s all at a rather primitive stage.

But no doubt this is all a transitional stage on the way to a fuller understanding of how DNA works to create living organisms, so more power to Venter and his DNA hacking. One day we will fully understand how to design and construct an organism from scratch, but I think that’s a long way off, despite the headlines we’ll no doubt be seeing in the next year or two.

I had a good day yesterday.

I heard from a publishing company, Sounds True, who are sending a contract for a three CD set of talks and guided meditations on the breath.

I sold a Mac PowerBook on eBay and got a lot more than I’d been expecting.

I sent 200 pounds (weight) of Dharma books to a prison Dharma group at the Los Angeles Zen Center.

Digg threw this story up today — Guess which driver’s facing 21 years in prison — the drunk , rich, white one or the sober, poor, black one? — and is causing heated discussions.

These pictures were submitted to Digg on consecutive days.

The one of Bush is from Andrew Sullivan’s blog on The Atlantic and has the caption:

US President George W. Bush leans over to talk with a girl after Bush participated in a lesson for young children on the importance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day during a tour of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC, 21 January 2008.

There’s no source given for the picture of Hillary. It’s also undated so it’s not clear if Hillary was doing some MLK Day visiting.

Funny to see two very similar images of mistrust so close together.

Definitely an “apropos of nothing” post, this one. This morning I had a phone call from my dad, who sounded a bit panicky. I was worried that something bad had happened, like my mum had taken sick. Through the bad line and with Maia crying because she was straining to pass a poop I picked up, however, that there was something up with his computer, but because of the circumstances (I was only hearing every other word) I wasn’t able to talk then and told him I’d call back as soon as I was free.

My dad’s 74, new to computers, and often has problems, but I assumed that this must be something fairly serious if it couldn’t wait until one of our twice-weekly calls. I was a bit concerned that I might not be able to offer much help from 3,500 miles away, especially since he’s on Windows XP, which I have very little experience with.

Anyway, Maia had her poop and I called back using Skype so I’d have my hands free and actually be able to hear my father. So what was up?

It turned out he’d been reading a book while burning some CDs and had accidentally dropped the book on the keyboard. To his shock, the impact caused the display on the monitor to rotate 90 degrees! It reminded me of the way in Maia’s fumbling with my keyboard often manages to produce unusual results, the most recent of which being that she managed to search for the word “ass” in my browser window. I’d no idea she was interested in donkeys.

I was relieved that my dad’s problem wasn’t too serious after all (although damned inconvenient) and I assumed there must be some magic combination to reset the display to its normal settings. After a bit of searching on Google I came up with two sites that suggested hitting Crtl+Alt+right-arrow. However all that did was flip the display by 180 degrees, meaning that it was now 90 degrees off in the other direction.

So I took a guess and reckoned that if Crtl+Alt+right-arrow changed the display one way then Crtl+Alt+left-arrow might have the opposite effect. However all that did was flip the display another 180 degrees.

My second guess was that either Crtl+Alt+up-arrow or Crtl+Alt+down-arrow might do the trick. And it turned out I was right! Crtl+Alt+up-arrow put the display back in its normal position. My dad thinks I’m a computer genius, but all I did was search on Google and play around.

Thus ends another exciting morning.

Just a quick one today. I came across the Buddhist Military Sangha blog the other day.

It is a “nonpolitical and nonsectarian forum for Buddhists serving in the US Armed Forces.”

I’m fascinated by the idea of Buddhists in the military, and I hope to interview some of the writers on that blog for Wildmind. LT Jeanette Shin seems to be the most prolific poster at the moment.

Continuing on the theme of clearing my desk and clearing my mind, I’m continuing to work on getting more organized. This strikes some people who know me as ridiculous because they see me as being already very organized, and compared to the average person I probably am. But I’m aware that there are some glaring weak spots in my ability to deal with bits of paper, and as I go through the heap of papers that has filled my desk’s in-tray I feel rather embarrassed. The most egregious oversights that have come to light are:

• A check from 2006 that never got deposited.
• A letter from 2006 that never even got opened.
• A folder titled “for immediate action” that contained the above-mentioned articles

What I’ve been doing is processing the heap. Well, actually, first I discovered that I had several heaps, and so I collected those all together. Then I started processing. Some stuff in the heap was simply shredded because it was junk. Some was filed in my filing cabinet because it was long-term material that simply hadn’t been returned there or had never been put in hanging folders for storage. Quite a lot of the stuff needed some kind of intermediate holding because it consists of things I want to action later. That’s the stuff that’s always caused me trouble.

So here’s what I’ve been doing.

1. I take the stuff that needs to be acted upon (e.g. an application form for a local business organization).
2. I take a manila folder.
3. I take a new hand-held label printer (A Brother PT-1010 if you’re interested) and create a nice neat label (”Newmarket Business Association”), which then gets applied to the said folder.
4. The folder gets filed alphabetically in a hanging file box that sits next to my desk.
5. I go to my organizational program (OmniFocus) and enter a task for that material (”Complete and mail application for Newmarket Business Association”).
6. And then I add the exact same text as was on the label at the end of the task, which now reads “Complete and mail application for Newmarket Business Association - “NEWMARKET BUSINESS ASSOCIATION.”
7. If necessary I date the task, but sometimes I’m not doing that since I don’t want to over-plan.

Ta-da!

Anyway, thanks to my hanging file box, the alphabetical filing system, the labels, and the fact that the task listing now tells me exactly where to look to find the actionable materials I no longer have to store stuff in my in tray.

My in tray is now close to empty. It’ll maybe take another hour to process the remaining stuff that’s in there.

In future my in tray will not be a depository for stuff I want to remember to do, but will be a genuine in tray — a kind of entrance hall for my office. Anything lifted from my in tray will be processed, filed if necessary (some will be shredded and recycled), and a task created (again only if necessary).

I think I’m finally getting the hang of dealing with paper.

Having a desk which is free from paper is good for my mind. Knowing that I’m unlikely to lose a task is good for my mind. I feel mentally cleaner already. Really, this is an important mindfulness practice.

I’m still using the emwave device while I meditate, in an experiment to see whether or not it’s helpful.

One hitch was that I thought the thing had died on me. The display would light up when I switched it on, and then the top LED would glow red and the rest of the display would fade out. I tried recharging it but that didn’t help. Maybe a dodgy battery, I thought, so I contacted HeartMath’s tech-support. At the end of the day I had a call from a really pleasant and helpful guy who figured out that I’d inadvertently set the device to “advanced mode” and “stealth mode.” Didn’t know it had a stealth mode. He guessed this straight away, and I got the impression he’d seen this a lot.

One problem with the emwave, as I mentioned in my last post on the topic, is that it tries to use one button and one display to control or show many different functions. Honestly, after two weeks I’ve had to have the manual with me every time I use it. It’s that complexity-to-the-point-of-unusability that made me think it was broken. Anyway, it’s “fixed” now.

I moved up from level two to level three. On level two I could keep the display in the green (”very coherent”) for at least 90% of the time. Okay, let’s move it on, I thought. On level three I found, first time around, that I was in the red (”low coherence”) for 90% of the time. The rest of the meditation I was in the blue (medium) zone. There was no hint of green to be seen. The shame!

A strong factor for pushing me into the blue was visualization. Another was metta (lovingkindness). The two of those together were able to get my coherence levels up. (Listen to me, I don’t even know if coherence is a real phenomenon!).

Anyway, this is an interesting challenge. I tend to think that since I’ve been meditating for years this should all be a skoosh, but apparently not. Of course I’m a new father, frequently sleep-deprived, and for much of last year my meditation practice was non-existent, so maybe I’m just not back in the groove yet. But if that was level three, what the heck would level four be like?

More later.

When my parents were visiting in October they sang a nice wee song to Maia. It went:

Oh, Maia Sering, I love you.
Tell me Maia Sering do you love me too?
I’ll marry you my darling,
I’ll die if you say no,
And I will come and kiss you, Maia Sering, oh.

There’s a nice tune that goes with it — rather old-fashioned but very sweet. I sing Maia to sleep with it all the time. Apparently my mum and dad sang it to me when I was small, but I don’t remember that at all.

Anyway, I’d heard them singing this years ago to my niece, with the name changed, naturally (”Oh, Jessie Barrie…”), and I was curious about the origins of the song. I’d assumed it was some old song from the 1940’s or earlier but I’d tried finding it on Google without success. So I asked my parents and my mother was pretty sure that this was a family song, and she thought that possibly my grandmother had made it up. So that was a surprise, because I’d never thought of my family as having a creative streak. Good for you, Marjory Tragham!

Also, I swear that I woke up well before dawn this morning and heard Maia “singing” the song! She’s only 14 months so the lyrics were composed entirely of “da-da-da,” and she wasn’t too tuneful, but she did the first two lines in perfect rhythm. Of course I’m not the sharpest crayon in the art-supplies box at 2 AM, so I may have been hallucinating, but I’m sticking to my story for now.

If anyone else is familiar with that song, or even one similar to it, could you please let me know?

New Year is often a time when I make changes in my life, as many people do. This year I’m working my way through Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen.

While I think there’s some hype in the whole “stress-free” part of the title Allen does seem to have some very good advice on handling the “stuff” that work and life throws at us.

My own weak spot is dealing with paper, and that’s where I’m most looking for advice. While I can have incredibly neat, efficient filing systems on computers, I tend to accumulate piles of paper. I remember visiting an old workplace a couple of years after leaving and someone asking me where something was filed on the computer — I immediately knew because my filing system was very logical.

Now, while I’ve learned how to use a filing cabinet for long-term storage of bank statements, notes for talks, important documents, etc, no one has ever explained to me how to use an in-tray system, and how to deal with those bits of paper that you don’t need immediately but which need to be dealt with in the next few days or weeks. My tendency is to leave them out so that they’ll act as visual reminders that they need to be dealt with, but that system frankly sucks. For a start it creates an atmosphere of clutter that’s stressful in itself, but also things tend to accumulate in piles and the things that are hidden cease being visual reminders because I can’t see them!

This is the kind of thing I’m looking for help with. I need to learn to be more mindful with paper. It’s early days with the book and I’m still at the stage of getting an overview of Allen’s system, but already my desk has been free of papers and other clutter for two days now. Of course part of that is because I’ve moved everything onto a heap in my in-tray, but the next step (gotta keep reading that book — haven’t got to this bit yet) is working through the pile and process it. That’s the mysterious bit.

There’s an astonishing story in the Times today about a monkey, Idoya, who has electrodes implanted in her brain. The electrodes are able to pick up on the activity that controls Idoya’s legs, and the signals are then transmitted to a computer and ultimately to a robot capable of walking. Got all that?

So Idoya walks on a treadmill and — thousands of miles away in Japan — a robot walks in step with her. Idoya can see the robot walking on a computer screen as she pounds the treadmill. Got that?

Then, Idoya’s treadmill is stopped. And the robot keeps walking, because Idoya is thinking about making the robot walk. Wow!

The implications for this are absolutely staggering, especially in terms of its applications to human disability. (Plus, robots and monkeys working together would make a great Sci Fi movie).

All this reminds me of some of the reasons I got interested in Buddhism. When I was at high school and studying science I realized that the signals going along nerves from, say, your eye to your brain are exactly the same as the signals that are going along your nerves between your ears and your brain. Ditto for the other senses.

So the sense organs are different. The experiences in the brain are different. And yet in between the sense organs and the brain all senses are conveyed by the same little sparks of electricity flowing along nerves. So it occurred to me that our experience is created in the mind (or brain). The difference between the smell of a banana and the color of grass is produced in the mind. And we can never actually know what we’re sensing. We can never experience things directly — we can only experience the pictures, sounds, etc that are produced in the brain. If we had different brains we’d experience very differently. If we re-routed our nerves, say by taking olfactory nerves into the visual cortex, we’d see smells.

I can’t tell you how fascinating this was, to realize that we live in a “Matrix”-like illusion. That got me thinking about the nature of reality, the nature of perception, the way we construct experiences, and all that interesting stuff. I even predicted experiments exactly like the one involving Idoya (although I imagined the robot being on the Moon). And no monkeys were involved (or harmed).

(Anyway, I hope they’re nice to Idoya. After all, she’s a sentient being. And she can control 200 lb robots with her thoughts.)

I was talking the other day about how Maia is signing and how she’d been repeatedly using a sign that neither Shrijnana nor I could figure out. She’s made up signs for “cheerios” (which she’s addicted to — that’s a modification of the sign for “more”) and “music” (that’s kind of sad — she waggles one arm in what is evidently an imitation of her father dancing).

Anyway, so we thought she’d made up yet another sign, but my clever wife figured out that she had been trying to tell us that she wanted a bath! (She was doing the sign, but in a modified way). Poor Maia must have been so frustrated wanting to play in the bath but not being able to get her dense parents to understand her.

Incidentally, neither of us is a signer. We’ve learned what little we know from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Baby Sign Language. I don’t know how anyone can bring up a baby without sign language. How else could a one-year-old tell you she wanted something as specific as music, or cheerios, or a bath?

There’s a great article in yesterday’s Boston Globe called “Don’t just stand there, think.” It’s about research showing that thinking involves the body as well as the mind — a phenomenon that’s called “embodied cognition.” For example, when people were doing spatial relations problems researchers noticed that their eyes moved in characteristic patterns just before getting the answer. Asking people to make the same eye movements helped them to figure out the problem more quickly too, even though they though the eye movements were distracting.

The business of the body being involved in mental processing is familiar to anyone who has experience of meditation. The body’s posture, even something as simple as the angle of the head, has a big effect on how we feel and what level of thinking goes on. Often when people find their meditation entering “the zone” they find that there are spontaneous changes in the way they hold their bodies.

I’m having a short break from writing an outline for a set of CDs that Sounds True is interested in having me record, and I just stumbled upon the following, which this site says is on the actor Jeff Bridges’ blog (tho’ I haven’t checked to confirm):

While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles. Now, while doing this, draw the number “6″ in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction and there’s nothing you can do about it.

And you know, dammit, he’s right!

Added later:

I got my wife to try this as well and she was equally incapable of keeping her foot circling clockwise. She didn’t try for very long, however. I tried several times and never got the coordination going, although I can do things like pat my head and circle my tummy without any difficulty at all. The Jeff Bridges trick is a really weird thing.

I think a lot of people don’t know that there are free TV programs available for download from the iTunes store. I’ve discovered a few gems through that route, as well as a few clunkers. Perhaps because of the writers’ strike there’s not as much available as usual, but the other night I downloaded a program called “How to Look Good Naked.” I don’t know, I thought maybe it was some kind of comedy show — some kind of “Sex and the City” knock-off. It wasn’t.

It turned out to be a somewhat glib and pop-psych but nevertheless fascinating case-history of a woman moving from hating her body to loving it. No, she wasn’t working out. She wasn’t dieting. This was a woman (Layla) who was being coached to become aware of the cognitive biases that she experienced around the issue of her body image. Now Layla is a big girl — no doubt about it. And she was first put on a diet by her mother when she was 12. She’s given up struggling with losing weight. She didn’t have the confidence to date.

The most interesting things for me:

• Layla was shown a line-up of women, arranged in a line according to their hip size. The women were all in their underwear (hey, this is serious research!). Layla was asked to place herself in the line where she thought she fitted in terms of her hip size. She placed herself at the second-to-largest spot. Actually, she was second-to-smallest. So she saw herself as being way bigger than she actually was.
• A picture of her underwear-clad body (minus head) was projected on a building above a busy city street, and passers-by were asked for their opinions. People said various things like “That’s what a real woman looks like,” “Great rack,” etc. Layla was shown the video and it was obviously a shock to her that people might find her body attractive. She thought of herself as unattractive and assumed other people must as well. Now I said that Layla was a big girl, but by current US standards (excluding the freak-show that is Holywood and the fashion scene) she’s just “normally overweight.”
• Layla was shown simultaneous videos of three women’s bodies as they walked down a street, and was asked for her opinions about them. One woman looked glamorous, sexy, confident — she was striding down the street. Another looked like she was walking to work in a business-like suit but also slouching. Another was slouching and looked like she lacked confidence, and was dressed in pretty dreadful baggy clothes. The first woman looked slimmer and in much better physical shape than the other two. Except — it was all the same woman, with different clothes and exhibiting different levels of confidence.

Layla was also given a makeover being shown how to pick clothes that worked for her figure. I think most women might find that more interesting than I did.

By the end of the program (which was shot over five days) Layla had moved from being chronically underconfident to being proud of herself, thinking of herself as being sexy, and being much happier. It was just a blast to see that transformation. In my own work as a teacher I find that there’s nothing that makes me happier than seeing people changing and becoming happier, although my meditation teaching doesn’t usually involve advice on picking a bra.

I’d suggest downloading iTunes if you don’t have it already, navigating to the iTunes store, and downloading the show. It’s worth a look.