You – Own it.

Posted on October 3, 2009 by Josh

The character “Taylor” (played by John P. Whitecloud – who was awesome!) in the movie Poltergeist 2 tells “Steve” (Craig T. Nelson), when Steve is losing his mind because his family has been overrun by evil spirits…AGAIN…that he must take responsibility…

Taylor – You understand me, no matter how much you want to feel sorry for yourself. That is the path you have chosen to take, whether you know it or not. YOU should assume full responsibility.
Steve – RESPONSIBILITY FOR WHAT!
Taylor – Responsibility for EVERYTHING. Everything in your world.

"God is in, His holy tem-PUL!"

I think he’s right.

Community is great. I think it’s wonderful to have a group of like-minded individuals around, to support you when needed.

But not at the expense of your self, your individuality, your soul.

The biggest part of being an individual is taking responsibility for yourself as an individual.

And this is something our culture does not (and many communities do not) teach.

Beyond that, is the extent to which you must take responsibility for yourself. And in this, too, Taylor is right – you must take responsibility for everything in your world.

There is no “your world” without “you the individual.” Your perception of your world = you.

I don’t mean this in a hard way. It shouldn’t be hard. It should be very easy. In fact, it should be easier still because your community supports you in this process.

If you live in a community like that.

I think our culture likes to tell people what to do a lot. “Prescriptions,” instead of education. Which is strange, since we live in a predominantly Christian society (at least, predominantly led by people who call themselves “Christian” – and I am not, just in case you were wondering). What I mean is, Jesus said something about teaching people to fish instead of giving them fish. In our culture, we like to tell people to catch their own fish, and tell them that they have to make their own fishing rods, and lines, and hooks. But we don’t show them how to do those things. We just tell them that they need to.

I encounter this effort to escape responsibility all the time – in myself and in others – and it’s extremely frustrating.

One of the funniest places to see it, for me, is in culture itself. We currently have a ton of excuses for why people aren’t self-responsible…number one among them is…

“ENTITLEMENT”

they need the extra space on the sides of the car...they're fat

…which, simply put, means, “feeling that one does not need to be self-responsible.”

Uh? What? So, when we have a problem, we approach it by making another name for it? That…doesn’t sound like it will have any effect.

Yeah, people complain all the time about their kids, their peers, their grandkids, their neighbors, having a bizarre sense of entitlement…

…and there it ends.

Instead of saying “you are not entitled to this,” they argue about it. They have debates. They talk about it on talk shows. Anything rather than facing their beliefs about the issue and doing something about it.

Beyond that, whose responsibility are your feelings/opinions? They’re yours. What are your estimations of other people as acting with false entitlement giving you?

Is it helping you to avoid pointing the finger back where it belongs?

When you tell someone else that they’re wrong, bad, not good, dumb, conceited, egotistical, silly, lazy, or anything else, do you take responsibility for the fact that it is you who thinks this about the other person? It is not they who think it. You don’t know what they think. You can’t. Even when they tell you what they think, you only have a vague notion of what those words mean to them as an individual.

And when you do own it, do you then hold that feeling inside from then on? Push it down? Debate about it with yourself?

Or do you play with those beliefs? Do you experiment, play, with the other person, to see whether your ideas match reality or not?

There’s a big difference between judgment and play.

One, judgment, says that you know “how it is.” You’re already certain, based on your (I’m sure vast) experience, what a person is thinking, who they are; or, what a situation is, and what the “right” response is.

The other, play, says that you might have an idea of what’s happening, but that you want to explore the possibilities – in a way that involves empathy, compassion, humor, lightheartedness…

Another place people often try to avoid responsibility for themselves and their world is in religion and politics. OH NO! THE TWO “TABOO” SUBJECTS WE SHOULD NEVER SPEAK ABOUT!

"I went down to the crossroads..."

Why is it that we should never speak about them?

Well, what happens when you speak about something?

No…not that you argue. I mean, the arguing leads to something else.

It means that you will be forced to confront your views of the world. By saying them out loud, in the presence of another person, you will be forced to look at what you believe. You will be forced to confront…

Yourself

Still other places I’ve noticed people hiding from themselves in are – jobs/careers, illnesses (ADD, ADHD? – it’s not my fault I can’t control myself, I have an illness), relationships…etc.

Can’t we all just play along?

What does all of this have to do with training?

I can provide a good answer from the response I just posted on Aaron Schwenzfeier’s Blog:

For me, the future of “training” is educating people about how their bodies work. Then they can become, as they should be, the boss of themselves…self-responsible.

How does a human body work, in general? What are the mechanisms at work? Chek doesn’t teach his people that…probably because he’s afraid that, if he did, they wouldn’t need him anymore.

That’s really sad, though. True coaching isn’t about telling people what to do all the time. It’s about being an artist. It’s about accumulating the time in the field, researching your field, seeing what works and what doesn’t, so that you can effectively help the individuals you work with in a faster and faster manner…

Coaching is an art.

More education. Less admonishment, less prescription, less arguing about “what’s right for everyone” (it doesn’t exist…every one individual is different), less “guru-ism.”

My goal here, has not been to prescribe an action to you, or to condemn anyone for behaving in any way. I hope you don’t take it that way. I’m just trying to describe the new state of behavior I’m trying to foster in myself.

If you want to do that too, let’s play.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Culture – Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You

Posted on September 24, 2009 by Josh

Remember history class? At any point. High school, college, prison…wherever you took a history class. Remember?

Remember what you studied? Yeah, dates, events, blah blah blah. But the important stuff, the stuff that grabbed your attention?

For me, there were two things. The first was the great leaders in history. Usually, they were the “conquerors” – Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, etc.

Then, it was the great cultures. The rise and fall of civilizations – the Babylonians, the Greek, Roman, Aztec, Mayan, Mongol, etc.

The great leaders either represented the pinnacle of the culture they led, or became the representation of that pinnacle – the goal to reach for, for that culture (Jesus is a good example of this latter type).

I’ve been thinking a lot about culture recently. Ever since I read Rene Dubos’ book, “So Human an Animal,” back in the Spring.

An article in “Trends and Updates” laments “The Culture of Getting and Spending.” Which is part of our American (US) culture. The author highlights this culture by quoting from William Wordsworth’s poem ”

There are other aspects of that culture, such as:

Ignorance of one’s own feelings (lack of self-awareness)
Self-denial (“needy” people are looked down upon)
An inability to communicate feelings
Obsessive Compulsive tendencies
Tendencies to Hyperactive/Attentional disorders
Unconscious mythmaking/Idolatry
Sloth and gluttony (lack of self-awareness in relation to one’s surroundings)
Lack of general awareness (of surroundings)
Disdain and/or lack of awareness of nature

There was an article published in the New York Times on September 10th called “Are Your Friends Making You Fat?”

The answer, in short, is YES.

Researchers have found that there is a direct connection between fitness levels/mortality indicators and…friends.

Your culture determines largely what you will engage in or not. Do all of your friends smoke? If yes, than you are likely a smoker as well. Does everyone in your neighborhood play soccer all the time? If yes, then you probably will as well.

Does your culture believe in faith healing? If yes, then most likely, you will as well – and not only that, but you will likely be healed by a faith healing at some point in your life.

Sure, you might also die. But what does that say about you?

The secret here, is to do something. Thinking about what your culture does is fine, to get better at thinking (specifically, to get better at thinking about what your culture does…maybe not better at “thinking in general”).

If you want to get better at doing things, you have to do. You cannot get better at doing things by thinking about them.

If you want to get thin – make friends with thin people. If you want to be more active – surround yourself with people who are active (preferably, who’ve been where you are now, and are now active).

The age of the craftsman has almost entirely vanished. But in that practice, there was the concept of apprenticeship. If you wanted to learn a craft, you went and lived with the master. This used to be true of the martial arts, as well (and still is, for some). You made sacrifices of your personal liberties in order to learn what the teacher had to teach you.

Culture, Self-Control, and What We Do To Ourselves

Posted on September 18, 2009 by Josh

This post represents a few different ideas that have been swimming through my brain for the past week or so, and are starting to bubble over. Excuse me if it isn’t entirely cohesive yet.

First, the importance of culture in determining biology. Marshall Sahlins has (and many others have) written extensively about this. But it seems to go unheard. The culture that you are in will determine what aspects of your biology you express. Americans are fat, not because they are lazy, nor because of an overabundance of cheap calories, but because they live in a culture that supports gluttony, sloth, self-abnegation, dissocation from self and other wonderful ethics, etc.

We also live in a culture that is – and this is counterintuitive considering the above statement – addicted to personal property (or rather, the idea of personal property). Everything is owned, and has an owner. Because things can be owned, the person with the most “ownings” has the most “power” (in quotes as these are culturally-defined terms).

Separation from self and others is extended to separation from nature.

Blah blah blah…

I’ve been drawn back to Sparta by a few different coincidences recently. First, my buddy Dave called, and told me the old story of Philip II of Macedon; who, as the Wikipedia entry on Spartan (or “Laconic”) Wit says:

turned his attention to Sparta and sent a message: “If I win this war, you will be slaves forever.” In another version, Philip proclaims: “You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.” The Spartan ephors sent back a one word reply: “If.”

As the entry notes, Socrates held the Spartans in high regard. Though this is disputed by some, I tend to believe that it is true. Socrates was an orator, and a master of rhetoric. The Spartans were notoriously silent, except for single-word or single-sentence answers that could stop an argument dead in its tracks. What’s not to admire about a people who can do that?

But that ability of the Spartans’ didn’t come from training in rhetoric. They didn’t practice rhetoric, or philosophy, or the arts. It came from their culture. Their entire way of life was based around simplicity. Sometimes it was brutal, but it was a brutality, I think, designed to create an honest appreciation and ability to interact with What-Is (of course, this is disputable as well).

They didn’t have a disbelief in personal property, but they believed that property was mainly what causes problems between people, and so self-limited their possessions.

The Stoic branch of philosophy arose out of that culture. But again, Stoicism is a “philosophy,” it is a system of thought, a way to approach things. It’s a mental bearing.

It is not a culture.

I posted the following response on the Playthink blog in response to today’s post in which the author posted the results of an old study, where children were put into a room, and given the option of having the marshmallow that sat on the table in front of them, or of waiting to eat until the researcher returned, at which time they could have an additional marshmallow (two, instead of one). The author ends up saying that the children who were able to restrain themselves, and hold out for two marshmallows, were more “successful” in their lives:

Very fascinating, especially with regard to what we define as “success” in our culture. Some of the things that go along with denying yourself a marshmallow for twenty minutes:

- Self-denial, to the point of death (overworking, overstress, under-nourishment, under-exercise, etc.)
- The belief in private property, which leads to aggressive anti-social tendencies, and perhaps
- The complete inability to determine where impulse arises from within oneself.

There are also very good things that come from learning self-control. Denying yourself delicious treats, though, might not be the best way to develop that self-control.

I’d add another quality that this type of thinking trains – obedience. The pain/reward dialectic.

That’s all…let me know what you think about this.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

More to Philosophical Babies

Posted on September 13, 2009 by Josh

There are a few other things to share from Alison Gopnik’s book “The Philosophical Baby.”

For one, her account of babies’ idea/ability to work with time is fascinating. On page 153, she says “babies and young children don’t yet have autobiographical memory and executive control. They don’t experience their lives as a single timeline stretching back into the past and forward into the future…”

Apparently, this is an ability that we acquire through practice. What does that mean?!

And, “those programs [the Perry Preschool Project, and the Carolina Abecedarian Project - preschool projects that resulted in adults who were significantly more prosperous, healthier, and less likely to be jailed than their peers] didn’t just influence the children, they influenced their parents, too. These progams gave poor parents, as well as poor children, a sense of autonomy and connection. The children in these programs didn’t just have different early experiences, they had different parents, and they had those different parents for life…” pg. 177.

There is a very real problem with the “do it yourself” attitude that is being espoused in our country recently.

No one does anything by themselves. In case you haven’t noticed, everyone is intimately connected in this world, and everything is intimately connected in existence.

The funny thing about the “drive to personal responsibility” that we see in recent government programs, 401k, corporate doctrines, etc., is driving people closer and closer together. The “entitlement generation” isn’t leaving home till they’re in their mid-twenties. The family stays together longer. Lack of medical care is forcing the elderly to live with their children. The family becomes a unit again.

While on the one hand it’s sad that it takes a lack of general support to the individual from the government or larger organizations to drive this type of change, on the other hand, it’s change for the better!

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Entitlement

Posted on February 23, 2009 by Josh

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about a child-psychologist’s perspective of “entitlement” as being slightly different from what we hear about in the press these days. Entitlement, in psychological terms, is the feeling that you are allowed and capable of doing the things you want to do. Nowadays, we take it to mean the most extreme case – where people think they are entitled to do whatever they want whenever they want, and have everything handed to them.

That’s something different…that’s extreme egotism.

Feeling a sense of true entitlement (that you are able and allowed) is actually a great gift to any human being, and is something we should all carry within us. It is related to self-respect and dignity. Unfortunately, it is something our society does not teach. Instead, our culture teaches that we’re all lacking in some way, or somehow deficient. The culture of Capitalism, and mass-marketing, approaches things from a negative perspective.

Danger lurks everywhere – or so they’d have you believe. Your house is full of germs, your car isn’t as safe as a [insert German car manufacturer of your choice here]. Or, they can “help” your busy life by making it more “convenient” – microwave everything, three-minute abs, etc. You aren’t something enough – diet pills, botox, Viagra, etc. Or a combination of any or all of these.

It’s certainly not the case. In fact, this feeling of deficiency has to be manufactured. And it is. It is the goal of every advertisement to make you feel like you are somehow not complete without the thing being advertised.

I think we need to take a new perspective on these things.

Try this experiment – from now on, when you see an advertisement, or hear someone tell you that there’s something you must have, or that you are not really “cool” or “in” without something, ask this question – “What part of me, physically, will improve through the acquisition and use of this thing?”

If there’s a really positive answer, you might consider buying it. But I’ll bet, for most things, the answer is – “no part of me will improve.”

I would push the inquiry even further, to include the world. If you do get a positive answer, ask “How does the world improve through my purchasing and using this thing?”

Now, here comes the good part, because I’m not a Luddite. I honestly believe that the iPod has enriched my physical being. I’m able to access the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard, whenever I want it. I’ll extend those praises to my computer, and the iTunes store (which has made a lot of that music accessible to me). Music makes me feel good, which improves the quality of my life. By making me happy, it makes others happy, because I’m able to spread that joy wherever I go. Further, my computer has helped me to stay in closer contact with my family and friends, which is invaluable to me.

I guess the point of this post is this – stop thinking about what’s wrong with technology, or your situation, and start thinking about what’s right with it. And if you can’t make it right, stop doing it. Realize that you are full and complete in and of yourself, as you are, right now. You don’t need anything external to make you “better.” In fact, nothing external can make you “better,” only you can do that, by choosing things that are good for you and your world. Most of the time, you’ll get “better” by doing a lot less – being barefoot, working fewer hours, decreasing stress, watching less TV, eating less, eating more simply…

And here’s the spot by Lewis CK, on Conan O’Brien, that prompted this little rant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoGYx35ypus

Lacking Motivation? No Wonder

Posted on November 27, 2008 by Josh

I just wrote this response to an entry on the Define Fitness weblog, and thought it was worthwhile to continue the conversation on my own page. Here it is:

As for this topic, it’s one I’ve been grappling with for at least a couple of years now. However, I don’t think the real answer is related to any of the things on the list. I learned those things as “obstacles” in my old Gold’s Gym days – Gold’s taught us that those were the real reasons people didn’t work out.
Having given it some thought, I now believe that it’s something more personal than those things. Something that a person couldn’t click a check-box next to, even if you could figure out how to word it. It’s something so personal they might not even understand the situation if it was explained in detail.
In short, I think it’s a result of our civilization.

Convenience, and everything it brings, kills the desire in the human soul to test itself. The ability to get whatever you want, whenever you want it, takes the drive out of the animal. We don’t have to fight to survive. We don’t have to work hard to enjoy the fruits of our labor. And one law that stands the test of time in nature is the law of least resistance. If we don’t have to, we won’t.

Of course, then, there are the exceptions…who feel compelled within their souls to move, to lift heavy things to push the envelope. If you could bottle their motivation, you’d pass Bill Gates in seconds.

A friend of mine texted me a few weeks ago. He was watching an international weightlifting competition, and he asked “Why is it always the Eastern Bloc up for Gold in these contests, never the USA?” I wrote back “Because they have to.”

Until it’s necessary, people won’t do it. And even then, many will still find any way possible to get around it. Physical activity. Sounds crazy, but I think it’s true.