Happy Spring!

We had a winter that seemed to qualify as such. Spring, however, is transitional, even more so than fall, which we judge by color. "Oh there is no spring anymore!" someone always asserts. What is spring then? It is not reduced to a single characteristic, is not snow, or foliage, or broiling days.
It is enough rain to keep us through the drier summers, enough heat to move our gardens, cool air well into April so our spinach doesn't bolt. It is a hatching and birthing season. Trout and Baseball season. A calendar season, as when the sun rises due east and sets due west, and a time of strong but balanced forces. For the ancient Chinese philosopher, whose source is the I Ching, it is when thunder comes out of the ground. It is called Chen, the Arousing.

A singular moment of Spring is when I can perceive upon the wooded hills around us the faintest, but deepening, blush of red and pink buds.

Poetry Friday, Medieval China Edition

In 1125 c.e. A vast storm began to gather over the glories of Sung China. The Jurchen peoples, expanding out of Manchuria, were breaking the Sung's hold on its northern territories. In 1127 they overwhelmed the emperor's forces at Kaifeng, the capital (where I was married, by the way, 869 years later), forcing them south.

Lu Yu, self-nicknamed Fang (fang: "the wild old man") was born around this time, in a small boat tethered to banks of the Huai, the traditional boundary between northern and southern China, parallel to and between the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. His life would be long- 82 years- and would see the gathering of an even greater force than the Jurchen, the Mongols, who would destroy the Jin and eventually overwhelm the Sung.

His life would also meld the two great philosophical traditions of Chinese philosophy: the engaged, rational, urbane Confucian and the ironic, wholly untamed Daoist. He was a brilliant writer early in life, but never passed the crucial civil service exam, a stilted and complex literary test which guaranteed a place in the Chinese world. He was a patriot, and deeply critical of the government's weak response to the Jurchen threat. He would often disappear to his hermit retreat in the West, far from the turmoil and failure that forever shadowed him.

His poetry is dense with qualities utterly untranslatable to English. Keep in mind that the tones (or pitch direction) of each word in the Chinese is distinct and patterned, and each pair of lines can mirror each other in this way. Another thing is that many Chinese words sound very, very similar, allowing for a richness of punning impossible in our language. And lastly, the words are actually dense, abstract, visual designs that also constantly pun and comment on each other.

What follows are translations by David M. Gordon.

"Crossing Spirit-Rock's Three Peaks"

On that crag meet horse?
Shocked hell out of old crock.

Shu Range or Wu Crests,
the same washed clean abyss.

From ground up, blue green,
five thousand fathoms:

I'll cram that vast peak
into this flea-sized poem.


Where the above poem signals the light spirit of the hermit out west, this poem expresses the disappointment of the exhausted and duty-bound Confucian:

"New Spring'

I'm at age's rim:
three years ill,

and new king's first
ten day's overcast;

drooping fence,
a dried vine ties up,

and ruined wall
overrun with green moss.

Grief for own land,
labor, alone, tears-

to lull Huns,
warrior bends heart's will.

I'm disjoined from my
kids' world-

how make them
a white-haired song?

Why Struggle?

I usually find meditation more difficult when I have more time to myself. A routine, apparently is crucial- if I know I have only that 30 minutes to sit, it is then or never. But perhaps this isn't the case at all. Perhaps, just perhaps, I am just impossible.

There is a "map" to deepening one's practice in Zen, one's teacher and tradition. In Shim Gum Do, the map is seemingly straight forward. Learn the sword or karate forms, observe your mind (your mood, concentration, resistance, fear, judgment) while doing them, and bring those observations into everyday life. While doing the dishes, pay attention, know when you are thinking elsewhere, and come back to the dishes. Everyday practice. This is what distinguishes Chinese from Indian Buddhism, and was what Dogen brought back with him to Japan.

Sitting zazen is important to me. But, I fear, I am no good at it. I can sit for extended periods- especially on retreat- but my mind scrambles all over the cage it has made for itself. Rarely do I get up from my morning practice and think, "that was pretty good". But the judgment on one's practice is one of the layers to peel back. Who is judging, why the need to judge? Am I hedging? Am I really doing what I think I am doing? When I am with my children, am I fully with them?

Yet there are echoes throughout my day that something has shifted. Sitting with noticably better focus in the morning has no relationship to my state of mind for the rest of the day. I have observed that my mood, effectiveness, gentleness, insight over the course of a day have no apparent relationship to how focused my morning practice was. If I wanted a "good" day, sitting every morning is not the way to get one.

What has changed is that my ability to concentrate has improved. The last time that happened was while training intensively for my second black belt in sword. I am also somewhat less affected by other people's moods, more so than can be explained by the long journey from 43 to 43 and a half.

It is not often a sports commentator makes much sense to me. I even dreamt last night of a particularly inane exchange between a sports writer and a ball player: boring question, vague and predictable answer. But during a rain delay last night one commentator was talking about his playing time in the majors, and how the best coaches were usually players who weren't Major League sucesses. Why? They struggled consciously, nothing came easy. They had to analyze their game, and everyone else's, in order to find a fingerhold to keep them in the big leagues. A brilliant athlete is often so intuitive, and certain elements of the game so easy for so long, that he or she can't explain it. How do you throw such an effective slider? Well, I just kind of zing it in there. Thanks, man. That'll help me keep my job.

The struggle is the practice. We don't sit to get something, we sit to sit. It is a workshop. It reminds me a bit of, well, Practice...play your instrument, learn your lines and stage directions, comb through the data systematically, mix your paints, then do what you do without a trace of self-consciousness. Do your practice, and then take it out into the world.

Morning All, vacation edition...

Today is the day I have 6 uninterrupted hours to work. I must use it well. While I attempt that, please mull over this very provisional version of a "teaching matrix" for TAS, based on (stolen from!) Zen Mountain Monastery's:


Body: Each student is required to take 120 hours of yoga or martial arts, as well as 120 additional hours of physical education. All students have opportunities to help prepare and cook our daily lunches, which are varied and highly nutritious.

Arts: Our visual arts program develops basic skills and use of materials as well as a deep awareness of the creative process as a mode of self knowledge. More advanced classes develop technique in various media. The music program provides basic instruction in singing, guitar, composition, and performance, and develops the ability to create instruments as well as to compose and share musical ideas.

Academics: The TAS program is based on the assumption that the traditional liberal arts of history, natural science, mathematics, written and verbal communication, and languages are best taught in small, high supportive classes that move at the student’s individual pace. Older students contribute a great deal to the shaping of their own course of study. Each student is required to pass a course on basic writing skills and an advanced class on research projects. All students complete a senior project.
note to seniors: although a total of 72 credit hours are required to graduate, all seniors have a separate requirement to complete at least 18 credit hours for their senior year, regardless of their credit status.

Teacher: The teacher-student relationship is the most important relationship at TAS; it is the axis that the school experience turns on. By the end of the sophomore year each student is expected to have developed a close, cooperative, working relationship with at least one member of the TAS faculty. This faculty member provides the stability and mentoring needed to develop a plan for graduation as well as for yearly goals and the day to day support every young person requires. This teacher is also in frequent communication with the student’s family.

Meditation/mindfulness: All students are instructed in the basic skill of meditation, which is the foundation for self-awareness. Meditation and mindfulness has been clearly demonstrated to help with problems of attention, depression, anger, and relationships. The ability to choose the object of one’s attention is probably the most important cognitive skill a person can develop.
TAS will be developing a contemplative education program for interested students. It will include retreats in school and away from it, as well as support for mindfulness practice throughout certain school days.

Social Justice: All students are required to commit to community service through any of the following programs: elder outreach, established local programs, and TAS’s “Books Through Bars” which collects and distributes books to prisoners around the country.

Ritual: TAS has three major events during the school year- the fall opening ceremony, the winter coffee house, and graduation. All older students are expected to attend each and fully participate. Each school day opens with a period of meditation and closes with a brief ceremony which requires quiet attentiveness. At midday, just before lunch, all activity in the school ceases for a moment of silence and gratefulness.

Work: All students perform chores in the kitchen throughout the week. In the Spring and Fall the vegetable and flower gardens require constant attention, as do the grounds. Friday is when we clean the entire building. All students learn how to clean a kitchen and bathroom thoroughly.
Occasionally, the school will have periods of silent cleaning.

St. Swithin's- whoops- St. Patrick's Day.

I admit to little feeling at all for this holiday. It is probably a result of living in Boston for more than a decade, where with each every passing year I cringed a little more at the sheer idiocy that swarmed my otherwise marvelous Allston. My children are more Irish than I am, as their mother is nothing but, and I purely mutt, despite a moody garrulousness that points straight to Galway.

Waxing Irish is not my thing today, but rather, evidence! I find the "evidence-based" medicine and psychology and education "movements" to be rather funny. As I like to tell my teen-aged psychology students, "there really wasn't much empirically supported treatment at all before Dylan was born, that is, one human lifetime.." All the grand achievements of medicine are crammed into a very small time period.
Vaccines, check. Surgery, check. Databases, check. But perhaps the foundation for all of it is antibiotics. Modern medical life is unimaginable without antibiotics. Take them away, and surgical outcomes look pretty grim. They are the gold standard of effective, measurable treatment. And we over use them, and risk the whole enterprise.

Psychiatric medicine is my favorite hobby horse. It is so in the dark, so thoroughly infested with bad practices, so only occasionally effective that it boggles the mind. And yet, sometimes it is all we have. This era of massive over-medicating will seem as merely a groping extension of electro-convulsive therapy and lobotomies.

This site, Bandolier, is very interesting. A good layman's site for empirical research. Not the last word- there IS no last word in science- but a good place to start. For instance, health tips for the older young and younger old:

1. Eat whole grain foods (bread, or rice, or pasta) on four occasions a week. This will reduce the chance of having almost any cancer by 40%. Given that cancer gets about 1 in 3 of us in a lifetime, that's big advice.
2. Don't smoke. If you do smoke, stop. Nicotine patches, gum or inhaler won't help much, and acupuncture won't help at all. Try to reduce your smoking, as there is a profound dose-response (the more you smoke, the more likely you are to have cancer, or heart or respiratory disease). So cut down to below five cigarettes a day and leave long portions of the day without a cigarette.
3. Eat at least five portions of vegetables and fruit a day, and especially tomatoes (including ketchup), red grapes and the like, as well as salad all year. This protects against a whole variety of different nasty things:
   
   • It reduces the risk of stroke dramatically
   • It reduces the risk of diabetes considerably
   • It will reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer.
4. Use Benecol instead of butter or margarine. It really does reduce cholesterol, and reducing cholesterol will reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke even in those whose cholesterol is not particularly high.
5. Drink alcohol regularly. The type of alcohol probably doesn't matter too much, but the equivalent of a couple of glasses of wine a day or a couple of beers is a good thing. The odd day without alcohol won't hurt either. Think of it as medicine.
6. Eat fish. Eating fish once a week won't stop you having a heart attack in itself, but it reduces the likelihood of you dying from it by half.
7. Take a multivitamin tablet every day, but be sure that it is one with at least 200 micrograms of folate. The evidence is that this can substantially reduce chances of heart disease in some individuals, and it has been shown to reduce colon cancer by over 85%. It may also reduce the likelihood of developing dementia. Folate is essential in any woman contemplating pregnancy because it will reduce the chance of some birth defects.
8. If you are pregnant or have high blood pressure, coffee is best minimised. For the rest of us drinking four cups of coffee a day is likely to reduce our chances of getting colon cancer and Parkinson's disease.
9. Get breathless more often. You don't have to go to a gym or be an Olympic marathon runner. Simply walking a mile a day, or taking reasonable exercise three times a week (enough to make you sweat or glow) will substantially reduce the risk of heart disease. If you walk, don't dawdle. Make it a brisk pace. One of the benefits of regular exercise is that it strengthens bones and keeps them strong. Breaking a hip when elderly is a very serious thing.
10. Check your height and weight on a chart to see if you are overweight for your height. Your body mass index is the weight in kilograms divided by the height in metres squared: for preference it should be below 25. If you are overweight, lose it. This has many benefits. There is no good evidence on simple ways to lose weight that work. Crash diets don't work. Take it one step at a time, do the things that are possible now, and combine some calorie limitation with increased exercise. The good news is that in a few years time we may have some appetite suppressants to make it easier.

Or this analysis of older anti-depressants vs. inactive placebo in children (i.e. an inactive placebo may be more recognizable by the subject as a fake and thus make the anti-depressant seem more effective than it really is):

there is no evidence that tricyclics are more effective than placebo for depression in children and adolescents

any possible benefits are probably outweighed by the risks of toxicity

these patients may well respond to non-drug strategies


Pretty clear, don't you think? There are many studies that indicate that SSRI's (Prozac, etc) are not much better. The following is from a thorough, but short, analysis of the placebo debate and the role of the media:

...antidepressant research confirms an empirically demonstrated drug-placebo difference, although careful examination of this literature reveals that this difference is not nearly as large as most individuals believe, or as many of the pharmaceutical companies would have the public believe. Currently, the methodological problems with antidepressant trials preclude us from concluding definitively that the difference actually indicates specific biological effects of the drugs, as various nonspecific factors have not been adequately ruled out. Until these questions are answered, the media should understand that placebos can be double-edged swords, and that "expectancy" effects can result in harm as well as benefit.

There is more and more information and analysis becoming available. It requires some time and some scientific literacy. But it is worth it.

OUCH! Something is a little, well, wrong with this study...

Abstract

The intelligence–religiosity nexus:

A representative study of white adolescent Americans

The present study examined whether IQ relates systematically to denomination and income within the framework of the g nexus, using representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY97). Atheists score 1.95 IQ points higher than Agnostics, 3.82 points higher than Liberal persuasions, and 5.89 IQ points higher than Dogmatic persuasions. Denominations differ significantly in IQ and income. Religiosity declines between ages 12 to 17. It is suggested that IQ makes an individual likely to gravitate toward a denomination and level of achievement that best fit his or hers particular level of cognitive complexity. Ontogenetically speaking this means that contemporary denominations are rank ordered by largely hereditary variations in brain efficiency (i.e. IQ). In terms of evolution, modern Atheists are reacting rationally to cognitive and emotional challenges, whereas Liberals and, in particular Dogmatics, still rely on ancient, pre-rational, supernatural and wishful thinking.

I love the last sentence. I wonder a) what the writer's IQ is and b) whether or not he is an atheist.

Here is the study. Expensive and a little weedy. Just sayin'.

America is changing. Or is it?

an excerpt via Andrew Sullivan:

It's a reminder to exercise a little skepticism when you hear of America’s religious exceptionalism. Yes, America is far more devout than most of western Europe; but it is not immune to the broader crises facing established religion in the West. The days when America’s leading intellectuals contained a strong cadre of serious Christians are over. There is no Thomas Merton in our day; no Reinhold Niebuhr, Walker Percy or Flannery O’Connor. In the arguments spawned by the new atheist wave, the Christian respondents have been underwhelming.

The article is from the Sunday (London) Times. Catholicism hasn't developed any significant thinkers in our day. Think back to the fifties- so much was happening, it is hard to comprehend (to me it is a far more significant decade than the sixties)- when a Catholic monk and intellectual, Thomas Merton, wrote widely read, lucid, learned, deeply affecting books on faith, doctrine and spirituality, and had a profound engagement with poetry and with Zen Buddhist practice. It is is the kind of life possible only as a monk, and a path that some former Catholics (like myself) believe was crucial to the faith and practice of all.

The a slightly later passage jumped out at me:

[the Evangelical movement] has spawned its own shadow pop music industry, coopts the popular culture as any brand-conscious franchise would and has a completely informal form of worship. Go to one of these places and it feels like a town in itself – with shops, daycare centres, conference rooms and social networking groups. The car parks feel like those in sports stadiums; and the atmosphere evokes a big match. In 20 years, the number of Americans finding identity and God in these places has soared from 200,000 to more than 8m.

This is not, one hastens to add, an intellectual form of faith. It is a highly emotional and spontaneous variety of American Protestantism and theologically a blend of self-help, biblical literalism and Republican politics. This is, in many ways, how George W Bush reframed conservatism in America – and with one in three Americans now calling themselves evangelical, you can see the political temptation. The problem was that the issues the evangelicals focused obsessively on – abortion, gays, stem cells, feeding tubes for those in permanent vegetative states – often came to seem warped to many others. Those who might once have passively called themselves Christian suddenly found the label toxic, if it meant identifying with such a specific political agenda. And so as evangelicalism rose, atheism and nonaffiliation emerged as a reaction.

I would suggest two things: one, that American entrepreneurial Christianity is rooted in pretty shallow soil. Religion is partly about community. It used to be about communication. In the midwest, as it was being changed over from prairie to farmland (read Willa Cather's wonderful novels, especially My Antonia, or Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson), the Methodist circuit rider was one of several cords that slowly bound the region together:

In American Methodism circuits were sometimes referred to as a "charge." A pastor would be appointed to the charge by his bishop. During the course of a year he was expected to visit each church on the charge at least once, and possibly start some new ones. At the end of a year the pastors met with the bishop at annual conference, where they would often be appointed to new charges. A charge containing only one church was called a station. The traveling preachers responsible for caring for these societies, or local churches and stations, became known as circuit- riders, or sometimes saddlebag preachers. They traveled light, carrying their belongings and books in their saddlebags. Ranging far and wide through villages and wilderness, they preached daily or more often at any site available be it a log cabin, the local court house, a meeting house, or an outdoor forest setting. Unlike the pastors of settled denominations, these itinerating preachers were constantly on the move. Their assignment was often so large it might take them 5 or 6 weeks to cover the territory. (General Commission on Archives & History, United Methodist Church)

Communication: The local Catholic parishes, the crucial Congregational churches of New England, the freemasonry halls in the first half of this country's history, the black churches, the abolition, child labor, and temperance movements...each was brought into being within a dynamic communication nexus. My guess is that technological changes have begun to displace this function of religion.

Community: American has always been a nation of displaced persons. The rise of mega-churches is utterly linked to the rise of the sunbelt and the huge gap between economic 0pportunity and established social linkages. The decline in Catholicism is no doubt partly attributable to both industial decline in the northeast and the inability of the Church to adequately address the sexual abuse scandals. More changes are coming, and they will be felt quite firmly in the evangelical movement as economic and demographic shifts pick up speed in the south and west.

Christianity- in its Evangelical, Mainline Protestant, or Catholic forms- no longer seems to have a spiritual practice that it trains its adherents in. In Zen, one learns how to meditate. In Yoga traditions, there are rigorous techniques. Are people taught to pray in Christiantiy? Are protestants provided with a map of sorts of what to expect as one's practice deepens? How many young christians have any intellectual grasp of their tradition?

As an aside, does the term "christian" include Catholics any longer? It doesn't if you ask many older evengelicals.

If religious practice is merely meeting social and economic needs, it will vanish when those needs change.

Monday Morning Specials

A scientist explores the mind/body relationship in terms of biological triggers and feedback loops. Some of his research may lead to answers about Chronic Fatigue, Gulf War, and Irritable Bowel Syndromes:

Often there is an organic trigger like glandular fever. That's the start, and usually most people get over it, albeit after some weeks or months. But others can get trapped in vicious circles of monitoring their symptoms, restricting their activities beyond what is necessary and getting frustrated or demoralised. This causes more symptoms, more concerns and more physical changes, so much so that what started it all off is no longer what is keeping it going.

One of the enigmas is why certain infections, like glandular fever, have an increased likelihood of triggering chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), while others, such as influenza, do not. We also don't know why people who have had depression are twice as likely to develop CFS. I get cross with people who want to explain one and not the other. Some people take too psychiatric a view of CFS and ignore the infective trigger, whereas others want to think only about the infection.

The NY Times gives us a feel good story about (the early-seventies band) Death. This is a must read for fans of early punk:

The teenage Hackney brothers started playing R&B in their parents’ garage in the early ’70s but switched to hard rock in 1973, after seeing an Alice Cooper show. Dannis played drums, Bobby played bass and sang, and David wrote the songs and contributed propulsive guitar work, derived from studying Pete Townshend’s power-chord wrist technique. Their musicianship tightened when their mother allowed them to replace their bedroom furniture with mikes and amps as long as they practiced for three hours every afternoon. “From 3 to 6,” said Dannis, 54, “we just blew up the neighborhood.”

Death began playing at cabarets and garage parties on Detroit’s predominantly African-American east side, but were met with reactions ranging from confusion to derision. “We were ridiculed because at the time everybody in our community was listening to the Philadelphia sound, Earth, Wind & Fire, the Isley Brothers,” Bobby said. “People thought we were doing some weird stuff. We were pretty aggressive about playing rock ’n’ roll because there were so many voices around us trying to get us to abandon it.”

And lastly, this, a literature review of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction from 2006:

The abstract (email me if you would like the whole, quite short paper)

Meditation, as a psychological intervention, has become of increasing interest to psycholo-
gists who conduct clinical research with or provide clinical services to medical populations.
Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is a manualized program which teaches a vari-
ety of meditation techniques and has frequently been used in medical settings with mixed
medical populations. The following is a review of the literature, which provides preliminary
support for the effectiveness of MBSR in specific medical populations, including persons with
chronic pain, cancer and heart disease. Despite these encouraging findings, experts agree that
continued research is needed, especially controlled studies with more rigorous methodology