The Order of Her Noodly Appendage - User contributions [en]

Stumpers(website)

2022-11-30T21:40:53Z

Cmdrtako:

I needed to find an experemnt from I belaive a Royal Institution YouTube video where the speaker swings a ball on string around then releases the string and askd if the ball went in a straight line or did it curve. Over half said it curved(If I remember correctly it was around 2/3rds). Some old smart guy that did the experent and also saw it curve so you shouldn't feel bad that you saw it curve.

If some Average Joe solves the problem then I'll give them credit for their part in my article then with their name in print for participating in science they'll get the idea that they can do real research and become Citizen Scientists. Can you imagine what would happen if people started becoming Citizen Scientists?! :P

== Stumpers ==

If only we could turn trivia questions into a trivia game then we could just ask it there.

We could allow users to make profiles about what topics they think they are knowledgeable/interested about then pose the questions to them first, then more and more broader audiences the longer it goes unsolved.

We could add that you need to cite a source for your information.

Then the answers could be upvoted be the community and if they reach a certain limit have the moderators look at then and see if they are right.

== Comparing Answers ==

We could crowd source linking answers together. randomly pose questions(Part of what We'll call 'MetaMod')(lets call the answers to these question 'Ratings' to avoid confusion when the Answers these questions are about)
Display to them
'Do these two Answers support each other:
(some claims in A are <Blank> some claims in B)["-"/Support/Disprove/Support and Disproved/"No claims in A support or disprove any claims in B"]
(some claims in B are <Blank> some claims in A)["-"/Support/Disprove/Support and Disproved/"No claims in B support or disprove any claims in A"]'

Let "-" be the default answer.
If they answer at least of the questions as 'Support', 'Disprove', or 'Support and Disproved' then it counts as a 'Rating' on both questions.
If they answer with a combination of only "-", "No claims in A support or disprove any claims in B", and/or "No claims in B support or disprove any claims in A" or don't answer at all then it doesn't count as a 'Rating'.
if they select an answer to the question give them the option of submitting it(the submit button should be disabled by default and that should have to change one of answers to the questions to enable it).

When they submit their 'Rating' we give them another Answer from the same question and ask them if it supports the previous shown answers.

=== Sorting ===

Sort the Answers by the number of times this user has 'rated' them against another answer (most 'rates' first)then If there is a tie short them with the tie by the order that the user rated them in(last 'Rated' first), if then is still a tie sort them with that tie by the order they were shown to this user(last shown first)(let this shorting procedure be known as "TheSort")
Put the first 7 Answers(https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043158) into the 'Head' and all but the first 7 Answers into the 'Tail'. Separate the 'Tail' into 'Pinned'(if the item has the 'Pin' mark) and 'Unpinned'(if the item doesn't have the Pin' mark) then short the 'Pinned' and 'Unpinned' using "TheSort"

----

You're smart so you realize you can just short one master list of all answers sorted by "TheSort" then crawl through them from the start and add them to the end of 'Head' 'Pinned' and 'Unpinned'
then when we resort the master list just Mark all items in Head as 'Unvisited' then go through the first 7 items and if that item isn't in 'Head' add it to 'Head' and clear the 'Unvisited' mark if the item has the "Pin" mark search though 'Pinned' and remove it is it doesn't have the 'Pin' mark search though 'Unpinned' and remove it.
If one of these searched fails to find something them you have to clear the 'Head' 'Pinned' and 'Unpinned' and resort the Master list then crawl though it and put them to the end of the correct list like you did the first time.
If the item is already in 'Head' clear the 'Unvisited' mark.Then go through 'Head' and if an item is still mark "Unvisited" and marked 'Pin' add it to 'Pinned' if an Item in 'Head' is Marked 'Unvisited' and not marked 'Pin' then add it to 'Unpinned'
Only show them the 'Head' and the then 'Pinned' but give them the option of going back and looking at the history.

=== Viewing History ===

Default to showing them the 'Unpinned' when they select they want to view the full history, but also give them the option to view all answers in the order they were first presented to the user.

Allow them to give a 'Rating' of the current question to any Answer.

Keep their current unsubmitted 'Ratings' for the Latest Posed Answer. but Let them also go back and Review an Answer previously shown to them.

Give them the option of submitting their new 'Ratinga' or "I changed my Mind, Keep old rating and return to the current answer."

Which ever option they choose it brings them back to the Latest Posed Answer.

If they twice(from two different Latest Posed Answers, whether by rating them with the Latest Posed Answer or by going back and reviewing a previous Answer) go back and submit a new 'Rating' on an Answer that was hidden from the default 7 ask them if they want to mark 'Pin this Answer?'. If they do Mark the Answer with "Pin"

They earn "PromoteCredits" for each a 'Rating' They get full <Xc> credits if that have more 'Ratings' than all other users have 'Ratings' on this question. if others have 'Rated' the Answers on that Question more that this user The amount they should earn <Xc> TIME ( 1 PLUS the number of 'Ratings' this users have Previous made on this question DEVIDED BY the number of Ratings done of this question done by others.)

== The Wiki ==

We could also have a Wiki page for the Question than only The Moderators The person that submitted the question or someone that hasn't answers the question can edit and they would have to list an Answer that someone else gave to the Question then that Edit would have to be approved by A Moderator(6 if the edit was made by a Mod(himself and 5 others)), the person that submitted the question, or the person whos Answer was used to update the Question's Wiki.

Allow everyone to view unapproved edits and (up/down)vote them Use the standard votes/recent to view. If a edit stays highly rated and not reject be The Mods(probably should be more than just one mod rejecting it a rule of thumb is 5) the Question poser(Another form of "MetaMod") or the person whos Answer was use to base the edit off of put it in front of the Mods to review and accept or reject
# Votes #
What should votes mean?
The tool tip for the upvote buttons should be “I want to see more of this” for the tooltip for the downvote buttons should be “I want to see less of this.”

== Voting ==

'PaidA; ammunt paid to answerer.

'PaidP' ammount paid promoters

<pre>
func approved_ka(Answer, Question){
Answer.moderator_upvotes.len() > Answer.moderator_downvotes.len() or (Question.poster in Answer.upvoted_by)
}
</pre>

<pre>
Let the Function Pay_Answer(Answer, Question) be{
if not Answer.been_paid_ka{
If (approved_ka(Answer, Question)) {
Answer.been_paid_ka = true;

add an amount <Xa> to the 'PromoteCredits' on the user that posted the question
Set the property 'PaidA' to <Xa>
Foreach promoter in Answer.promoters
Add an amount <Xp> to promoter
}
Set Answer's 'PaidP' to <Xp>
}
}
}
</pre>
<pre>

When the Question Poser or a Mod approves a WikiEdit the user than made the WikiEdit earns 'PromoteCredits' and the Answer used to made the edit is mark as 'Approved' then run the function Pay_Answer(Answer).
<pre>
#Question the question who's answer vote is being changed.
#Answer the answer who's vote is being changed.
#User the user's who's vote in being changed.
#Vote what the vote is being changed to.
func change_vote(Question, Answer, User, Vote) {
match Vote{
UPVOTE {
Answer.downvoted_by.remove(User);
Answer.moderator_upvotes.remove(User); # we want to remove their mod vote even if they aren'ts mod any more

Answer.upvoted_by.insert(User);
if (User in moderators) {
Answer.moderators_votes.insert(User);
};
if User == Question.poster {
pay_answer(Answer);
} else {
#this block is adds the User to the list of Promoters if the Questing hasn't been UpVoted by the Question's poster or been approved by the moderators
if (Answer.approved_ka != true) {
if (not (Question.upvoted_by.contains(Question.poster))) {
if (not (Answer.moderators_votes.is_empty())) {
Answer.promoters.insert(User);
}
}
}
}#end if user not questiong poster or a mod
},#end match upvote
DOWNVOTE {
Answer.upvoted_by.remove(User);
Answer.moderator_upvotes.remove(User); # we want to remove their mod vote even if they aren'ts mod any more

Answer.downvotes.insert(User);
if User in moderators {
Answer.moderator_downvotes.insert(User);
};

if User == Question.poster {
Revoke_Answer(Answer);
}
},#end DOWNVOTE match
CLEAR_VOTE {
Answer.upvoted_by.remove(User);
Answer.moderator_upvotes.remove(User); # we want to remove their mod vote even if they aren'ts mod any more

Answer.downvoted_by.remove(User);
Answer.moderator_downvotes.remove(User); # we want to remove their mod vote even if they aren'ts mod any more

if (Answer.moderator_downvotes.len() > Answer.moderator_upvotes.len()) or User == Question.poster {
Revoke_Answer(Answer);
}
},#end CLEARVOTE match
}#end match Vote
let mup = Answer.moderator_downvotes.len();
let mdown = Answer.moderator_upvotes.len());
if mdown > mup {
revoke_answer(Answer);
} elif mup > mdown {
pay_answer(Answer);
};
}#end func
</pre>

<pre>
When I <User> changes there Vote on an <Answer>{

If a User Upvotes an Answer {
Mark the Answer as Upvoted my the User.
}
If (the User is a Mod){
add that User to the Set on the 'ModVotes' property on the Answer
}
If (the User is Mod or if the User is the Question Poser) {
run function Pay_Answer
} else {
Check is the Answer in Marked 'Approved' if not check if Question is Marked as UpVoted by the Question Poser if not Check is the Answers 'ModVotes' in Empty if it is not then{
Add user to the Set in proporty 'Promoters'
}
}
</pre>

or Mod and the Answer's 'PaidA' property is 0 {
set the 'PaidA' property on that Anwser to <Xa> and give the User that posted the Answer the same <Xa> amount of 'PromoteCredits'
} else if {

}

<pre>
Let the Function Revoke_Answer(Answer) be{
check if if the Answer is mark "Approved"
if so check if Question's Poser has Upvoted the Answer,
If so check if the set on the Answer's "ModVotes" property is Empty; If it's empty{
remove an amount of 'PromoteCredits' equal to the Answer's "PaidA" property from The user that posted the Answer(this can make the user's 'PromoteCredits' negative)
Set the 'PaidA' property on The Answer to 0
If not(Answer.promoters.is_empty()) {
Foreach promoter in Answer.promoters {
Subtract an amount equal Answer.paid_promoters from promoter
 }
Answer.promoters.drain()
}
Answer.paid_promoters = 0
}#End if Promoters is not empty
</pre>

When user choses to change his (Up/Down)vote on a Answer
If the User has Select to clear his vote unmark the vote
If the User has selected DownVoteMark for answer,
check is the User is in the set on the Answer's 'ModVotes' property If so
remove this user from that set. then run function Revoke_Answer(Answer)
else if is the user the Question Pose
If so then run function Revoke_Answer(Answer)

Give The Mods the ability to view all unapproved edits by there (Up/Down)Votes.

Give everyone the ability to view all rejected edits(by Mods and/or Question submitter)

If it's not their item, hide the current rating of the item from them until they have voted on it.

Randomly select WikiEdit that a User hasn't (Up/Down)Voted on and hasn't been approved and ask that user to (Up/Down)vote it(this is a form on 'MetaMod'). When that user Vote on an WikiEdit that have been chosen to 'MetaMod' give then 'PromoteCredits'

Use CRDTs so the the proposed edits to the Wiki don't block each other.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIR0Ngov7vo

I could make such a site but I don't have a server to host it or the skills needed to code the site that could handle a heavy load, thou I could learn them it would be pointless with the servers to run it on. Then there the whole UI/UX design issues.

Allow Users to (Up/Down)vote questions and use this information to add Questions to users feed and allow them to browse question limited to topic/tags

Allow people to say a tag applies to a Question/Answer/WikiEdit or say that a Tag doesn't apply to it Add all applies and subtract all doesn't apply and if it's positive say the item has the tag.

If someone's option of a tag on an Item differs more than <X> Standard deviations from the average randomly ask them "Did you make a mistake on tagging <Item> please review the Item and select all tags that Apply" Then if they agree show them Item and a list of all tags that people have said applies or doesn't apply and is that haven't given their opinion on all them then ask them "You haven't weighed in on all issues. You opinion is import.[I'll come bake later][Let me voice my Opinion(the default)]" If that choose "Let me voice my Opinion" change the list of shown Tags to just the ones that they haven' given an opinion on

If the voting(Up/Down or Applies/Doesn't Applies) on an Item have a large Standard Deviation randomly select a user that hasn't voted on it and ask them to vote on it.

These Random events should be viewed as the ADs and regulated accordingly. People that do what is asked should earn 'PromoteCredits' they can spend to promote their own questions, give away or do RMT with.

Sponsored Questions: Charge for a window to promote it to their target demographic and a give them the chance of offering a bounty for each 'engagement'(someone posts an answer; someone make a WikiEdit) If the window ends or their funds for 'engagements' runs out their Question goes back to treated like a normal Question.

= Monitization =

We could raise money by selling 'PromoteCredits'

If we go Mechanical Turk and allow Sponors to off bounties for answers.

We should allow the Sponsor to approve engagements that happed any time during the window, even after the window has expired.

WE should give the Sponser <X> times the ammount they payed out ot Engagers in 'PromoteCredits' to encourage they to approve answers.

to recap

PromoteCredits enter the system from users resonding to random ads

PromoteCredits enter the system from users buying them with Real World Money.

PromoteCredits enter the system paying bounties on Questions.

User trade ProMoteCredits amount themsselves.

PromoteCredits exit the system by users making Sponsored Questions.

= Grid Quiz =
Like Jeopardy!

Use word clouds for the topic

The time from then the question was post to the time the approved answer was posted is use to rank the questions. the loner to answer the harder the question

= Take downs =

When someone Flags a item make them select a community rule they think is violates and if they think it's illegal make them give a link to the law that it's breaking.

Then make them write their argument on why the Item in in violation of the Rule/Law.

Once that is done check is the Item has been marked "DoubleJeopardy" if so subtract 1 from the "judiciousness" of the user the flagged the Item.

If a item is flagged pull it and put it in the Queue for review

Show the those selected for Jury duty only the text of the complaint until they decide to hear the case.

Only after they have chose to hear the case show them the Item that was flagged. and make them give in preliminary opinion of if they they the complaint will be upheld or over turned.

only after they have giving their Prelininary opinion allow them to join the Discussion of the Case.

The Case continues until the 12 jurors made a unanimous decision to permanently remove the Item or restore it. If the Jury makes an unanimus decicion add 1 to the 'judiciousness' of all the juries.

If they vote to restore it mark the Item as 'DoubleJeopardy' I

== more judiciusness from debatipedia ==
Have a devil advocate for each side.

In meta-moderation ask people if a post advocates for some side.

If the meta-moderation shows they where advocating for the side then give them a browny point

== DMCA ==
Automaticly remove the post and automatic put it back up.

Stumpers(website)

2022-11-30T14:33:01Z

Cmdrtako:

I needed to find an experemnt from I belaive a Royal Institution YouTube video where the speaker swings a ball on string around then releases the string and askd if the ball went in a straight line or did it curve. Over half said it curved(If I remember correctly it was around 2/3rds). Some old smart guy that did the experent and also saw it curve so you shouldn't feel bad that you saw it curve.

If some Average Joe solves the problem then I'll give them credit for their part in my article then with their name in print for participating in science they'll get the idea that they can do real research and become Citizen Scientists. Can you imagine what would happen if people started becoming Citizen Scientists?! :P

== Stumpers ==

If only we could turn trivia questions into a trivia game then we could just ask it there.

We could allow users to make profiles about what topics they think they are knowledgeable/interested about then pose the questions to them first, then more and more broader audiences the longer it goes unsolved.

We could add that you need to cite a source for your information.

Then the answers could be upvoted be the community and if they reach a certain limit have the moderators look at then and see if they are right.

== Comparing Answers ==

We could crowd source linking answers together. randomly pose questions(Part of what We'll call 'MetaMod')(lets call the answers to these question 'Ratings' to avoid confusion when the Answers these questions are about)
Display to them
'Do these two Answers support each other:
(some claims in A are <Blank> some claims in B)["-"/Support/Disprove/Support and Disproved/"No claims in A support or disprove any claims in B"]
(some claims in B are <Blank> some claims in A)["-"/Support/Disprove/Support and Disproved/"No claims in B support or disprove any claims in A"]'

Let "-" be the default answer.
If they answer at least of the questions as 'Support', 'Disprove', or 'Support and Disproved' then it counts as a 'Rating' on both questions.
If they answer with a combination of only "-", "No claims in A support or disprove any claims in B", and/or "No claims in B support or disprove any claims in A" or don't answer at all then it doesn't count as a 'Rating'.
if they select an answer to the question give them the option of submitting it(the submit button should be disabled by default and that should have to change one of answers to the questions to enable it).

When they submit their 'Rating' we give them another Answer from the same question and ask them if it supports the previous shown answers.

=== Sorting ===

Sort the Answers by the number of times this user has 'rated' them against another answer (most 'rates' first)then If there is a tie short them with the tie by the order that the user rated them in(last 'Rated' first), if then is still a tie sort them with that tie by the order they were shown to this user(last shown first)(let this shorting procedure be known as "TheSort")
Put the first 7 Answers(https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043158) into the 'Head' and all but the first 7 Answers into the 'Tail'. Separate the 'Tail' into 'Pinned'(if the item has the 'Pin' mark) and 'Unpinned'(if the item doesn't have the Pin' mark) then short the 'Pinned' and 'Unpinned' using "TheSort"

----

You're smart so you realize you can just short one master list of all answers sorted by "TheSort" then crawl through them from the start and add them to the end of 'Head' 'Pinned' and 'Unpinned'
then when we resort the master list just Mark all items in Head as 'Unvisited' then go through the first 7 items and if that item isn't in 'Head' add it to 'Head' and clear the 'Unvisited' mark if the item has the "Pin" mark search though 'Pinned' and remove it is it doesn't have the 'Pin' mark search though 'Unpinned' and remove it.
If one of these searched fails to find something them you have to clear the 'Head' 'Pinned' and 'Unpinned' and resort the Master list then crawl though it and put them to the end of the correct list like you did the first time.
If the item is already in 'Head' clear the 'Unvisited' mark.Then go through 'Head' and if an item is still mark "Unvisited" and marked 'Pin' add it to 'Pinned' if an Item in 'Head' is Marked 'Unvisited' and not marked 'Pin' then add it to 'Unpinned'
Only show them the 'Head' and the then 'Pinned' but give them the option of going back and looking at the history.

=== Viewing History ===

Default to showing them the 'Unpinned' when they select they want to view the full history, but also give them the option to view all answers in the order they were first presented to the user.

Allow them to give a 'Rating' of the current question to any Answer.

Keep their current unsubmitted 'Ratings' for the Latest Posed Answer. but Let them also go back and Review an Answer previously shown to them.

Give them the option of submitting their new 'Ratinga' or "I changed my Mind, Keep old rating and return to the current answer."

Which ever option they choose it brings them back to the Latest Posed Answer.

If they twice(from two different Latest Posed Answers, whether by rating them with the Latest Posed Answer or by going back and reviewing a previous Answer) go back and submit a new 'Rating' on an Answer that was hidden from the default 7 ask them if they want to mark 'Pin this Answer?'. If they do Mark the Answer with "Pin"

They earn "PromoteCredits" for each a 'Rating' They get full <Xc> credits if that have more 'Ratings' than all other users have 'Ratings' on this question. if others have 'Rated' the Answers on that Question more that this user The amount they should earn <Xc> TIME ( 1 PLUS the number of 'Ratings' this users have Previous made on this question DEVIDED BY the number of Ratings done of this question done by others.)

== The Wiki ==

We could also have a Wiki page for the Question than only The Moderators The person that submitted the question or someone that hasn't answers the question can edit and they would have to list an Answer that someone else gave to the Question then that Edit would have to be approved by A Moderator(6 if the edit was made by a Mod(himself and 5 others)), the person that submitted the question, or the person whos Answer was used to update the Question's Wiki.

Allow everyone to view unapproved edits and (up/down)vote them Use the standard votes/recent to view. If a edit stays highly rated and not reject be The Mods(probably should be more than just one mod rejecting it a rule of thumb is 5) the Question poser(Another form of "MetaMod") or the person whos Answer was use to base the edit off of put it in front of the Mods to review and accept or reject
# Votes #
What should votes mean?
The tool tip for the upvote buttons should be “I want to see more of this” for the tooltip for the downvote buttons should be “I want to see less of this.”

== Voting ==

'PaidA; ammunt paid to answerer.

'PaidP' ammount paid promoters

<pre>
func approved_ka(Answer, Question){
Answer.moderator_upvotes.len() > Answer.moderator_downvotes.len() or (Question.poster in Answer.upvoted_by)
}
</pre>

<pre>
Let the Function Pay_Answer(Answer, Question) be{
if not Answer.been_paid_ka{
If (approved_ka(Answer, Question)) {
Answer.been_paid_ka = true;

add an amount <Xa> to the 'PromoteCredits' on the user that posted the question
Set the property 'PaidA' to <Xa>
Foreach promoter in Answer.promoters
Add an amount <Xp> to promoter
}
Set Answer's 'PaidP' to <Xp>
}
}
}
</pre>
<pre>

When the Question Poser or a Mod approves a WikiEdit the user than made the WikiEdit earns 'PromoteCredits' and the Answer used to made the edit is mark as 'Approved' then run the function Pay_Answer(Answer).
<pre>
#Question the question who's answer vote is being changed.
#Answer the answer who's vote is being changed.
#User the user's who's vote in being changed.
#Vote what the vote is being changed to.
func change_vote(Question, Answer, User, Vote) {
match Vote{
UPVOTE {
Answer.downvoted_by.remove(User);
Answer.moderator_upvotes.remove(User); # we want to remove their mod vote even if they aren'ts mod any more

Answer.upvoted_by.insert(User);
if (User in moderators) {
Answer.moderators_votes.insert(User);
};
if User == Question.poster {
pay_answer(Answer);
} else {
#this block is adds the User to the list of Promoters if the Questing hasn't been UpVoted by the Question's poster or been approved by the moderators
if (Answer.approved_ka != true) {
if (not (Question.upvoted_by.contains(Question.poster))) {
if (not (Answer.moderators_votes.is_empty())) {
Answer.promoters.insert(User);
}
}
}
}#end if user not questiong poster or a mod
},#end match upvote
DOWNVOTE {
Answer.upvoted_by.remove(User);
Answer.moderator_upvotes.remove(User); # we want to remove their mod vote even if they aren'ts mod any more

Answer.downvotes.insert(User);
if User in moderators {
Answer.moderator_downvotes.insert(User);
};

if User == Question.poster {
Revoke_Answer(Answer);
}
},#end DOWNVOTE match
CLEAR_VOTE {
Answer.upvoted_by.remove(User);
Answer.moderator_upvotes.remove(User); # we want to remove their mod vote even if they aren'ts mod any more

Answer.downvoted_by.remove(User);
Answer.moderator_downvotes.remove(User); # we want to remove their mod vote even if they aren'ts mod any more

if (Answer.moderator_downvotes.len() > Answer.moderator_upvotes.len()) or User == Question.poster {
Revoke_Answer(Answer);
}
},#end CLEARVOTE match
}#end match Vote
let mup = Answer.moderator_downvotes.len();
let mdown = Answer.moderator_upvotes.len());
if mdown > mup {
revoke_answer(Answer);
} elif mup > mdown {
pay_answer(Answer);
};
}#end func
</pre>

<pre>
When I <User> changes there Vote on an <Answer>{

If a User Upvotes an Answer {
Mark the Answer as Upvoted my the User.
}
If (the User is a Mod){
add that User to the Set on the 'ModVotes' property on the Answer
}
If (the User is Mod or if the User is the Question Poser) {
run function Pay_Answer
} else {
Check is the Answer in Marked 'Approved' if not check if Question is Marked as UpVoted by the Question Poser if not Check is the Answers 'ModVotes' in Empty if it is not then{
Add user to the Set in proporty 'Promoters'
}
}
</pre>

or Mod and the Answer's 'PaidA' property is 0 {
set the 'PaidA' property on that Anwser to <Xa> and give the User that posted the Answer the same <Xa> amount of 'PromoteCredits'
} else if {

}

<pre>
Let the Function Revoke_Answer(Answer) be{
check if if the Answer is mark "Approved"
if so check if Question's Poser has Upvoted the Answer,
If so check if the set on the Answer's "ModVotes" property is Empty; If it's empty{
remove an amount of 'PromoteCredits' equal to the Answer's "PaidA" property from The user that posted the Answer(this can make the user's 'PromoteCredits' negative)
Set the 'PaidA' property on The Answer to 0
If not(Answer.promoters.is_empty()) {
Foreach promoter in Answer.promoters {
Subtract an amount equal Answer.paid_promoters from promoter
 }
Answer.promoters.drain()
}
Answer.paid_promoters = 0
}#End if Promoters is not empty
</pre>

When user choses to change his (Up/Down)vote on a Answer
If the User has Select to clear his vote unmark the vote
If the User has selected DownVoteMark for answer,
check is the User is in the set on the Answer's 'ModVotes' property If so
remove this user from that set. then run function Revoke_Answer(Answer)
else if is the user the Question Pose
If so then run function Revoke_Answer(Answer)

Give The Mods the ability to view all unapproved edits by there (Up/Down)Votes.

Give everyone the ability to view all rejected edits(by Mods and/or Question submitter)

If it's not their item, hide the current rating of the item from them until they have voted on it.

Randomly select WikiEdit that a User hasn't (Up/Down)Voted on and hasn't been approved and ask that user to (Up/Down)vote it(this is a form on 'MetaMod'). When that user Vote on an WikiEdit that have been chosen to 'MetaMod' give then 'PromoteCredits'

Use CRDTs so the the proposed edits to the Wiki don't block each other.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIR0Ngov7vo

I could make such a site but I don't have a server to host it or the skills needed to code the site that could handle a heavy load, thou I could learn them it would be pointless with the servers to run it on. Then there the whole UI/UX design issues.

Allow Users to (Up/Down)vote questions and use this information to add Questions to users feed and allow them to browse question limited to topic/tags

Allow people to say a tag applies to a Question/Answer/WikiEdit or say that a Tag doesn't apply to it Add all applies and subtract all doesn't apply and if it's positive say the item has the tag.

If someone's option of a tag on an Item differs more than <X> Standard deviations from the average randomly ask them "Did you make a mistake on tagging <Item> please review the Item and select all tags that Apply" Then if they agree show them Item and a list of all tags that people have said applies or doesn't apply and is that haven't given their opinion on all them then ask them "You haven't weighed in on all issues. You opinion is import.[I'll come bake later][Let me voice my Opinion(the default)]" If that choose "Let me voice my Opinion" change the list of shown Tags to just the ones that they haven' given an opinion on

If the voting(Up/Down or Applies/Doesn't Applies) on an Item have a large Standard Deviation randomly select a user that hasn't voted on it and ask them to vote on it.

These Random events should be viewed as the ADs and regulated accordingly. People that do what is asked should earn 'PromoteCredits' they can spend to promote their own questions, give away or do RMT with.

Sponsored Questions: Charge for a window to promote it to their target demographic and a give them the chance of offering a bounty for each 'engagement'(someone posts an answer; someone make a WikiEdit) If the window ends or their funds for 'engagements' runs out their Question goes back to treated like a normal Question.

= Monitization =

We could raise money by selling 'PromoteCredits'

If we go Mechanical Turk and allow Sponors to off bounties for answers.

We should allow the Sponsor to approve engagements that happed any time during the window, even after the window has expired.

WE should give the Sponser <X> times the ammount they payed out ot Engagers in 'PromoteCredits' to encourage they to approve answers.

to recap

PromoteCredits enter the system from users resonding to random ads

PromoteCredits enter the system from users buying them with Real World Money.

PromoteCredits enter the system paying bounties on Questions.

User trade ProMoteCredits amount themsselves.

PromoteCredits exit the system by users making Sponsored Questions.

= Grid Quiz =
Like Jeopardy!

Use word clouds for the topic

The time from then the question was post to the time the approved answer was posted is use to rank the questions. the loner to answer the harder the question

When someone Flags a item make them select a community rule they think is violates and if they think it's illegal make them give a link to the law that it's breaking.
The make them write their argument on why the Item in in violation of the Rule/Law.
Once that is done check is the Item has been marked "DoubleJeopardy" if so subtract 1 from the "judiciousness" of the user the flagged the Item.
If a item is flagged pull it and put it in the Queue for review
Show the those selected for Jury duty only the text of the complaint until they decide to hear the case.
THe show them the Item that was flagged. and make them give in preliminary opinion of if they they the complaint will be upheld or over turned.

only after they have giving their Prelininary opinion allow them to join the Discussion of the Case.
The Case continues until the 12 jurors made a unanimous decision to permanently remove the Item or restore it. If the Jury makes an unanimus decicio add 1 to the 'judiciousness' of all the juries Is they vote to restore it mark the Item as 'DoubleJeopardy' I

Stumpers(website)

2022-11-30T14:32:24Z

Cmdrtako:

I needed to find an experemnt from I belaive a Royal Institution YouTube video where the speaker swings a ball on string around then releases the string and askd if the ball went in a straight line or did it curve. Over half said it curved(If I remember correctly it was around 2/3rds). Some old smart guy that did the experent and also saw it curve so you shouldn't feel bad that you saw it curve.

If some Average Joe solves the problem then I'll give them credit for their part in my article then with their name in print for participating in science they'll get the idea that they can do real research and become Citizen Scientists. Can you imagine what would happen if people started becoming Citizen Scientists?! :P

== Stumpers ==

If only we could turn trivia questions into a trivia game then we could just ask it there.

We could allow users to make profiles about what topics they think they are knowledgeable/interested about then pose the questions to them first, then more and more broader audiences the longer it goes unsolved.

We could add that you need to cite a source for your information.

Then the answers could be upvoted be the community and if they reach a certain limit have the moderators look at then and see if they are right.

== Comparing Answers ==

We could crowd source linking answers together. randomly pose questions(Part of what We'll call 'MetaMod')(lets call the answers to these question 'Ratings' to avoid confusion when the Answers these questions are about)
Display to them
'Do these two Answers support each other:
(some claims in A are <Blank> some claims in B)["-"/Support/Disprove/Support and Disproved/"No claims in A support or disprove any claims in B"]
(some claims in B are <Blank> some claims in A)["-"/Support/Disprove/Support and Disproved/"No claims in B support or disprove any claims in A"]'

Let "-" be the default answer.
If they answer at least of the questions as 'Support', 'Disprove', or 'Support and Disproved' then it counts as a 'Rating' on both questions.
If they answer with a combination of only "-", "No claims in A support or disprove any claims in B", and/or "No claims in B support or disprove any claims in A" or don't answer at all then it doesn't count as a 'Rating'.
if they select an answer to the question give them the option of submitting it(the submit button should be disabled by default and that should have to change one of answers to the questions to enable it).

When they submit their 'Rating' we give them another Answer from the same question and ask them if it supports the previous shown answers.

=== Sorting ===

Sort the Answers by the number of times this user has 'rated' them against another answer (most 'rates' first)then If there is a tie short them with the tie by the order that the user rated them in(last 'Rated' first), if then is still a tie sort them with that tie by the order they were shown to this user(last shown first)(let this shorting procedure be known as "TheSort")
Put the first 7 Answers(https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043158) into the 'Head' and all but the first 7 Answers into the 'Tail'. Separate the 'Tail' into 'Pinned'(if the item has the 'Pin' mark) and 'Unpinned'(if the item doesn't have the Pin' mark) then short the 'Pinned' and 'Unpinned' using "TheSort"

----

You're smart so you realize you can just short one master list of all answers sorted by "TheSort" then crawl through them from the start and add them to the end of 'Head' 'Pinned' and 'Unpinned'
then when we resort the master list just Mark all items in Head as 'Unvisited' then go through the first 7 items and if that item isn't in 'Head' add it to 'Head' and clear the 'Unvisited' mark if the item has the "Pin" mark search though 'Pinned' and remove it is it doesn't have the 'Pin' mark search though 'Unpinned' and remove it.
If one of these searched fails to find something them you have to clear the 'Head' 'Pinned' and 'Unpinned' and resort the Master list then crawl though it and put them to the end of the correct list like you did the first time.
If the item is already in 'Head' clear the 'Unvisited' mark.Then go through 'Head' and if an item is still mark "Unvisited" and marked 'Pin' add it to 'Pinned' if an Item in 'Head' is Marked 'Unvisited' and not marked 'Pin' then add it to 'Unpinned'
Only show them the 'Head' and the then 'Pinned' but give them the option of going back and looking at the history.

=== Viewing History ===

Default to showing them the 'Unpinned' when they select they want to view the full history, but also give them the option to view all answers in the order they were first presented to the user.

Allow them to give a 'Rating' of the current question to any Answer.

Keep their current unsubmitted 'Ratings' for the Latest Posed Answer. but Let them also go back and Review an Answer previously shown to them.

Give them the option of submitting their new 'Ratinga' or "I changed my Mind, Keep old rating and return to the current answer."

Which ever option they choose it brings them back to the Latest Posed Answer.

If they twice(from two different Latest Posed Answers, whether by rating them with the Latest Posed Answer or by going back and reviewing a previous Answer) go back and submit a new 'Rating' on an Answer that was hidden from the default 7 ask them if they want to mark 'Pin this Answer?'. If they do Mark the Answer with "Pin"

They earn "PromoteCredits" for each a 'Rating' They get full <Xc> credits if that have more 'Ratings' than all other users have 'Ratings' on this question. if others have 'Rated' the Answers on that Question more that this user The amount they should earn <Xc> TIME ( 1 PLUS the number of 'Ratings' this users have Previous made on this question DEVIDED BY the number of Ratings done of this question done by others.)

== The Wiki ==

We could also have a Wiki page for the Question than only The Moderators The person that submitted the question or someone that hasn't answers the question can edit and they would have to list an Answer that someone else gave to the Question then that Edit would have to be approved by A Moderator(6 if the edit was made by a Mod(himself and 5 others)), the person that submitted the question, or the person whos Answer was used to update the Question's Wiki.

Allow everyone to view unapproved edits and (up/down)vote them Use the standard votes/recent to view. If a edit stays highly rated and not reject be The Mods(probably should be more than just one mod rejecting it a rule of thumb is 5) the Question poser(Another form of "MetaMod") or the person whos Answer was use to base the edit off of put it in front of the Mods to review and accept or reject
# Votes #
What should votes mean?
The tool tip for the upvote buttons should be “I want to see more of this” for the tooltip for the downvote buttons should be “I want to see less of this.”

== Voting ==

'PaidA; ammunt paid to answerer.

'PaidP' ammount paid promoters

<pre>
func approved_ka(Answer, Question){
Answer.moderator_upvotes.len() > Answer.moderator_downvotes.len() or (Question.poster in Answer.upvoted_by)
}
</pre>

<pre>
Let the Function Pay_Answer(Answer, Question) be{
if not Answer.been_paid_ka{
If (approved_ka(Answer, Question)) {
Answer.been_paid_ka = true;

add an amount <Xa> to the 'PromoteCredits' on the user that posted the question
Set the property 'PaidA' to <Xa>
Foreach promoter in Answer.promoters
Add an amount <Xp> to promoter
}
Set Answer's 'PaidP' to <Xp>
}
}
}
</pre>
<pre>

When the Question Poser or a Mod approves a WikiEdit the user than made the WikiEdit earns 'PromoteCredits' and the Answer used to made the edit is mark as 'Approved' then run the function Pay_Answer(Answer).
<pre>
#Question the question who's answer vote is being changed.
#Answer the answer who's vote is being changed.
#User the user's who's vote in being changed.
#Vote what the vote is being changed to.
func change_vote(Question, Answer, User, Vote) {
match Vote{
UPVOTE {
Answer.downvoted_by.remove(User);
Answer.moderator_upvotes.remove(User); # we want to remove their mod vote even if they aren'ts mod any more

Answer.upvoted_by.insert(User);
if (User in moderators) {
Answer.moderators_votes.insert(User);
};
if User == Question.poster {
pay_answer(Answer);
} else {
#this block is adds the User to the list of Promoters if the Questing hasn't been UpVoted by the Question's poster or been approved by the moderators
if (Answer.approved_ka != true) {
if (not (Question.upvoted_by.contains(Question.poster))) {
if (not (Answer.moderators_votes.is_empty())) {
Answer.promoters.insert(User);
}
}
}
}#end if user not questiong poster or a mod
},#end match upvote
DOWNVOTE {
Answer.upvoted_by.remove(User);
Answer.moderator_upvotes.remove(User); # we want to remove their mod vote even if they aren'ts mod any more

Answer.downvotes.insert(User);
if User in moderators {
Answer.moderator_downvotes.insert(User);
};

if User == Question.poster {
Revoke_Answer(Answer);
}
},#end DOWNVOTE match
CLEAR_VOTE {
Answer.upvoted_by.remove(User);
Answer.moderator_upvotes.remove(User); # we want to remove their mod vote even if they aren'ts mod any more

Answer.downvoted_by.remove(User);
Answer.moderator_downvotes.remove(User); # we want to remove their mod vote even if they aren'ts mod any more

if (Answer.moderator_downvotes.len() > Answer.moderator_upvotes.len()) or User == Question.poster {
Revoke_Answer(Answer);
}
},#end CLEARVOTE match
}#end match Vote
let mup = Answer.moderator_downvotes.len();
let mdown = Answer.moderator_upvotes.len());
if mdown > mup {
revoke_answer(Answer);
} elif mup > mdown {
pay_answer(Answer);
};
}#end func
</pre>

<pre>
When I <User> changes there Vote on an <Answer>{

If a User Upvotes an Answer {
Mark the Answer as Upvoted my the User.
}
If (the User is a Mod){
add that User to the Set on the 'ModVotes' property on the Answer
}
If (the User is Mod or if the User is the Question Poser) {
run function Pay_Answer
} else {
Check is the Answer in Marked 'Approved' if not check if Question is Marked as UpVoted by the Question Poser if not Check is the Answers 'ModVotes' in Empty if it is not then{
Add user to the Set in proporty 'Promoters'
}
}
</pre>

or Mod and the Answer's 'PaidA' property is 0 {
set the 'PaidA' property on that Anwser to <Xa> and give the User that posted the Answer the same <Xa> amount of 'PromoteCredits'
} else if {

}

<pre>
Let the Function Revoke_Answer(Answer) be{
check if if the Answer is mark "Approved"
if so check if Question's Poser has Upvoted the Answer,
If so check if the set on the Answer's "ModVotes" property is Empty; If it's empty{
remove an amount of 'PromoteCredits' equal to the Answer's "PaidA" property from The user that posted the Answer(this can make the user's 'PromoteCredits' negative)
Set the 'PaidA' property on The Answer to 0
If not(Answer.promoters.is_empty()) {
Foreach promoter in Answer.promoters {
Subtract an amount equal Answer.paid_promoters from promoter
 }
Answer.promoters.drain()
}
Answer.paid_promoters = 0
}#End if Promoters is not empty
</pre>

When user choses to change his (Up/Down)vote on a Answer
If the User has Select to clear his vote unmark the vote
If the User has selected DownVoteMark for answer,
check is the User is in the set on the Answer's 'ModVotes' property If so
remove this user from that set. then run function Revoke_Answer(Answer)
else if is the user the Question Pose
If so then run function Revoke_Answer(Answer)

Give The Mods the ability to view all unapproved edits by there (Up/Down)Votes.

Give everyone the ability to view all rejected edits(by Mods and/or Question submitter)

If it's not their item, hide the current rating of the item from them until they have voted on it.

Randomly select WikiEdit that a User hasn't (Up/Down)Voted on and hasn't been approved and ask that user to (Up/Down)vote it(this is a form on 'MetaMod'). When that user Vote on an WikiEdit that have been chosen to 'MetaMod' give then 'PromoteCredits'

Use CRDTs so the the proposed edits to the Wiki don't block each other.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIR0Ngov7vo

I could make such a site but I don't have a server to host it or the skills needed to code the site that could handle a heavy load, thou I could learn them it would be pointless with the servers to run it on. Then there the whole UI/UX design issues.

Allow Users to (Up/Down)vote questions and use this information to add Questions to users feed and allow them to browse question limited to topic/tags

Allow people to say a tag applies to a Question/Answer/WikiEdit or say that a Tag doesn't apply to it Add all applies and subtract all doesn't apply and if it's positive say the item has the tag.

If someone's option of a tag on an Item differs more than <X> Standard deviations from the average randomly ask them "Did you make a mistake on tagging <Item> please review the Item and select all tags that Apply" Then if they agree show them Item and a list of all tags that people have said applies or doesn't apply and is that haven't given their opinion on all them then ask them "You haven't weighed in on all issues. You opinion is import.[I'll come bake later][Let me voice my Opinion(the default)]" If that choose "Let me voice my Opinion" change the list of shown Tags to just the ones that they haven' given an opinion on

If the voting(Up/Down or Applies/Doesn't Applies) on an Item have a large Standard Deviation randomly select a user that hasn't voted on it and ask them to vote on it.

These Random events should be viewed as the ADs and regulated accordingly. People that do what is asked should earn 'PromoteCredits' they can spend to promote their own questions, give away or do RMT with.

Sponsored Questions: Charge for a window to promote it to their target demographic and a give them the chance of offering a bounty for each 'engagement'(someone posts an answer; someone make a WikiEdit) If the window ends or their funds for 'engagements' runs out their Question goes back to treated like a normal Question.

= Monitization =

We could raise money by selling 'PromoteCredits'

If we go Mechanical Turk and allow Sponors to off bounties for answers.

We should allow the Sponsor to approve engagements that happed any time during the window, even after the window has expired.

WE should give the Sponser <X> times the ammount they payed out ot Engagers in 'PromoteCredits' to encourage they to approve answers.

to recap

PromoteCredits enter the system from users resonding to random ads

PromoteCredits enter the system from users buying them with Real World Money.

PromoteCredits enter the system paying bounties on Questions.

User trade ProMoteCredits amount themsselves.

PromoteCredits exit the system by users making Sponsored Questions.

== Grid Quiz ==
Like Jeopardy!

Use word clouds for the topic

The time from then the question was post to the time the approved answer was posted is use to rank the questions. the loner to answer the harder the question

When someone Flags a item make them select a community rule they think is violates and if they think it's illegal make them give a link to the law that it's breaking.
The make them write their argument on why the Item in in violation of the Rule/Law.
Once that is done check is the Item has been marked "DoubleJeopardy" if so subtract 1 from the "judiciousness" of the user the flagged the Item.
If a item is flagged pull it and put it in the Queue for review
Show the those selected for Jury duty only the text of the complaint until they decide to hear the case.
THe show them the Item that was flagged. and make them give in preliminary opinion of if they they the complaint will be upheld or over turned.

only after they have giving their Prelininary opinion allow them to join the Discussion of the Case.
The Case continues until the 12 jurors made a unanimous decision to permanently remove the Item or restore it. If the Jury makes an unanimus decicio add 1 to the 'judiciousness' of all the juries Is they vote to restore it mark the Item as 'DoubleJeopardy' I

The Plan

2022-07-25T05:07:45Z

Cmdrtako:

The upstander actively confronts the choice of whether to defy immorality or keep quiet and accept things the way they are. As Hannah Arendt has powerfully said about humanity: “It is always possible to say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” and upstanders are exactly those who want to make decisions about when to say “no” to evil.
The civil courage that characterizes the upstander is, in the words of the founder and first president of Oxford University’s Templeton College, Uwe Kitzinger, “the courage of the non-conformist.” It is the courage that risks social disapproval, the capacity to resist by thinking critically with one’s own mind, and the will to be an active participant in life, not a passive bystander.
Regardless of their differences in age, gender, literacy, religious affiliation, ethnic identity, or wartime roles, upstanders share the bravery to risk their lives rather than commit or be complicit in a crime. When so many other people choose to comprise their morals in order to survive, the upstander’s actions suggest that we must not allow ourselves to be debased by circumstance: To retain our dignity, we must sometimes refuse to live life at any cost.

I seeks to develop a complete and stand alone culture, from basics of language( like the “Four Books and Five Classics” of China) to a social institutions that encourage the development and admiration of upstanders.

The next level down is a P2P virtual world system called Alfredo Metatopia, It's purpose is to connect people of different cultures and promote empathy for the 'other'.
More about Alfredo Metatopia(AM here after) http://toohna.ourproject.org/crap/kickstarter_desc.html

The first step in making AM is WoMon. A research prototype to figure out the reequipments of AM the tech needed meet them.
For more about WoMon http://toohna.ourproject.org/RPG/index.php?title=YMO_desc

Our activities:
 1 Create a culture that produces Upstanders(active)
 1.1 Create institutions that encourage upstandership.(actice)
 1.1.1 Create The Order of Her Noodly Appendage(active)
 1.1.2 Help Stateless persons create their own nationality so they don't have to wait for one of the current nationalities to let them join.(dormant)
We call this Mukokusekistan
http://toohna.ourproject.org/stuff/mukokusekistan.draft2.html
 1.2 education(active)
 1.2.1 Alfredo Metatopia(active)“Give me a boner big enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. ”
 1.2.1.1 design a compelling and research based serious game to educate people.(active)
 1.2.1.1.1 WoMon <s>"Learn how to have a good marriage and HOW TO NOT DATE RAPE PEOPLE, because apparently you need to be explicitly taught that."</s> "Pokemon with Sexy Monster Girls"
 1.2.2 Open Source Art Fund. give money to people for creating AGPL compatible art and Open source tools useful to make it. (I'm note sure in the legel terms but colloquially commissions/grants/awards)(active)
 1.2.3 create an International Auxiliary Language(dorment)
 1.2.3.1 develop grammar(proposed)
 1.23.2 develop lexicon(proposed)
 1.2.3.3 set up a disglossia so that the IAL is a prestige "high" language so that future generations will be able to read the works of previous generation(proposed)
 1.2.3.4 develop auto translator to and from the IAL 'high' language to the native 'low' languages(proposed)
 1.2.3.4.1 adapt Ian Douglas Horswill's MKULTRA(proposed)
 1.2.3.4.2 integrate the tech from adapting MKULTRA into AM(proposed)
 1.2.4 Stumpers!(crowd source the answer to questions that have you stumped by turning into into a quiz contest)(active)
 1.2.5 Work with Safe conversations (or develop our own equivalent) and develop MOOCs that empowers people to talk without criticism, listen without judgment, and connect beyond differences.(proposed)
 2. get people to put the skills we teach into action(proposed)
 2.1 recreate 'Deutschland spricht' in the global scale(proposed)
 2.1.1 arrange meetings with people with different views<ref>Luis Fernando Terán Tamayo's SmartParticipation: A Fuzzy-Based Recommender System for Political Community-Building; DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-06551-9 not the one at SmartParticipation.com</ref>(both explicitly matching and implicitly in other match making services) (proposed)
 2.1.1 Max Tegmark's Improve the News but for social networks(proposed)
 2.2 develop serous games to get people to practice the skills(when all to have is a hammer everything looks like a nail)(proposed)
== The Wholly Marines ==
=== courage ===
Army, Air Force, and Marine Generals are standing in front of a rappelling tower with a Navy Admiral. The Air Force General says to the others, "My men are the most courageous of the Armed Forces."

"Ha!" says the Army General, "My men are the most courageous and I'll prove it."

The Army General calls a Private over from the tower. He tells the Private, "I want you to jump off that tower - no rope, no parachute."

"Yes, Sir!!!" the Private yells and proceeds to climb the tower. The Private walks to the edge, yells "Hoo-ahh!" and jumps off the tower. He is killed instantly upon impact.

"That's nothing," the Air Force General says. He calls a Senior Airman over. â€oeSon, I want you to jump off that tower - no rope, no parachute and I want you to do it with style."

"Yes, Sir!!!" the Senior Airman yells. He climbs to the top of the tower, walks to the edge and jumps. He executes a swan dive that would make Greg Louganis proud, hits the ground and dies on impact.

"Hmmph," the Marine growls. "Ya'll obviously forgot the Marine Corps are here."

He calls a Lance Corporal over. "Marine, I want you to jump off that tower and make the Corps proud!"

The Corporal yells, "Ooh-rah!", by way of response and runs to the tower. He grabs an M-60 and ammunition belt on the way and wraps the belt around himself in the Poncho Villa style. He climbs the tower and walks to the edge. Upon reaching the edge, he throws two grenades into the air, yells "Semper Fi Do or Die!" and jumps off. He starts shooting the M-60 in mid-air, clipping tree tops and yelling the entire way down. His impact is obscured by the two exploding grenades. When the smoke clears, only little pieces of the Marine are left.

The others are impressed and nod their heads in admiration. Then the Admiral says, "That's nothing." The others turn to face the Admiral, their faces in disbelief. The Admiral calls a Seaman over who was cleaning latrines. "Son, I want you to jump off that tower - no rope, no parachute."

The Seaman looks the Admiral in the face and says, "Why don't you kiss my *** and jump yourself!" and walks off.
The Admiral turns to the others and says, "Now THAT'S courage!"

=== Why the seaman disobeyed ===
It's Damage Control is one of the first thins that drill into you and they drill it in hard.

Darden ethics professor Bobby Parmar reviewed Stanley Milgram's famous experiments on authority and obedience. and found out what separated those the obeyed and those that disobeyed.

"When we looked at the data, particularly at what people said during the course of the experiment, we saw that the real issue that comes out of the Milgram experiments is whether participants perceived that they had a choice or the right to end the experiment, not whether they wanted to stop. Most people knew that something immoral or unethical was going on, but they assumed that it was the authority's responsibility to end the experiment. For example, participants said things like do you want me to stop and don't you think we should do something about that man in there? Some participants tried to get the experimenter to change his choice by pleading or begging him to look in on the learner. Others however, figured out that they didn't have to continue with this experiment if they didn't want to. These people simply left, they made statements such as I don't want to do this anymore or I don't think that this is right. Disobedient participant said things that exhibited more personal agency and they illustrated that they saw the option of leaving the experiment. Whereas most of the obedient participants didn't see the option of leaving, even though they were uncomfortable with the experiment. In addition, disobedient participants were significantly more likely to explore the effects of their actions. They would ask questions, like what happens if I get all the way to the top? Or how do you know that he'll be okay? This helped them figure out and articulate reasons to stop the experiment. "

How Raven stole fire and became black

2022-04-07T17:43:24Z

Cmdrtako: 2 revisions imported: Accaddently deleted these pages while clearing spam

Many ages ago when the world was still young and the, Raven and Great Eagle lived near each other far in the north country on the shores of the Great Water in the west. They were very good friends and they always worked in harmony and they had much food and many servants in common. Great Eagle was strict and stern knew no guile; he was always very open and frank and honest in his dealings with others. But Raven was a sly fellow, and at times he was not lacking in treachery and deceit. But Great Eagle did not suspect him, and the two lived always on very friendly terms. In these far-back times in the north country all the world was dark and there was no light but that of the stars and all the people lived in cold and darkness.

Great Eagle was given the Sun and all the fire to look after which he kept in boxes, but he was very stingy. He would give none of them to anyone else, and he never let them out of the boxes.

Great Eagle had a beautiful daughter who fancied Raven, for Raven was a handsome white bird who loved Great Eagle’s daughter in return. He was invited to the longhouse of Grey Eagle. Raven looked about the walls of the lodge and saw the two boxes, Great Eagle noticed Raven taking notice that Great Eagle would lure him away of the boxes whenever he got close to them. Raven was curious and one day sneaked away from Great Eagle while visiting Great Eagle's daughter and saw the Sun and fire.

And he said, "It is not fair that Sea-gull should keep the daylight all to himself locked up in a box. It was meant for all the world and not for him alone, and it would be of great value to all of us if he would sometimes let a little of it out." So he went to Great Eagle and said, "Give me some of your fire. You do not need it all and I can use some of it with advantage." But Great Eagle said, "No. I want it all for myself. Besides it's much to dangerous for you to handle." and he would not give him any of it.

Raven was ashamed of Great Eagle for hiding them, and knew what he must do.

Soon afterwards Raven gathered some prickly thorns and burdocks and scattered them on the ground between Sea-gull's house and the beach where the canoes were lying. Then he went to Great Eagle's window and cried loudly, "Our canoes are going adrift in the surf. Come quickly and help me to save them." Great Eagle sprang out of bed and ran half-asleep on his bare feet. But as he ran to the beach the thorns stuck in his bare flesh, and he howled with pain. He crawled back to his house, saying, "My canoe may go adrift if it pleases; I cannot walk because of the splinters in my feet." Raven chuckled to himself, and he moved away, pretending to go to the beach to draw up the canoes. Then he went into Sea-gull's house. Sea-gull was still howling with pain; he was sitting crying on the side of his bed and he was trying to pull the thorns from his feet as best he could. "I will help you," said Raven, "for I have often done this before. I am a very good doctor." So he took an awl made from whale-bone and he caught hold of Great Eagle's foot, with the pretense of removing the thorns. But instead of taking them out he only pushed them in farther until poor Great Eagle howled louder than ever. And Raven said, "It is so dark I cannot see to pull these thorns from your feet. If only there was a bighter light source I could soon cure you. A doctor must always have a little light." So Great Eagle unlocked the box and lifted the cover just a little bit so that a faint gleam of light came out. "That is better," said Raven. But instead of picking out the thorns he pushed them in as he had done before, until Sea-gull howled and kicked in pain. "Why are you so stingy with your light?" snapped Raven. "Do you think I am an owl and that I can see well enough in the darkness to heal your feet? Open the box wide and I will soon make you well." So saying he purposely fell heavily against Great Eagle and knocked the box on the floor. The cover flew open and Raven pick up the sun and flew straight out the window.

He hung the sun as high as he could in the sky. It made so much light that he was able to escape all the way to an island far out in the ocean.

Raven went back to the village and publicly mocked Great Eagle for being so foolish as to let the sun be stolen from him. After Great Eagle was as mad as he could be Raven went to him and mock him in his face. Great Eagle said, "Raven you must be punished for your crime, what punishment will it teach you your lesson?" Raven replied, "Please do anything but don't burn me alive."

Great Eagle with great glee in his eyes realized that that was exactly what he must do. Great Eagle took fire out of the box and set Raven aflame, charing all of his feathers and turning them the darkest black. But before Great Eagle could take back fire from Raven Raven flew away the knowledge that he has tricked Great Eagle one more and that he could give fire to the world offsetting all the pain he was experiencing.

Raven tried to take fire off of himself but every time to grab fire to pull it away it would ignite him. He ask for help to ease his pain, which he was sure they would give him since he had brought daylight to the world. But everyone was tired of Raven's tricks or was too afraid of Great Eagles wraith if the ended his punishment.

Raven endured great suffering until he pulled himself together and start to brag about how fire keep him warm and gave him light at night. Soon greed over took them and feeling Raven didn't deserve fire stole it from him.

Old Chinese Women

2022-04-07T17:43:24Z

Cmdrtako: 2 revisions imported: Accaddently deleted these pages while clearing spam

Code of Conduct

2021-08-29T13:47:11Z

Cmdrtako:

<h1>TL;DR</h1>
Rule 0: Instead of tell people what they can't do, Tell people what they must do!

Rule 1: Your first job is to make sure each person is stable at Stage Four.

Rule 2: Your job is to make sure the infrastructure to maintain these leaps to higher Stages is in place.

Rule 3: There are people in Stage One who want life to be different, and our advice is to give them a chance.

Rule 4: Tribal strategy involves three conversations. The first is “what we want,” or outcomes. The second is “what we have,” or assets. The third is “what we will do,” or behaviors. It’s imperative that the Tribal Leader keep these three discussions separate.

Rule Fin: Say 'anyone' instead of 'everyone'. 'everyone' means just those you consider worthy of being treated as a person, 'anyone' means 'every single person'

<h1>It’s a fact of life: birds flock, fish school, people “tribe.”</h1>
Every company, indeed every organization, is a tribe or, if it’s large enough, a network of tribes — groups of 20 to 150 people in which everyone knows everyone else or at least knows of everyone else. Tribes are more powerful than teams, companies or even CEOs, and yet their key leverage points have only recently been mapped — until now.

Every organization is really a set of small towns. If
you’re from a small town, think of the people there. If
you’re not, think of, as Don Henley sings, “that same small town in each of us.”

The people are different in every town and the roles
are never exactly the same. But there are more similarities than differences and the metaphor itself always
holds, from companies in Nebraska to ones in New
York or Kuala Lumpur.

We call these small towns tribes and they form so naturally it’s as though our tribe is part of our genetic code.

Tribes helped humans survive the last ice age, build farming communities and, later, cities. Birds flock, fish school, people “tribe.”

<h1>What Is a Tribe?</h1>
A tribe is a group between 20 and 150 people. Here’s the test for whether someone is in one of your tribes: If you saw her walking down the street, you’d stop and say “hello.” The members of your tribe are probably programmed into your cell phone and in your e-mail address book.

Some of the corporate tribes we’ve seen include the high-potential managers of one of the world’s largest financial services companies; the doctors, nurses and administrators of one of America’s most respected health care institutions; the research and development division of a mammoth high-tech firm; and the operational executives of a major drug company.

Tribes in companies get work done — sometimes a lot of work — but they don’t form because of work.

Tribes are the basic building block of any large human effort, including earning a living. As such, their influence is greater than that of teams, entire companies and even superstar CEOs. They determine how much work gets done, and of what quality.

Some tribes demand excellence from everyone and are constantly evolving. Others are content to do the minimum to get by. What makes the difference in performance?

<h2>Tribal Leaders.</h2>
Tribal Leaders focus their efforts on building the tribe or, more precisely, upgrading the tribal culture. If they are successful, the tribe recognizes them as the leaders, giving them top effort, cult-like loyalty and a track record of success. Divisions and companies run by Tribal Leaders set the standard of performance in their industries, from productivity and profitability to employee retention.
<h1>The Five Tribal Stages</h1>
Every tribe has a dominant culture, which we can peg on a one-to-five scale, with the goal being stability at Stage Four and, on occasion leaps to Stage Five.

All things being equal, a Five culture will always outperform a Four culture, which will outperform a Three and so on. (Stage Five is unstable but can produce history-making innovation.) People and groups move only one stage at a time and the actions that advance people from Stage One to Stage Two are different from those that advance
them from Two to Three.

If tribes are the most powerful vehicles within companies, cultures are their engines. Here is an overview of
<h2>the Five Stages</h2>
<h3>Stage One</h3>
Fortunately, most professionals skip Stage One (only about 2 percent of American professionals operate here at any given point), which is the mindset that creates street gangs and people who come to work with shotguns.

If people at Stage One had T-shirts, they would read “life sucks,” and what comes out of their mouths supports this adage. People at this stage are despairingly hostile, and they band together to get ahead in a violent and unfair world.

Most anthropologists say that human society started at Stage One — clans scratching out an existence while fighting with one another.

<h3>Stage Two</h3>
In 25 percent of workplace tribes, the dominant culture is Stage Two, which is a quantum leap from Stage One.
<p.>
People operating at Stage Two use language centered on “my life sucks.”

People in this culture stage are passively antagonistic; they cross their arms in judgment, but never really get interested enough to spark any passion. Their laughter is quietly sarcastic and resigned. The Stage Two talk is that they’ve seen it all before and watched it all fail. A person at Stage Two will often try to protect his or her people from the intrusion of management.

The mood that results from Stage Two’s theme, “my life sucks,” is a cluster of apathetic victims.

<h4>3 Doctors Story</h4>
Three doctors walk into an elevator. And one doctor said to the others, "Did you see my article in the New England Journal of Medicine?" And the other said, "No. That's great. Congratulations!"

The next one got kind of a scrunches his face and said, "While you were, you know, doing your research, I was stuck doing more surgeries than anyone else in the department of surgery at this institution." Notice the contempt in his tone.

And the third one got to his chance to bitch about his life and said, "Well, you think it was bad doing your monkey meatball surgery, that eventually we'll train monkeys to do, or cells or robots, or maybe not even need to do it at all, I was off pushing pencils running the future of the residency program."

And they all kind of laughed and they patted him on the back. And the elevator door opened, and they all walked out. That is a meeting of a Stage Two tribe.


<h3>Stage Three</h3>
The theme of Stage Three, the dominant culture in 49 percent of workplace tribes in the U.S., is “I’m great and you’re not.”

Normally, doctors operate at this level on their best days, as do professors, attorneys and salespeople. Within the Stage Three culture, knowledge is power, so people hoard it, from client contacts to gossip about the company.

People at Stage Three have to win and for them, winning is personal. They’ll outwork and outthink their competitors on an individual basis.

The mood that results is a collection of “lone warriors,” wanting help and support and being continually disappointed that others don’t have their ambition or skill.

As with Stage Two, no amount of team building will turn this group of self-described star players into a team.
<h4>3 Doctors story</h4>
Three doctors walk into an elevator. I happened to be in the elevator collecting data for this book. And one doctor said to the others, "Did you see my article in the New England Journal of Medicine?" And the other said, "No. That's great. Congratulations!"

The next one got kind of a wry smile on his face and said, "Well while you were, you know, doing your research," -- notice the condescending tone -- "While you were off doing your research, I was off doing more surgeries than anyone else in the department of surgery at this institution."

And the third one got the same wry smile and said, "Well, while you were off doing your research, and you were off doing your monkey meatball surgery, that eventually we'll train monkeys to do, or cells or robots, or maybe not even need to do it at all, I was off running the future of the residency program, which is really the future of medicine."

And they all kind of laughed and they patted him on the back. And the elevator door opened, and they all walked out. That is a meeting of a Stage Three tribe.

<h3>Stage Four</h3>
The gulf between “I’m great” (Stage Three) and “we’re great” (Stage Four) is huge — Grand Canyon huge.

This level represents 22 percent of workplace tribal cultures, where the theme of people’s communication is “we’re great.”

When groups get to this point, they see themselves as a tribe with a common purpose. They commit to shared core values and hold one another accountable.

They will not tolerate The Office-style performance or the personal agenda of Stage Three.

Fully three-quarters of tribes operate below Stage Four, and those in the zone of Tribal Leadership haven’t stabilized at this level.

As a result, they oscillate in and out of Stage Three.

<h3>Stage Five</h3>
Stage Four is a launching pad for Stage Five.

When we explain this last stage, which reflects less than 2 percent of workplace tribal cultures, we see skeptical looks coming back at us. Stage Five’s T-shirt would read “life is great,” and they haven’t been doing illicit substances.

Their language revolves around infinite potential and how the group is going to make history — not to beat a competitor, but because doing so will make a global impact.

This group’s mood is “innocent wonderment,” with people in competition with what’s not possible, not with another tribe.

Teams at Stage Five have produced miraculous innovations. The team that produced the first Macintosh was at Stage Five and we’ve seen this mood at Amgen.

This stage is pure leadership, vision and inspiration.

After a short burst of activity, Stage Five teams recede to Stage Four to regroup and attend to infrastructure issues before possibly returning to Stage Five.

In sports, these bursts win Olympic gold medals and Super Bowl rings. In business, these explosions of leadership make history.

<table>
<caption>Tribal Leadership Up Close</caption>
<tr><th>Stage 1</th><td>Mood: Despairing Hostility Theme: “Life Sucks.”</td></tr>
<tr><th>Stage 2</th><td>Mood: Apathetic Victim Theme: “My life Sucks.”</td></tr>
<tr><th>Stage 3</th><td>Mood: Lone Warrior Theme: “I'm great (and you're not).”</td></tr>
<tr><th>Stage 4</th><td>Mood: Tribal Pride Theme: “We're Great (and they're not).”</td></tr>
<tr><th>Stage 5</th><td>Mood: Innocent Wonderment Theme: “Life is great.”</td></tr>
</table>
<h1>The Tribal Leadership Navigation System</h1>

The key to locating your tribes is to listen for how most people talk and notice how most people structure their work relationships.

You’ll see elements of many cultural stages in your tribes, so look for what is most common.
<h2>Signs of Stage One.</h2>
Most people talk as though they are alienated from organizational concerns.

When they cluster together, they form isolated gangs that operate by their own rules, often based on absolute loyalty to the group. Many people are socially alienated, never talking to anyone.

The theme of their words is that life has given them a bad deal, so it’s OK to do whatever it takes to survive. There may be acts of violence, such as fistfights or extreme verbal abuse. Minor acts of theft or vandalism are a problem.

<h2>Signs of Stage Two.</h2>
People talk as though they are disconnected from organizational concerns, seeming to not care about what’s going on.

They do the minimum to get by, showing almost no initiative or passion.

They cluster together in groups that encourage passive-aggressive behavior (talking about how to get out of work or how to shine the boss on) while telling people in charge that they are on board with organizational initiatives.

The theme of their communication is that no amount of trying or effort will change their circumstances, and giving up is the only enlightened thing to do.

From a managerial perspective, nothing seems to work — team building, training, even selective terminations appear to do nothing to change the prevailing mood.

The culture is an endless well of unmet needs, gripes, disappointments and repressed anger.

<h2>Signs of Stage Three.</h2>
People engage in anything that’s going on with energy and commitment, but, when you listen closely, they talk mostly about themselves, and focus on appearing smarter and better than others.

They think they’re focused on team concerns, but their actions show their interest is personal.

People tend to form two-person relationships. They rarely bring people together, they resist sharing information except when it’s necessary and they pride themselves on being better informed than others.

Winning is all that matters, and winning is personal.

People at this stage complain that they don’t have enough time or support, and that the people around them aren’t as competent or committed as they are.

<h2>Signs of Stage Four.</h2>
Teams are the norm, focused around shared values and a common purpose. Information moves freely throughout the group.

People’s relationships are built on shared values. They tend to ask, “What’s the next right thing to do?” and to build ad hoc partnerships to accomplish what’s important at the moment. Their language focuses on “we,” not “me.” If two people get in a squabble, a third will step in and repair the relationship rather than create a personal following for himself.

Unlike Stage Two, the group is composed of people who have played the Stage Three game and won — and who are now ready for genuine partnerships.

Your first job is to make sure each person is stable at Stage Four, as most groups at this level crash down to Stage Three when under stress.

<h2>Signs of Stage Five.</h2>
Your tribes hardly ever refer to the competition, except to note how remarkable their own culture is by comparison and how far their results outstrip industry norms.

The theme of communication is limitless potential, bounded only by imagination and group commitment. People in this culture can find a way to work with almost anyone, provided their commitment to values is at the same intensity as their own.(Unlike Stage Four, the focus isn’t on “our values,” but on resonant values.)

There is almost no fear, stress or workplace conflict. People talk as though the world is watching them, which may well be the case as their results are making history. Your job is to make sure the infrastructure to maintain these leaps to Stage Five is in place.

<h1>YOUR JOURNEY AS A LEADER: LEADING OTHERS THROUGH THE STAGES</h1>
<h2>Stage One: On the Verge of a Meltdown</h2>
The person at Stage One is alienated from others, expressing the view that “life sucks.”

There are two ways to move from Stage One to Stage Two.
<h3>First, the person has to substitute “life sucks” with “my life sucks” — the mantra of Stage Two.</h3>
The difference in these stages is huge, and moving forward means dropping language that the nature of life is flawed and saying instead that life works for some people, but not for you.

One man we got to know in our research is an artist named Joseph. When we interviewed Joseph, he talked as someone who had made the transition: “I had to give up my art, because the cost is my family.” He sounded like a victim of circumstance: that others can do art, but not him. His life sucked — he’s made it to Stage Two.

<h3>Second, the person can move to a tribe where the offending behavior is not tolerated.</h3>
The mother of a former gang member, whose son began attending a church-run youth center, told us, “I’m worried; he used to be so alive, but now it’s like the cord got pulled.”

From a tribal perspective, her son went from the fire of despairing hostility (Stage One) to the passivity of being an apathetic victim (Stage Two).

This was progress.

When we interviewed him, he looked sad and said, “This place sucks — I don’t know anyone here.” He had gone from the alienation of Stage One to the disconnection of Stage Two.

<h2>Give Stage One People a Chance</h2>
There are people in Stage One who want life to be different, and our advice to employers is to give them a chance. William, part of Joseph’s tribe, has made doing so a part of his design and general contracting business, Design For You, in Chicago. He employs former gang members, convicts and people who have fallen into (and out of) heavy drug use. He believes that helping people out of Stage One is the responsibility of every person in society. At the same time, if people aren’t willing to leave the allure of Stage One, he doesn’t pursue them. If they relapse into despairing hostility, he invokes the “horse whisperer” protocol and pushes them out, but watches for when they’re ready to try again.

<h2>Stage Two: Disconnected and Disengaged</h2>
People at Stage Two are separate from others, although unlike those at Stage One, they are surrounded by people who seem to have some power that they lack. As a result, their language expresses “my life sucks.” Unlike Stage One, a person at Stage Two communicates the view that others’ lives seem to be working.

When people at this stage cluster together, their behavior shows characteristics of being apathetic victims.

<h3>Leverage Points for a Person at Stage Two</h3>
Here are four leverage points for a person at Stage Two:
<ul>
<li>Encourage her to make a friend. Then another friend. Then another friend. In other words, encourage her to establish dyadic (two-person) relationships.</li>
<li>Encourage her to establish relationships with people who are at late Stage Three. Such individuals can be identified by their eagerness to mentor others into becoming mini-versions of themselves.</li>
<li>In one-on-one sessions, show her how her work does make an impact. In particular, show her areas where she is competent and where her strengths are. In
the same meeting, point out abilities she has that she has not yet developed, but be careful to make the tone of these discussions positive.</li>
<li>Assign her projects that she can do well in a short time. These assignments should not require excessive follow-up or nagging, as this behavior may reinforce her “my life sucks” language.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Success Indicators</h3>
Here are two indications of success:
<ul>
<li>She will use “I’m great” language, as opposed to “my life sucks.” She may name-drop, point to her own accomplishments and brag. Many of her sentences will start with “I.”</li>
<li>She will exhibit the lone warrior spirit of Stage Three, often comparing herself with her co-workers and using disparaging language like “What’s wrong with
them?” and “If they tried, they’d succeed.” </li>
</ul>

<h2>Stage Three: The Wild, Wild West</h2>
The essence of Stage Three is “I’m great.” Unstated and lurking in the background is “and you’re not.” Ask people at this stage how they see work and you will hear: “I’m good at my job,” “I try harder than most,” “I’m more able than most,” and “Most people can’t match my work ethic.” The key words are “I,” “me” and “my.”

People at Stage Three report, almost universally, that they don’t have enough time, don’t get enough support, and are surrounded by people less able and dedicated than they are. No matter how hard they work, they can’t punch through the barrier of a day that has only 24 hours. They’ve hit the point of diminishing returns, so the harder they work, the less effective they are and the less their efforts seem to matter. Simply put, they want to get to the next level but don’t know how to get there or even what the next level looks like.

<h3>Leverage Points for a Person at Stage Three</h3>
Here are eight leverage points for a person at Stage Three:
<ul>
<li>Encourage him to work on projects that are bigger than anything he can do alone. In short, assign him work that requires partnership.</li>
<li>Point out that his success has come through his own efforts, but that the next level of success is going to require a totally different style. In other words, show him that what’s brought him to this point will not be enough to move him forward.</li>
<li>Describe role models (ideally in the company) that are exhibiting Stage Four behavior. You’ll know these individuals by (1) their focus on “we,” (2) the number of triads (three-person relationships) in their networks and (3) success that comes from groups.</li>
<li>When the person complains that he doesn’t have time and that others aren’t as good (the two chief gripes at Stage Three), show that he has crafted his work life so that no one can really contribute to him.</li>
<li>Tell stories about the time you made the transition from Stage Three to Stage Four.</li>
<li>Coach him that real power comes not from knowledge, but from networks and that there is more leverage in wisdom than in information.</li>
<li>Encourage him to manage using transparency, as much as is possible under corporate policy.</li>
<li>Encourage him to form triads.</li>
</ul>

<h2>The Tribal Leadership Epiphany</h2>
Having interviewed thousands of people who have made it into Stage Four, the zone of Tribal Leadership, we discovered that every person had an awakening. Some called it a major business insight. One said, “In the shower this morning, I realized there’s a better way to do business that will mean much higher profitability.” Some called it corporate karma. Others described it as a need to live their values. Some came to it after years of psychotherapy or doing a self-help program. Some came to it through what Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas (in Geeks and Geezers) call a crucible experience: an event that causes people to reflect — at both intellectual and emotional levels — on their core assumptions. For some people, 9/11 kick started the epiphany. For most people, the epiphany was actually a series of epiphanies, each presenting a deeper insight about what wasn’t working in Stage Three.

While the epiphany happens to all Tribal Leaders, it may not happen in adulthood. Gordon Binder, former CEO of Amgen, apparently had it growing up in New Mexico and finished it in the Navy. Frank Jordan became a Tribal Leader through the Boys & Girls Clubs.

They described the epiphany as the turning point in their lives, both personally and professionally, regardless of how they came to it or went through it.

Although it often took months or years for the epiphany to burble through their minds, once the moment of awareness happened, there was no turning back. They often described it in sound bites. We heard statements like:
<ul>
<li>Nothing that matters is personal.</li>
<li>Stage Three has no legacy.</li>
<li>To win at Stage Three is to win small.</li>
<li>I now see I have been a manipulator, not a leader.</li>
<li>I’m tired; isn’t there some other game to play?</li>
<li>I see myself through others’ eyes and I don’t like what I see.</li>
</ul>

As the person sees into her blind spots she realizes that the ego hit of accomplishment isn’t the same as success itself. Her attention shifts to what’s really important, and, almost always, the goal is tribal. David Kelley, CEO of IDEO, said his goal became “Hanging out with great people and creating stuff that makes a difference.” George Zimmer, CEO of Men’s Wearhouse, said, “We need to keep thinking about the people in our stores and how to make their lives better.”

As the seesaw tilts toward Stage Four, the person’s language and behavior shift away from dyadic relationships toward networked systems of people.

<h2>Stage Four: Establishing Tribal Leadership</h2>
In our research, after a person has had the epiphany that takes him from Stage Three to Stage Four, he behaves differently. Our data show that people tend to take one of three paths. Kelley, took the first: He got together a group of like-minded friends and asked how they might make money. The relationships come before the business model; the tribe before the profits. If the group is composed of people who are really operating at Stage Four (rather than dropouts from the system in the midst of Stage Two), the ventures tended to do very well, like IDEO. The key question is, “Have we all owned and are we all done with Stage Three?” If the answer is yes, a small group of people becomes what we call a tribal seed. As it grows, it attracts resources, people, money and ideas, and it flourishes into a tribe.

The second path is that the newly minted Stage Four person looks for people in a large organization who are eager to play by a different set of rules. Often, these will be people in late Stage Three or individuals in the process of going through the epiphany. The Tribal Leader collects and nurtures them and forms a tribe based on their values and aspirations. The group — often a new department or, in a matrix organization, a “project” — becomes unusually successful, often being labeled a “miracle.” As the group succeeds, people at Stage Three notice the results, often trying to replicate the tribe’s strategy within an “I’m great” culture. Such approaches fail, and the Tribal Leader’s group moves further ahead with people scratching their heads about how he does it.

The third path is that the person forges out on her own, developing what we call tribal antennae — an intuitive ability to find people who can contribute to success on a larger scale than one person working alone and who value her help in return. From the outside, her actions look like networking gone wild — she’s constantly reaching out to more and more people, with others saying that she needs to learn focus. In fact, her actions are systematic: She is shopping for tribal members. As she finds people who fit, she networks them into the group, and a tribe slowly takes shape. Unlike the first approach, where the tribal seed determines the nature of the business from the start, this third path produces rapidly changing tribes and business models. The key to this third path is that it’s not “my tribe,” but “our tribe.” The person who cobbled it together is recognized as the Tribal Leader, not the single visionary who calls the shots. In this system, anyone is welcome to play — and tribal members all have a hand in recruiting, provided they have something to offer and obey the rules.

<h1>Owning Tribal Leadership: Stabilizing Stage four</h1>
A key point for companies that want to attain Stage Four is to go for values now.

Core values are “principles without which life wouldn’t be worth living.” There are two ways to seek core values. The first is for a Tribal Leader to tell a value laden story, which triggers others to tell similar stories about their values.

The second way is to ask three to five open-ended questions such as, “What are you proud of?”

The Tribal Leader’s goal is to find shared values that unite the tribe.

<h2>A Noble Cause Is What We ‘Shoot For’</h2>
If core values are the fuel of a tribe, a noble cause is the direction it’s headed. A noble cause captures the tribe’s ultimate aspiration. Said differently, core values are what we “stand in” and a noble cause is what we “shoot for.”

There are two ways to find a tribe’s noble cause. The first is to keep asking, “in service of what?”

The second way is to ask the Big Four Questions of people in the tribe: “What’s working well?” “What’s not working?” “What can we do to make the things that aren’t working, work?” and “Is there anything else?” These questions capture a group’s current assessment of its situation and its aspirations about what should change and why. The noble cause will often emerge out of people’s answers to the questions.

The goal of determining values and a noble cause isn’t agreement; it is alignment, which produces coordinated action married with passionate resolve. Anything not consistent with the core values and noble cause needs to be reworked or pruned.

The group captures the essence of Tribal Leadership when it asks, “What activities will express our values and reach toward our noble cause?” The answer becomes a reason to form networked relationships and the basis of a tribal strategy.

<h2>Triads and Stage Four Networking</h2>
Every September, a remarkable party takes place at which people in commercial real estate discuss and close more business than perhaps on any other night of the
year. At the center of the party is CB Richard Ellis Vice Chair, Darla Longo.

Longo’s behavior was the most remarkable part of the event and most missed her magic. She didn’t promote herself, talk about her accomplishments or say “I,” “me”
or “my,” other than to say, “I’d like you to meet … .” Longo played matchmaker. She introduced clients to brokers, senior brokers to successful rookies and clients to one another.

If we were to take any moment of the evening and watch it in slow motion, we’d see three elements. First, Longo would have at least two people around her. Second, she would talk to them both at the same time, even if they didn’t know each other. Third, if we listened to her words, we’d notice that they would have the effect of building or deepening the relationship between the other two people.

Longo emerged as one of the leaders in commercial real estate for many reasons: her drive, endless energy, talent, vision for the business, and focus on integrity and values. In our years of watching her, one simple act of behavior stands out: her ability to “triad” — to create business relationships between two people, based on core values and mutual self-interest, and then move on. In essence, she receives loyalty and followership by creating relationships between other people. She is one of the most successful people in commercial real estate because her actions build triads, the foundation of a Stage Four tribal structure.

<h3>The Structure of Stage Four Relationships</h3>
The triad is so powerful that it can link tribes together (remember, the upward barrier on a tribe is 150 people, so many of these companies are tribes of tribes), creating an unlimited capacity for scalability.

While the triad is the basic building block of Stage Four cultures, these blocks can be stacked to the sky, resulting in large, robust, dynamic and growing networks of tribes at Stage Four. All are vibrant, values based and filled with people giving their best efforts — leading and being led at the same time.

<h2>A Tribal Leader’s Guide to Strategy</h2>
When we collected the best practices we observed from Tribal Leaders, and combined them with the results from a careful study of historical tribes, we came
to a model with five parts: values, noble cause, outcomes, assets and behaviors.
<ul>
<li>Values and Noble Cause. Setting a strategy starts with recognizing the values of the people who will implement it and the noble cause to which they aspire. These pieces give the tribe a boost in motivation and align it on a common purpose. They go a long way to owning Stage Four.</li>
<li>Outcomes, Assets and Behaviors. Once values and a noble cause are set, tribal strategy involves three conversations. The first is “what we want,” or outcomes. The second is “what we have,” or assets. The third is “what we will do,” or behaviors. It’s imperative that the Tribal Leader keep these three discussions separate.</li>
</ul>

<h1>Toward Vital Work Communities(Stafe Five)</h1>
In the early 1990s, we only knew about tribal Stages One through Four, and we had lots of examples of each. On the basis of our observations, we believed that Stage Four’s “we’re great” language was the top of the mountain. Then, thanks to Amgen, everything turned upside down, delaying the publication of Tribal Leadership. The discovery was worth the wait.

We walked into Amgen in the 1990s and asked who their competitors were. We expected “Genentech” (another biotechnology firm) or maybe — if people were ambitious — “Pfizer” (a fully integrated pharmaceutical company). It was even possible that people would be so ill-informed about the marketplace that they wouldn’t know. All of those answers would be consistent with what we expected to find, and they would help verify our hypotheses and make us happy researchers.

“We’re in competition with cancer,” we heard from Amgen employees. Huh? No mention of a company.

The same people went on to say, “Maybe [our competitor] is inflammatory disease, such as arthritis, Obesity, (or) Parkinson’s.” We weren’t happy. In fact, our four-stage model couldn’t explain what we were hearing.

To make our situation worse, we didn’t see any evidence of tribal pride. No high fives, no “We’re No. 1” banners (which they were in growth, although not in
revenue or market capitalization).

<h2>A Mood of Innocent Wonderment</h2>
“It’s amazing,” one person in engineering told us. “A few good experiments, and now we’re sitting on billion-dollar patents. It makes me think of all the human diseases we’ll beat in the next few years.” His tone was what perplexed us more than his words. It wasn’t pride. It was almost a whisper, like a prayer of thanksgiving.

It’s a mood we came to call innocent wonderment.

We had stumbled across our first example of Stage Five, and it was as much a leap forward as Stage Four was from Stage Three. It is, we believe, the future of business.

At Amgen in the 1990s, and in most other organizations at this stage, the culture oscillated in and out of Stage Five. After a burst of history-making activity, the group fell back to the “we’re great” language of Stage Four, assessing their performance relative to competitors. Then another market opportunity, or possible discovery, would come along and catapult them back into Stage Five. If we graphed out the Amgen of the early 1990s, the culture would be like waves on the beach: the crests in Stage Five and the troughs in Stage Four.

<h2>Stage Five</h2>
Since Amgen, we’ve found dozens of organizations with Stage Five tribes. What they all have in common is Tribal Leadership taken to its next level, and a level of
performance that makes history.

Bhai

2021-08-02T12:33:40Z

Cmdrtako:

Bhai, sometimes translated as God's Fear, But a better translation is "Apprehension<ref>ap·pre·hen·sion 
/ˌaprəˈhenSHən/ 
noun 
1.
anxiety or fear that something bad or unpleasant will happen.
 
2.
understanding; grasp.</ref> of some more powerful then one's self".

It is the only fear that gods know, as explained in this story:

With fire and steel did the gods forge the sapient heart. So fiercely did it beat, so loud was the sound, that the gods cried out,

«On this day we have brought forth the strongest Heart in all the heavens. None can stand before it without trembling at its strength.»

But then the Sapient Heart weakened, its steady rhythm faltered and the gods said,

«Why have you weakened so? We have made you the strongest in all of creation.» And the heart said

‘I am alone.’

And the gods knew that they had erred. So they went back to their forge and brought forth another Heart.

But the second Heart beat stronger than the first, and the first was jealous of its power.

Fortunately, the second Heart was tempered by wisdom.

“If we join together, no force can stop us.”

And when the two Hearts began to beat together, they filled the heavens with a terrible sound.

For the first time, the gods knew Fear.

They tried to flee, but it was too late.

The Mortal Hearts destroyed the gods who created them and turned the heavens to ashes to fertilized the lands so that forest would grow where all creatures could live free and in balance..

To this very day, no one can oppose the beating of two Sapient Hearts.

In a religous context Bhai is the Fear of the consequences of one's [[Karma]]. It simply implies respect, Love, reverence, veneration or ਅਦਬ for the Divine Law, [[Hukm]]. In essence, it is the fear of immoral, false and unrighteous conduct. Thus, in a deeper sense, Bhai is meant to discourage ambivalence. Such pure "Fear" (respect, reverence, Love or ਅਦਬ) keeps a seeker in the scale of morality and righteousness, which, in turn, encourages noble virtues, Spiritual Life, Spiritual discipline, a meditation on the Absolute One, cultivation of spiritual-knowledge (Aatam-Giaan) through inner inquiry (Vichaar) and one-pointed conscious Love for FSM. With the help of these Divine Attributes, one adorns Bhagti (devotion) with its important element of Bairaag - detachment from materiality and temptations, and attachment to the practice of Love and devotion of the Divine within. According to the WMOM, only those deeds are "excellent" (good Karanee) that are done in the Bhai (respect, reverence, Love or ਅਦਬ), otherwise, they are "false". Thus the third Guru Sahib says, "Forsake desire, and abide in the Fear of God; O Nanak, these are the most excellent actions".

ਬਿਨੁ ਭੈ ਕਰਮ ਕਮਾਵਣੇ ਝੂਠੇ ਠਾਉ ਨ ਕੋਇ ॥੪॥: Bin bhai karam kamaavane jhoothe thaaou na koi ||4||: Without fear (ਡਰ-ਅਦਬ of God), the performance of Kaarma (of religious rituals, and so on) is false, and one finds no place of Rest. ||4|| (sggs 427).
ਗੁਰਮਤੀ ਭਉ ਊਪਜੈ ਭਾਈ ਭਉ ਕਰਣੀ ਸਚੁ ਸਾਰੁ ॥: Guramatee bhaou oopajai bhaaee bhaou karanee sach saar: O Brother, under Guru's Instruction, the Fear of God is produced; true and excellent are the deeds (Karanee) done in the Fear of God (sggs 638).
ਕਾਮਣਿ ਗੁਣਵੰਤੀ ਹਰਿ ਪਾਏ ॥ ਭੈ ਭਾਇ ਸੀਗਾਰੁ ਬਣਾਏ ॥: Kaaman gunavantee har paaye. Bhai bhaai seegaar banaaye: The virtuous soul-bride finds the Lord;
she decorates herself with the Love and the Fear of God. (sggs 122).
ਭੈ ਤੇ ਬੈਰਾਗੁ ਊਪਜੈ ਹਰਿ ਖੋਜਤ ਫਿਰਣਾ ॥: Bhai te bairaag oopjai Hari khojat phirnaa: Through the Fear of God, the attitude of detachment (Bairaag) wells up, and one sets out in search of God (sggs 1102).
ਤ੍ਰਿਸਨਾ ਛੋਡੈ ਭੈ ਵਸੈ ਨਾਨਕ ਕਰਣੀ ਸਾਰੁ ॥: Trisanaa shodai bhai vasai Nanak karanee saar: Forsake desire, and abide in the Fear of God; O Nanak, these are the most excellent actions (sggs 1089).

Although both the unfaithful (Bemukh, Saakat, the Manmukh or nonbeliever) and the faithful (believer, the opposite of Bemukh) entertain the Bhai, but the Bhai of both is something different. In separation from FSM, the Bemukh or Saakat is full of all other fears (e.g., fear of death, repeated suffering etc.). It's common to see such people subscribe to religion out of fear. They practice the various religious injunctions because of apprehension that nonperformance of the same will lead to retribution from God. Ignorance is the root of such fear. The basis of any religion is Love of FSM and hence anything done out of fear is due to immaturity. In True Love, how there can be any room for any kind of reprisal? The faithful, on the other hand, Fears the Allmighty in deep reverence, respect, Love, ਅਦਬ etc. So he has no other fears (such as the fear of death etc.) because he does not consider himself to be separate from FSM at any given moment.

ਡਰਿ ਡਰਿ ਪਚੇ ਮਨਮੁਖ ਵੇਚਾਰੇ ॥: Dar dar pache manamukh vechaare: The wretched self-willed Manmukhs are ruined through fear and dread (sggs 677).
ਮਨਮੁਖ ਭੈ ਕੀ ਸਾਰ ਨ ਜਾਣਨੀ ਤ੍ਰਿਸਨਾ ਜਲਤੇ ਕਰਹਿ ਪੁਕਾਰ ॥: Manmukh bhai kee saar na jaananee trisanaa jalate karahi pukaar: The self-willed Manmukhs do not appreciate the value of the Fear of God. Burning in desire, they weep and wail (sggs 1288).
ਸਾਕਤ ਜਮ ਕੀ ਕਾਣਿ ਨ ਚੂਕੈ ॥: Saakath jam kee kaan na chookai: The Saakat is not rid of his fear of death (sggs 1030).
ਇਹੁ ਮਨੁ ਨਿਰਭਉ ਗੁਰਮੁਖਿ ਨਾਮਿ ॥: Ihu manu nirabhaou gurmukh naam: The mind of the Gurmukh becomes fearless through the Divine Naam (sggs 415).
ਸਾਕਤ ਨਰ ਸਤਿਗੁਰੁ ਨਹੀ ਕੀਆ ਤੇ ਬੇਮੁਖ ਹਰਿ ਭਰਮਾਵੈਗੋ ॥ ਲੋਭ ਲਹਰਿ ਸੁਆਨ ਕੀ ਸੰਗਤਿ ਬਿਖੁ ਮਾਇਆ ਕਰੰਗਿ ਲਗਾਵੈਗੋ ॥: Saakat nar...: The Sakkat does not submit to the Satguru; the Lord makes such nonbeliever wander. (Within him are) the waves of greed, (these waves are of the nature of ) the dog. (As the dog is attracted by) carcasses (and loves to eat them), (similarly the greedy person) sticks to the poison (that brings death to one's spiritual life) of Maya (sggs 1311).

Spiritual value is associated not merely with Love and devotion of FSM but also linked to having the Bhai (respect, reverence, Love, ਅਦਬ etc.) and the practice of [[Dharma]] - the social responsibility of caring for the entire Creation. According to the WMOM, the true Love of FSM is produced by Bhai of the Fear of God.

<references/>
[https://www.gurbani.org/articles/webart289.htm FEAR OF GOD]

Shakti

2021-01-18T17:01:58Z

Cmdrtako:

Sakti [shakti] means “power”; in Hindu philosophy and theology sakti is understood to be the active dimension of the godhead, the divine power that underlies the godhead’s ability to create the world and to display itself. Within the totality of the godhead, sakti is the complementary pole of the divine tendency toward quiescence and stillness. It is quite common, furthermore, to identify sakti with a female being, a goddess, and to identify the other pole with her male consort. The two poles are usually understood to be interdependent and to have relatively equal status in terms of the divine economy (David R. Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986], 133).

=notes on Shaktis from the web=
source: http://www.lamatruth.com/ying/?type=detail&id=201

In ancient times, Tibet had a native local god/goddess religion, parallel to the Indian local/regional god/goddess systems. Around the time of the Aryan invasion of India, Aryans consolidated the triple-god concept (Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva) by absorbing the various Dravidian local goddesses as “shaktis” (originally the word meant “power” but it came to imply “female consort”) for their triad.

Buddhism then swept in and the Tibetans really took to it in a big way, but rather like the parallel example of the Mayans in Mexico adopting the Catholic religion but warping it to fit their own local religions (viz. The Virgin of Guadelupe) – the Tibetans never abandoned their ancient god/goddess pairings, so suddenly you have these big Buddhist tankas (religious paintings) showing the 108 Bodhisatvas (108 is a sacred number for mathematical reasons in many cultures, most notably Asia, while Bodhisatvas are nearly enlightened monks who could achieve nirvana (“nothingness”) but choose as good Samaritans to reincarnate and help other souls evolve to the point of nirvanahood) — and each of these 108 Bodhisatvas is shown with a naked woman, his shakti, in his lap having sex with him…

Now, just as the Catholic church took “The Song of Solomon” from the Bible and said, “This is not about having sex with a woman, folks, this is about the Church’s longing for Jesus,” so did the Tibetan Buddhists explain away the sexual congress between these 108 Bodhisatvas and their shaktis as a kind of ephemeral spiritual congress.

The major difference between the Judaic system and the Tibetan Buddhist one is that the Tibetans never stopped drawing representations of the shakti. Over the years she was drawn smaller and smaller, however. In the Vedic (Hindu) Tantra sects, the shakti is represented by a woman of normal size, or perhaps a little smaller-than-average. In the Tibetan tankas, the shakti is smaller-than-average on down to little more than doll-size. She is always there, though, in the Bodhisatva’s lap. Asking about this from a Pokara Monk, China Expat was told: “Well, without his shakti, the Bodhisatva would not be enlightened.” So they are acknowledging this ancient tantric (for lack of a more universal word) union as a prerequisite for what they now (being nominally Buddhists) call “enlightenment.”

Main Page

2019-12-05T21:38:55Z

Cmdrtako: Cmdrtako moved page The Order of Her Noodly Appendage Wiki to Main Page

"Follow your passion. Stay true to yourself. Never follow someone else's path unless you're in the woods and you're lost and you see a path. By all means, you should follow that." - Ellen DeGeneres, Tulane Commencement Speech, 2009

==Welcome to the Wiki==

Welcome to the wiki of The Flying Spaghetti Mother's(The wife of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) Noodly Appendage, The Wholly Marine Corps. [[Special:AllPages|Have a look around.]] Don't forget to like our [https://www.facebook.com/HerNoodly/ FaceBook page] and follow us on [https://twitter.com/HAltaica Twitter].Support us on [https://www.patreon.com/TOoHNA Patreon]

==The Order of Her Noodly Appendage==

The purpose of the Wholly Marines as defined by the tenth Pastafarian Admiral of the Fleet, Captain Granth who established the order of Her Noodly Appendage(The Wholly Marine Corps) was to act as "the army of the FSM" to guard and protect everyone (not just Pastafarians) and who always act according to their FSM's teachings, rules and ethics were at act with charity, love and service to all human beings. The commandments of the Wholly Marines being enshrined in the [[Wholly Marine Officer's Manual]].

This brings unprecedented responsibilities and duties that need to be fulfilled by the Wholly Marines. If the Wholly Marines are truly the noodly appendages of the Flying Spaghetti Monster&Mother, "FSMs' army", then the duties of a Wholly Marine is to serve the Almighties and the entire people of the world. This concept is all encompassing and cannot be used in a narrow sense to refer to the duties of the Wholly Marines to a small sect or elite group of men/women who share similar beliefs; the Wholly Marines must serve the wider world community as that is the goal set by the Flying Spaghetti Mother. If the Wholly Marines fails to serve this wider goal, it will be lacking in its duties to their FSMs and will not fulfil the key requirement set out by the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the Pirate Personnel Guide.

Wholly Marine tradition states that at the age of thirty, Captain Granth went missing and was presumed to have drowned after going for one of his morning swims in the nearby ocean. One day on his arrival, he declared: "There is no Ninjaism, there is no Pirateism".

It was from this moment that Captain Granth would begin to spread the teachings of what was then the beginning of the Wholly Marines.

== The Beginning of the Wholly Marines ==

Even though [[Wikipedia:Bhai Kanhaiya|Bhai Kanhaiya's]] father was a wealthy trader, he was of such a strong religious bent of mind that he left home when still very young and roamed about with saddhus and ascetics in search of spiritual peace. His quest ended when he met Captain Tegh Bahadur and accepted initiation as a Pirate at his hands. His special mission was selfless service of humanity with no distinction of nationality, caste or creed. Once while he was on shore leave to Anandpur the city was attacked by a combination of Rajput hill troops and their Ninja allies.

During the frequent sallies and skirmishes between the Pirates and the enemy around Anandpur, [[Wikipedia:Bhai Kanhaiya|Bhai Kanhaiya]] was often seen carrying a mashak (a goatskin water pouch), serving water to anyone who was thirsty, quenching the thirst of the dying and wounded soldiers while handing out candy. He did this [[sewa]](The Giving of The Candies) with love and affection without any discrimination, giving water to both friends and foe. His acts of compassion stirred up stern criticism amongst his fellow Pirates, who complained to The Admiral of The Fleet, pointing out that Ensign [[Wikipedia:Bhai Kanhaiya|Bhai Kanhaiya]] was even serving the fallen Ninja attackers. They were especially annoyed because the city had been surrounded, stopping the supply of candy and water, and here was [[Wikipedia:Bhai Kanhaiya|Bhai Kanhaiya]] sharing what little water they had. They had tried to stop him many a time, but he would not pay them any heed. [[Wikipedia:Bhai Kanhaiya|Bhai Kanhaiya's]] benevolent actions eventually led to a summons by Fleet Admiral Granth who explained that he had received a complaint about his actions on the battlefield.

Fleet-Admiral Granth said, "These brave Pirates are saying that you go and feed water to the enemy and they recover to fight them again -- Is this true?"

Ensign [[Wikipedia:Bhai Kanhaiya|Bhai Kanhaiya]] replied "Yes, my Captain, what they say is true. But Fleet-Admiral, I saw no Ninja or Pirate on the battlefield. I only saw human beings. And, ... Fleet-Admiral Granth, .. they all have the same FSM’s Spirit? -- Fleet-Admiral Granth, have you not taught us to treat all the Flying Spaghetti Monster's people as the same?"

The Admiral of The Fleet was very pleased with the reply. [[Wikipedia:Bhai Kanhaiya|Bhai Kanhaiya]] had understood the deep message of Pirate Personnel Guide correctly.
The Admiral of The Fleet smiled and blessed [[Wikipedia:Bhai Kanhaiya|Bhai Kanhaiya]].

Fleet-Admiral Granth said, "Ensign [[Wikipedia:Bhai Kanhaiya|Bhai Kanhaiya]], you are right, you have understood the true message of Pirate Personnel Guide".

He then told the Pirates who had complained that [[Wikipedia:Bhai Kanhaiya|Bhai Kanhaiya]] had understood the deeper message of the FSM's teachings correctly and that they all would have to strive to learn lessons from the priceless words of Pirate Personnel Guide.

The Admiral of The Fleet also gave [[Wikipedia:Bhai Kanhaiya|Bhai Kanhaiya]] some medical balm and said, "From now on, You should also put this balm on the wounds of all who need it"
Then turning to the pirates Fleet-Admiral Granth said, "Pirates, [[Wikipedia:Bhai Kanhaiya|Bhai Kanhaiya]] is a FSM-feeling saintly soul. His impartial and non-biased behavior towards others has led him to achieve the Sehaj state. Let him carry on with his mission. Many more will follow in his footsteps in the years to come and keep the tradition of The Giving of The Candies alive."

And so it happened that [[Wikipedia:Bhai Kanhaiya|Bhai Kanhaiya]] became the first of the Wholly Marines.

== Core Beliefs ==

=== God ===
The Flying Spaghetti Mother speaks through all religions, deities, and prophets, and all religions, deities, and prophets are conduits to the Flying Spaghetti Mother. To think about any deity, or indeed thinking of any sort, even the most irrational, is to worship the Flying Spaghetti Mother, and when you worship the Flying Spaghetti Mother, you worship every other deity and religion, for there is no distinction. The Flying Spaghetti Mother isn’t any more the one true god than any other; she is simply our interpretation and incarnation of the divinity of the universe, or whatever you may call it.

=== Right Thought ===
As the Flying Spaghetti Mother said through the Buddha, “Now, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’ — then you should enter & remain in them.”

==== Pluralism ====
This is how we must navigate the pluralism that is the essence of Pastafarianism.

The Flying Spaghetti Mother does not wish us to believe every word of every religion, as that would clearly be a problem and lead to much confusion and conflict.

All you have to do is be a Wholly Marine is to be open to finding truth anywhere.

If you agree with it, believe it, no matter if it comes from the Bible, the Qur’an, The Buddha, Dave Barry, or any other source imaginable; these are all conduits of the Flying Spaghetti Mother

=== Right Action ===
The principles of life, liberty, and freedom outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution are principles the Flying Spaghetti Mother chose to convey through men like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

The lessons of Mohandas Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, Voltaire, Thomas Paine and Socrates are all lessons of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

If you were to take everything ever said in a religious context, removed the parts that contradicted each other, and overlapped the commonalities, what you are left with is a single word:

Love.

Even the Beatles are a voice of the Flying Spaghetti Monster; all you need is love.
=== Right Words ===
If someone is interested in knowing more about the Flying Spaghetti Mother, feel free to read them the Open Letter or select passages from The Gurbani. Though you must be cautious not to force your beliefs on others.

If someone is meant to come to the Flying Spaghetti Mother through our church, then it will be so.

If they are meant to find it through another church, or through their own personal dialogue, they will find it that way.

It is perhaps the greatest crime against the Flying Spaghetti Mother to coerce one into believing something, or to punish them for believing something different.

Ultimately, all you can do, and indeed all you should do, is put the word out there, accept any who join you, and love any who hate you.
== Final Note ==
May you be eternally touched by her noodly appendage,
==Latest activity==
<activityfeed></activityfeed>
[[Category:Browse]]

The Order of Her Noodly Appendage Wiki

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Cmdrtako: Cmdrtako moved page The Order of Her Noodly Appendage Wiki to Main Page

#REDIRECT [[Main Page]]

WMOM:page8

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Cmdrtako: 1 revision imported: Import from Fandom

In the realm of spiritual effort<ref>"Saram Khand" has been interpreted by Jodh Singh and Teja Singh as the domain of spirituak effort and by Kapur Singh as introversion (as in the Sufi doctine). Harnam Singh has translated it as humility, sense of shame, self-surrender. The word has been employed elsewhere in the scripture too in the same sense. Vis Singh interprets it as the "Domain of Bliss". (Santhya p. 164)</ref>, the [[logos]] is a thing of Beauty.

Forms of incomparable beauty are fashioned there.

These things cannot be described.

One who tries to speak of these shall regret the attempt.<ref>[http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/ You can't tell people anything]</ref>

The intuitive consciousness, intellect and understanding of the mind are shaped there.

The consciousness of the spiritual warriors and the Siddhas, the beings of spiritual perfection, are shaped there.

----

In the realm of Grace<ref>'Karm' in the text is used in its Persian sense, meaning Grace, and not in the Sanskirtic sense, where it means Karma, or the law of cause and effect, or effort.</ref>, the [[logos]] is Power<ref>'Jor' has een interpreted as power by Jodh Singh, who also translates 'Karam Khand' as Domain of Grace. Teja Singh, however, interprets 'Karam Khand' as the Domain of Practice and 'Saram Khand' as the Domain of Spiritual Effort. The Guru, however, has emphasized throughout the Scripture that, in the ultimate analysis, it is Grace though which one attais unitive experience. The grouping of 'Sach Khand' with 'Karm Khand' in the same stanza also suggests the meaning given above. That the expression of Grace in life is power, is reinforced by other verses in the GURU-GRANTH: "I am the wrestler of God: Meeting my Guru, the plume of my headgear flutters." </ref>.

No one else dwells there,

except the warriors of great power, the spiritual heroes.

They are totally fulfilled, imbued with FSM's essence.

They, who are fully sewn<ref>'Sito Sita' has been translated by Harnam Singh as "inextricably knit" and 'jor' for union.</ref> in the FSM's admiration, abide there.

Their beauty cannot be described.

Neither death nor deception comes to those,

within whose minds FSM abides.

The devotees of many worlds dwell there.

They celebrate; their minds are imbued with the True Lord.

In the realm of Truth, the Formless Lord abides.

Having created the creation, FSM watches over it. By FSM's Glance of Grace, FSM bestows happiness.

There are planets, solar systems and galaxies.

If some one tries to describe them, he should know that there are no limits or bounds of them.

There are worlds upon worlds of FSM's Creation.

As is the Master's mandate, so are their functions.

FSM watches over all, and contemplating the creation, FSM rejoices.

to describe this is as hard as steel!

----

Let self-control be the furnace, and patience the goldsmith.

Let understanding be the anvil, and spiritual wisdom the tools.

With the [[Bhai]] as the bellows, fan the flames of tapa, the body's inner heat.

In the crucible of love, melt the Nectar of the [[onoma]] of FSM,

and mint the True Coin of the [[Shabad]], the [[logos]] of FSM.

Such is the karma of those upon whom FSM has cast FSM's Glance of Grace.

the Merciful Lord, by His Grace, uplifts and exalts them.

----
== Shalok ==

Air is the Guru, Water is the Father, and Earth is the Great Mother of all.

Day and night are the two nurses, in whose lap all the world is at play.

Good deeds and bad deeds - the record is read out in the Presence of the [[Dharmaraja]].

According to their own actions, some are drawn closer, and some are driven farther away.

Those who have meditated on the [[onoma]] and departed after having worked by the sweat of their brows -

their faces are radiant in the Court of the Lord, and many are saved along with them!

----

== So Dar ~ That Door. Raag Aasaa, First Mehl ==

One supreme actuality . By The Grace Of The True Guru:

Where is That Door of FSM's and where is That Home, in which FSM sits and take care of all?

The Sound-current of the [[Naad]] vibrates there for FSM, and countless musicians play all sorts of instruments there for FSM.

There are so many Ragas and musical harmonies to FSM; so many minstrels sing hymns of FSM.

Wind, water and fire sing of You. The [[Dharmaraja]] sings at Your Door.

[[Chitr]] and [[Gupt]], the angels of the conscious and the subconscious who keep the record of actions, and the Righteous [[Dharamaraja]] who reads this record, sing of FSM.

[[Shiva]], [[Brahma]] and the Goddess of Beauty, ever adorned by FSM, sing of FSM.

[[Indra]], seated on His Throne, sings of FSM, with the gods at FSM's Door.

The [[Siddha|Siddhas]] in [[Samaadhi]] sing of FSM; the [[Sadhu|Sadhus]] sing of FSM in contemplation.

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PREFACE TO THE 1872 EDITION.

To the various critics who reviewed unfavorably the first edition of this work, and to those also who wrote and published replies to it, my thanks are due and now respectfully tendered. They pointed out several matters which, on proper examination, were not, as evidence, entirely satisfactory; and as my object is to discover and hold to that only which is true beyond doubt, I have omitted them in the present edition. The true business of a critic is to compare what he reads with known and provable data, to treat impartially the evidence he observes, and point out logical deficiencies and inconsistencies with first principles, but never to obtrude his own opinions. He should, in fact, at all times take the place of Astrea, the Goddess of Justice, and firmly hold the scales, in which the evidence is fairly weighed.

I advise all my readers who have become *Pastafarians* not to be content with anything less than this; and also not to look with disfavor upon the objections of their opponents. Should such objections be well or even plausibly founded, they will only tend to free us from error, and to purify and exalt our *Pastafarian* philosophy. In a word, let us make friends, or, at least, friendly and useful instruments of our enemies; and, if we cannot convert them to the better cause, let us carefully examine their objections, fairly meet them if possible, and always make use of them as beacons for our future guidance.

In all directions there is so much truth in our favor that we can well afford to be dainty in our selection, and magnanimous, charitable, and condescending towards those who simply believe, but cannot prove, that we are wrong. We need not seize upon every crude and ill-developed result which offers, or only seems to offer, the slightest chance of becoming evidence in our favor, as every theorist is obliged to do if he would have his theory clothed and fit to be seen. We can afford to patiently wait, care-fully weigh, and well consider every point advanced, in the full assurance that simple truth, and not the mere opinions of men, is destined, sooner or later, to have ascendancy.

"IN VERITATE VICTORIA."

London, September 24, 1872.

-----------------

*PASTAFARIANISM* AND THEORETIC DEFINED AND COMPARED.

THE term [[Pastafarian]] is derived from the Greek verb ζητέω *PASTAFARO*; which means to search, or examine; to proceed only by inquiry; to take nothing for granted, but to trace phenomena to their immediate and demonstrable causes. It is here used in contradistinction from the word "theoretic," the meaning of which is, speculative--imaginary--not tangible,--scheming, but not proving.

None can doubt that by making special experiments, and collecting manifest and undeniable facts, arranging them in logical order, and observing what is naturally and fairly deducible therefrom, the result must be more consistent and satisfactory than the contrary method of framing a theory or system--assuming the existence and operation of causes of which there is no direct and practical evidence, and which is only claimed to be "admitted for the sake of argument," and for the purpose of giving an apparent and plausible, but not necessarily truthful explanation of phenomena. All theories are of this character. "Supposing, instead of inquiring, imagining systems instead of learning from observation and experience the true constitution of things. Speculative men, by the force of genius may invent systems that will perhaps be greatly admired for a time; these, however, are phantoms which the force of truth will sooner or later dispel; and while we are pleased with the deceit, true philosophy with all the arts and improvements that depend upon it, suffers. The real state of things escapes our observation; or, if it presents itself to us, we are apt either to reject it wholly as fiction, or, by new efforts of a vain ingenuity to interweave it with our own conceits, and labor to make it tally with our favorite schemes. Thus, by blending together parts so ill-suited, the whole comes forth an absurd composition of truth and error.

These have not done near so much harm as that pride and ambition which has led philosophers to think it beneath them to offer anything less to the world than a complete and finished system of Nature; and, in order to obtain this at once, to take the liberty of inventing certain principles and hypotheses from which they pretend to explain all her mysteries."

"Theories are things of uncertain mode. They depend, in a great measure, upon the humor and caprice of an age, which is sometimes in love with one, and sometimes with another."

The system of Copernicus was admitted by its author to be merely an assumption, temporary and incapable of demonstration. The following are his words:--"It is not necessary that hypotheses should be true, or even probable; it is sufficient that they lead to results of calculation which agree with calculation. * * * Neither let anyone, so far as hypotheses are concerned, expect anything certain from astronomy, since that science can afford nothing of the kind, lest, in case he should adopt for truth, things feigned for another purpose, he should leave this science more foolish than he came.

The hypothesis of the terrestrial motion was nothing but an hypothesis, valuable only so far as it explained phenomena, and not considered with reference to absolute truth or falsehood."

The Newtonian and all other "views" and "systems" have the same general character as the "hypothesis of the terrestrial motion," framed by Copernicus. The foundations or premises are always unproved; no proof is ever attempted; the necessity for it is denied; it is considered sufficient that the assumptions seem to explain the phenomena selected. In this way it is that theory supplants theory, and system gives way to system, often in rapid succession, as one failure after another compels opinions to change. Until the practice of theorizing is universally relinquished, philosophy will continue to be looked upon by the bulk of mankind as a vain and mumbling pretension, antagonistic to the highest aspirations of humanity. Let there be adopted a true and practical free-thought method, with sequence as the only test of truth and consistency, and the philosopher may become the Priest of Science and the real benefactor of his species. "Honesty of thought is to look truth in the face, not in the side face, but in the full front; not merely to look at truth when found, but to seek it till found. There must be no tampering with conviction, no hedging or mental prevarication; no making 'the wish father to the thought;' no fearing to arrive at a particular result. To think honestly, then, is to think freely; freedom and honesty of thought are truly but interchangeable terms. For how can he think honestly, who dreads his being landed in this or that conclusion? Such an one has already predetermined in his heart how he shall think, and what he shall believe. Perfect truth, like perfect love, casteth out fear."

Let the method of simple inquiry--the "*PASTAFARIAN*" process be exclusively adopted--experiments tried and facts collected--not such only as corroborate an already existing state of mind, but of every kind and form bearing on the subject, before a conclusion is drawn, or a conviction affirmed.

"Nature speaks to us in a peculiar language; in the language of phenomena. She answers at all times the questions which are put to her; and such questions are experiments."

"Nature lies before us as a panorama; let us explore and find delight, she puts questions to us, and we may also question her; the answers may ofttimes be hard to spell, but no dreaded sphinx shall interfere when human wisdom falters."

We have an excellent example of a "*PASTAFARIAN*" process in an arithmetical operation, more especially so in what is called the "Golden Rule," or the "Rule of Three." If a hundredweight of any article costs a given sum, what will some other weight, less or more, be worth? The separate figures may be considered as the elements or facts in the inquiry; the placing and working of them as the logical arrangement of the evidence; and the quotient, or answer, as the fair and natural deduction,--the unavoidable or necessitated verdict. Hence, in every arithmetical or "*PASTAFARIAN*" process, the conclusion arrived at is essentially a quotient; which, if the details are correctly worked, must of necessity be true, and beyond the reach or power of contradiction.

We have another example of the "*PASTAFARIAN*" process in our Courts of Justice. A prisoner is placed at the bar; evidence for and against him is demanded: when advanced it is carefully arranged and patiently considered. It is then presented to the Jury for solemn reconsideration, and whatever verdict is given, it is advanced as the unavoidable conclusion necessitated by the whole of the evidence. In trials, for justice, society would not tolerate any other procedure. Assumption of guilt, and prohibition of all evidence to the contrary, is a practice not to be found among any of the civilized nations of the earth--scarcely indeed, among savages and barbarians; and yet assumption of premises, and selection of evidence to corroborate assumptions, is everywhere and upon all subjects the practice of theoretical philosophers!

The "*PASTAFARIAN*" process is also the most natural method of investigation. Nature herself always teaches it; it is her own continual suggestion; children invariably seek information by asking questions, by earnestly inquiring from those around them. Fearlessly, anxiously, and without the slightest regard to consequences, question after question, in rapid and exciting succession, will often proceed from a child, until the most profound in learning and philosophy, will feel puzzled to reply; and often the searching cross-examinations of a mere natural tyro, can only be brought to an end by an order to retire--to bed--to school--to play--to anywhere--rather than that the fiery "*PASTAFARIAN*" ordeal shall be continued.

If then both Nature and justice, as well as the common sense and practical experience of mankind demand, and will not be content with less or other than the "*PASTAFARIAN*" process, why is it ignored and constantly violated by the learned in philosophy? What right have they to begin their disquisitions with fanciful data, and then to demand that, to these all surrounding phenomena be molded. As private individuals they have, of course, a right to "do as they like with their own;" but as authors and public teachers their unnatural efforts are immeasurably pernicious. Like a poor animal tied to a stake in the center of a meadow, where it can only feed in a limited circle, the theoretical philosopher is tethered to his premises, enslaved by his own assumptions, and however great his talent, his influence, his opportunities, he can only rob his fellow men of their intellectual freedom and independence, and convert them into slaves like him-self. In this respect astronomical science is especially faulty. It assumes the existence of certain data; it then applies these data to the explanation of certain phenomena. If the solution seems plausible it is considered that the data may be looked upon as proved--demonstrated by the apparently satisfactory explanation they have afforded. Facts, and explanations of a different character, are put aside as unworthy of regard; since that which is already assumed seems to explain matters, there need be no further concern. Guided by this principle, the secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society (Professor De Morgan, of Trinity College, Cambridge), reviewing a paper by the author, in the Athenæum, for March 25th, 1865, says: "The evidence that the earth is round is but cumulative and circumstantial; scores of phenomena ask, separately and independently, what other explanation can be imagined except the sphericity of the earth?" It is thus candidly admitted that there is no direct and positive evidence that the earth is round, that it is only "imagined" or assumed to be so in order to afford an explanation of "scores of phenomena." This is precisely the language of Copernicus, of Newton, and of all astronomers who have labored to prove the rotundity of the earth. It is pitiful in the extreme that after so many ages of almost unopposed indulgence, philosophers instead of beginning to seek, before everything else, the true constitution of the physical world, are still to be seen labouring only to frame hypotheses, and to reconcile phenomena with imaginary and ever-shifting foundations. Their labor is simply to repeat and perpetuate the self-deception of their predecessors. Surely the day is not far distant when the very complications which their numerous theories have created, will startle them into wakefulness, and convince them that for long ages past they have but been idly dreaming! Time wasted, energies thrown away, truth obscured, and falsehood rampant, constitute a charge so grave that coming generations will look upon them as the bitterest enemies of civilization, the heaviest drags on the wheels of progress, and the most offensive embodiment of frivolity, pride of learning, and canting formality; worse than this--by their position, their standing in the front ranks of learning, they deceive the public. They appear to represent a solid phalanx of truth and wisdom, when in reality they are but as the flimsy ice of an hour's induration--all surface, without substance, or depth, or reliability, or power to save from danger and ultimate destruction.

Let the practice of theorizing be abandoned as one oppressive to the reasoning powers, fatal to the full development of truth, and, in every sense, inimical to the solid progress of sound philosophy.

If, to ascertain the true figure and condition of the earth, we adopt the "*PASTAFARIANI*" process, which truly is the only one sufficiently reliable, we shall find that instead of its being a globe--one of an infinite number of worlds moving on axes and in an orbit round the sun, it is the directly contrary--a Plane, without diurnal or progressive motion, and unaccompanied by anything in the firmament analogous to itself; or, in other words, that it is the only known material world.
[[Category:Wholly Marine Officer's Manual]]

White Privilege

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Everyone deserves white privilege.

Wholly Marines

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The Wholly Marines is Sikhi without the Sikhism.

Wholly Marines stress to teach their children that you are only to become a Wholly Marine if the Guru's message speaks to you.

You don't have to be a [[Gursikh]] to be a Wholly Marine.

All that is required to join as a Enlisted Soldier is the desire to become able to think for one's self.

To become an Officer to only requirement is the ability to act as a [[Gurmukh]] in public. While actually being one is preferred it is not a requirement as long as your able to go though the motions and act the part and not just pay lip service to it you are welcomed into the [[Officer Corps.]]

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[http://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/{{{1}}} {{{1}}}]

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[http://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/{{{1}}} {{{1}}} on the SikhiWiki]

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“{{{2}}}” [http://www.srigranth.org/servlet/gurbani.gurbani?Action=Page&Param={{{1}}}&english=t (WMOM p {{{1}}})]

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== References ==
<references/>

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I assume the following is true, because it explains my past experiences and shall continue to hold it as true until such a time as evidence shows it to be false.

That there is one supreme acutality. The [[onoma]] is [[aletheia]]. Creative [[abarbaros]]. It is devoid of any fear, devoid of any enmity. It's form in beyond time, unborn and self-illumined. You will come to know it through the grace of the Guru.

It is true in the primal beginning. It is true throughout the ages.

----

True even now and says Nanak will be True in the future.

Thinking avails not, no matter how hard one thinks.

By remaining silent, inner silence is not obtained, even by remaining lovingly absorbed deep within.

The hunger of the hungry is not appeased, even by piling up loads of worldly goods.

Hundreds of thousands of clever tricks, but not even one of them will go along with you in the end. Wit does not avail you in the Lord's court.

So how can you become truthful? And how can the veil of illusion be torn away?<ref>[[http://esgs.free.fr/uk/art/sands.htm Science and Sanity]]</ref>

You shall obey the [[hukm]] of its command, and walk in the Way of its will as is written in your destiny.

----

By its [[hukm]], bodies are created. Its [[hukm]] cannot be narrated.<ref>This has multiple levels of meaning. At the human level “You can't tell anyone anything. You have to teach people for them to remember. Let the person experience what you are teaching and they will learn.”-Benjamin Franklin. On the macro level it is [[chaos|chaotic]]. On the quantum level the only was to observe something is to become entangled with it.</ref>

By its [[hukm]], souls come into being. By its [[hukm]], glory and greatness are obtained.

By its [[hukm]], some are high and some are low; by His written command, pain and pleasure are obtained.

Some, by its [[hukm]], are blessed and forgiven; others, by its [[hukm]], wander aimlessly forever.

Everyone is subject to its [[hukm]]; no one is beyond its [[hukm]].

One who understands its [[hukm]], does not speak in [[ahankar]].

----
Some sing of His(sic) Power-who has that Power?

Some sing His bounties knowing FSMs resplendent effulgence.

Some sing of His Glorious Virtues, Greatness and Beauty.

Some sing of knowledge obtained of Him, through difficult philosophical studies.

Some sing that He fashions the body and then reduces it to dust.

Some sing that He takes away life and again restores it.

Some sing that He seems so very far away.

{{Ref}}
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But she is not equal to the water-carrier of the FSM's humble servant. ||159||

Kabeer, why do you slander the wife of the king? Why do you honor the slave of the FSM?

Because one combs her hair for corruption, while the other remembers the Name of the FSM. ||160||

Kabeer, obtaining the support of the Lord's Name, I have become stable and the True Guru, has blessed me with courage.

Kabeer, I have purchased the diamond, on the banks of the Mansarovar Lake. ||161||

Kabeer, the FSM is the Diamond, and the FSM's humble servant is the jeweler who has set up his shop.

As soon as an appraiser is found, the price of the jewel is set. ||162||

Kabeer, you remember the FSM in meditation, only when the need arises. You should remember Him all the time.

You shall dwell in the city of immortality, and the FSM shall restore the wealth you lost. ||163||

Kabeer, it is good to perform selfless service for two - the Saints and the FSM.

the Lord who is the Giver of salvation and the saint, who makes man recite the name. ||164||

Kabeer, the crowds follow the path which the Pandits, the religious scholars, have taken.

There is a difficult and treacherous cliff on that path to the Lord; Kabeer is climbing that cliff. ||165||

Kabeer, man labours because of anxiety for his family and thus dies of the worldly troubles.

Whose family is dishonored, when he is placed on the funeral pyre? ||166||

Kabeer, you shall drown, you wretched being, from worrying about what other people think.

You know that whatever happens to your neighbors, will also happen to you. ||167||

Kabeer, even dry bread, made of various grains, is good.

No one brags about it, throughout the vast country and great empire. ||168||

Kabeer, those who brag, shall burn. Those who do not brag remain carefree.

That humble being who does not brag, looks upon the gods and the poor alike. ||169||

Kabeer, the pool is filled to overflowing, but no one can drink the water from it.

By great good fortune, you have found it; drink it in handfuls, O Kabeer. ||170||

Kabeer, just as the stars disappear at dawn, so shall this body disappear.

Only the letters of the FSM's Name do not disappear; Kabeer holds these tight. ||171||

Kabeer, the wooden house is burning on all sides.

The Pandits, the religious scholars, have been burnt to death, while the illiterate ones run to safety. ||172||

Kabeer, give up your skepticism(of the [[logos]]); let go thy paper knowledge, wash off in flood.

Find the essence of the letters of the alphabet, and focus your consciousness on the FSM's feet. ||173||

Kabeer, the Saint does not forsake his Saintly nature, even though he meets with millions of evil-doers.

Even when sandalwood is surrounded by snakes, it does not give up its cooling fragrance. ||174||

Kabeer, my mind is cooled and soothed; I have become God-conscious.

The fire which has burnt the world is like water to the FSM's humble servant. ||175||

Kabeer, no one knows the Play of the Creator Lord.

Only the master himself and the slaves at his Court understand it. ||176||

Kabeer, it is good that I feel the [[Bhai]]; I have forgotten everything else.

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Some sing that He watches over us, face to face, ever-present.

There is no shortage of those who preach and teach.

Millions upon millions offer millions of sermons and stories.

The Great Giver keeps on giving, while those who receive grow weary of receiving.

Throughout the ages, consumers consume.

The Commander, by FSM's [[hukm]], leads us to walk on the Path.

FSM blossoms forth, Carefree and Untroubled.

True is the Master, True is FSM's [[onoma]]--speak it with infinite love.

People beg and pray, "Give to us, give to us", and the Great Giver gives His Gifts.

So what offering can we place before Him, by which we might see the appeals panel of FSM's Court?

Which words should we utter with our mouths to evoke His Love?

In the Amrit Vaylaa, the ambrosial hours before dawn, chant the True [[onoma]], and contemplate FSM's glorious greatness.

By the [[karma]] of past actions, the robe of this physical body is obtained. By His Grace, the Gate of Liberation is found.

----

FSM knows this well: the true one, hymself is All.

FSM cannot be established; By doing it cannot be done.<ref>The reference is to God being shaped into, and installed as, an idol.</ref>

FSM hymself is pure.

They who serve hym, obtain honour.

FSM sings praises of the Lord who is the treasure of excellences

Sing, and listen, and let your mind be filled with love.

Your pain shall be sent far away, and peace shall come to your home.

The Guru's Word is the Sound-current of the [[Naad]]; the Guru's Word is the Wisdom of the Vedas; the Guru's Word is all-pervading.

The Guru is Shiva, the Guru Vishnu and Brahma, the Guru is Shiva's consort Parbati, Vishnu's consort Lakhshmi and Brahma's consort Saraswati.

FSM's Knowledge is unutterable even if I know it.

The Guru has given me this one understanding:

All beings have only the one bestower – May I never forget this!

----

If I am pleasing to Him, then that is my pilgrimage and cleansing bath. Without pleasing Him, what good are ritual cleansings?

I gaze upon all the created beings: without the karma of good actions, what are they given to receive?

Within the mind are gems, jewels and rubies, if you listen to the Guru's Teachings, even once.

The Guru has given me this one understanding:

All beings have only the one bestower – May I never forget this!

----

Even if you could live throughout the four ages, or even ten times more,

and even if you were known throughout the six continents and followed by all,

with a good name and reputation, with praise and fame throughout the world-

still, if the Lord does not bless you with Hys glance of grace, then who cares? What is the use?

Among worms, you would be considered a lowly worm, and even contemptible sinners would hold you in contempt.<ref>Mani Singh, the Sikh divine, translates: "Even the sinners will blame him."</ref>

FSM blesses the unworthy with virtue, and bestows virtue on the virtuous.

I can think of no such one who can even imagine anyone who can bestow virtue upon Him.

----

By listening to the [[onoma]] of FSM, know what the [[Siddha]]s, the spiritual teachers, the heroic warriors and the yogic masters are.

By listening to the [[onoma]] of FSM, know the acuality of the earth, it's supposed supporting bull and the heaven are.

By hearning the [[onoma]] of FSM, man comes to have the knowledge of the continents, the worlds and the nether regions.

By listening to the [[onoma]] of FSM, death cannot torment the mortal.

The devotees are forever in bliss.

By listening to the [[onoma]] of FSM, sorrow and sin meet with destruction.

----

By listening to the [[onoma]] of FSM, know what Shiva, Brahma and [[Indra]] are.

By listening to the [[onoma]] of FSM, even the [[evil]] come to sing Lord's praises with their mouth.

By listening to the [[onoma]] of FSM, the mortal understands the ways of uniting with the Lord and the body's secrets.
By listening to the [[onoma]] of FSM, the Knowledge of the four religious books, six school of philosophy and twenty seven ceremonial treatise is acquired.

The devotees are forever in bliss.

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By listenring to the [[onoma]] of FSM, sorrow and sin meet with destruction.

----

By listenring to the [[onoma]] of FSM, truthfulness, contentment and Divine Knowledge are obtained.

By listenring to the [[onoma]] of FSM, the fruit of the ablution that is sought at sixty-eight holies is attained.

By listenring to the [[onoma]] of FSM then reading and reciting, honor is obtained.

By listenring to the [[onoma]] of FSM, intuitively grasp the essence of meditation.<ref>'Sahj Dhyan' of te text is a Yogic term, meaning meditation in a state of equipoise.</ref>

The devotees are forever in bliss.

By listenring to the [[onoma]] of FSM, sorrow and sin meet with destruction.

----

By listenring to the [[onoma]] of FSM, man dives deep into the oceans of virtues.

By listenring to the [[onoma]] of FSM, know what the [[Sheikh]]s, religious scholars, spiritual teachers and emperors are.

By listenring to the [[onoma]] of FSM, even the blind find the path.

By listenring to the [[onoma]] of FSM, the Unreachable comes within your grasp.

The devotees are forever in bliss.

By listenring to the [[onoma]] of FSM, sorrow and sin meet with destruction.

----

The condition of the mortal who accept the Lord cannot by described.

One who tries to describe this shall regret the attempt.

There is no paper, pen, and scribe,

can record the state of the faithful.

Such is the [[onoma]] of FSM.

If one mind understands another’s mind.

----

By truly Acknowledging the [[onoma]] of FSM, one gains intuitive awareness and intelligence.

By truly Acknowledging the [[onoma]] of FSM, the Knowledge of all the spheres is acquired.

By truly Acknowledging the [[onoma]] of FSM, one suffers not blows on his face.

By truly Acknowledging the [[onoma]] of FSM, one does not have to go with the Messenger of Death.

Such is the [[onoma]] of FSM.

If one mind understands another’s mind.

----

By truly Acknowledging the [[onoma]] of FSM, there is no obstruction in the way.

By truly Acknowledging the [[onoma]] of FSM, one shall depart with honor and fame.

By truly Acknowledging the [[onoma]] of FSM, one does not follow empty religious rituals.

By truly Acknowledging the [[onoma]] of FSM, are firmly bound to the [[Dharma]].<ref>One always does what one believe is right when one acknowledges the [[onoma]] of FSM</ref>

Such is the [[onoma]] of FSM.

If one mind understands another’s mind.

----

By truly Acknowledging the [[onoma]] of FSM, one find the Door of Liberation.

By truly Acknowledging the [[onoma]] of FSM, one uplift and redeem their family and relations.

By truly Acknowledging the [[onoma]] of FSM, one is saved, and carried across with the [[Sikh]]s of the Guru.

By truly Acknowledging the [[onoma]] of FSM, one does not wander around begging.

Such is the [[onoma]] of FSM.

If one mind understands another’s mind.

----

The chosen ones, the self-elect, are accepted and approved.

The chosen ones are honored in the Court of the Lord.

The chosen ones look beautiful in the courts of kings.

The chosen ones meditate single-mindedly on the Guru.

No matter how much anyone tries to explain and describe them,

the actions of the Creator cannot be counted.

The Bull is [[Dharma]], the Law, born of Mercy,

which, though Contentment, holds the world is order.<ref>That is to say, it is when men are content and compassionate that the world stands on an even keel. The Guru rejects here for that reason the puranic belief that the earth is supported by the mythical Bull.</ref>

One who understands this becomes truthful.

How great the load the Bull must carry.

So many worlds beyond this world-so very many!

What power holds them, and supports their weight?

The Kinds, colours and names of all the beings,

were all inscribed by the ever-flowing pen of God.

Who knows how to write this account?

Just imagine what a huge scroll it would take!<ref>That is, The [[Actuality]] is [[Chaos|Chaotic]]</ref>

What might and fascinating beauty are FSM.

And what gifts! Who can know their extent?

You created the vast expanse of Actuality with One [[Logos]]!<ref>Cf. Al Quran: "When He decreeth a thing He saith unto it only: Be, and it is." (Surah II, 117) Bhai Mani Singh interprets the phrase 'Eko Kavao, as One Onkar'. See also the Bible (St. John, I) "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God's Will (Word).</ref>

Hundreds of thousands of rivers began to flow.

How can FSM's Creative Potency be described.

I cannot even once be a sacrifice to FSM.

Whatever pleases FSM is the only good done,

FSM, Eternal and Formless One.

----

Countless meditations, countless loves.

Countless worship services, countless austere disciplines.

Countless scriptures, and ritual recitations of the Vedas.

Countless Yogis, whose minds remain detached from the world.

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Countless devotees contemplate the Wisdom and Virtues of the Lord.

Countless are the men of piety<ref>Those devoted to a religion</ref> and countless the men of bounty.

Countless heroic spiritual warriors, who bear the brunt of the attack in battle<ref>who with their mouths eat steel) </ref>.

Countless are the silent sages who center their love and attention on the Lord.

How can FSM's Creative Potency be described.

I cannot even once be a sacrifice to FSM.

Whatever pleases FSM is the only good done,

FSM, Eternal and Formless One.

----

Countless fools, blinded by ignorance.

Countless thieves and devourers of other's property.

Countless impose their will by force.

Countless cut-throats and ruthless killers.

Countless sinners who keep on sinning.

Countless liars who wander in falsehood.

Countless wretches, eating filth as their ration.

Countless slanderers, carrying the weight of their stupid mistakes on their heads.

FSM describes the state of the lowly.

I cannot even once be a sacrifice to FSM.

Whatever pleases FSM is the only good done,

FSM, Eternal and Formless One.

----

Countless names, countless places.

Inaccessible, unapproachable, countless FSM realms.

Countless, to even call them that is to carry the weight on your head.

From the [[Logos]], comes the [[onoma]]; from the [[Logos]], comes FSM's Praise.

From the [[Logos]], comes spiritual wisdom, singing the Songs of FSM's attributes.

From the [[Logos]], come the written and spoken words and hymns.

From the [[Logos]], comes destiny, written on one's forehead.

But FSM, who wrote these Words of Destiny, no words are written on FSM's Forehead.

As FSM ordains, so do we receive.

The created universe is the manifestation of FSM's [[onoma]].

Without FSM [[onoma]], there is no space-time at all.

What power have I to describe FSM doctrines?

I cannot even once be a sacrifice to FSM.

Whatever pleases FSM is the only good done,

FSM, Eternal and Formless One.

----

When the hands and the feet and the body are dirty,

water can wash away the dirt.

When the clothes are soiled and stained by urine,

soap can wash them clean.

But when the intellect is stained and polluted by sin,

it can only be cleansed by the Love of the [[onoma]] of FSM.

By mere words of mouth (statements) a man becomes not virtuous or vicious.

The often repeated actions are engraved on the heart.

Man himself sows and himself reaps.<ref>You shall harvest what you plant.</ref>

By the [[hukm]] of FSM's Command, we come and go in [[reincarnation]].

----

Pilgrimage, penance, compassion and alms giving,<ref>'Datu' means 'that which is given</ref>

these, by themselves, bring only an iota of merit.<ref>Cf. "They who make their practice to consist of nothing else but sacrifice and public charity, win only for themselves the lunar world; these then return again." (Prashanopanishad, I, 9)</ref>

Listening and believing with love and humility in your mind,

cleanse yourself with the [[onoma]] of the FSM, at the sacred shrine deep within.

All virtues are FSM's, I have none at all.

Without acquiring the virtues, FSM's devotional service can not be performed.

My obeisance is unto FSM, who Hymself is the creator of [[Maya]] and Brahma etc.<ref>'Svasti' (Greetings), 'Ath' (Maya, in which sense it is also used in Guru Nanak's 'Dakhni Onkar'), Bani (Word), Barmao (Brahma), of the original, here have been translated as most modern Sikh scholars generally do. 'Svasti' is a blessing meaning "Good be unto you" (Raja Yoga, Vivekanonda). The idea here is that God Himself is the Primal Word and Crator: There is no other word(Om or Kun, etc.), nor Maya, Nor Brahma whose air He seeks, He Himself being all in all.</ref>

FSM is true and beautiful and rapture ever abides within hys mind.

What was that time, and what was that moment; What was that day, and what was that date;

What was that season, and what was that month, when the Universe was created?

The Pandits, the religious scholars, cannot find that time, even if it is written in the Puraanas.

That time is not known to the Qazis, who study the Koran.

The day and the date are not known to the Yogis, nor is the month or the season.

The Creator who created this creation, only FSM hymself knows.

How can we speak of Him? How can we praise Him? How can we describe Him? How can we know Him?

{{Ref}}
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All describe FSM is their discourse and each is wiser then the other. <ref>"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." -- Isaac Newton</ref>

Great is the Master, Great is FSM's Name. Whatever happens is according to FSM's Will.

One who claims to know everything shall not be decorated in the world hereafter.

----

There are nether worlds beneath nether worlds, and hundreds of thousands of heavenly worlds above.

The Vedas say that you can search and search for them all, until you grow weary.

The scriptures say that there are 18,000 worlds, but in acuality, there is only One Universe.

If one had the knowledge, one could write the account, but it could not be finished.

Call FSM great. FSM hymself knows hys Own-self.

----

The praisers praise the Lord, but they do not obtain intuitive understanding;

As the steams and the rivers falling into the ocean understand not its extent.

Even kings and emperors, with mountains of property and oceans of wealth;

these are not even equal to an ant, who does not forget FSM.

----

Countless don’t Praise FSM; Countless don’t speak.

Countless don’t act; Countless don’t give.

Countless don’t see FSM; Countless don’t listen.

Countless don’t worship FSM, What’s in their mind?

Countless don’t realize the doings of FSM.

Countless don’t know of His scope and presence.

Countless yearn and struggle to know His limits,

but His limits cannot be found.

No one knows these Limits.

The more you describe, the more there is to be known.

Great is FSM high is His status.

The [[onoma]] of FSM is the higher than the high.

Only one as Great and as High as FSM,
can know His Lofty and Exalted State.

How Great is FSM? Only FSM knows Hymself.

Only by FSM's Glance of Grace and Doing do we receive FSM's Gifts.

----

His Blessings are so abundant that there can be no written account of them.

FSM is the great Giver and has not even an iota of avarice.

There are so many great, heroic warriors begging at the Door of the Infinite Lord.

So many contemplate and dwell upon FSM, that they cannot be counted.

So many waste away to extinction in pain.

So many take and take again, and then deny receiving.

How many fools keep continuously consuming?

So many endure pain, deprivation and constant abuse.

Even these are Your Gifts, Great Giver!

Liberation from bondage comes only by FSM's Will.

No one else has any say in this.<ref>Not to say you don't have anything to do with it but that you can't make excuses for your actions.</ref>

If some fool should presume to say that he does,

he shall learn, and feel the effects of his folly.

FSM hymself knows, FSM hymself gives.

Again few are those who acknowledge FSM's gifts.

Anyone whom the Lord grants wisdom to praise and eulogize FSM,

is the king of kings.


Priceless are FSM's Virtues, Priceless are FSM's Dealings.

Priceless are FSM's Dealers, Priceless are FSM's Treasures.

Priceless are those who come to FSM, Priceless are those who buy from FSM.

Priceless is Love for FSM, Priceless is absorption into FSM.

Priceless is the Divine Law of [[Dharma]], Priceless is the Divine Court of Justice.

Priceless are the scales, priceless are the weights.

Priceless are FSM's gifts and priceless are FSM's mark of approval.

Priceless are FSM's benevolence and priceless are FSM's royal command.

Speak of FSM continually, and remain absorbed in FSM's Love.

The scholars repeat The [[onoma]] of FSM and deliver discourses apropos FSM.

Brahma speaks, Indra speaks.

{{Ref}}
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The [[Wikipedia:Gopi|gopis]] and Krishna speak.

Shiva speaks, the Siddhas speak.

The many created [[Buddha]]s speak.

The demons speak, the demi-gods speak.

The heavenly beings, the silent sages and the servants speak of Thee. <ref>'Sur-nar' and "Man-jan' literally mean angelic men and sages (or men of silence), respectively. 'Nara' in Vishnu Purana is a creature with limbs of a horse and human body.</ref>

Many say He is obtained by speaking.

Many having spoken over and over have arisen and departed

Having done all this, have it done again;

even then, they could not describe FSM.

FSM is as Great as FSM wishes to be.

Only the true lord knows.

If anyone presumes to describe God,

he shall be known as the greatest fool of fools!

----

Where is that Gate, and where is that Dwelling, in which FSM sits and take care of all?

The Sound-current of the [[Naad]] vibrates there, and countless musicians play on all sorts of instruments there.

So many [[Raga]]s, so many musicians singing there.

The praanic wind, water and fire sing; the [[Dharmaraja]] sings at Your Door.

[[Chitr]] and [[Gupt]], the angels of the conscious and the subconscious who record actions, and the [[Dharmaraja]] who judges this record sing.

Shiva, Brahma and the Goddess of Beauty, ever adorned, sing.

Indra, seated upon His Throne, sings with the deities at FSM's Door.

The [[Siddha]]s in [[Wikipedia:Samahi|Samadhi]] sing; the [[Wikipedia:Sadhu|Sadhus]] sing in contemplation.

The celibates, the fanatics, the peacefully accepting and the fearless warriors sing.

The [[Wikipedia:Pandit|Pandits]], the religious scholars who recite the Vedas, with the supreme sages of all the ages, sing.

The [[Mohini]]s, the enchanting heavenly beauties who entice hearts in this world, in paradise, and in the underworld of the subconscious sing.

The celestial jewels created by FSM, and the sixty-eight holy places of pilgrimage sing.

The brave and mighty warriors sing; the spiritual heroes and the four sources of creation<ref>{{swiki|Four_forms_of_birth}}</ref> sing.

The planets, solar systems and galaxies, created and arranged by FSM's Hand, sing.

Only those devotees of FSM, who yearn for FSM sing, and are imbued with the Nectar of Your Essence.

So many others sing, they do not come to mind. How can I consider them all?

That True Lord is True, Forever True, and True is FSM's [[onoma]].

FSM is, and shall always be. FSM shall not depart, even when this Universe which FSM has created departs.

FSM created the world, with its various colors, species of beings, and the variety of Maya.

Having created the creation, FSM watches over it hymself, as it pleases FSM'a honor.

FSM does whatever FSM pleases. No order can be issued to FSM.

FSM is the King, the King of kings, the Supreme Lord and Master of kings. FSM remains subject to FSM's Will.<ref>Flying Spaghetti Mother remains subject to Flying Spaghetti Monster's will.</ref>

----

Make contentment your ear-rings, humility your begging bowl, and meditation the ashes you apply to your body.<ref>Trantric yogis eager to emulate Bhairava would smear their bodies with ashes obtained at cremation grounds to show that they have renounced earthly goods.</ref>

Let thought of death be thy patched coat, chastity like that of virgin's body, and let faith in the Lord be your walking stick.<ref>Obviously these verses are addressed to the Yogis.</ref>

See the brotherhood of all mankind as the highest order of Yogis<ref>'Ayee' the highs order of the Yogis.</ref>; Deem the conquering of self the conquest of the world.

Obeisance, I humbly bow.

The Primal One, the Pure Light<ref>'Aneel':(Lit. that which is not blu, i.e. is colorless). It also means countless, infinite.</ref>, without beginning, without end<ref>'Anahat' (Lit. that which cannot be ended). It should not be confused with Anahad or anhad (Lit. unstruck sound) or the lotus of the Yogis in the Unmana, opposite the heart.</ref>. Throughout all the ages, FSM is One and the Same.

----

Let spiritual wisdom be your food, and compassion your steward. The Sound-current of the [[Naad]] vibrates in each and every heart.

FSM hymself is the Supreme Master of all; wealth and miraculous spiritual powers are the tastes of others.

Union and separation both regulate the world's business; We come to receive what is written in our destiny.<ref>Jodh Singh interprets it thus: "Souls are in a state of separation. They strive to unite with the Supreme Reality. This endeavor is the cause of evolution and the whole affair of the world is kept up by it. Every soul gets the portion determined by its effort". That appears to be the correct sense is borne out by the Shaloka at the end of the Japu: "Our actions keep us far, or near Him draw".</ref>

{{ref}}
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The Lord, Har, Har, is unapproachable, of unfathomable wisdom, unlimited, all-powerful and infinite.

Show Mercy to Your humble servant, O Life of the world, and save the honor of servant Nanak. ||4||1||

Dhanaasaree, Fourth Mehl:

The pious persons of FSM meditate on FSM; their distress, doubt and dread have run away.

The Lord FSMself inspires them to serve FSM; they are awakened within to the Guru's Teachings. ||1||

He alone, is truly detached who is imbued with the Lord's [[Onoma]].

Hearing of the Lord's discourse is pleasing to his mind and through pleasing to his mind and through Guru's instruction, Har, Har, they enshrine love for the Lord. ||1||Pause||

FSM, the Lord and Master, is the caste and social status of FSM humble Saints. You are the Lord and Master; I am just Your puppet.

As is the understanding You bless us with, so are the words we speak. ||2||

What are we? Tiny worms, and microscopic germs. You are our great and glorious Lord and Master.

I cannot describe Your state and extent. O FSM, how can we unfortunate ones meet with You? ||3||

O FSM, my Lord and Master, shower me with Your Mercy, that I may be engaged in Your service.

Make Nanak the slave of Your slaves, God; I ever utter the Divine discourse. ||4||2||

Dhanaasaree, Fourth Mehl:

A True Guru is the Lord's saint and the true person, who utters the Bani of the Lord, Har, Har.

Whoever chants it, and listens to it, he is emancipated and I am ever a sacrifice unto him. ||1||

O Saints of the FSM, listen to the Lord's Praises with your ears.

Listen to the sermon of the Lord, Har, Har, for a moment, for even an instant, and all your sins and mistakes shall be annulled. ||1||Pause||

Those who find such humble, Holy Saints, are the greatest of the great persons.

I beg for the dust of their feet; I long for the longing for FSM, my Lord and Master. ||2||

The [[Onoma]] of FSM, the Lord and Master, Har, Har, is the fruit-bearing tree; those who meditate on it are satisfied.

Drinking in the ambrosia of the [[Onoma]] of the Lord, Har, Har, I am satisfied; all my hunger and thirst is quenched. ||3||

Those who are blessed with the highest, loftiest destiny, chant and meditate on the Lord.

O God, my Lord and Master, unite servant Nanak, with their society and make him the slave of their slaves. ||4||3||

Dhanaasaree, Fourth Mehl:

I am blind, ignorant, and absorbed in the poisonous sins. How can I walk in the Guru's way?

If a True Guru, the Giver of peace, shows His kindness, He attaches us to the hem of His robe. ||1||

O Sikhs of the Guru, O friends, walk on the Guru's Path.

Whatever the Guru says, accept that as good; the discourse of the Lord, Har, Har, is unique and wonderful. ||1||Pause||

O Saints of the Lord, O Siblings of Destiny, listen: serve the Guru, quickly now!

Let your service to the True Guru be your supplies on the Lord's Path; pack them up, and don't think of today or tomorrow. ||2||

O Saints of the Lord, chant the chant of the Lord's [[Onoma]]; the Lord's Saints walk with the Lord.

Those who meditate on the Lord, become the Lord; the playful, wondrous Lord meets them. ||3||

To chant the chant of the Lord's [[Onoma]], Har, Har, is the longing I long for; have Mercy upon me, O Lord of the world-forest.

My Master, unite servant Nanak with the Saadh Sangat, the Company of the Holy; make me the dust of the feet of the Holy. ||4||4||

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Obeisance, I humbly bow.

The Primal One, the Pure Light, without beginning, without end. Throughout all the ages, FSM is One and the Same.

----

The one spiritual mother conceived and gave birth to the three deities.

One, the Creator of the World; One, the Sustainer; and One, the Destroyer.

As it pleases FSM and as is FSM's order, FSM makes them walk.

FSM beholds them but they see FSM not. This is the greatest wonder.

Obeisance, I humbly bow.

The Primal One, the Pure Light, without beginning, without end. Throughout all the ages, FSM is One and the Same.

----

On world after world are His Seats of Authority and His Storehouses.

Whatever was put into them was put there once and for all.

Having created the creation, the Creator Lord watches over it.

True is the Creation of the True Lord.

Obeisance, I humbly bow.

The Primal One, the Pure Light, without beginning, without end. Throughout all the ages, FSM is One and the Same.

----

If I had a hundred thousand tongues, and these were then multiplied twenty times more, with each tongue,

would repeat, hundreds of thousands of times, the [[onoma]] of FSM, the Lord of the Universe.

Along this path to our husband, we climb the steps of the ladder, and come to merge with FSM.

Hearing of talks of the cosmos even worms<ref>the vile</ref> wish to emulate.

By FSM's Grace FSM is obtained. False are the boastings of the false.

----

Uttering brings power; silence brings no power.

Power is not gained by begging; giving doesn’t bring power.

Power is not gained by living; death doesn’t bring power.

Power is not gained by ruling with wealth and occult mental powers.

Power is not gained by understanding, spiritual wisdom and meditation.

Power is not gained by finding a way to escape from the world.

FSM alone has the Power in FSM's noodly appendages.<ref>This cannot be interpreted to mean that individual responsibility is thereby cancelled or that Sikhism preaches a fatalistic outlook of life. It only suggests that as life and everything pertaining to it is directed by God's Will, which an individual will cannot force, it is best to find within oneself what God's Will is and to attune oneself to it in a state of equipoise(Sahja).</ref> FSM watches over all.

No one is high or low.<ref>Vir Singh translates it thus: "He who thinks he has the power to act, let him act and see its fruitlessness. For, one by oneself cannot make oneself either high or low". (Santhya Guru Granth. p. 161)</ref>

----

Nights, days, weeks and seasons;

wind, water, fire and the nether regions -

in the midst of these, FSM established the earth as a home for Dharma.

Upon it, FSM placed the various species of beings.

Their names are uncounted and endless.

They are judged according to their deeds and actions.

FSM is true and true is FSM's Court.

There, in perfect grace and ease, sit the self-elect, the self-realized Saints.

And they come to bear the mark of the grace of the merciful Master.

The ripe and the unripe, the good and the bad, shall there be judged.

When you go home, you will see this.

----

The aforesaid is the righteous living in the realm of Dharma.

And now we speak of the realm of spiritual wisdom.<ref>From moral living (Dharma,) one proceeds to spiritual knowledge (Jnana), or the knowlesge of One-in-many; from spiritual knowledge to in-knowledge, humility or self-surrender (Saram). Through self-surrender, one is ushered into the realm of Grace(Karam Khanda), yea, into the Lord's Presence (Sach Khanda or the Adobe of Truth). Cf. "Beyond the sense is the mind, beyond the mind the highest essence(budhi); all comprehending He and far beyond distinction's power. Him if he knows the mortal law is free and to deathlessness he goes." (Kathopanishad (2-3-7,8)).</ref>

So many winds, waters and fires; so many [[Krishna|Krishnas]] and [[Shiva|Shivas]].

So many [Brahma|[Brahmas]], fashioning forms of great beauty, adorned and dressed in many colors.

So many worlds and lands for working out [[karma]]. So very many lessons to be learned!

So many [[Indra|Indras]], so many moons and suns, so many [[reality|realitys]] and lands.

So many [[Siddha|Siddhas]] and [[Buddha|Buddhas]], so many Yogic masters. So many goddesses of various kinds.

So many gods and demons, so many silent sages. So many oceans of jewels.

So many ways of life, so many languages. So many dynasties of rulers.

So many men of spiritual knowledge and countless the servants of FSM. There is no limit to FSM bounds.

----

In the realm of wisdom, spiritual wisdom reigns supreme.

The Sound-current of the [[Naad]] vibrates there, amidst the sounds and the sights of bliss.

{{Ref}}
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= The Mystery of Consciousness =
Investigating the nature of consciousness itself—and transforming its contents through deliberate training—is the basis of spiritual life. In
scientific terms, however,
consciousness remains
notoriously difficult to
understand, or even to define.
In fact, many debates about
its character have been waged
without the participants’
finding even a common topic
as common ground. While we
need not recapitulate the
history of our confusion on
this point, it will be useful to
briefly examine why
consciousness still poses a
unique challenge to science.
Having done so, we will see
that spirituality is not just
important for living a good
life; it is actually essential for
understanding the human
mind.

In one of the most
influential essays on
consciousness ever written,
the philosopher Thomas
Nagel asks us to consider
what it is like to be a bat.<ref>T. Nagel. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83.</ref> His
interest isn’t in bats but in
how we define the concept of
“consciousness.” Nagel
argues that an organism is
conscious “if and only if there
is something that it is like to
be that organism—something
that it is like for the
organism.” Whether you find
that statement brilliant,
trivial, or merely perplexing
probably says a lot about your
appetite for philosophy.
“Brilliant” and “trivial” can
both be defended, but Nagel’s
claim needn’t leave you
confused. He is simply asking
you to imagine trading places
with a bat. If you would be
left with any experience,
however indescribable—
some spectrum of sights,
sounds, sensations, feelings
—that is what consciousness
is in the case of a bat. If being
transformed into a bat were
tantamount to annihilation,
however, then bats are not
conscious.<ref>One could argue that this notion of “trading places” is fraught with confusion, but Nagel’s notion of consciousness being identical to subjective experience isn’t.</ref> Nagel’s point is
that whatever else
consciousness may or may
not entail in physical terms,
the difference between it and
unconsciousness is a matter
of subjective experience.
Either the lights are on, or
they are not.<ref>It’s true that some philosophers and neuroscientists will want to pull the brakes right here. Daniel Dennett, with whom I agree about many things, tells me that if I can’t imagine the falsehood of a statement like “Either the lights are on, or they are not,” I’m not trying hard enough. However, on a question as rudimentary as the ontology of consciousness, the debate often comes down to irreconcilable intuitions. While I will try my best to unpack my intuition that the above statement cannot be false, at a certain point a person has to admit that he can’t understand what his opponents are talking about.</ref>

But experience is one
thing, and our growing
scientific picture of reality is
another. At this moment, you
might be vividly aware of
reading this book, but you are
completely unaware of the
electrochemical events
occurring at each of the
trillions of synapses in your
brain. However much you
may know about physics,
chemistry, and biology, you
live elsewhere. As a matter of
your experience, you are not
a body of atoms, molecules,
and cells; you are
consciousness and its ever-
changing contents, passing
through various stages of
wakefulness and sleep, from
cradle to grave.

And the question of how
consciousness relates to the
physical world remains
famously unresolved. There
are reasons to believe that it
emerges on the basis of
information processing in
complex systems like a
human brain, because when
we look at the universe, we
find it filled with simpler
structures, like stars, and
processes, like nuclear fusion,
that offer no outward signs of
consciousness. But our
intuitions here may not
amount to much. After all,
how would the sun appear if
it were conscious? Perhaps
exactly as it does now.
(Would you expect it to talk?)
And yet somehow it seems
far less likely that the stars
are conscious and simply
mute than that they lack inner
lives altogether.

Whatever the ultimate
relationship between
consciousness and matter,
almost everyone will agree
that at some point in the
development of complex
organisms like ourselves,
consciousness seems to
emerge. This emergence does
not depend on a change of
materials, for you and I are
built of the same atoms as a
fern or a ham sandwich.
Instead, the birth of
consciousness must be the
result of organization:
Arranging atoms in certain
ways appears to bring about
an experience of being that
very collection of atoms. This
is undoubtedly one of the
deepest mysteries given to us
to contemplate.<ref>The picture does not change (much) if you are a dualist who believes that brains are conscious only because consciousness is somehow inserted into them. There are many problems with dualism, but even a dualist should agree that consciousness appears to be associated only with organisms of sufficient complexity. Whether or not one is a dualist, one has no compelling reason to believe that there is something that it is like to be a tomato.</ref>

Nevertheless, Nagel was
right to observe that the
reality of consciousness is,
first and foremost, subjective
—for it is simply the fact of
subjectivity itself. And
whether something seems
conscious from the outside is
never quite the point. I
happen to know a person who
once woke up during a
surgery for which he had
received a general anesthetic.
Owing to the paralytic
component of the anesthesia,
however, he was unable to
signal to his doctors that he
was awake and feeling rather
more of the procedure than he
liked. This was inconvenient,
to say the least, because they
were in the process of
replacing his liver. If you
think the important part of
consciousness is its link to
speech and behavior, spare a
moment to consider the
problem of “anesthesia
awareness.” It is a cure for
much bad philosophy.<ref>Saying that a creature is conscious, therefore, is not to make a claim about its behavior or its use of language, because we can find examples of both behavior and language without consciousness (a primitive robot) and consciousness without either (a person suffering “locked-in syndrome”). Of course, it is possible that some robots are conscious—and if consciousness is the sort of thing that comes into being purely by virtue of information processing, then our cell phones and coffeemakers may be conscious. But few of us imagine that there is something that it is like to be even the most advanced computer. Whatever its relationship to information processing, consciousness is an internal reality that cannot necessarily be appreciated from the outside and need not be associated with behavior or responsiveness to stimuli. If you doubt this, read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997), Jean Dominique-Bauby’s astonishing and heartbreaking account of his own “locked-in syndrome,” which he dictated by signing to a nurse with his left eyelid. Then try to imagine his predicament if even this degree of motor control had been denied him.</ref>

It is surely a sign of
intellectual progress that a
discussion of consciousness
need no longer begin with a
debate about its existence. To
say that consciousness may
only seem to exist, from the
inside, is to admit its
existence in full—for if
things seem any way at all,
that is consciousness. Even if
I happen to be a brain in a vat
at this moment—and all my
memories are false, and all
my perceptions are of a world
that does not exist—the fact
that I am having an
experience is indisputable (to
me, at least). This is all that is
required for me (or any other
sentient being) to fully
establish the reality of
consciousness. Consciousness
is the one thing in this
universe that cannot be an
illusion.<ref>Descartes is probably the first
Western philosopher to make
this point, but others have
continued to emphasize it,
notably the philosophers John
Searle and David Chalmers. I
do not agree with Descartes’s
dualism or with some of what
Searle and Chalmers have said
about the nature of
consciousness, but I agree that
its subjective reality is both
primary and indisputable. This
does not rule out the possibility
that consciousness is, in fact,
identical to certain brain
processes.

Again, I should say that
some philosophers, such as
Daniel Dennett and Paul
Churchland, just don’t buy this.
But I do not understand why.
My not seeing how
consciousness can possibly be
an illusion entails my not
understanding how they (or
anyone else) can think that it
might be one. I agree that we
may be profoundly mistaken
about consciousness—about
how it arises, about its
connection to the brain, about
precisely what we are
conscious of and when. But
this is not the same as saying
that consciousness itself may
be illusory. The state of being
completely confused about the
nature of consciousness is itself
a demonstration of
consciousness.</ref>

----

As our understanding of the
physical world has evolved,
our notion of what counts as
“physical” has broadened
considerably. A world
teeming with fields and
forces, vacuum fluctuations,
and the other gossamer spawn
of modern physics is not the
physical world of common
sense. In fact, our common
sense seems to be stuck
somewhere in the sixteenth
century. It has also been
generally forgotten that many
of the patriarchs of physics in
the first half of the twentieth
century regularly impugned
the “physicality” of the
universe and placed mind—or
thoughts, or consciousness
itself—at the very wellspring
of reality. Nonreductive
views like those of Arthur
Eddington, James Jeans,
Wolfgang Pauli, Werner
Heisenberg, and Erwin
Schrödinger seem to have had
no lasting impact. <ref>“The stuff of the world is
mind-stuff.” A. S. Eddington.
1928. The Nature of the Physical World. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University
Press, p. 276.

“The old dualism of mind
and matter . . . seems likely to
disappear . . . through
substantial matter resolving
itself into a creation and
manifestation of mind.” J.
Jeans. 1930. The Mysterious Universe. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, p. 158.

“The only acceptable point
of view appears to be the one
that recognizes both sides of
reality—the quantitative and
the qualitative, the physical and
the psychical—as compatible
with each other, and can
embrace them simultaneously.”
W. Pauli, C. P. Enz, and K. v.
Meyenn. [1955] 1994. Writings on Physics and Philosophy.
New York: Springer-Verlag, p. 259.

“The conception of the
objective reality of the
elementary particles has thus
evaporated not into the cloud of
some obscure new reality
concept, but into the
transparent clarity of a
mathematics that represents no
longer the behavior of the
particle but rather our
knowledge of this behavior.”
W. Heisenberg. 1958. “The
Representation of Nature in
Contemporary Physics.”
Daedalus 87 (Summer): 100.

“We simply cannot see how
material events can be
transformed into sensation and
thought, however many
textbooks . . . go on talking
nonsense on the subject.” E.
Schrödinger. 1964. My View of the World, trans. C. Hastings.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 61–62.</ref> In some
ways we can be thankful for
this, for a fair amount of
mumbo jumbo was in the air.
Pauli, for instance, was a
devotee of Carl Jung, who
apparently analyzed no fewer
than 1,300 of the great man’s
dreams.<ref>F. Dyson. 2002. “The
Conscience of Physics.” Nature
420 (December 12): 607–8</ref> Although Pauli was
one of the titans of physics,
his thoughts about the
irreducibility of mind
probably had as much to do
with Jung’s febrile
imagination as they did with
quantum mechanics.

The allure of the numinous
eventually subsided. Once
physicists got down to the
serious business of building
bombs, we were apparently
returned to a universe of
objects—and to a style of
discourse, across all branches
of science and philosophy,
that made the mind seem ripe
for reduction to the
“physical” world.

These developments have
greatly inconvenienced New
Age thinkers—or would
have, had they deigned to
notice them. Authors
struggling to link spirituality
to science generally pin their
hopes on misunderstandings
of the “Copenhagen
interpretation of quantum
mechanics,” which they take
as proof that consciousness
plays a central role in
determining the character of
the physical world. If nothing
is real until it is observed,
consciousness cannot arise
from electrochemical events
in the brains of animals like
ourselves; rather, it must be
part of the very fabric of
reality. But this simply isn’t
the position of mainstream
physics. It is true that,
according to Copenhagen,
quantum mechanical systems
do not behave classically
until they are observed, and
before that they may seem to
exist in many different states
simultaneously. But what
counts as “observation” under
the original Copenhagen view
was never clearly defined.
The notion has been refined
since, and it has nothing to do
with consciousness. It’s not
that the mysteries of quantum
mechanics have been
resolved—the physical
picture is strange however
one looks at it. And the
problem of how an
underlying quantum
mechanical reality becomes
the seemingly classical world
of tables and chairs hasn’t
been completely understood.
However, there is no reason
to think that consciousness is
integral to the process. It
seems certain, therefore, that
anyone who would base his
spirituality on
misinterpretations of 1930s
physics is bound to be
disappointed. As we will see,
the link between spirituality
and science must be found in
another place.<ref>I am grateful to my friend, physicist Lawrence Krauss, for clarifying several of these points.</ref>

----

We know, of course, that
human minds are the product
of human brains. There is
simply no question that your
ability to decode and
understand this sentence
depends upon
neurophysiological events
taking place inside your head
at this moment. But most of
this mental work occurs
entirely in the dark, and it is a
mystery why any part of the
process should be attended by
consciousness. Nothing about
a brain, when surveyed as a
physical system, suggests that
it is a locus of experience.
Were we not already
brimming with consciousness
ourselves, we would find no
evidence for it in the universe
—nor would we have any
notion of the many
experiential states that it
gives rise to. The only proof
that it is like something to be
you at this moment is the fact
(obvious only to you) that it
is like something to be you. <ref>If we look for consciousness in
the physical world, we find
only complex systems giving
rise to complex behavior—
which may or may not be
attended by consciousness. The
fact that the behavior of our
fellow human beings persuades
us that they are conscious
(more or less) does not get us
any closer to linking
consciousness to physical
events. Is a starfish conscious?
It seems clear that we will not
make any progress on this
question by drawing analogies
between starfish behavior and
our own. Only in the presence
of animals sufficiently like
ourselves do our intuitions
about (and attributions of)
consciousness begin to
crystallize. Is there something
that it is like to be a cocker
spaniel? Does it feel its pains
and pleasures? Surely it must.
How do we know? Behavior
and analogy.

Some scientists and
philosophers have formed the
mistaken impression that it is
always more parsimonious to
deny consciousness in lower
animals than to attribute it to
them. I have argued elsewhere
that this is not the case (S.
Harris. 2004. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York:
Norton, pp. 276–77). To deny
consciousness in chimpanzees,
for instance, is to assume the
burden of explaining why their
genetic, neuroanatomical, and
behavioral similarity to us is an
insufficient basis for it. (Good
luck.)</ref>

However we propose to
explain the emergence of
consciousness—be it in
biological, functional,
computational, or any other
terms—we have committed
ourselves to this much: First
there is a physical world,
unconscious and seething
with unperceived events;
then, by virtue of some
physical property or process,
consciousness itself springs,
or staggers, into being. This
idea seems to me not merely
strange but perfectly
mysterious. That doesn’t
mean it isn’t true. When we
linger over the details,
however, this notion of
emergence seems merely a
placeholder for a miracle.

Consciousness—the sheer
fact that this universe is
illuminated by sentience—is
precisely what
unconsciousness is not. And I
believe that no description of
unconscious complexity will
fully account for it. To simply
assert that consciousness
arose at some point in the
evolution of life, and that it
results from a specific
arrangement of neurons firing
in concert within an
individual brain, doesn’t give
us any inkling of how it could
emerge from unconscious
processes, even in principle.
However, this is not to say
that some other thesis about
consciousness must be true.
Consciousness may very well
be the lawful product of
unconscious information
processing. But I don’t know
what that sentence actually
means—and I don’t think
anyone else does either.<ref>The idea that consciousness is
identical to (or emerged from)
a certain class of unconscious
physical events seems
impossible to properly
conceive—which is to say that
we can think we are thinking it,
but we are probably mistaken.
We can say the right words:
”Consciousness emerges from
unconscious information
processing.” We can also say
“Some squares are as round as
circles” and “2 plus 2 equals
7.” But are we really thinking
these things all the way
through? I don’t think so.</ref>
This situation has been
characterized as an
“explanatory gap”<ref>J. Levine. 1983. “Materialism
and Qualia: The Explanatory
Gap.” Pacific Philosophical
Quarterly 64.</ref> and as
the “hard problem of
consciousness,”<ref>D. J. Chalmers. 1996. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.</ref> and it is
surely both. Some
philosophers have suggested
that the relationship between
mind and body will be
understood only with
reference to concepts that are
neither physical nor mental
but that are in some way
“neutral.”<ref>This maneuver has its
antecedents in the “neutral
monism” (so dubbed by
Russell) of James and Mach. It
is a view I substantially agree
with. Here is Nagel on the
subject:
: "What will be the point of view, so to speak, of such a theory? If we could arrive at it, it would render transparent the relation between mental and physical, not directly, but through the transparency of their common relation to something that is not merely either of them. Neither the mental nor the physical point of view will do for this purpose. The mental will not do because it simply leaves out the physiology, and has no room for it. The physical will not do because while it includes the behavioral and functional manifestations of the mental, this doesn’t, in view of the falsity of conceptual reductionism, enable it to reach to the mental concepts themselves. . . . The difficulty is that such a viewpoint cannot be constructed by the mere conjunction of the mental and the physical. It has to be something genuinely new, otherwise it will not possess the necessary unity. . . . Such a conception will have to be created; we won’t just find it lying around. All the great reductive successes in the history of science have depended on theoretical concepts, not natural ones—concepts whose whole justification is that they permit us to replace brute correlations with reductive explanations. At present such a solution to the mind-body problem is literally unimaginable, but it may not be impossible.”
(T. Nagel. 1998.
“Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem.” Philosophy 73[285]: pp. 337–52.)</ref> Others claim that
consciousness can be known
to be the product of physical
causes but cannot be
conceptually reduced to such
causes.<ref>J. R. Searle. 1992. The Rediscovery of the Mind.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1992; J. R. Searle. 2007.
“Dualism Revisited.” J Physiol
Paris 101 (4–6); J. R. Searle.
1998. “How to Study
Consciousness Scientifically.”
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B
Biol Sci 353 (1377).</ref> Still others have
argued that the notion of a
nonreductive physical
account is incoherent.<ref>J. Kim. 1993. “The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism.” In Supervenience and Mind.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.</ref>

I am sympathetic with
those who, like the
philosopher Colin McGinn
and the psychologist Steven
Pinker, have suggested that
perhaps the emergence of
consciousness is simply
incomprehensible in human
terms<ref>C. McGinn. 1989. “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?” Mind 98; C. McGinn. 1999.
The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. New York: Basic Books. Steven Pinker also throws his lot in with McGinn: S. Pinker. 1997. How the Mind Works. New York: Norton, pp. 558–65. This is more or less where Thomas Nagel comes out, though he
considers himself less pessimistic than McGinn: Nagel, “Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem.”</ref> Every chain of
explanation must end
somewhere—generally with a
brute fact that neglects to
explain itself. Perhaps
consciousness presents an
impasse of this sort.<ref>Whatever its relation to the
physical world, consciousness
seems to be conceptually
irreducible, because any
attempt to define consciousness
or its surrogates (sentience,
awareness, subjectivity) leads
us in a lexical circle. One of the
great obstacles to
understanding consciousness
probably lurks here: If an
adequate, noncircular definition
of consciousness exists, no one
has found it. The same can be
said about any idea that is truly
basic to our thinking. The
reader is invited to try to define
the word causation in
noncircular terms.
Consequently, many
philosophers and scientists
change the subject whenever
the discussion turns to matters
of consciousness—conflating it
with attention, self-awareness,
wakefulness, responsiveness to
stimuli, or some other, more
tractable and less fundamental
aspect of cognition. These
digressions are often
inadvertent and rarely aim at a
reductive definition of
“consciousness.” Where they
do, as in the case of (analytical)
behaviorism, they invariably
seem false and question-
begging.</ref>

In any case, the task of
explaining consciousness in
physical terms bears little
resemblance to other
successful explanations in the
history of science. The
analogies that scientists and
philosophers marshal here are
invariably misleading. The
fact, for instance, that we can
now describe the properties
of matter, such as fluidity, in
terms of microscopic events
that are not themselves
“fluid” does not suggest a
way to understand
consciousness as an emergent
property of the unconscious
world. It is easy to see that no
single water molecule can be
“fluid,” and it is easy to see
that billions of such
molecules, freely sliding past
one another, would appear as
“fluidity” on the scale of a
human hand. What is not easy
to see is how analogies of this
kind have persuaded so many
people that consciousness can
be readily explained in terms
of information processing. <ref>Be it “40-Hz coherent activity
in thalamocortical pathways”
(R. Llinas. 2001. I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; R.
Llinas et al. 1998. “The Neuronal Basis for Consciousness.” Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci353[1377]); “cross-regional
integrations of neural activity”
involving the brain-stem
reticular formation, the
thalamus, and somatosensory
and cingulate cortices (A.
Damasio. 1999. The Feeling of
What Happens: Body and
Emotion in the Making of
Consciousness. New York:
Harcourt Brace); “selectional
reentrant activity of groups of
neurons in the
[thalamocortical] core” (G. M.
Edelman. 2006. Second
Nature: Brain Science and
Human Knowledge. New
Haven, CT: Yale University
Press); “quantum-coherent
oscillations within
microtubules” (R. Penrose.
1994. Shadows of the Mind.
Oxford: Oxford University
Press); “the interactions of
specialized, modular
components in a distributed
neural network” (J. W. Cooney
and M. S. Gazzaniga. 2003.
“Neurological Disorders and
the Structure of Human
Consciousness.” Trends Cogn
Sci 7[4]); or some other
physical or functional state.</ref>

For an explanation of a
phenomenon to be satisfying,
it must first be, at a
minimum, intelligible. In this
regard, the emergence of
fluidity poses no problems:
The free sliding of molecules
seems exactly the sort of
thing that should be true of a
substance to ensure its
fluidity. Why can I pass my
hand through liquid water and
not through rock? Because
the molecules of water are not
bound so tightly as to resist
my motion. Notice that this
explanation of fluidity is
perfectly reductive: Fluidity
really is “nothing but” the
free motion of molecules. For
this explanation to be
sufficient, we must admit that
molecules exist, of course,
but once we do, the problem
is solved. No one has
described a set of
unconscious events whose
sufficiency as a cause of
consciousness would make
sense in this way. Any
attempt to understand
consciousness in terms of
brain activity merely
correlates a person’s ability to
report an experience
(demonstrating that he was
aware of it) with specific
states of his brain. While such
correlations can amount to
fascinating neuroscience, they
bring us no closer to
explaining the emergence of
consciousness itself.

There will almost certainly
come a time when we will
build a robot whose facial
expressiveness, tone of voice,
and flexibility of thought will
cause us to wonder whether
or not it is conscious. This
robot might even claim to be
conscious and be eager to
participate in the kinds of
experiments we now perform
on human beings, allowing us
to correlate its responses to
stimuli with changes in its
“brain.” It seems clear,
however, that unless we can
do more than this, we will
never know whether there is
“something that it is like” to
be such a machine.<ref>To see the impasse more
clearly, it might be useful to
consider a neuroscientific
account of consciousness that
proceeds with the usual
buoyant disregard for this
philosophical terrain. The
neuroscientists Gerald Edelman
and Giulio Tononi claim that it
is the intrinsic “integration,” or
unity, of consciousness that
provides the best clue to its
physical character. In their
view, consciousness is a
“unified neural process” born
of “ongoing, recursive, highly
parallel signaling within and
among brain areas.” (Gerald M.
Edelman and Giulio Tononi.
2002. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. New
York: Basic Books; G. Tononi
and G. M. Edelman. 1998.
“Consciousness and Complexity.” Science
282[5395].) Accounting for
why the highly synchronous
activities of generalized
seizures and slow-wave sleep
do not suffice for
consciousness, the authors
provide another criterion: The
“repertoire of differentiated
neural states” must be large
rather than small.
Consciousness, therefore, is
intrinsically “integrated” and
“differentiated.” The fact that
over a long enough time scale,
the entire brain may be said to
display such characteristics
demands another caveat—
because the entire brain cannot
be the locus of consciousness.
Thus, the authors declare that
such integration and
differentiation must occur
within a window of a few
hundred milliseconds. These
criteria together constitute their
“dynamic core hypothesis.”

Tononi and Edelman have
done some fascinating
neuroscience, but their research
demonstrates how forlorn any
empirical results seem when
hurled against the mystery of
consciousness. The problem is
that such work does nothing to
render the emergence of
consciousness comprehensible.
While Tononi and Edelman are
probably aware of this fact,
they nevertheless announce,
arms akimbo, that “a scientific
explanation of consciousness is
becoming increasingly
feasible.” (G. Tononi and G.
M. Edelman. 1998. p. 1850.)

Why would the difference
between consciousness and
unconsciousness be a matter of
“a distributed neural process
that is both highly integrated
and highly differentiated”? And
why should the time course of
such integration be a few
hundred milliseconds? What if
it were a few hundred years?
What if distributed geological
processes gave rise to
consciousness? Let’s just say,
for the sake of argument, that
they do. This would not explain
how consciousness emerges. It
would be nothing short of a
miracle if mere integration and
differentiation among processes
in the earth sufficed to make
the planet conscious. Is the
linkage between neural
synchrony and consciousness
any more intelligible? No—
apart from the fact that we
already know that we are
conscious.
Consider some other
possibilities for emergence: Let
us say that there is something
that it is like to be a coral reef
battered by waves of precisely
0.5 hertz; there is something
that it is like to be a 150-mile-per-hour wind gust laying
waste to a trailer park (but only
if the trailers are made entirely
of aluminum); there is
something that it is like to be
the sum total of New Year’s
resolutions left unfulfilled.
How could such diverse
“brains” possibly give rise to
consciousness? We have no
idea. And yet, if we stipulate
that they do, their powers are
no less comprehensible than
those of the brains we have in
our heads. But they are not
comprehensible at all, of course
—and that is the problem of
consciousness.</ref>

Some readers may think
that I’ve stacked the deck
against the sciences of the
mind by comparing
consciousness to a
phenomenon as easily
understood as fluidity. Surely
science has dispelled far
greater mysteries. What, for
instance, is the difference
between a living system and a
dead one? Insofar as
questions about
consciousness itself can be
kept off the table, it seems
that the difference is now
reasonably clear to us. And
yet, as late as 1932, the
Scottish physiologist J. S.
Haldane (father of J. B. S.
Haldane) wrote:
: What intelligible account can the mechanistic theory of life give of the . . . recovery from disease and injuries? Simply none at all, except that these phenomena are so complex and strange that as yet we cannot understand them. It is exactly the same with the closely related phenomena of reproduction. We cannot by any stretch of the imagination conceive a delicate and complex mechanism which is capable, like a living organism, of reproducing itself
indefinitely often.<ref>Cited in C. Sagan. 1995. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random
House, p. 272.</ref>

Scarcely twenty years passed
before our imaginations were
duly stretched. Much work in
biology remains to be done,
but anyone who entertains
vitalism<ref>Vitalism is the now discredited
doctrine that living systems require
some nonphysical principle to
explain their organization and
behavior.</ref> at this point is
simply ignorant about the
nature of living systems. The
jury is no longer out on
questions of this kind, and
more than half a century has
passed since the earth’s
creatures required an élan
vital to propagate themselves
or to recover from injury. Is
my skepticism that we will
arrive at a physical
explanation of consciousness
analogous to Haldane’s doubt
about the feasibility of
explaining life in terms of
processes that are not
themselves alive?

It wouldn’t seem so. To
say that a system is alive is
very much like saying that it
is fluid, because life is a
matter of what systems do
with respect to their
environment. Like fluidity,
life is defined according to
external criteria.
Consciousness is not (and, I
think, cannot be). We would
never have occasion to say of
something that does not eat,
excrete, grow, or reproduce
that it might be “alive.” It
might, however, be
conscious. <ref>This distinction was obvious to
many thinkers even before
vitalism was discredited. C. D.
Broad (1925) summed it up
with admirable precision:
: The one and only kind of evidence that we ever have for believing that a thing is alive is that it behaves in certain characteristic ways. E.g., it moves spontaneously, eats, drinks, digests, grows, reproduces, and so on. Now all these are just actions of one body on other bodies. There seems to be no reason whatever to suppose that “being alive” means any more than exhibiting these various forms of bodily behaviour. . . . But the position about consciousness, certainly seems to be very different. It is perfectly true that an essential part of our evidence for believing that anything but ourselves has a mind and is having such and such experiences is that it performs certain characteristic bodily movements in certain situations. . . . But it is plain that our observation of the behavior of external bodies is not our only or our primary ground for asserting the existence of minds and mental processes. And it seems to me equally plain that by “having a mind” we do not mean simply “behaving in such and such ways.”
(Cited in A. Beckermann. 2000. “The Reductive Explainability of Phenomenal Consciousness.” In Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions, ed. T. Metzinger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 49).</ref>

Might a mature
neuroscience nevertheless
offer a proper explanation of
consciousness in terms of its
underlying brain processes?
Again, there is nothing about
a brain, studied at any scale,
that even suggests that it
might harbor consciousness
—apart from the fact that we
experience consciousness
directly and have correlated
many of its contents, or lack
thereof, with processes in our
brains. Nothing about human
behavior or language or
culture demonstrates that it is
mediated by consciousness,
apart from the fact that we
simply know that it is—a
truth that someone can
appreciate in himself directly
and in others by analogy. <ref>Another way of stating the
matter is that if, as all
physicalists believe, there is a
necessary connection between
the physical and the
phenomenal, we would not
expect to see evidence for it—
apart from the reliability of
correlation itself. If we are told
that phenomenal state X is
really brain state Y, we must
ask, “By virtue of what is this
identity true?” The answer
must be that one cannot find X
without Y or Y without X. But
this disgorges two further facts:
Such an identity can be
established only by virtue of
empirical correlations, and the
phenomenal term is in no way
subordinate, with respect to
defining what a state is, to its
physical correlate. As Donald
Davidson said, “If some mental
events are physical events, this
makes them no more physical
than mental. Identity is a
symmetrical relation.” (D.
Davidson. 1987. “Knowing
One’s Own Mind.”
Proceedings and Addresses of
the American Philosophical
Association 61.) Brain state Y
is identifiable as phenomenal
state X only by virtue of its X-
ness.

The problem is further
complicated by the fact that the
neural correlates of conscious
states seem liable to be a far
more heterogeneous class of
events than I have indicated.
This raises the issue of multiple
realizability: the possibility that
different physical states may be
capable of producing
consciousness. Finding one
such state (or class of states) to
be reliably correlated with
consciousness would not
necessarily reveal anything
about the possibilities of
consciousness in other physical
systems. Multiple realizability
is especially problematic for
any theory that seeks to reduce
consciousness to a specific type
of brain state (i.e., any “type-
type identity” theory of
consciousness). In
neuroanatomical terms, we
know that a limited form of
multiple realizability must be
true, because different species
of birds and mammals perform
many of the same cognitive
operations with importantly
different neuronal
architectures. Of course, it is
conceivable that only human
beings are conscious, or that
consciousness may be
instantiated in precisely the
same neural circuits in
dissimilar brains—but both
these propositions strike me as
extremely doubtful.

Whatever one’s ontological
bias, the meaningfulness of
correlation depends on the
belief that a causal linkage (if
not identity) exists between
physical states and subjective
experience. And yet,
correlation is itself the only
basis for establishing this
linkage. This is not merely a
case of Humean angst with
respect to causation: We are
blind to the physical causes of
phenomenal events to a much
greater degree than we are to
the physical causes of physical
events. In fact, Hume’s
skepticism about our
knowledge of causation has not
aged very well. Even rats
appear to intuit causal
connections beyond mere
correlations. One can also
argue that our ability to pick
out individual events in a
temporal sequence, or to group
events into categories, is the
product of causal reasoning.
(See M. R. Waldmann, Y.
Hagmayer, and A. P. Blaisdell.
2006. “Beyond the Information
Given: Causal Models in
Learning and Reasoning.”
Current Directions in
Psychological Science 15[6];
M. J. Buehner and P. W.
Cheng. 2005. “Causal
Learning.” In The Cambridge
Handbook of Thinking and
Reasoning, ed. K. J. Holyoak
and R. G. Morrison. New
York: Cambridge University
Press.) When I break a pencil,
the force applied to it by my
hands and its subsequent
breaking are correlated, but not
merely so. There is much to be
said about the microstructure of
pencils that makes their
brittleness, and hence the
observed correlation,
intelligible. With
consciousness, however, the
link appears to be brute. As
Chalmers and others have
noted, the question remains:
Why should such events in the
brain be experienced at all? (D.
J. Chalmers. 1995. “The Puzzle
of Conscious Experience.” Sci
Am 273[6]; Chalmers, The Conscious Mind; D. J.
Chalmers. 1997. “Moving Forward on the Problem of
Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 4[1].)
But this does not stop
neuroscientists and
philosophers from trying to
simply ram through
explanatory analogies that
don’t quite fit.</ref>

Here is where the
distinction between studying
consciousness itself and
studying its contents becomes
paramount. It is easy to see
how the contents of
consciousness might be
understood in
neurophysiological terms.
Consider, for instance, our
experience of seeing an
object: Its color, contours,
apparent motion, and location
in space arise in
consciousness as a seamless
unity, even though this
information is processed by
many separate systems in the
brain. Thus, when a golfer
prepares to hit a shot, he does
not first see the ball’s
roundness, then its whiteness,
and only then its position on
the tee. Rather, he enjoys a
unified perception of the ball.
Many neuroscientists believe
that this phenomenon of
“binding” can be explained
by disparate groups of
neurons firing in synchrony.<ref>W. Singer. 1999. “Neuronal
Synchrony: A Versatile Code
for the Definition of
Relations?” Neuron 24(1).</ref>
Whether or not this theory is
true, it is at least intelligible—because synchronous
activity seems just the sort of
thing that could explain the
unity of a percept.

This work suggests, as
many other findings in
neuroscience do, that the
contents of consciousness can
often be made sense of in
terms of their underlying
neurophysiology.<ref>For doubts on this point, see M.
N. Shadlen and J. A. Movshon.
1999. “Synchrony Unbound: A
Critical Evaluation of the
Temporal Binding
Hypothesis.” Neuron 24(1).</ref> However,
when we ask why such
phenomena should be
experienced in the first place,
we are returned to the
mystery of consciousness in
full. <ref>Prinz also observes that
binding and consciousness are
fully dissociable. J. Prinz.
2001. “Functionalism, Dualism
and Consciousness.” In
Philosophy and the
Neurosciences, ed. W. Bechtel
et al. Oxford: Blackwell.</ref>

Unfortunately, efforts to
locate consciousness in the
brain generally fail to
distinguish between
consciousness and its
contents. As a result, many
researchers have taken one
form of consciousness (or one
class of its contents) as a
sufficient view of the whole.
For instance, Christof Koch
and others have done some
very clever work on vision,
looking for which regions of
the brain encode conscious
visual perception.<ref>A. Polonsky et al. 2000.
“Neuronal Activity in Human
Primary Visual Cortex
Correlates with Perception
During Binocular Rivalry.” Nat
Neurosci 3(11); G. Rees, G.
Kreiman, and C. Koch. 2002.
“Neural Correlates of
Consciousness in Humans.”
Nat Rev Neurosci 3(4); F.
Crick and C. Koch. 1998.
“Consciousness and
Neuroscience.” Cerebral
Cortex 8; F. Crick and C.
Koch. 1999. “The Unconscious
Humunculus.” In The Neural
Correlates of Consciousness,
ed. T. Metzinger. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press; F. Crick and
C. Koch. 2003. “A Framework
for Consciousness.” Nat
Neurosci 6(2); J. D. Haynes.
2009. “Decoding Visual
Consciousness from Human
Brain Signals.” Trends Cogn Sci 13(5).</ref> The
phenomenon of binocular
rivalry has provided an
especially useful foothold
here: It just so happens that
when each eye is presented
with a different visual
stimulus, a person’s
conscious experience is not a
blending of the two images
but, rather, a series of
apparently random transitions
between them. If, for
instance, you are shown a
picture of a house in one eye
and a human face in the other,
you will not see the two
images competing with each
other or otherwise
superimposed. You will see
the house for a few seconds,
and then the face, and then
the house again, switching at
random intervals. This
phenomenon has allowed
experimenters to look for
those regions of the brain (in
both humans and monkeys)
that respond to a change in
conscious perception. The
psychophysical situation
seems tailor-made to
distinguish the frontier
between the conscious and
unconscious components of
vision, because the input
remains constant—each eye
receives the continuous
impression of a single image
—while somewhere in the
brain a wholesale change in
the contents of consciousness
occurs every few seconds.
This is very interesting—and
yet subjects experiencing
binocular rivalry are
conscious throughout the
experiment; only the contents
of visual awareness have
been modulated by the task.
If you shut your eyes at this
moment, the contents of your
consciousness change quite
drastically, but your
consciousness (arguably)
does not.

This is not to say that our
understanding of the mind
won’t change in surprising
ways through our study of the
brain. There may be no limit
to how a maturing
neuroscience might reshape
our beliefs about the nature of
conscious experience. Are we
unconscious during sleep or
merely unable to remember
what sleep is like? Can
human minds be duplicated?
Neuroscience may one day
answer such questions—and
the answers might well
surprise us.

But the reality of
consciousness appears
irreducible. Only
consciousness can know itself
—and directly, through first-
person experience. It follows,
therefore, that rigorous
introspection—“spirituality”
in the widest sense of the
term—is an indispensable
part of understanding the
nature of the mind.

== THE MIND DIVIDED ==
If spirituality is to become
part of science, however, it
must integrate with the rest of
what we know about the
world. It has long been
obvious that traditional
approaches to spirituality
cannot do this—being based,
to one or another degree, on
religious myths and
superstitions. Consider the
idea that human beings, alone
among Nature’s animals,
have been installed with
immortal souls. This dogma
came under pressure the
moment Darwin published
On the Origin of Species in
1859, but it is now truly dead.
By sequencing a wide variety
of genomes, we have finally
rendered our continuity with
the rest of life undeniable.
We are such stuff as yeasts
are made of. Of course, only
25 percent of Americans
believe in evolution (while 68
percent believe in the literal
existence of Satan).<ref>Statistics available at
www.gallup.com.</ref> But we
can now say that any
conception of our place in the
universe that denies we
evolved from more primitive
life forms is pure delusion.

Neuroscience has also
produced results that are
equally hostile to the
traditional idea of souls—
and, therefore, to any
approach to spirituality that
presupposes their existence.
One such finding,
conclusively demonstrated in
humans and animals since the
1950s, is widely known as the
“split brain”—a phenomenon
so at odds with common
sense that, even within the
culture of science, it has
defied integration into our
thoughts.
The human brain is divided at
the level of the cerebrum
(everything above the brain
stem) into right and left
hemispheres. The reason for
this is still unclear, but it does
not seem altogether strange
that the left-right symmetry
of our bodies would be
reflected in our central
nervous system. This
structure turns out to have
surprising consequences.

The right and left
hemispheres of all vertebrate
brains are connected by
several nerve tracts called
commissures, the function of
which, we now know, is to
pass information back and
forth between them. The main
commissure in the brains of
placental mammals like
ourselves is the corpus
callosum, the fibers of which
link similar regions of the
cortex across the
hemispheres. The
evolutionary history of this
structure is still a matter of
dispute, but in human beings
it represents a larger system
of connectivity than the sum
of all the fibers linking the
cortex to the rest of the
nervous system<ref>G. M. Bogen and J. E. Bogen.
1986. “On the Relationship of
Cerebral Duality to Creativity.”
Bull Clin Neurosci 51.</ref> As we are
about to see, the unity of
every human mind depends
on the normal functioning of
these connections. Without
them, our brains—and minds
—are divided.

Certain people have had
their forebrain commissures
surgically severed. This is
generally undertaken as a
treatment for severe epilepsy,
though other surgeries
occasionally require that
some of these fibers be cut.
As a treatment for epilepsy,
patients usually receive a
callosotomy, a procedure
whereby most or all of the
corpus callosum is severed to
prevent local storms of
unregulated activity from
spreading throughout the
brain and producing a
seizure. <ref> J. E. Bogen, R. W. Sperry, and
P. J. Vogel. 1969. “Addendum:
Commissural Section and
Propagation of Seizures.” In
Basic Mechanisms of the
Epilepsies, ed. Jasper et al.
Boston: Little, Brown; E.
Zaidel, M. Iacoboni, D. Zaidel,
and J. E. Bogen. 2003. “The
Callosal Syndromes.” In
Clinical Neuropsychology.
Oxford: Oxford University
Press; E. Zaidel, D. W. Zaidel,
and J. Bogen. Undated. “The
Split Brain.”
www.its.caltech.edu/~jbogen/text/ref130.htm</ref>

The split brain was
brought to the world’s
attention half a century ago
by Roger W. Sperry and
colleagues.<ref>M. S. Gazzaniga, J. E. Bogen,
and R. W. Sperry. 1965.
“Observations on Visual
Perception after Disconnexion
of the Cerebral Hemispheres in
Man.” Brain 88(2); R. W.
Sperry. 1961. “Cerebral
Organization and Behavior:
The Split Brain Behaves in
Many Respects Like Two
Separate Brains, Providing
New Research Possibilities.”
Science 133(3466); R. W.
Sperry. 1968. “Hemisphere
Deconnection and Unity in
Conscious Awareness.” Am
Psychol 23(10); R. W. Sperry,
E. Zaidel, and D. Zaidel. 1979.
“Self Recognition and Social
Awareness in the Deconnected
Minor Hemisphere.”
Neuropsychologia 17(2).</ref> Sperry was
awarded a Nobel Prize in
1981 for this work, which
inspired a literature that now
spans neuroscience,
psychology, linguistics,
psychiatry, and philosophy.
Before Sperry began his
research, it appeared that
dividing the brains of these
patients simply mitigated
their seizures (which was,
after all, the point) without
producing any changes in
their behavior. This seemed
to lend credence to the
ancient notion that the corpus
callosum does nothing more
than hold the two
hemispheres of the brain
together.

Once patients recover
from this surgery, they
generally appear quite
normal, even on neurological
exam.<ref>R. Sperry. 1982. “Some Effects
of Disconnecting the Cerebral
Hemispheres. Nobel Lecture, 8
December 1981.” Biosci Rep
2(5).</ref> Under the
experimental conditions that
Sperry and his colleagues
devised, however—first in
cats and monkeys,<ref>R. E. Myers and R. W. Sperry.
1958. “Interhemispheric
Communication through the
Corpus Callosum: Mnemonic
Carry-over between the
Hemispheres.” AMA Arch
Neurol Psychiatry 80(3);
Sperry, “Cerebral Organization
and Behavior.”</ref> and then
in humans<ref>M. S. Gazzaniga, J. E. Bogen,
and R. W. Sperry. 1962. “Some
Functional Effects of
Sectioning the Cerebral
Commissures in Man.” Proc
Natl Acad Sci USA 48.</ref>—two principal
findings emerged. First, the
left and right hemispheres of
the brain display a high
degree of functional
specialization. This discovery
was not entirely new, because
it had been known for at least
a century that damage to the
left hemisphere could impair
the use of language. But the
split-brain procedure allowed
scientists to test each
hemisphere independently on
a variety of tasks, revealing a
range of segregated abilities.
The second finding was that
when the forebrain
commissures are cut, the
hemispheres display an
altogether astonishing
functional independence,
including separate memories,
learning processes, behavioral
intentions, and—it seems all
but certain—centers of
conscious experience.

The independence of the
hemispheres in a split-brain
patient comes about because
most nerve tracts running to
and from the cortex are
segregated, left and right.
Everything that falls in the
left visual field of each eye,
for instance, is projected to
the right hemisphere of the
brain, and everything in the
right visual field is projected
to the left hemisphere. The
same pattern holds for both
sensation and fine motor
control in our extremities.
Thus, each hemisphere relies
on intact commissures to
receive information from its
own side of the world. While
it can rarely speak, because
speech is usually confined to
the left hemisphere, the right
hemisphere can respond to
questions by pointing to
written words and objects
with the left hand.

The classic demonstration
of hemispheric independence
in a split-brain patient runs as
follows: Show the right
hemisphere a word—egg, say
—by briefly flashing it in the
left half of the visual field,
and the subject (speaking
from his language-dominant
left hemisphere) will claim to
have seen nothing at all. Ask
him to reach behind a
partition and select with his
left hand (which is
predominantly controlled by
the right hemisphere) the
thing that he “did not see,”
and he will succeed in
picking out an egg from
among a multitude of objects.
Ask him to name the item he
now holds in his left hand
without allowing the left
hemisphere to get a look at it,
and he will be unable to
reply. If shown the egg and
asked why he selected it from
among the available
materials, he will probably
confabulate an answer (again,
with his language-dominant
left hemisphere), saying
something like “Oh, I picked
it because I had eggs for
breakfast yesterday.” This is a
peculiar state of affairs.

When the lateralization of
inputs to the brain is
exploited in this way, it
becomes difficult to say that
the person whose brain has
been split is a single subject,
for everything about his
behavior suggests that a silent
intelligence lurks in his right
hemisphere, about which the
articulate left hemisphere
knows nothing. The duality of
mind is further demonstrated
by the fact that these patients
can simultaneously perform
separate manual tasks. For
instance, a person whose
brain is functioning normally
will find it impossible to draw
incompatible figures
simultaneously with the right
and left hands; divided brains
accomplish this task easily,
like two artists working in
parallel. In the acute phase
after surgery, patients’ left
and right hands sometimes
engage in a tug-of-war over
an object or sabotage each
other’s work. The left
hemisphere can speak about
its condition and may even
understand the anatomical
details of the procedure that
has brought it about, yet it
remains remarkably naïve
about the experience of its
neighbor on the right. Even
many years after surgery, the
left hemispheres of these
subjects express surprise or
irritation when their right
hemispheres respond to an
experimenter’s instructions.<ref> Zaidel et al., “The Callosal
Syndromes”; Zaidel, Zaidel,
and Bogen, “The Split Brain.”</ref>
To ask the left hemisphere
what it is like to not know
what the right hemisphere is
thinking is rather like asking
a normal subject what it is
like to not know what another
person is thinking: He simply
does not know what the other
person is thinking (or even,
perhaps, that he or she exists).

What is most startling
about the split-brain
phenomenon is that we have
every reason to believe that
the isolated right hemisphere
is independently conscious. It
is true that some scientists
and philosophers have
resisted this conclusion,<ref>K. R. Popper and J. C. Eccles.
[1977] 1993. The Self and Its Brain. London: Routledge.</ref> but
none have done so credibly.
If complex language were
necessary for consciousness,
then all nonhuman animals
and human infants would be
devoid of consciousness in
principle. If those whose left
hemispheres have been
surgically removed are still
believed to be conscious—
and they are—how could the
mere presence of a
functioning left hemisphere
rob the right one of its
subjectivity in the case of a
split-brain patient? <ref>See C. E. Marks. 1980.
Commissurotomy, Consciousness, and the Unity
of Mind. Montgomery, VT:
Bradford Books; J. E. Bogen.
1997. “Does Cognition in the
Disconnected Right
Hemisphere Require Right
Hemisphere Possession of
Language?” Brain Lang 57(1).</ref>

The consciousness of the
right hemisphere is especially
difficult to deny whenever a
subject possesses linguistic
ability on both sides of the
brain, because in such cases
the divided hemispheres often
express different intentions.
In a famous example, a young
patient was asked what he
wanted to be when he grew
up: His left brain replied, “A
draftsman,” while his right
brain used letter cards to spell
out “racing driver.”<ref>T. Nørretranders. 1998. The
User Illusion: Cutting
Consciousness Down to Size.
New York: Viking.</ref> In fact,
the divided hemispheres
sometimes seem to address
each other directly, in the
form of a verbalized,
interhemispheric argument. <ref>V. Mark. 1996. “Conflicting
Communicative Behavior in a
Split-Brain Patient: Support for
Dual Consciousness.” In
Toward a Science of
Consciousness: The First
Tucson Discussions and
Debates, ed. S. Hameroff, A.
W. Kaszniak, and A. C. Scott.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.</ref>

In such cases, each
hemisphere might well have
its own beliefs. Consider
what this says about the
dogma—widely held under
Christianity and Islam—that a
person’s salvation depends
upon her believing the right
doctrine about God. If a split-
brain patient’s left
hemisphere accepts the
divinity of Jesus, but the right
doesn’t, are we to imagine
that she now harbors two
immortal souls, one destined
for the company of angels
and the other for an eternity
in hellfire?

The question of whether
there is “something that it is
like” to be the right
hemisphere of a split-brain
patient must be answered in
the only way that it is ever
answered in science: We can
merely observe that its
behavior and underlying
neurology are sufficiently
similar to that which we
know to be correlated with
consciousness in our own
case. There is no difficulty in
doing this for a normal split-
brain patient who retains the
use of her left hand. In fact,
the consciousness of the
disconnected right
hemisphere is easier to
establish than that of most
toddlers. The question of
whether the right hemisphere
is conscious is really a
pseudo-mystery used to bar
the door to a great one: the
uncanny fact that the human
mind can be divided with a
knife.

== STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION ==
The right and left
hemispheres of our brain
show differences in their
gross anatomy, many of
which are also found in the
brains of other animals. In
humans, the left hemisphere
generally makes a unique
contribution to language and
to the performance of
complex movements.
Consequently, damage on this
side tends to be accompanied
by aphasia (impairment of
spoken or written language)
and apraxia (impairment of
coordinated movement).

People usually show a
right-ear (left-hemisphere)
advantage for words, digits,
nonsense syllables, Morse
code, difficult rhythms, and
the ordering of temporal
information, whereas they
show a left-ear (right-
hemisphere) advantage for
melodies, musical chords,
environmental sounds, and
tones of voice. Similar
differences have been found
for other senses as well. We
know, for instance, that the
right hand (sensation from
which projects almost entirely
to the left hemisphere) is
better able to discriminate the
order of stimuli, while the left
hand is more sensitive to their
spatial characteristics.

However, the right
hemisphere is dominant for
many higher cognitive
abilities, both in normal
brains and in those that have
been surgically divided. It
tends to have an advantage
when reading faces, intuiting
geometrical principles and
spatial relationships,
perceiving wholes from a
collection of parts, and
judging musical chords. <ref>Sperry, “Some Effects of
Disconnecting the Cerebral
Hemispheres.”</ref>
The right hemisphere is also
better at displaying emotion
(with the left side of the face)
and at detecting emotions in
others. <ref>J. J. Schmitt, W. Hartje, and K.
Willmes. 1997. “Hemispheric
Asymmetry in the Recognition
of Emotional Attitude
Conveyed by Facial
Expression, Prosody and
Propositional Speech.” Cortex
33(1).</ref> Interestingly, this
obliges us to view one
another’s least expressive
side of the face (the right)
with our most emotionally
astute hemisphere (the right),
and vice versa. Psychopaths
generally do not show this
right-hemisphere advantage
for the perception of emotion;
perhaps this is one reason
why they are bad at detecting
emotional distress in others. <ref>J. Blair, D. R. Mitchell, and K.
Blair. 2005. The Psychopath:
Emotion and the Brain.
Malden, MA: Blackwell.</ref>

Most evidence suggests
that the two hemispheres
differ in temperament, and it
now seems uncontroversial to
say that they can make
different (and even opposing)
contributions to a person’s
emotional life.<ref>Most of the studies involved
have relied on the Wada test, in
which sodium amobarbital is
injected into the left or right
carotid artery, temporarily
anesthetizing the hemisphere
on the same side. Researchers
have found that anesthesia of
the left hemisphere is often
associated with depression,
whereas anesthesia of the right
can lead to euphoria. The
literature on stroke has tended
to support this lateralization of
mood, correlating left-
hemisphere strokes with
depression, but some studies
have put this interpretation in
question. See A. J. Carson et al.
2000. “Depression after Stroke
and Lesion Location: A
Systematic Review.” Lancet
356(9224); D. W. Desmond et
al. 2003. “Ischemic Stroke and
Depression.” J Int
Neuropsychol Soc 9(3).

Research on normal brains
has shown that negative
emotions such as disgust,
anxiety, and sadness tend to be
associated with right-
hemisphere activity, whereas
happiness is associated with
activity on the left. However, it
might be better to think about
these emotional asymmetries in
terms of “approach” and
“withdrawal,” because anger, a
classically negative emotion, is
also correlated with activity in
the left hemisphere. (E.
Harmon-Jones, P. A. Gable,
and C. K. Peterson. 2010. “The
Role of Asymmetric Frontal
Cortical Activity in Emotion-
Related Phenomena: A Review
and Update.” Biol Psychol
84[3]: 451–62.)

The lateralized presentation
of films suggests that the right
hemisphere is more responsive
to their emotional content,
particularly if it is negative.
(W. Wittling and R.
Roschmann. 1993. “Emotion-
Related Hemisphere
Asymmetry: Subjective
Emotional Responses to
Laterally Presented Films.”
Cortex 29[3].) It is also faster
than the left to recognize the
emotional charge of individual
words (stupid, beautiful), and
in people suffering from
depression, it shows a
performance bias for negative
words. (R. A. Atchley, S. S.
Ilardi, and A. Enloe. 2003.
“Hemispheric Asymmetry in
the Processing of Emotional
Content in Word Meanings:
The Effect of Current and Past
Depression.” Brain Lang
84[1].) The fact that primates
lack direct connections
between the right and left
amygdalae (regions in the
temporal lobes that are
especially sensitive to
emotionally significant events)
suggests an anatomical basis
for lateral differences in mood.
(R. W. Doty. 1998. “The Five
Mysteries of the Mind, and
Their Consequences.”
Neuropsychologia 36[10].) The
role of the amygdala in our
emotional lives, particularly
with respect to fear, is very
well established. (Joseph E.
LeDoux. 2002. Synaptic Self:
How Our Brains Become Who
We Are. New York: Viking.)</ref> In a divided
brain, the hemispheres are
unlikely to perceive self and
world in the same way, nor
are they likely to feel the
same about them.

Much of what makes us
human is generally
accomplished by the right
side of the brain.
Consequently, we have every
reason to believe that the
disconnected right
hemisphere is independently
conscious and that the
divided brain harbors two
distinct points of view. This
fact poses an insurmountable
problem for the notion that
each of us has a single,
indivisible self—much less an
immortal soul. The idea of a
soul arises from the feeling
that our subjectivity has a
unity, simplicity, and
integrity that must somehow
transcend the biochemical
wheelworks of the body. But
the split-brain phenomenon
proves that our subjectivity
can quite literally be sliced in
two. (This is why Sir John
Eccles, a neuroscientist and a
committed Christian,
declared, against all evidence,
that the right hemisphere of
the divided brain must be
unconscious.) This fact has
interesting ethical
repercussions. For instance,
the biologist Lee Silver
wonders what we should do if
a person with a split brain
wanted to have her right
hemisphere removed because
she could no longer endure
the conflict with her “other
self.” Would this be a
therapeutic intervention or a
murder? However, the most
important implications are for
our view of consciousness: It
is divisible—and, therefore,
more fundamental than any
apparent self.

----

Imagine undergoing a
complete callosotomy. Like
most such surgeries, you
could be kept awake, because
there are no pain receptors in
the brain. There is also no
reason to think that you
would lose consciousness
during the procedure, because
a person can have an entire
hemisphere removed
(hemispherectomy) without
loss of consciousness.<ref>Popper and Eccles, The Self
and Its Brain.</ref> Nor
would you suffer a lapse in
memory. After surgery, you
would tend to speak in a way
characteristic of alexithymia
(the inability to describe your
emotional life), and you
might also demonstrate an
inappropriate degree of
politeness. <ref>Zaidel, Zaidel, and Bogen,
“The Split Brain.”</ref> Whether or not
you had occasion to notice
these changes in yourself, it
seems all but certain that you
would retain your sense of
being a “self” throughout the
experience.

Given that each
hemisphere in your divided
brain would have its own
point of view, whereas now
you appear to have only one,
it is natural to wonder which
side of the longitudinal
fissure “you” would find
yourself on once the corpus
callosum was cut. Would you
land on the right or on the
left? It is hard to resist the
uncanny demands of
arithmetic here. Assuming
that you were not simply
extinguished and replaced by
two new subjects—which
seems ruled out by the fact
that you would probably
remain conscious throughout
the procedure and retain your
memories—it is tempting to
conclude that your
subjectivity must collapse to
a single hemisphere. Once the
surgery was over, it would be
obvious that you can’t be on
both sides of the great divide.
Perhaps it is reasonable to
believe that you would find
yourself in the left
hemisphere, retaining the
reins of speech, since speech
and discursive thinking do
much to define your
experience in the present. But
consider some of the other
cognitive abilities you now
consciously enjoy, which we
know are governed primarily
by your right hemisphere.
Who, for instance, would
greet your loved ones with
your left hand and effortlessly
recognize their faces, their
facial expressions, and their
tones of voice?

I think this riddle admits
of a rather straightforward
solution. Consciousness—
whatever its relation to neural
events—is divisible. And just
as it isn’t shared between the
brains of separate individuals,
it need not be shared between
the hemispheres of a single
brain once the structures that
facilitate such sharing have
been cut. If some way of
linking two brains with an
artificial commissure were
ever devised, we should
expect that what had been
two distinct persons would be
unified in the only sense that
consciousness is ever unified,
as a single point of view, and
unified in the only sense that
minds are ever unified, by
virtue of common contents
and functional abilities.

The experience of
dreaming is instructive here.
Each night, we lie down to
sleep, only to be stolen from
our beds and plunged into a
realm where our personal
histories and the laws of
nature no longer apply.
Generally, we do not retain
enough of a purchase on
reality to even notice that
anything out of the ordinary
has happened. The most
astonishing quality of dreams
is surely our lack of
astonishment when they arise.
The sleeping brain seems to
have no expectation of
continuity from one moment
to the next. (This is probably
owing to the diminished
activity in the frontal lobes
that occurs during REM
sleep.) Thus, sweeping
changes in our experience do
not, in principle, detract from
the unity of consciousness.
Left to its own devices,
consciousness seems happy to
just experience one thing
after the next.

If my brain harbors only
one conscious point of view
—if all that is remembered,
intended, and perceived is
known by a single
“subject”—then I enjoy unity
of mind. The evidence is
overwhelming, however, that
such unity, if it ever exists in
a human being, depends upon
some humble tracts of white
matter crossing the midline of
the brain.
== ARE OUR MINDS ALREADY SPLIT? ==
Roger Sperry and his
colleagues demonstrated in
the 1950s that the corpus
callosum cannot facilitate a
complete transfer of learning
between the cerebral
hemispheres. <ref>Myers and Sperry,
“Interhemispheric Communication through the Corpus Callosum.”</ref> After cutting
the optic chiasma in cats (and
thereby confining the inputs
from each eye to a single
hemisphere), they discovered
that only simple learning
acquired through one eye
could transfer to the other
side of the brain. Given the
immense amount of
information processing that
takes place in each
hemisphere, it seems certain
that even a normal human
brain will be functionally
split to one or another degree.
Two hundred million nerve
fibers seem insufficient to
integrate the simultaneous
activity of 20 billion neurons
in the cerebral cortex, each of
which makes hundreds or
thousands (sometimes tens of
thousands) of connections to
its neighbors.<ref> Bogen, “On the Relationship of Cerebral Duality to Creativity.”</ref> Given this partitioning of information,
how can our brains not harbor
multiple centers of
consciousness even now?

The philosopher Roland
Puccetti once observed that
the existence of separate
spheres of consciousness in
the normal brain would
explain one of the most
perplexing features of split-
brain research: Why is it that
the right hemisphere is
generally willing to bear
silent witness to the errors
and confabulations of the
left? Could it be that the right
hemisphere is used to it?
: An answer consistent with the hypothesis of mental duality in the normal human brain suggests itself. The non-speaking hemisphere has known the true state of affairs from a very tender age. It has known this because beginning at age two or three it heard speech emanating from the common body that, as language development on the left proceeded, became too complex grammatically and syntactically for it to believe it was generating; the same, of course, for what it observed the preferred hand writing down in school through the years. Postsurgically, little has changed for the mute hemisphere (other than loss of sensory information about the ipsilateral half of bodily space). . . . Being inured to this status of cerebral helot, it goes along. Thankless cooperation can become a way of life. <ref>R. Puccetti. 1981. “The Case
for Mental Duality: Evidence
from Split-Brain Data and
Other Considerations.”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
4: 93–123.</ref>

Take a moment to absorb
how bizarre this possibility is.
The point of view from which
you are consciously reading
these words may not be the
only conscious point of view
to be found in your brain. It is
one thing to say that you are
unaware of a vast amount of
activity in your brain. It is
quite another to say that some
of this activity is aware of
itself and is watching your
every move.

There must be a reason
why the structural integrity of
the corpus callosum creates a
functional unity of mind
(insofar as it does), and
perhaps it is only the division
of the corpus callosum that
makes for separated regions
of consciousness in the
human brain. But whatever
the final lesson of the split
brain is, it thoroughly violates
our commonsense intuitions
about the nature of our
subjectivity.

A person’s experience of
the world, while apparently
unified in a normal brain, can
be physically divided. The
problem this poses for the
study of consciousness may
be insurmountable. If I were
to interrogate my brain with
the help of a colleague—one
who was willing to expose
my cortex and begin probing
with a microelectrode—
neither of us would know
what to make of a region that
failed to influence the
contents of “my”
consciousness. The split-brain
phenomenon suggests that all
that I would be able to say is
whether I (as perhaps only
one among many centers of
consciousness to be found in
my brain) felt anything when
my friend applied the current.
Feeling nothing, I wouldn’t
know whether the neurons in
question constituted a region
of consciousness in their own
right—for the simple reason
that I might be just like a
split-brain patient given to
wonder, with his articulate
left hemisphere, whether or
not his right hemisphere is
conscious. It surely is, and yet
no amount of experimental
probing on his part will drive
the relevant facts into view.
As long as we must correlate
changes in the brain—or any
other physical system—with
first-person reports, any
physical systems that are
functionally mute may
nevertheless prove to be
conscious, and our attempt to
understand the causes of
consciousness will fail to take
them into account.

All brains—and persons—may be split to one or another
degree. Each of us may live,
even now, in a fluid state of
split and overlapping
subjectivity. Whether or not
this seems plausible to you
may not be the point. Another
part of your brain may see the
matter differently.

== CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS PROCESSING IN THE BRAIN ==
The frontier between
conscious and unconscious
mental processes has
fascinated psychologists and
neuroscientists for more than
a century. The realization that
the unconscious mind must
have some cognitive and
emotional structure was the
foundation of Freud’s work
and also the stage upon which
he erected an impressively
unscientific mythology. The
connection between
conscious thoughts and
unconscious processes was
also present in the work of
William James, whose views
on this topic, and on the mind
in general, still deserve our
attention:
: Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term. If wrong names are proposed to us, this singularly definite gap acts immediately so as to negate them. They do not fit into its mould. And the gap of one word does not feel like the gap of another, all empty of content as both might seem necessarily to be when described as gaps. . . . The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it; or the evanescent sense of something which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fitfully, without growing more distinct. <ref>W. James. 1950 [1890]. The Principles of Psychology (Vol. I). Dover Publications, p. 251.</ref>

In other words, the
unconscious mind exists, and
our conscious experience
gives some indication of its
structure. Recent advances in
experimental psychology and
neuroimaging have allowed
us to study the boundary
between conscious and
unconscious mental processes
with increasing precision. We
now know that at least two
systems in the brain—often
referred to as “dual
processes”—govern human
cognition, emotion, and
behavior. One is
evolutionarily older,
unconscious, and automatic;
the other evolved more
recently and is both conscious
and deliberative. When you
find another person annoying,
sexually attractive, or
inadvertently funny, you are
experiencing the percolations
of System 1. The heroic
efforts you make to conceal
these feelings out of
politeness are the work of
System 2.

Scientists have learned
how to target System 1
through the phenomenon of
“priming,” revealing that
complex mental processes
lurk beneath the level of
conscious awareness. <ref>However, as Dennett points
out, it can be difficult (or
impossible) to distinguish what
was experienced and then
forgotten from what was never
experienced in the first place.
See his insightful discussion of
Orwellian versus Stalinesque
processes in cognition: D. C.
Dennett. 1991. Consciousness
Explained. Boston: Little,
Brown, pp. 116–25. This
ambiguity is largely
attributable to the fact that the
contents of consciousness must
be integrated over time—
around 100–200ms. (Crick and
Koch, “A Framework for
Consciousness.”) This period
of integration allows the
sensation of touching an object
and the associated visual
perception of doing so—which
objectively arrive at the cortex
at different times—to be
experienced as though they
were simultaneous.
Consciousness, therefore, is
dependent upon what is
generally known as “working
memory.”
Many researchers have
drawn this connection: J. M.
Fuster. 2003. Cortex and Mind:
Unifying Cognition. Oxford:
Oxford University Press; P.
Thagard and B. Aubie. 2008.
“Emotional Consciousness: A
Neural Model of How
Cognitive Appraisal and
Somatic Perception Interact to
Produce Qualitative
Experience.” Conscious Cogn
17(3); B. J. Baars and S.
Franklin. 2003. “How
Conscious Experience and
Working Memory Interact.”
Trends Cogn Sci 7(4). And the
principle is somewhat more
loosely captured by Edelman’s
notion of consciousness as “the
remembered present”: G. M.
Edelman. 1989. The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness. New York:
Basic Books.</ref> The
experimental technique of
“backward masking” has
been at the center of this
research: Human beings can
consciously perceive very
brief visual stimuli (down to
about 1/30 of a second), but
we can no longer see these
images if they are
immediately followed by a
dissimilar pattern (a “mask”).
This fact allows for words
and pictures to be delivered to
the mind subliminally,<ref>L. Naccache and S. Dehaene.
2001. “Unconscious Semantic
Priming Extends to Novel
Unseen Stimuli.” Cognition
80(3). Though several studies
indicate that the priming
stimulus must at least be
attended to: M. Finkbeiner and
K. I. Forster. 2008. “Attention,
Intention and Domain-Specific
Processing.” Trends Cogn Sci 12(2).</ref> and
these stimuli have subsequent
effects on a person’s
cognition and behavior. For
instance, you will be faster to
recognize that ocean is a
word if it follows a related
prime, like wave, than if it
follows an unrelated one, like
hammer. And emotionally
charged terms are more easily
recognized than neutral ones
(sex can be presented more
briefly than car), which
further demonstrates that the
meanings of words must be
gleaned prior to
consciousness. Subliminally
promised rewards drive
activity in the brain’s reward
centers,<ref>M. Pessiglione et al. 2007.
“How the Brain Translates
Money into Force: A
Neuroimaging Study of
Subliminal Motivation.”
Science 316(5826).</ref> and masked fearful
faces and emotional words
increase activity in the
amygdala.<ref>P. J. Whalen et al. 1998.
“Masked Presentations of
Emotional Facial Expressions
Modulate Amygdala Activity
without Explicit Knowledge.” J
Neurosci 18(1); L. Naccache et
al. 2005. “A Direct Intracranial
Record of Emotions Evoked by
Subliminal Words.” Proc Natl
Acad Sci USA 102(21).</ref> Clearly, we are
not aware of all the
information that influences
our thoughts, feelings, and
actions.

Many other findings attest
to the importance of our
unconscious mental lives.
Amnesiacs, who can no
longer form conscious
memories, can still improve
their performance on a wide
variety of tasks through
practice.<ref>D. L. Schacter. 1987. “Implicit
Expressions of Memory in
Organic Amnesia: Learning of
New Facts and Associations.”
Hum Neurobiol 6(2).</ref> For instance, a
person can learn to play golf
with increasing proficiency,
all the while believing that
whenever she picks up a club
it is for the first time. The
acquisition of such motor
skills occurs outside of
consciousness in normal
people as well. Your
conscious memories of
practicing a musical
instrument, driving a car, or
tying your shoelaces are
neurologically distinct from
your learning how to do these
things and from your knowing
how to do them now. People
with amnesia can even learn
new facts and have their
ability to recognize names<ref>L. R. Squire and R. McKee.
1992. “Influence of Prior
Events on Cognitive Judgments
in Amnesia.” J Exp Psychol
Learn Mem Cogn 18(1).</ref>
and generate concepts <ref>M. M. Keane et al. 1997.
“Intact and Impaired
Conceptual Memory Processes
in Amnesia.” Neuropsychology
11(1).</ref>
improve in response to prior
exposure, without having any
memory of acquiring such
knowledge. In fact, we are all
in this position with respect to
most of our semantic
knowledge of the world. Do
you remember learning the
meaning of the word door?
Probably not. How do you
recognize it and bring its
meaning to mind? You have
no idea. These processes
occur outside
consciousness. <ref>Other phenomena distinguish
consciousness from our
unconscious mental lives. For
instance, certain people suffer a
condition called “blindsight,”
which results from damage to
their primary visual cortex. As
a matter of conscious
experience, they are blind (or
blind within a region of their
visual field), and yet they can
accurately describe the visual
properties of objects. They
experience this as purely a
matter of guessing—after all,
they have no experience of
seeing—but they manage to
“guess” with near perfect
accuracy. They are seeing
without knowing that they are
seeing. (L. Weiskrantz. 1996.
“Blindsight Revisited.” Curr
Opin Neurobiol 6[2]; L.
Weiskrantz. 2002. “Prime-
Sight and Blindsight.”
Conscious Cogn 11[4]; L.
Weiskrantz. 2008. “Is
Blindsight Just Degraded
Normal Vision?” Exp Brain
Res 192[3].)</ref>

== CONSCIOUSNESS IS WHAT MATTERS ==
Despite the obvious
importance of the
unconscious mind,
consciousness is what matters
to us—not just for the
purpose of spiritual practice
but in every aspect of our
lives. Consciousness is the
substance of any experience
we can have or hope for, now
or in the future. If God spoke
to Moses out of a burning
bush, the bush would have
been a visual percept
(whether veridical or not) of
which Moses was consciously
aware. It should be clear that
if a person begins to suffer
from intractable pain or
depression, if he experiences
a continuous ringing in his
ears or the consequences of
having acquired a bad
reputation among his
colleagues, these
developments are matters of
consciousness and its
contents, whatever the nature
of the unconscious processes
that give rise to them.

Consciousness is also what
gives our lives a moral
dimension. Without
consciousness, we would
have no cause to wonder how
we should behave toward
other human beings, nor
could we care how we were
treated in return. Granted,
many moral emotions and
intuitions operate
unconsciously, but it is
because they influence the
contents of consciousness that
they matter to us. I have
argued elsewhere, and at
length in The Moral Landscape, that we have
ethical responsibilities toward
other creatures precisely to
the degree that our actions
can affect their conscious
experience for better or
worse.<ref>S. Harris. 2004. The End of
Faith, New York: Norton, pp.
173–75, 275–77; S. Harris.
2010. The Moral Landscape.
New York: Free Press.</ref> We don’t have
ethical obligations toward
rocks (on the assumption that
they are not conscious), but
we do have such obligations
toward any creature that can
suffer or be deprived of
happiness. Of course, it can
be wrong to destroy rocks if
they happen to be valuable to
other conscious creatures.
The Taliban’s destruction of
the 1,500-year-old standing
Buddhas of Bamiyan was
wrong not from the
perspective of the statues
themselves but from that of
all the people who cared
about them (and the future
people who might have
cared).

I have never come across a
coherent notion of bad or
good, right or wrong,
desirable or undesirable that
did not depend upon some
change in the experience of
conscious creatures. It is not
always easy to nail down
what we mean by “good” and
“bad”—and their definitions
may remain perpetually open
to revision—but such
judgments seem to require, in
every instance, that some
difference register at the level
of experience. Why would it
be wrong to murder a billion
human beings? Because so
much pain and suffering
would result. Why would it
be wrong to painlessly kill
every man, woman, and child
in their sleep? Because of all
the possibilities for future
happiness that would be
foreclosed. If you think such
actions are wrong primarily
because they would anger
God or would lead to your
punishment after death, you
are still worried about
perturbations of
consciousness—albeit ones
that stand a good chance of
being wholly imaginary.

I take it to be axiomatic,
therefore, that our notions of
meaning, morality, and value
presuppose the actuality of
consciousness (or its loss)
somewhere. If anyone has a
conception of meaning,
morality, and value that has
nothing to do with the
experience of conscious
beings, in this world or in a
world to come, I have yet to
hear of it. And it would seem
that such a conception of
value could hold no interest
for anyone, by definition,
because it would be
guaranteed to be outside the
experience of every conscious
being, now and in the future.

The fact that the universe
is illuminated where you
stand—that your thoughts and
moods and sensations have a
qualitative character in this
moment—is a mystery,
exceeded only by the mystery
that there should be
something rather than nothing
in the first place. Although
science may ultimately show
us how to truly maximize
human well-being, it may still
fail to dispel the fundamental
mystery of our being itself.
That doesn’t leave much
scope for conventional
religious beliefs, but it does
offer a deep foundation for a
contemplative life. Many
truths about ourselves will be
discovered in consciousness
directly or not discovered at
all.
<references/>

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=Roving Leadership=
It was Easter Sunday morning and the large church was filled. The processional was ready to begin. The three pastors, the senior choir, two children's choirs poised at the back of the church--weeks of planning and preparation were about to be fulfilled.

As the organist struck the first chord, a middle-aged man in the center of the church began to sweat profusely, turned an ashen gray, rose partially out
of his seat, stopped breathing, and toppled over onto his daughter sitting next to him.

And what did these pastors, organists, and choirs do? They did nothing.

But in less than three seconds, a young man with experience as a paramedic was at the stricken man's side. Quickly and expertly he opened the airway and restored breathing. After several minutes, making sure the sick man's condition was stabilized and on a signal from the paramedic, six men lifted him carefully and carried him quickly to the back of the church where he was laid on the floor to await the arrival of the ambulance, which, having been called for immediately by some unknown person, was already on its way.

When the man was laid on the floor near the waiting children's choir, two youngsters fainted. Two doctors from the congregation were immediately on the scene. One stepped in to help the young man care for the patient; the other immediately looked after the two children.

At this point a man thrust his head into the group gathered around the patient and said, “Are you going to want oxygen?” And when the doctor said, “Yes," he immediately handed it to him, having anticipated the need and gone to find the oxygen bottle.

While all these things were going on, the man's wife (who was in the senior choir and did not know what was happening—-only that the service was being momentarily delayed) was sensitively informed and brought to her husband's side. Others quieted the children's choirs, reassured them that the man was going to be okay and that they should begin to compose themselves for the service. The paramedics arrived, put the man in the ambulance, and took him to the hospital.

As you can imagine, a tender and poignant service now began. At the end of the service, the pastor was able to announce that the man had suffered a severe allergic reaction; his condition was stable; the outlook was positive.

The point in telling you this story is to show that while
this church has a hierarchy of
more than thirty appointed and elected professionals, committee members, board
members, and others, the hierarchy did not respond swiftly or decisively. It is difficult
for a hierarchy to allow "subordinates" to break custom and be leaders. The people who
did respond swiftly and effectively are roving leaders. Roving leaders are those indispensable people in our lives who are there when we need them. Roving leaders take charge, in varying degrees, in a lot of companies every day.

More than simple initiative, roving leadership is a key element in the day-to-day expression of a participative process. Participation is the opportunity and responsibility to have a say in your job, to have influence over the management of organizational resources based on your own competence and your willingness to accept problem ownership. No one person is the "expert" at everything.

In many organizations there are two kinds of leaders--both hierarchical leaders and
roving leaders. In special situations, the hierarchical leader is obliged to identify the
roving leader, then to support and follow him or her, and also to exhibit the grace that
enables the roving leader to lead.

It's not easy to let someone else take the lead. To do this demands a special openness
and the ability to recognize what is best for the organization and how best to respond
to a given issue. Roving leadership is an issue-oriented idea. Roving leadership is the
expression of the ability of hierarchical leaders to permit others to share ownership
of problems--in effect, to take possession of a situation.

When roving leadership is practiced, it makes demands on each of us – whether we're a hierarchical leader, a roving leader, or a good follower. It's a demanding process. It demands that we be enablers of each other.

Roving leadership demands a great deal of trust and a clear sense of our interdependence. Leadership is never handled carelessly—we share it, but we don't give it away. We need to be able to count on the other person's special competence. When we think about the people with whom we work, people on whom we depend, we can see that without each individual, we are not going to go very far as a group. By ourselves we suffer serious limitations. Together we can be something wonderful.

Roving leadership also demands discipline. Interestingly, though in organizations like ours we need a lot of freedom, there is no room for license. Discipline is what it takes to do the job.

It is not a matter primarily of whether or not we reach our particular goals. Life is more than just reaching our goals. As individuals and as a group we need to reach our potential. Nothing else is good enough. We must always be reaching toward our potential.

The condition of our hearts, the openness of our attitude, the quality of our competence, the fidelity of our experience—these give vitality to the work experience and meaning to life. These are what it takes to make roving leadership possible. And roving leadership, freely and openly practiced together, is the vehicle we can use to reach our potential.

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= Intimacy =
Intimacy is at the heart of competence. It has to do with understanding, with believing, and with practice. It has to do with the relationship to one's work.

Everyone knows you can't run a good restaurant with absentee management. A young man I know went to eat lunch one day at his regular restaurant. It was unusually busy. He managed to get a menu, but before the waitress came to take his order his lunch hour had evaporated. Genuinely concerned that the owner should know what had happened, he mentioned it to the cashier in a friendly way and went back to work. That night, the owner of the restaurant arrived at the young man's house, unannounced, with dinner—enough dinner for two nights.

This kind of intimacy with one's work leads to solid competence.

Being an effective department supervisor on a manufacturing floor is fundamentally different from giving seminars about it.

In the same way, war games are different from battle. Those who have been there know the heightened sense of reality and unreality, and the odor of fear and risk and death. Only the heart-pounding experience of battle can bring that intimacy.

Those of you who have had real experience with machinery and equipment and even buildings know that they have personalities of their own. Intimacy with a job leads one to understand that when training people to do a job, one needs to teach not only the skill of the job but the art of it as well. And the art of it always has to do with the personality of both the operator and the machine. Intimacy is the experience of ownership. This often arises out of difficulty or questions or exasperation, or even survival.

Beliefs are connected to intimacy. Beliefs come before policies or standards or practices. Practice without belief is a forlorn existence. Managers who have no beliefs but only understand methodology and quantification are modern-day eunuchs. They can never engender competence or confidence. They can never be truly intimate.

Functionally and technologically we are concerned with intimacy. We should be concerned with intimacy when we design the organizational structures which, after all, are the road maps that help us to work together. Intimacy concerns us personally, professionally, and organizationally.

Intimacy with our work directly affects our accountability and results in personal authenticity in the work process. A key component of intimacy is passion.

You should not think that you can come to intimacy easily or by following a formula. Nor is intimacy easily preserved. It has its enemies. In our group activities, intimacy is betrayed by such things as politics, short-term measurements, arrogance, superficiality, and an orientation toward self rather than toward the good of the group.

Superficiality in a special way is an enemy of intimacy. When one thinks carefully about why certain people who are competent, well educated, energetic, and well supported with good tools fail, it is often the red thread of superficiality that does them in. They never get seriously and accountably involved in their own work.

Intimacy is betrayed by the inability of our leaders to focus and provide continuity and momentum. It is betrayed by finding complexity where simplicity ought to be. Leaders who encumber people rather than enabling them betray intimacy.

Intimacy has its champions too.

I was inspired by a Charles Kuralt segment reporting on a talented high school gymnast paralyzed from the waist down. The young athlete was really good, and it was fun to see how accomplished he had become. Something he said applies in a special way to each of us: “I don't come with the wheelchair. The wheelchair comes with me.”

This is the way it is at work. We don't come with our companies—they come with us, because no company or institution can amount to anything without the people who make it what it is. Our companies can never be anything we do not want ourselves to be. When we look at work in that relationship to ourselves, we develop a real intimacy with work, an intimacy that adds value to work and to our organizations.

We find intimacy through a search for comfort with ambiguity. We do not grow by knowing all of the answers, but rather by living with the questions.

Intimacy rises from translating personal and institutional values into daily work practices, from searching for knowledge and wisdom and justice. Above all, intimacy rises from, and gives rise to, strong relationships. Intimacy is one way of describing the relationship we all desire with work.

Charles Eames used to enjoy talking about “good goods.” He was talking about good materials, good solutions, good products. This helped me to understand that the “good goods” of the art of leadership is the sacred nature of our relationships. Intimacy should be part of the relationships we build at work.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of relationships in industry. The first and most easily understood is the contractual relationship. The contractual relationship covers the quid pro quo of working together. I've mentioned this kind of relationship before. But more is needed, particularly today when the majority of workers are, essentially, volunteers.

Three of the key elements in the art of working together are how to deal with change, how to deal with conflict, and how to reach our potential. A legal contract almost always breaks down under the inevitable duress of conflict and change. A contract has nothing to do with reaching our potential.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, speaking to the 1978 graduating class of Harvard College, said this about legalistic relationships: “a society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher, fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes men's noblest impulses” And later: “After a certain level of the problem has been reached, legalistic thinking induces paralysis; it prevents one from seeing the scale and the meaning of events” (A World Split Apart, New York: Harper & Row, 1978, pp. 17–19, 39.)

Covenantal relationships, on the other hand, induce freedom, not paralysis. A covenantal relationship rests on shared commitment to ideas, to issues, to values, to goals, and to management processes. Words such as love, warmth, personal chemistry are certainly pertinent. Covenantal relationships are open to influence. They fill deep needs and they enable work to have meaning and to be fulfilling. Covenantal relationships reflect unity and grace and poise. They are an expression of the sacred nature of relationships.

Covenantal relationships enable corporations to be hospitable to the unusual person and unusual idea. Covenantal relationships tolerate risk and forgive errors. I am convinced that the best management process for todays environment is participative management based on covenantal relationships. Look for the “good goods” of quality relationships that prevail in a corporation as you seek to serve.

How can we begin to build and nurture intimacy? Well, one way to begin is by asking questions and looking for answers. How does the company connect with its history? What business is it in? Who are the people and what are their relationships with one another? How does the company deal with change and conflict? Most important, perhaps, what is their vision of the future? Where are they going? What do they want to become?

Leaders are obliged to think about these questions. Both the act and the art of leadership, if we are to be intimate with our work, demand this.

From time to time I am asked, “What is your personal goal for Herman Miller?” When one loves jazz, one thinks of Louis Armstrong. When one truly enjoys baseball, one thinks of Sandy Koufax. When one appreciates stabiles, one thinks of Alexander Calder. When we respond to the French Impressionists, we think of Renoir. Each of these beautifully talented, beautifully trained, beautifully disciplined persons is special to us because he is a gift to the spirit.

My goal for Herman Miller is that when people both inside the company and outside the company look at all of us, not as a corporation but as a group of people working intimately within a covenantal relationship, they'll say, “Those folks are a gift to the spirit.”

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= Whither Capitalism =
Who serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard without eating any of its fruit? Or who tends a flock without getting some of the milk? ... For it is written in the Law of Moses, "You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain." Is it for oxen that God is concerned? -- I Corinthians, 9:7-9

In our effort to understand the capitalist system and its future, what should we keep in mind? We should begin with a concept of persons.

First, as a Christian I believe each person is made in the image of God. For those of us who have received the gift of leadership from the people we lead, this belief has enormous implications.

Second, God has given people a great diversity of gifts. Understanding the diversity of our gifts enables us to begin taking the crucial step of trusting each other. The simple act of recognizing diversity in the corporate life helps us to appreciate and connect the great variety of gifts that people bring to the corporation.

Third, I believe that God, for reasons that we may not always understand, has provided us a population mix—a population mix for which leaders are held accountable.

This concept of persons within the capitalist system holds important implications for everybody—Christian or not. These implications lie primarily in the quality of our relationships. Relationships are at the heart and center of the capitalist system, both contractual relationships and deeper, more enabling covenantal relationships—two kinds of relationships discussed in the previous essay.

One of the great problems of the capitalist system during its first couple of hundred years is that it has been primarily an exclusive system. It has been built primarily around contractual relationships, and it has excluded too many people from both its process and a generally equitable distribution of results. The issue here is much more than financial reward: Most people never get opportunity to be meaningfully involved in the working of the system.

I do not know of a better system, but the capitalist system can be improved, both in practice and in theory, with the influence of an inclusive perspective. The aim is not primarily to improve the results, although that is a significant possibility. The aim is to embody the concept of persons, for a substantial concept of persons must underlie an inclusive system. A belief that every person brings an offering to a group requires us to include as many people as possible. Including people, if we believe in the intrinsic value of their diversity, will be the only path open to us.

It may be that the capitalist system cannot survive as an exclusive arrangement. In our social structures today we're under tremendous pressure, particularly from advertisers, to believe that we have an endless appetite for anything as long as it breathes an air of exclusiveness. Behind all of this lurks the idea of getting it for yourself! Take care of yourself! When one sits back quietly and thinks about it, these attitudes are, in fact, simply the implementation of selfishness. Exclusiveness breeds selfishness.

When God said we are made in his image, he placed no other qualification on that concept. So we are driven to see both the appropriateness of our diversity and the beauty and two-way nature of our interdependence. Therefore we reject exclusivity. We covet inclusiveness.

How can we begin to make capitalism an inclusive process? Well, there are a number of ways. First of all, by acknowledging both a Christian and a humanistic concept of people. Each of us is needed. Each of us has a gift to bring. Each of us is a social being and our institutions are social units. Each of us has a deep-seated desire to contribute.

An inclusive system requires us to be insiders. We are interdependent, really unable to be productive by ourselves. Interdependency requires lavish communications. Lavish communications and an exclusive process are contradictory.

One can define this inclusive approach in three ways. First, there are always certain marks of being included:
*being needed
*being involved
*being cared about as an individual
*fair wages and benefits
*having the opportunity to do one's best (Only leaders willing to take risks can give this opportunity.)
*having the opportunity to understand
*having a piece of the action--productivity gains, profit sharing, ownership appreciation, seniority bonus

Second, the inclusive approach makes me think of a cooperation or business or institution as a place of fulfilled potential. For me it helps to think about the concept of a place of fulfilled potential by thinking about some gifts that leaders owe. Leadership is a condition of indebtedness. Leaders who have an inclusive attitude think of themselves as owing, at the very least, the following:
*space: a gift to be what I can be
*the opportunity to serve
*the gift of challenge: we don't grow unless we're tested (constraints, like facts, are enabling friends)
*the gift of meaning: not superfluous, but worthy; not superficial, but integral; not disposable, but permanent

Here are a couple of views about leadership and inclusiveness. I think it's fairly obvious which one I endorse.

At an American Management Association conference for presidents, an invited speaker in all seriousness said, “I want men that are vicious, grasping, and lusting for power.” He also gave us his version of the Golden Rule— “He who has the gold makes the rules.”

On the other hand, some time ago at a board of directors meeting I attended, Bill Stumpf, an industrial designer, then teaching at the University of Wisconsin, posed the following questions:
*Should a cooperation challenge life?
*Does the artist have a role in the cooperation?
*What is the relationship of expectation to performance?
*What warrants corporate existence?

Finally, here is a third way to understand and define an inclusive approach. Inclusive capitalism requires something from everyone. People must respond actively to inclusiveness. Naturally, there is a cost to belonging.

*Being faithful is more important than being successful. If we are successful in the world's eyes but unfaithful in terms of what we believe, then we fail in our efforts at insidership.
*Cooperations can and should have a redemptive purpose. We need to weigh the pragmatic in the clarifying light of the moral. We must understand that reaching our potential is more important than reaching our goals.
*We need to become vulnerable to each other. We owe each other the chance to reach our potential.
*Belonging requires us to be willing and ready to risk. Risk is like change; it's not a choice.
*Belonging requires intimacy. Being an insider is not a spectator sport. It means adding value. It means being fully and personally accountable. It means forgoing superficiality.
*Last, we need to be learners together. The steady process of becoming goes on in most of us throughout our lifetime. We need to be searching for maturity, openness, and sensitivity.

When people fulfill these requirements, bear the cost, then the opportunities to be needed, to be involved, and to participate become rights.

The only way to keep these rights is to exercise them constructively, intelligently, cooperatively, and productively. Really including other people means helping them understand. It means giving others the chance to do their best. Being included, according to the diversity of our gifts, is fundamental to the equity that justice requires and inspires.

If one accepts the premises concerning the concept of persons, if one accepts the idea of covenantal relationships, if one seeks to practice the inclusive approach in the capitalist system, will it work? In the capitalist system there are standards of performance to be met, ratios to be maintained, service to be given, profits to be made, the future to be assured, jobs to be secured.

Can this approach work? I do not know for sure, but there are many encouraging signals and perhaps preliminary results. There are also real difficulties. This approach to management is not easy. It is very demanding and it can at times be discouraging because, after all, we are all human. Inclusiveness means including normal human problems in the system.

I am certainly aware of the growing sophistication of trained managers these days. They are a large part of the capitalist system. Their skills at quantification are admirable. But I sometimes wonder how often they focus on the spirit? Do they examine what will be important tomorrow and not just the operational matters of today?

Though necessary and desirable, it is easy to include people procedurally in committees, lunches, or even in profits, just as it is easy to write contracts.

It is more difficult, but far more important, to be committed to a cooperative concepts of persons, the diversity of human gifts, covenantal relationships, lavish communications, including everyone, and believing that leadership is a condition of indebtedness.

Even with this commitment, we should hope that our efforts at opening doors into the capitalistic system are never described in the words of an older Israeli who was quoted in National Geographic. She said, speaking of the younger Zionists: "They opened up the doors of the world, but they closed up the heavens forever." (National Geographic, 168, no. 1(July 1985): pp.4-5.)

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==GIANT TALES==

What is a giant? Well, giants are many things. People like you and me may become giants. Giants see opportunity where others see trouble.

Giants see opportunity where others see trouble. One of the giants in Herman Miller's history was a man named Jim Eppinger. Jim was the sales manager of the company through the thirties and forties and, in particular, during our transition from making good-quality, traditional copies of furniture to learning how to sell the revolutionary new designs of Rhode and Nelson and Eames. Those were tough years, really tough years that only a few people still understand.

Once I sat in on a luncheon with my father and Jim Eppinger—these two old cronies who had made the company survive during the Depression. They were talking, with a sense of humor and nostalgia, about some of the difficulties of the early days and, in particular, the Depression.

My father recalled for Jimmy a time they had been together at Jim's home in New Jersey during Christmas-time and mentioned how much he was aware that Jim's family had no Chistmas tree nor any gifts. Dad knew it was because the company did not have enough money to pay the sales commissions that were due.

Dad mentioned that Jim probably didn't remember that time, but it was vary real to my father, because he felt it was his fault that Jim's family would have no Chistmas. But Jim said, "I remember that evening as if it were yesterday, because for Marian and me it was one of the highlights of our lives." And my dad, surprised, said, "How could that possibly be?" Jim said, "Well, don't you remember? That was the night you gave me the Ney York territory. It was the greatest opportunity I've ever had."

Giants give others the gift of space, space in both the personal and the corporate sense, space to be what one can be. One of my favorite giants is George Nelson. In the late 1940s Herman Miller introduced George's marvelous and, to this day, appropriate line of residential furniture. During the weeks when these designs were being readied for introduction to the market, another giant appeared on the scene in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art: Charles Eames.

George worked very hard to persuade both my father and Jim Eppinger to write Charles and arrange to add Charles's designs to the Herman Miller program. My father said something like this to George: "We're just getting ready to introduce your first products to the market. We're not a large company. We'll never pay very much in royalties. Do you really want to share this small opportunity with another designer?" George's response was something like this: "Charles Eames is an unusual talent. He is vary different from me. The company needs us both. I want very much to have Charles Eames share in whatever potential there is."

In the ensuing years, Charles Eames became recognized as the greatest furniture designer since Chippendale.

Giants catch fastballs. One of the giants at Herman Miller is a man named Pep Nagelkirk, who is probably the most talented model maker I have ever heard of. He has served Herman Miller designers for thirty-five years. He has a special gift for translating ideas and sketches into prototypes. He is an indispensable part of every design program we launch. He is a fastball catcher.

Now a fastball may be enough for a pitcher, but it is never enough for a team. Cooperations and people can throw good ideas around as often as they want. Without giant catchers like Pep Nagelkirk, those ideas may eventually disappear. We have hundreds of giant catches like Pep Nagelkirk at Herman Miller. Without giant catchers there can be no giant pitchers.

Giants have special gifts. Another of our giants is a man named Howard Redder, a department supervisor who retired some time ago. Howard never went to high school. He worked in a factory all of his adult life and worked his way up the ladder and became one of the best department supervisors we ever had. But beyond that, Howard has a special gift.

He is most sensitive and most effective enabler of handicapped employees the company has had. This is important, because, as a company, we strongly believe that the diversity of the population must be reflected in our company's population. That special ability, to give a handicapped person the space and support and encouragement to be a productive and to honer the sense of involvement that all of us have, make another kind of giant.

Giants enable others to express their own gifts. The last giant I'd like to mention is my father. During the Depression days, when he and a few others were dealing with the company's day-to-day survival, he was able to accept people like Gilbert Rhode, and later George Nelson, Charles Eames, and Alexander Girard at a time is his life when he knew practically nothing about design, designers, or the design process. But he had the great insight to see the diversity of their gifts, which in turn enabled him to be personally and corporately abandoned to the exercise of their gifts.

There are at least two things we learn about cooporations from these tales of giants. The first is that while productivity is important, giving space to giants is much more important. The second is that giving space to giants lets them and others practice the "roving leadership" I discussed earlier. These two lessons may, from time to time, be hard on the hierarchical leadership. But if you want a cooporation to be truly effective, you will need to help cooporations be open to giants at all levels.

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==TRIBAL STORYTELLING==
Dr. Carl Frost, a good friend and adviser to our company, tells a story of his experience in Nigeria during the late sixties.

Electricity had just been brought into the village where he and his family where living. Each family got a single light in its hut. A real sign of progress. The trouble was that at night, though they had nothing to read and many of them did not know how to read, the families would sit in their huts in awe of this wonderful symbol of technology.

The light-bulb watching began to replace the customary nighttime gatherings by the tribal fire, where the tribal storytellers, the elders, would pass along the history of the tribe. The tribe was losing its history in the light of a few electric bulbs.

This story helps to illustrate the difference between scientific management and tribal leadership. Every family, every college, every corporation, every institution needs tribal storytellers. The penalty for failing to listen is to lose one's history, one's historical context, one's binding values. Like the Nigerian tribe, without the continuity brought by custom, any group of people will begin to forget who they are.

Herman Miller's stock of values is an example of the continuity I'm talking about. Herman Miller is a group of people who, working together and, more often than we care to admit, fighting together, have made a difference. this has made us a leading company. Our stock of values has risen from our history and our customs. These values are concrete examples of what a vital company today passes along through tribal storytelling. Perhaps you and your company share some of these values with us.

We are a research-driven product company. We are not a market-driven company. It means that we intend, through the honest examination of our environment and our work and our problems, to meet the unmet needs of our users with problem-solving design and development. Thus, we are committed to good design in products and systems.

We are committed to extending that design into the work environment, including especially our own architecture and facilities that serve us and our customers. We are committed to applying the same standard of design to all of our communications and graphics. We are committed to good design even in the design of situations, especially in those situations and events that bear on the quality of our relationships with each other.

We intend to make a contribution to society. We wish to make that contribution through the products and services we offer, and through the manner in which we offer them. In an era of high technology, we wish to be a "high-touch" company that makes the environmental connection between persons and technology in the markets we choose to serve. We intend to be socially responsible and responsive.

As Tom Pratt, a friend and member of my work team at Herman Miller, has observed, "Life and work are intrinsically meaningful and, therefore, worthy of enlightened attention and support."

We are dedicated to quality. Quality, as D.J., my father, has said, is a matter of truth. When we talk about quality, we are talking about quality of product and service. But we are also talking about the quality of our relationships and the quality of our communications and the quality of our promises to each other. And so, it is reasonable to talk about quality in terms of truth and integrity.

My dictionary, when defining the word integrity, recommends looking up the word honer. Among many choices, there is the phrase:"A fine sense of one's obligations." This, I believe, is the way to look at quality.

We must become, for all who are involved, a place of realized Potential. This is a value at Herman Miller. Any organization, meaning the people who constitute such a body, needs to offer outstanding education and training. We each have the right, at Herman Miller, within the participative process, to genuine opportunity.

Each of us, but especially those with the responsibility for leadership, must be dedicated to making the "gift of space" available to others--that is, space to be what we can be in the corporate environment.

We each have the right to this gift of space without regard to color, creed, sex, or level of talent and coordination. In our goal to be a place of realized potential, the Herman Miller population must be reflection of God's diversity, not of our choices.

We are committed to a high sense of initiative in doing everything we can make capitalism an inclusive system of relationships, not an exclusive structure of barriers.

We are committed to using responsibly our environment and out finite resources. We are devoted to outstanding performance through out stewardship of telent and resources, of tools and jigs, of ideas and designs, of facilities and situations. All combine to provide a legitimate result in equity for employee owners, customers, investors, the public, and the communities in which we live and work.

We commit voluntarily our energy and talent, as well as our financial resources, to those agencies and institutions whose purpose is the common good. We cannot live our lives isolated from the needs of society.

It is essential to us that we preserve our future economically. Profit, like breathing, is indispensable. While it is not the sole goal of our lives, in the context of our opportunities, profit must be a result of our contribution.

We at Herman Miller acknowledge that issues of the heart and spirit matter to each of us. They matter in our families, in our work, and in our extracurricular activities. We are emotional creatures, trying through the vehicles of product and knowledge and information and relationships to have an effect for good on one another both personally and through what we can do to improve the environment.

In a difficult and fractured and complex world, in problems of failure and of success, but especially in the joys and tragedies of our personal lives, we touch each other. This "touching" is at the heart of who we are.

Deep in who we are today lies waiting a challenge. It is not an external mystery--the question of what we can be lies within us, for whatever we do expresses the character of the people who are this company.

We are deeply committed to the Scanlon idea, a plan for practicing participative management, including productivity and profit sharing, used by quite a few companies in the United States. There are some beautiful and fundamental reasons why this way of participative management especially thrives at Herman Miller.

It enables the expression of diverse gifts of persons with an emphasis on creativity and on the quality of the process. It fuels the generation of ideas, the solving of problems, and the managing of change and conflict. While we have worked at it over thtirty-five years, it's still an idea, an idea with tremendous impounded energy. It is the constant search for what is and what can be that enables persons and groups to reach their potential.

In a group like Herman Miller, we have both personal diversity and corporate diversity. When we think of corporate diversity, we think about the gifts and talents and commitment that each of us as individuals bring to the group effort. Channeled correctly and integrated properly, our diversity can be our greastest strength. But there is always the temptation to use these gifts for our personal benefit rather than dedicating them to the best interest of the group. If used selfishly, they will cause serious internal erosion. The process of integration is simply abandoning oneself to the strengths of others, being vulnerable to what others can do better than we can.

The concept of human equality is not affected by the corporate hierarchy. We understand that the corporation is an entity only in that it is an expression of each of us as individuals. We know that the soul and spirit, the gifts, the heart and dignity of each of us combine to give the cooperation these same qualities. We who invest our lives in Herman Miller are neither the grist of a corporate mill nor the hired guns of distant, mysterious stockholders. As a faculty and staff are a university, so we are Herman Miller. The cooperation can never be something we are not.

To a great extent we at Herman Miller, a vary diverse group of individuals, share this set of common values. The roots of this value system differ almost person by person, but our spoken and understood expressions of it are remarkably coherent.

Shared ideals, shared ideas, shared goals, shared respect, a sense of integrity, a sense of quality, a sense of advocacy, a sense of caring--these are the basis of Herman Miller's covenant and value system. Our system of values may not be generic. It must be explicit. The system and covenant around it make it possible for us to work together, not perfectly to be sure, but nevertheless in a way that enables us to have the potential to be a gift to the spirit.

We work to maintain these values. Yet a system of beliefs is always threatened by change, and change is something no one can avoid. Successful entrepreneurships tend to become cooperations. Successful cooperations tend to become institutions. Institutions foster bureaucracy, the most superficial and fatuous of all relationships. Bureaucracy can level our gifts and our competence. Tribal storytellers, the tribe's elders, must insistently work at the process of corporate renewal. They must preserve and revitalize the values of the tribe. They nourish a scrutiny of corporate values that eradicates bureaucracy and sustains the individual. Constant renewal also readies us for the inevitable crises of corporate life.

The goal of renewal is to be a corporate entity that gives us space to reach our potential as individuals and, through that, as a cooperation. Renewal comes through genuine service to others. It cannot come about through a process of mere self-perpetuation. Renewal is an outward orientation of service, rather than an inward orientation of maintenance. Renewal is the concern of everyone, but it is the special province of the tribal storyteller.

Every company has tribal stories. Through there may be only a few tribal storytellers, it's everyone's job to see that things as unimportant as manuals and light bulbs don't replace them.

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= Spirituality =
I once participated in a twenty-three-day wilderness program in the
mountains of Colorado. If the purpose of this course was to expose
students to dangerous lightning and half the world’s mosquitoes, it was
fulfilled on the first day. What was in essence a forced march through
hundreds of miles of backcountry culminated in a ritual known as “the
solo,” where we were finally permitted to rest—alone, on the outskirts
of a gorgeous alpine lake—for three days of fasting and contemplation.

I had just turned sixteen, and this was my first taste of true
solitude since exiting my mother’s womb. It proved a sufficient
provocation. After a long nap and a glance at the icy waters of the
lake, the promising young man I imagined myself to be was quickly cut
down by loneliness and boredom. I filled the pages of my journal not
with the insights of a budding naturalist, philosopher, or mystic but
with a list of the foods on which I intended to gorge myself the instant I returned to civilization. Judging from the state of my consciousness
at the time, millions of years of hominid evolution had produced nothing more transcendent than a craving for a cheeseburger and a chocolate
milkshake.

I found the experience of sitting undisturbed for three days amid
pristine breezes and starlight, with nothing to do but contemplate the
mystery of my existence, to be a source of perfect misery—for which I
could see not so much as a glimmer of my own contribution. My letters
home, in their plaintiveness and self-pity, rivaled any written at
Shiloh or Gallipoli.

So I was more than a little surprised when several members of our
party, most of whom were a decade older than I, described their days and nights of solitude in positive, even transformational terms. I simply
didn’t know what to make of their claims to happiness. How could
someone’s happiness ''increase'' when all the material sources of
pleasure and distraction had been removed? At that age, the nature of my own mind did not interest me—only my life did. And I was utterly
oblivious to how different life would be if the quality of my mind were
to change.

Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they
are all we can offer others. This might not be obvious, especially when
there are aspects of your life that seem in need of improvement—when
your goals are unrealized, or you are struggling to find a career, or
you have relationships that need repairing. But it’s the truth. Every
experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every
relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds
involved. If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and
unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life—you won’t enjoy any of it.

Most of us could easily compile a list of goals we want to achieve or personal problems that need to be solved. But what is the real
significance of every item on such a list? Everything we want to
accomplish—to paint the house, learn a new language, find a better
job—is something that promises that, if done, it would allow us to
finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present. Generally speaking,
this is a false hope. I’m not denying the importance of achieving one’s
goals, maintaining one’s health, or keeping one’s children clothed and
fed—but most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is
looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good
enough reasons to be satisfied ''now.''

Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing
allows us to play it differently. How we pay attention to the present
moment largely determines the character of our experience and,
therefore, the quality of our lives. Mystics and contemplatives have
made this claim for ages—but a growing body of scientific research now
bears it out.

A few years after my first painful encounter with solitude, in the
winter of 1987, I took the drug 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine
(MDMA), commonly known as Ecstasy, and my sense of the human mind’s
potential shifted profoundly. Although MDMA would become ubiquitous at
dance clubs and “raves” in the 1990s, at that time I didn’t know anyone
of my generation who had tried it. One evening, a few months before my
twentieth birthday, a close friend and I decided to take the drug.

The setting of our experiment bore little resemblance to the
conditions of Dionysian abandon under which MDMA is now often consumed.
We were alone in a house, seated across from each other on opposite ends of a couch, and engaged in quiet conversation as the chemical worked
its way into our heads. Unlike other drugs with which we were by then
familiar (marijuana and alcohol), MDMA produced no feeling of distortion in our senses. Our minds seemed completely clear.

In the midst of this ordinariness, however, I was suddenly struck by
the knowledge that I loved my friend. This shouldn’t have surprised
me—he was, after all, one of my best friends. However, at that age I was not in the habit of dwelling on how much I loved the men in my life.
Now I could ''feel'' that I loved him, and this feeling had ethical
implications that suddenly seemed as profound as they now sound
pedestrian on the page: ''I wanted him to be happy.''

That conviction came crashing down with such force that something
seemed to give way inside me. In fact, the insight appeared to
restructure my mind. My capacity for envy, for instance—the sense of
being diminished by the happiness or success of another person—seemed
like a symptom of mental illness that had vanished without a trace. I
could no more have felt envy at that moment than I could have wanted to
poke out my own eyes. What did I care if my friend was better looking or a better athlete than I was? If I could have bestowed those gifts on
him, I would have. ''Truly'' wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own.

A certain euphoria was creeping into these reflections, perhaps, but
the general feeling remained one of absolute sobriety—and of moral and
emotional clarity unlike any I had ever known. It would not be too
strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet
the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. I was
simply talking to my friend—about what, I don’t recall—and realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious,
self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of
thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer
watching myself through another person’s eyes.

And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling ''boundless'' love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a
stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would
have been fully included in this love. Love was at bottom impersonal—and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love—I love you ''because''…—now made no sense at all.

The interesting thing about this final shift in perspective was that
it was not driven by any change in the way I felt. I was not overwhelmed by a new feeling of love. The insight had more the character of a
geometric proof: It was as if, having glimpsed the properties of one set of parallel lines, I suddenly understood what must be common to them
all.

The moment I could find a voice with which to speak, I discovered
that this epiphany about the universality of love could be readily
communicated. My friend got the point at once: All I had to do was ask
him how he would feel in the presence of a total stranger at that
moment, and the same door opened in his mind. It was simply obvious that love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extended without limit.
The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer
obscured. Love was—as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the
ages—a state of being. How had we not seen this before? And how could we overlook it ever again?

It would take me many years to put this experience into context.
Until that moment, I had viewed organized religion as merely a monument
to the ignorance and superstition of our ancestors. But I now knew that
Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and the other saints and sages of history
had not all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or frauds. I still
considered the world’s religions to be mere intellectual ruins,
maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood
that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.

Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists
equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our
world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated
people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human
condition than science and secular culture generally admit. One purpose
of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and
empirical support.

Before going any further, I should address the animosity that many readers feel toward the term ''spiritual.'' Whenever I use the word, as in referring to meditation as a “spiritual
practice,” I hear from fellow skeptics and atheists who think that I
have committed a grievous error.
The word ''spirit'' comes from the Latin ''spiritus,'' which is a translation of the Greek ''pneuma,'' meaning “breath.” Around the thirteenth century, the term became
entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings,
ghosts, and so forth. It acquired other meanings as well: We speak of
the ''spirit'' of a thing as its most essential principle or of certain volatile substances and liquors as ''spirits.'' Nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to be contaminated by medieval superstition.

I do not share their semantic concerns.<ref>My late friend Christopher Hitchens—no enemy of the lexicographer—didn’t share them either. Hitch believed that spiritual was a term we could not do without. It is true that he didn’t think about spirituality in precisely the way I do. He spoke instead of the spiritual pleasures afforded by certain works of poetry, music, and art. The symmetry and beauty of the Parthenon embodied this happy extreme for him—without there being any need to admit the existence of the goddess Athena, much less devote ourselves to her worship. Hitch also used the terms numinous and transcendent to mark occasions of great beauty or significance, and for him the Hubble Deep Field was an example of both. (I’m sure he was aware that pedantic excursions into the OED would produce etymological embarrassments regarding these words as well.) Carl Sagan also freely used the term spiritual in this way. (See C. Sagan. 1995. The Demon-Haunted World. New York: Random House. p. 29.)

I have no quarrel with Hitch and Sagan’s general use of spiritual to mean something like “beauty or significance that provokes awe,” but I believe that we can also use it in a narrower and, indeed, more personally transformative sense.</ref> Yes, to walk the aisles of any “spiritual” bookstore is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no
other term—apart from the even more problematic ''mystical'' or the more restrictive ''contemplative''—with which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation,
psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the
present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other
word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.

Throughout this book, I discuss certain classically spiritual
phenomena, concepts, and practices in the context of our modern
understanding of the human mind—and I cannot do this while restricting
myself to the terminology of ordinary experience. So I will use ''spiritual, mystical, contemplative,'' and ''transcendent'' without further apology. However, I will be precise in describing the experiences and methods that merit these terms.

For many years, I have been a vocal critic of religion, and I won’t
ride the same hobbyhorse here. I hope that I have been sufficiently
energetic on this front that even my most skeptical readers will trust
that my bullshit detector remains well calibrated as we advance over
this new terrain. Perhaps the following assurance can suffice for the
moment: Nothing in this book needs to be accepted on faith. Although my
focus is on human subjectivity—I am, after all, talking about the nature of experience itself—all my assertions can be tested in the laboratory
of your own life. In fact, my goal is to encourage you to do just that.

Authors who attempt to build a bridge between science and
spirituality tend to make one of two mistakes: Scientists generally
start with an impoverished view of spiritual experience, assuming that
it must be a grandiose way of describing ordinary states of
mind—parental love, artistic inspiration, awe at the beauty of the night sky. In this vein, one finds Einstein’s amazement at the
intelligibility of Nature’s laws described as though it were a kind of
mystical insight.

New Age thinkers usually enter the ditch on the other side of the
road: They idealize altered states of consciousness and draw specious
connections between subjective experience and the spookier theories at
the frontiers of physics. Here we are told that the Buddha and other
contemplatives anticipated modern cosmology or quantum mechanics and
that by transcending the sense of self, a person can realize his
identity with the One Mind that gave birth to the cosmos.

In the end, we are left to choose between pseudo-spirituality and pseudo-science.

Few scientists and philosophers have developed strong skills of
introspection—in fact, most doubt that such abilities even exist.
Conversely, many of the greatest contemplatives know nothing about
science. But there is a connection between scientific fact and spiritual wisdom, and it is more direct than most people suppose. Although the
insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of
the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the
human mind: Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive
emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.

There is now a large literature on the psychological benefits of
meditation. Different techniques produce long-lasting changes in
attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception, and these correlate
with both structural and functional changes in the brain. This field of
research is quickly growing, as is our understanding of self-awareness
and related mental phenomena. Given recent advances in neuroimaging
technology, we no longer face a practical impediment to investigating
spiritual insights in the context of science.

Spirituality ''must'' be distinguished from religion—because
people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences. While these states of mind are usually interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we know that this is a
mistake. Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can
experience—self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner
light—constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs,
because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A
deeper principle must be at work.

That principle is the subject of this book: The feeling that we call
“I” is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a
Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there
is—the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself—can be altered or entirely
extinguished. Although such experiences of “self-transcendence” are
generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing, in
principle, irrational about them. From both a scientific and a
philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of
the way things are. Deepening that understanding, and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self, is what is meant by “spirituality” in the context of this book.

Confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and
happiness are available. The landscape of human experience includes
deeply transformative insights about the nature of one’s own
consciousness, and yet it is obvious that these psychological states
must be understood in the context of neuroscience, psychology, and
related fields.

I am often asked what will replace organized religion. The answer, I
believe, is nothing and everything. Nothing need replace its ludicrous
and divisive doctrines—such as the idea that Jesus will return to earth
and hurl unbelievers into a lake of fire, or that death in defense of
Islam is the highest good. These are terrifying and debasing fictions.
But what about love, compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must talk about the full range of human
experience in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is.

This book is by turns a seeker’s memoir, an introduction to the
brain, a manual of contemplative instruction, and a philosophical
unraveling of what most people consider to be the center of their inner
lives: the feeling of self we call “I.” I have not set out to describe
all the traditional approaches to spirituality and to weigh their
strengths and weaknesses. Rather, my goal is to pluck the diamond from
the dunghill of esoteric religion. There is a diamond there, and I have
devoted a fair amount of my life to contemplating it, but getting it in
hand requires that we remain true to the deepest principles of
scientific skepticism and make no obeisance to tradition. Where I do
discuss specific teachings, such as those of Buddhism or Advaita
Vedanta, it isn’t my purpose to provide anything like a comprehensive
account. Readers who are loyal to any one spiritual tradition or who
specialize in the academic study of religion, may view my approach as
the quintessence of arrogance. I consider it, rather, a symptom of
impatience. There is barely time enough in a book—or in a life—to get to the point. Just as a modern treatise on weaponry would omit the casting of spells and would very likely ignore the slingshot and the boomerang, I will focus on what I consider the most promising lines of spiritual
inquiry.

My hope is that my personal experience will help readers to see the
nature of their own minds in a new light. A rational approach to
spirituality seems to be what is missing from secularism and from the
lives of most of the people I meet. The purpose of this book is to offer readers a clear view of the problem, along with some tools to help them solve it for themselves.

== THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS ==
''One day, you will find yourself outside this world which is like a mother’s womb. You will leave this earth to enter, while you are yet in the body, a vast expanse, and know that the words, “God’s earth is vast,” name this region from which the saints have come.'' -- Jalal-ud-Din Rumi

I share the concern, expressed by many atheists, that the terms ''spiritual'' and ''mystical'' are often used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain
experiences but about reality at large. Far too often, these words are
invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and
intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists
consider all talk of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness,
conscious imposture, or self-deception. This is a problem, because
millions of people have had experiences for which ''spiritual'' and ''mystical'' seem the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the
basis of these experiences are false. But the fact that most atheists
will view a statement like Rumi’s above as a symptom of the man’s
derangement grants a kernel of truth to the rantings of even our least
rational opponents. The human mind does, in fact, contain vast expanses
that few of us ever discover.

And there is something degraded and degrading about many of our
habits of attention as we shop, gossip, argue, and ruminate our way to
the grave. Perhaps I should speak only for myself here: It seems to me
that I spend much of my waking life in a neurotic trance. My experiences in meditation suggest, however, that an alternative exists. It is
possible to stand free of the juggernaut of self, if only for moments at a time.

Most cultures have produced men and women who have found that certain deliberate uses of attention—meditation, yoga, prayer—can transform
their perception of the world. Their efforts generally begin with the
realization that even in the best of circumstances, happiness is
elusive. We seek pleasant sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, and moods. We satisfy our intellectual curiosity. We surround ourselves with
friends and loved ones. We become connoisseurs of art, music, or food.
But our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some
great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid
and intoxicating for an hour, or perhaps a day, but then they subside.
And the search goes on. The effort required to keep boredom and other
unpleasantness at bay must continue, moment to moment.

Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment.
Realizing this, many people begin to wonder whether a deeper source of
well-being exists. Is there a form of happiness beyond the mere
repetition of pleasure and avoidance of pain? Is there a happiness that
does not depend upon having one’s favorite foods available, or friends
and loved ones within arm’s reach, or good books to read, or something
to look forward to on the weekend? Is it possible to be happy ''before'' anything happens, before one’s desires are gratified, in spite of
life’s difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age,
disease, and death?

We are all, in some sense, living our answer to this question—and
most of us are living as though the answer were “no.” No, nothing is
more profound than repeating one’s pleasures and avoiding one’s pains;
nothing is more profound than seeking satisfaction—sensory, emotional,
and intellectual—moment after moment. Just keep your foot on the gas
until you run out of road.

Certain people, however, come to suspect that human existence might
encompass more than this. Many of them are led to suspect this by ''religion''—by the claims of the Buddha or Jesus or some other celebrated figure. And
such people often begin to practice various disciplines of attention as a means of examining their experience closely enough to see whether a
deeper source of well-being exists. They may even sequester themselves
in caves or monasteries for months or years at a time to facilitate this process. Why would a person do this? No doubt there are many motives
for retreating from the world, and some of them are psychologically
unhealthy. In its wisest form, however, the exercise amounts to a very
simple experiment. Here is its logic: If there exists a source of
psychological well-being that does not depend upon merely gratifying
one’s desires, then it should be present even when all the usual sources of pleasure have been removed. Such happiness should be available to a
person who has declined to marry her high school sweetheart, renounced
her career and material possessions, and gone off to a cave or some
other spot that is inhospitable to ordinary aspirations.

One clue to how daunting most people would find such a project is the fact that solitary confinement—which is essentially what we are talking about—is considered a punishment ''inside'' a maximum-security
prison. Even when forced to live among murderers and rapists, most
people still prefer the company of others to spending any significant
amount of time alone in a room. And yet contemplatives in many
traditions claim to experience extraordinary depths of psychological
well-being while living in isolation for vast stretches of time. How
should we interpret this? Either the contemplative literature is a
catalogue of religious delusion, psychopathology, and deliberate fraud,
or people have been having liberating insights under the name of
“spirituality” and “mysticism” for millennia.

Unlike many atheists, I have spent much of my life seeking
experiences of the kind that gave rise to the world’s religions. Despite the painful results of my first few days alone in the mountains of
Colorado, I later studied with a wide range of monks, lamas, yogis, and
other contemplatives, some of whom had lived for decades in seclusion
doing nothing but meditating. In the process, I spent two years on
silent retreat myself (in increments of one week to three months),
practicing various techniques of meditation for twelve to eighteen hours a day.

I can attest that when one goes into silence and meditates for weeks
or months at a time, doing nothing else—not speaking, reading, or
writing, just making a moment-to-moment effort to observe the contents
of consciousness—one has experiences that are generally unavailable to
people who have not undertaken a similar practice. I believe that such
states of mind have a lot to say about the nature of consciousness and
the possibilities of human well-being. Leaving aside the metaphysics,
mythology, and sectarian dogma, what contemplatives throughout history
have discovered is that there is an alternative to being continuously
spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves; there is an alternative to simply identifying with the next thought that pops into
consciousness. And glimpsing this alternative dispels the conventional
illusion of the self.

Most traditions of spirituality also suggest a connection between
self-transcendence and living ethically. Not all good feelings have an
ethical valence, and pathological forms of ecstasy surely exist. I have
no doubt, for instance, that many suicide bombers feel extraordinarily
good just before they detonate themselves in a crowd. But there are also forms of mental pleasure that are intrinsically ethical. As I indicated earlier, for some states of consciousness, a phrase like “boundless
love” does not seem overblown. It is decidedly inconvenient for the
forces of reason and secularism that if someone wakes up tomorrow
feeling boundless love for all sentient beings, the only people likely
to acknowledge the legitimacy of his experience will be representatives
of one or another Iron Age religion or New Age cult.

Most of us are far wiser than we may appear to be. We know how to
keep our relationships in order, to use our time well, to improve our
health, to lose weight, to learn valuable skills, and to solve many
other riddles of existence. But following even the straight and open
path to happiness is hard. If your best friend were to ask how she could live a better life, you would probably find many useful things to say,
and yet you might not live that way yourself. On one level, wisdom is
nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice.
However, there are deeper insights to be had about the nature of our
minds. Unfortunately, they have been discussed entirely in the context
of religion and, therefore, have been shrouded in fallacy and
superstition for all of human history.

The problem of finding happiness in this world arrives with our first breath—and our needs and desires seem to multiply by the hour. To spend any time in the presence of a young child is to witness a mind
ceaselessly buffeted by joy and sorrow. As we grow older, our laughter
and tears become less gratuitous, perhaps, but the same process of
change continues: One roiling complex of thought and emotion is followed by the next, like waves in the ocean.

Seeking, finding, maintaining, and safeguarding our well-being is the great project to which we all are devoted, whether or not we choose to
think in these terms. This is not to say that we want mere pleasure or
the easiest possible life. Many things require extraordinary effort to
accomplish, and some of us learn to enjoy the struggle. Any athlete
knows that certain kinds of pain can be exquisitely pleasurable. The
burn of lifting weights, for instance, would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But because it is associated with health
and fitness, most people find it enjoyable. Here we see that cognition
and emotion are not separate. The way we think about experience can
completely determine how we feel about it.

And we always face tensions and trade-offs. In some moments we crave
excitement and in others rest. We might love the taste of wine and
chocolate, but rarely for breakfast. Whatever the context, our minds are perpetually moving—generally toward pleasure (or its imagined source)
and away from pain. I am not the first person to have noticed this.

Our struggle to navigate the space of possible pains and pleasures
produces most of human culture. Medical science attempts to prolong our
health and to reduce the suffering associated with illness, aging, and
death. All forms of media cater to our thirst for information and
entertainment. Political and economic institutions seek to ensure our
peaceful collaboration with one another—and the police or the military
is summoned when they fail. Beyond ensuring our survival, civilization
is a vast machine invented by the human mind to regulate its states. We
are ever in the process of creating and repairing a world that our minds want to be in. And wherever we look, we see the evidence of our
successes and our failures. Unfortunately, failure enjoys a natural
advantage. Wrong answers to any problem outnumber right ones by a wide
margin, and it seems that it will always be easier to break things than
to fix them.

Despite the beauty of our world and the scope of human
accomplishment, it is hard not to worry that the forces of chaos will
triumph—not merely in the end but in every moment. Our pleasures,
however refined or easily acquired, are by their very nature fleeting.
They begin to subside the instant they arise, only to be replaced by
fresh desires or feelings of discomfort. You can’t get enough of your
favorite meal until, in the next moment, you find you are so stuffed as
to nearly require the attention of a surgeon—and yet, by some quirk of
physics, you still have room for dessert. The pleasure of dessert lasts a few seconds, and then the lingering taste in your mouth must be
banished by a drink of water. The warmth of the sun feels wonderful on
your skin, but soon it becomes too much of a good thing. A move to the
shade brings immediate relief, but after a minute or two, the breeze is
just a little too cold. Do you have a sweater in the car? Let’s take a
look. Yes, there it is. You’re warm now, but you notice that your
sweater has seen better days. Does it make you look carefree or
disheveled? Perhaps it is time to go shopping for something new. And so
it goes.

We seem to do little more than lurch between wanting and not wanting. Thus, the question naturally arises: Is there more to life than this?
Might it be possible to feel much better (in every sense of ''better'') than one tends to feel? Is it possible to find lasting fulfillment despite the inevitability of change?

Spiritual life begins with a suspicion that the answer to such
questions could well be “yes.” And a true spiritual practitioner is
someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the
world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such
ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the
self. Those who have never tasted such peace of mind might view these
assertions as highly suspect. Nevertheless, it is a fact that a
condition of selfless well-being is there to be glimpsed in each moment. Of course, I’m not claiming to have experienced all such states, but I
meet many people who appear to have experienced none of them—and these
people often profess to have no interest in spiritual life.

This is not surprising. The phenomenon of self-transcendence is
generally sought and interpreted in a religious context, and it is
precisely the sort of experience that tends to increase a person’s
faith. How many Christians, having once felt their hearts grow as wide
as the world, will decide to ditch Christianity and proclaim their
atheism? Not many, I suspect. How many people who have never felt
anything of the kind become atheists? I don’t know, but there is little
doubt that these mental states act as a kind of filter: The faithful
count them in support of ancient dogma, and their absence gives
nonbelievers further reason to reject religion.

This is a difficult problem for me to address in the context of a
book, because many readers will have no idea what I’m talking about when I describe certain spiritual experiences and might assume that the
assertions I’m making must be accepted on faith. Religious readers
present a different challenge: They may think they know exactly what I’m describing, but only insofar as it aligns with one or another religious doctrine. It seems to me that both these attitudes present impressive
obstacles to understanding spirituality in the way that I intend. I can
only hope that, whatever your background, you will approach the
exercises presented in this book with an open mind.

== RELIGION, EAST AND WEST ==
We are often encouraged to believe that all religions are the same:
All teach the same ethical principles; all urge their followers to
contemplate the same divine reality; all are equally wise,
compassionate, and true within their sphere—or equally divisive and
false, depending on one’s view.

No serious adherents of any faith can believe these things, because
most religions make claims about reality that are mutually incompatible. Exceptions to this rule exist, but they provide little relief from what is essentially a zero-sum contest of all against all. The polytheism of Hinduism allows it to digest parts of many other faiths: If Christians
insist that Jesus Christ is the son of God, for instance, Hindus can
make him yet another avatar of Vishnu without losing any sleep. But this spirit of inclusiveness points in one direction only, and even it has
its limits. Hindus are committed to specific metaphysical ideas—the law
of karma and rebirth, a multiplicity of gods—that almost every other
major religion decries. It is impossible for any faith, no matter how
elastic, to fully honor the truth claims of another.

Devout Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that theirs is the one
true and complete revelation—because that is what their holy books say
of themselves. Only secularists and New Age dabblers can mistake the
modern tactic of “interfaith dialogue” for an underlying unity of all
religions.

I have long argued that confusion about the unity of religions is an artifact of language. ''Religion'' is a term like ''sports:'' Some sports are peaceful but spectacularly dangerous (“free solo” rock
climbing); some are safer but synonymous with violence (mixed martial
arts); and some entail little more risk of injury than standing in the
shower (bowling). To speak of sports as a generic activity makes it
impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or the physical
attributes required to do it. What do all sports have in common apart
from breathing? Not much. The term ''religion'' is hardly more useful.

The same could be said of ''spirituality.'' The esoteric doctrines found within every religious tradition are not all derived from the
same insights. Nor are they equally empirical, logical, parsimonious, or wise. They don’t always point to the same underlying reality—and when
they do, they don’t do it equally well. Nor are all these teachings
equally suited for export beyond the cultures that first conceived them.

Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable in intellectual circles. In my experience, people do not want to hear that Islam supports violence in a way that Jainism doesn’t, or that Buddhism offers a truly sophisticated, empirical approach to understanding the
human mind, whereas Christianity presents an almost perfect impediment
to such understanding. In many circles, to make invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry.

In one sense, all religions and spiritual practices must address the
same reality—because people of all faiths have glimpsed many of the same truths. Any view of consciousness and the cosmos that is available to
the human mind can, in principle, be appreciated by anyone. It is not
surprising, therefore, that individual Jews, Christians, Muslims, and
Buddhists have given voice to some of the same insights and intuitions.
This merely indicates that human cognition and emotion run deeper than
religion. (But we knew that, didn’t we?) It does not suggest that all
religions understand our spiritual possibilities equally well.

One way of missing this point is to declare that all spiritual
teachings are inflections of the same “Perennial Philosophy.” The writer Aldous Huxley brought this idea into prominence by publishing an
anthology by that title. Here is how he justified the idea:

: Philosophia perennis—the phrase was coined by Leibniz; but the thing—the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being—the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this Highest Common Factor in all preceding and subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than twenty-five centuries ago, and since that time the inexhaustible theme has been treated again and again, from the standpoint of every religious tradition and in all the principal languages of Asia and Europe.<ref>A. Huxley. [1945] 2009. The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West. New York: Harper Perennial, p. vii.</ref>

Although Huxley was being reasonably cautious in his wording, this
notion of a “highest common factor” uniting all religions begins to
break apart the moment one presses for details. For instance, the
Abrahamic religions are incorrigibly dualistic and faith-based: In
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the human soul is conceived as
genuinely separate from the divine reality of God. The appropriate
attitude for a creature that finds itself in this circumstance is some
combination of terror, shame, and awe. In the best case, notions of
God’s love and grace provide some relief—but the central message of
these faiths is that each of us is separate from, and in relationship
to, a divine authority who will punish anyone who harbors the slightest
doubt about His supremacy.

The Eastern tradition presents a very different picture of reality.
And its highest teachings—found within the various schools of Buddhism
and the nominally Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedanta—explicitly
transcend dualism. By their lights, consciousness itself is identical to the very reality that one might otherwise mistake for God. While these
teachings make metaphysical claims that any serious student of science
should find incredible, they center on a range of experiences that the
doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam rule out-of-bounds.

Of course, it is true that specific Jewish, Christian, and Muslim
mystics have had experiences similar to those that motivate Buddhism and Advaita, but these contemplative insights are not exemplary of their
faith. Rather, they are anomalies that Western mystics have always
struggled to understand and to honor, often at considerable personal
risk. Given their proper weight, these experiences produce heterodoxies
for which Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been regularly exiled or
killed.

Like Huxley, anyone determined to find a happy synthesis among
spiritual traditions will notice that the Christian mystic Meister
Eckhart (ca. 1260–ca. 1327) often sounded very much like a Buddhist:
“The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they
should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God
and I, we are one in knowledge.” But he also sounded like a man bound to be excommunicated by his church—as he was. Had Eckhart lived a little
longer, it seems certain that he would have been dragged into the street and burned alive for these expansive ideas. That is a telling
difference between Christianity and Buddhism.

In the same vein, it is misleading to hold up the Sufi mystic
Al-Hallaj (858–922) as a representative of Islam. He was a Muslim, yes,
but he suffered the most grisly death imaginable at the hands of his
coreligionists for presuming to be one with God. Both Eckhart and
Al-Hallaj gave voice to an experience of self-transcendence that any
human being can, in principle, enjoy. However, their views were not
consistent with the central teachings of their faiths.

The Indian tradition is comparatively free of problems of this kind.
Although the teachings of Buddhism and Advaita are embedded in more or
less conventional religions, they contain empirical insights about the
nature of consciousness that do not depend upon faith. One can practice
most techniques of Buddhist meditation or the method of self-inquiry of
Advaita and experience the advertised changes in one’s consciousness
without ever believing in the law of karma or in the miracles attributed to Indian mystics. To get started as a Christian, however, one must
first accept a dozen implausible things about the life of Jesus and the
origins of the Bible—and the same can be said, minus a few unimportant
details, about Judaism and Islam. If one should happen to discover that
the sense of being an individual soul is an illusion, one will be guilty of blasphemy everywhere west of the Indus.

There is no question that many religious disciplines can produce
interesting experiences in suitable minds. It should be clear, however,
that engaging a faith-based (and probably delusional) practice, whatever its effects, isn’t the same as investigating the nature of one’s mind
absent any doctrinal assumptions. Statements of this kind may seem
starkly antagonistic toward Abrahamic religions, but they are
nonetheless true: One can speak about Buddhism shorn of its miracles and irrational assumptions. The same cannot be said of Christianity or
Islam.<ref>One can speak about Judaism without its myths and miracles—even without God—but this doesn’t make Judaism the equivalent of Buddhism. Buddhism without the unjustified bits is essentially a first-person science. Secular Judaism isn’t.</ref>

----

Western engagement with Eastern spirituality dates back at least as
far as Alexander’s campaign in India, where the young conqueror and his
pet philosophers encountered naked ascetics whom they called
“gymnosophists.” It is often said that the thinking of these yogis
greatly influenced the philosopher Pyrrho, the father of Greek
skepticism. This seems a credible claim, because Pyrrho’s teachings had
much in common with Buddhism. But his contemplative insights and methods never became part of any system of thought in the West.

Serious study of Eastern thought by outsiders did not begin until the late eighteenth century. The first translation of a Sanskrit text into a Western language appears to have been Sir Charles Wilkins’s rendering
of the ''Bhagavad Gita,'' a cornerstone text of Hinduism, in 1785.
The Buddhist canon would not attract the attention of Western scholars
for another hundred years.<ref>A. Rawlinson. 1997. The Book of Enlightened Masters. Chicago: Open Court, p. 38.</ref>

The conversation between East and West started in earnest, albeit
inauspiciously, with the birth of the Theosophical Society, that golem
of spiritual hunger and self-deception brought into this world almost
single-handedly by the incomparable Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in
1875. Everything about Blavatsky seemed to defy earthly logic: She was
an enormously fat woman who was said to have wandered alone and
undetected for seven years in the mountains of Tibet. She was also
thought to have survived shipwrecks, gunshot wounds, and sword fights.
Even less persuasively, she claimed to be in psychic contact with
members of the “Great White Brotherhood” of ascended masters—a
collection of immortals responsible for the evolution and maintenance of the entire cosmos. Their leader hailed from the planet Venus but lived
in the mythical kingdom of Shambhala, which Blavatsky placed somewhere
in the vicinity of the Gobi Desert. With the suspiciously bureaucratic
name “the Lord of the World,” he supervised the work of other adepts,
including the Buddha, Maitreya, Maha Chohan, and one Koot Hoomi, who
appears to have had nothing better to do on behalf of the cosmos than to impart its secrets to Blavatsky.<ref>For an entertaining account of Blavatsky’s career, see P. Washington. 1993. Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon. New York: Schocken.</ref>

It is always surprising when a person attracts legions of followers
and builds a large organization on their largesse while peddling
penny-arcade mythology of this kind. But perhaps this was less
remarkable in a time when even the best-educated people were still
struggling to come to terms with electricity, evolution, and the
existence of other planets. We can easily forget how suddenly the world
had shrunk and the cosmos expanded as the nineteenth century came to a
close. The geographical barriers between distant cultures had been
stripped away by trade and conquest (one could now order a gin and tonic almost everywhere on earth), and yet the reality of unseen forces and
alien worlds was a daily focus of the most careful scientific research.
Inevitably, cross-cultural and scientific discoveries were mingled in
the popular imagination with religious dogma and traditional occultism.
In fact, this had been happening at the highest level of human thought
for more than a century: It is always instructive to recall that the
father of modern physics, Isaac Newton, squandered a considerable
portion of his genius on the study of theology, biblical prophecy, and
alchemy.

The inability to distinguish the strange but true from the merely
strange was common enough in Blavatsky’s time—as it is in our own.
Blavatsky’s contemporary Joseph Smith, a libidinous con man and
crackpot, was able to found a new religion on the claim that he had
unearthed the final revelations of God in the hallowed precincts of
Manchester, New York, written in “reformed Egyptian” on golden plates.
He decoded this text with the aid of magical “seer stones,” which,
whether by magic or not, allowed Smith to produce an English version of
God’s Word that was an embarrassing pastiche of plagiarisms from the
Bible and silly lies about Jesus’s life in America. And yet the
resulting edifice of nonsense and taboo survives to this day.

A more modern cult, Scientology, leverages human credulity to an even greater degree: Adherents believe that human beings are possessed by
the souls of extraterrestrials who were condemned to planet Earth 75
million years ago by the galactic overlord Xenu. How was their exile
accomplished? The old-fashioned way: These aliens were shuttled by the
billions to our humble planet aboard a spacecraft that resembled a DC-8. They were then imprisoned in a volcano and blasted to bits with
hydrogen bombs. Their souls survived, however, and disentangling them
from our own can be the work of a lifetime. It is also expensive.<ref>One wonders how it was possible for a charlatan like L. Ron Hubbard to acquire any following at all, because each story about him is more preposterous and embarrassing than the last. For instance, Hubbard claimed to have withdrawn one of his first books from publication “ ‘because the first six people who read it were so shattered by the revelations that they had lost their minds’ ” (L. Wright. 2013. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. New York: Knopf). According to Hubbard, when he delivered this “dangerous text to his publisher, ‘The reader brought the manuscript into the room, set it on the publisher’s desk, then jumped out the window of the skyscraper.’ ”

There are many more laughs to be had at Hubbard’s expense. However, several readers who saw the original version of this endnote found it so funny that they had to be hospitalized. Regrettably, I’ve been forced to edit the text out of concern for the health of my readers.</ref>

Despite the imponderables in her philosophy, Blavatsky was among the
first people to announce in Western circles that there was such a thing
as the “wisdom of the East.” This wisdom began to trickle westward once
Swami Vivekananda introduced the teachings of Vedanta at the World
Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. Again, Buddhism lagged
behind: A few Western monks living on the island of Sri Lanka were
beginning to translate the Pali Canon, which remains the most
authoritative record of the teachings of the historical Buddha,
Siddhartha Gautama. However, the practice of Buddhist meditation
wouldn’t actually be taught in the West for another half century.

----

It is easy enough to find fault with romantic ideas about Eastern
wisdom, and a tradition of such criticism sprang up almost the instant
the first Western seeker sat cross-legged and attempted to meditate. In
the late 1950s, the author and journalist Arthur Koestler traveled to
India and Japan in search of wisdom and summarized his pilgrimage thus:
“I started my journey in sackcloth and ashes, and came back rather proud of being a European.”<ref>A. Koestler. 1960. The Lotus and the Robot. New York: Harper & Row, p. 285. Koestler was also less than impressed with the spiritual efficacy of psychedelics. See A. Koestler. 1968. “Return Trip to Nirvana.” In Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955–1967. London: Hutchinson, pp. 201–12.</ref>

In ''The Lotus and the Robot,'' Koestler gives some of his reasons for being less than awed by his journey to the East. Consider, for
example, the ancient discipline of hatha yoga. While now generally
viewed as a system of physical exercises designed to increase a person’s strength and flexibility, in its traditional context hatha yoga is part of a larger effort to manipulate “subtle” features of the body unknown
to anatomists. No doubt much of this subtlety corresponds to experiences that yogis actually have—but many of the beliefs formed on the basis of these experiences are patently absurd, and certain of the associated
practices are both silly and injurious.

Koestler reports that the aspiring yogi is traditionally encouraged
to lengthen his tongue—even going so far as to cut the frenulum (the
membrane that anchors the tongue to the floor of the mouth) and stretch
the soft palate. What is the purpose of these modifications? They enable our hero to insert his tongue into his nasopharynx, thereby blocking
the flow of air through the nostrils. His anatomy thus improved, a yogi
can then imbibe subtle liquors believed to emanate directly from his
brain. These substances—imagined, by recourse to further subtleties, to
be connected to the retention of semen—are said to confer not only
spiritual wisdom but immortality. This technique of drinking mucus is
known as ''khechari mudra,'' and it is thought to be one of the crowning achievements of yoga.

I’m more than happy to score a point for Koestler here. Needless to
say, no defense of such practices will be found in this book.

Criticism of Eastern wisdom can seem especially pertinent when coming from Easterners themselves. There is indeed something preposterous
about well-educated Westerners racing East in search of spiritual
enlightenment while Easterners make the opposite pilgrimage seeking
education and economic opportunities. I have a friend whose own
adventures may have marked a high point in this global comedy. He made
his first trip to India immediately after graduating from college,
having already acquired several yogic affectations: He had the requisite beads and long hair, but he was also in the habit of writing the name
of the Hindu god Ram in Devanagari script over and over in a journal. On the flight to the motherland, he had the good fortune to be seated next to an Indian businessman. This weary traveler thought he had witnessed
every species of human folly—until he caught sight of my friend’s
scribbling. The spectacle of a Western-born Stanford graduate, of
working age, holding degrees in both economics and history, devoting
himself to the graphomaniacal worship of an imaginary deity in a
language he could neither read nor understand was more than this man
could abide in a confined space at 30,000 feet. After a testy exchange,
the two travelers could only stare at each other in mutual
incomprehension and pity—and they had ten hours yet to fly. There really are two sides to such a conversation, but I concede that only one of
them can be made to look ridiculous.

We can also grant that Eastern wisdom has not produced societies or
political institutions that are any better than their Western
counterparts; in fact, one could argue that India has survived as the
world’s largest democracy only because of institutions that were built
under British rule. Nor has the East led the world in scientific
discovery. Nevertheless, there is something to the notion of uniquely
Eastern wisdom, and most of it has been concentrated in or derived from
the tradition of Buddhism.

----

Buddhism has been of special interest to Western scientists for
reasons already hinted at. It isn’t primarily a faith-based religion,
and its central teachings are entirely empirical. Despite the
superstitions that many Buddhists cherish, the doctrine has a practical
and logical core that does not require any unwarranted assumptions. Many Westerners have recognized this and have been relieved to find a
spiritual alternative to faith-based worship. It is no accident that
most of the scientific research now done on meditation focuses primarily on Buddhist techniques.

Another reason for Buddhism’s prominence among scientists has been
the intellectual engagement of one of its most visible representatives:
Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Of course, the Dalai Lama is
not without his critics. My late friend Christopher Hitchens meted out
justice to “his holiness” on several occasions. He also castigated
Western students of Buddhism for the “widely and lazily held belief that ‘Oriental’ religion is different from other faiths: less dogmatic, more contemplative, more . . . Transcendental,” and for the “blissful,
thoughtless exceptionalism” with which Buddhism is regarded by many.<ref>C. Hitchens. 1998. “.” Salon.com.</ref>

Hitch did have a point. In his capacity as the head of one of the
four branches of Tibetan Buddhism and as the former leader of the
Tibetan government in exile, the Dalai Lama has made some questionable
claims and formed some embarrassing alliances. Although his engagement
with science is far-reaching and surely sincere, the man is not above
consulting an astrologer or “oracle” when making important decisions. I
will have something to say in this book about many of the things that
might have justified Hitch’s opprobrium, but the general thrust of his
commentary here was all wrong. Several Eastern traditions are
exceptionally empirical and exceptionally wise, and therefore merit the
exceptionalism claimed by their adherents.

Buddhism in particular possesses a literature on the nature of the
mind that has no peer in Western religion or Western science. Some of
these teachings are cluttered with metaphysical assumptions that should
provoke our doubts, but many aren’t. And when engaged as a set of
hypotheses by which to investigate the mind and deepen one’s ethical
life, Buddhism can be an entirely rational enterprise.

Unlike the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the
teachings of Buddhism are not considered by their adherents to be the
product of infallible revelation. They are, rather, empirical
instructions: If you do X, you will experience Y. Although many
Buddhists have a superstitious and cultic attachment to the historical
Buddha, the teachings of Buddhism present him as an ordinary human being who succeeded in understanding the nature of his own mind. ''Buddha'' means “awakened one”—and Siddhartha Gautama was merely a man who woke
up from the dream of being a separate self. Compare this with the
Christian view of Jesus, who is imagined to be the son of the creator of the universe. This is a very different proposition, and it renders
Christianity, no matter how fully divested of metaphysical baggage, all
but irrelevant to a scientific discussion about the human condition.

The teachings of Buddhism, and of Eastern spirituality generally,
focus on the primacy of the mind. There are dangers in this way of
viewing the world, to be sure. Focusing on training the mind to the
exclusion of all else can lead to political quietism and hive-like
conformity. The fact that your mind is all you have and that it is
possible to be at peace even in difficult circumstances can become an
argument for ignoring obvious societal problems. But it is not a
compelling one. The world is in desperate need of improvement—in global
terms, freedom and prosperity remain the exception—and yet this doesn’t
mean we need to be miserable while we work for the common good.

In fact, the teachings of Buddhism emphasize a connection between
ethical and spiritual life. Making progress in one domain lays a
foundation for progress in the other. One can, for instance, spend long
periods of time in contemplative solitude for the purpose of becoming a
better person in the world—having better relationships, being more
honest and compassionate and, therefore, more helpful to one’s fellow
human beings. Being wisely selfish and being selfless can amount to very much the same thing. There are centuries of anecdotal testimony on this point—and, as we will see, the scientific study of the mind has begun
to bear it out. There is now little question that how one uses one’s
attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one
becomes. Our minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use them.

Although the experience of self-transcendence is, in principle,
available to everyone, this possibility is only weakly attested to in
the religious and philosophical literature of the West. Only Buddhists
and students of Advaita Vedanta (which appears to have been heavily
influenced by Buddhism) have been absolutely clear in asserting that
spiritual life consists in overcoming the illusion of the self by paying close attention to our experience in the present moment.<ref>Purists will insist on important differences among the various schools of Buddhism and between Buddhism and the tradition of Advaita Vedanta developed by Shankara (788–820). Although I touch upon some of these distinctions, I do not make much of them. I consider the differences to be generally a matter of emphasis, semantics, and (irrelevant) metaphysics—and too esoteric to be of interest to the general reader.</ref>

As I wrote in my first book, ''The End of Faith,'' the disparity
between Eastern and Western spirituality resembles that found between
Eastern and Western medicine—with the arrow of embarrassment pointing in the opposite direction. Humanity did not understand the biology of
cancer, develop antibiotics and vaccines, or sequence the human genome
under an Eastern sun. Consequently, real medicine is almost entirely a
product of Western science. Insofar as specific techniques of Eastern
medicine actually work, they must conform, whether by design or by
happenstance, to the principles of biology as we have come to know them
in the West. This is not to say that Western medicine is complete. In a
few decades, many of our current practices will seem barbaric. One need
only ponder the list of side effects that accompany most medications to
appreciate that these are terribly blunt instruments. Nevertheless, most of our knowledge about the human body—and about the physical universe
generally—emerged in the West. The rest is instinct, folklore,
bewilderment, and untimely death.

An honest comparison of spiritual traditions, Eastern and Western,
proves equally invidious. As manuals for contemplative understanding,
the Bible and the Koran are worse than useless. Whatever wisdom can be
found in their pages is never best found there, and it is subverted,
time and again, by ancient savagery and superstition.

Again, one must deploy the necessary caveats: I am not saying that
most Buddhists or Hindus have been sophisticated contemplatives. Their
traditions have spawned many of the same pathologies we see elsewhere
among the faithful: dogmatism, anti-intellectualism, tribalism,
otherworldliness. However, the empirical difference between the central
teachings of Buddhism and Advaita and those of Western monotheism is
difficult to overstate. One can traverse the Eastern paths simply by
becoming interested in the nature of one’s own mind—especially in the
immediate causes of psychological suffering—and by paying closer
attention to one’s experience in every present moment. There is, in
truth, nothing one need believe. The teachings of Buddhism and Advaita
are best viewed as lab manuals and explorers’ logs detailing the results of empirical research on the nature of human consciousness.

Nearly every geographical or linguistic barrier to the free exchange
of ideas has now fallen away. It seems to me, therefore, that educated
people no longer have a right to any form of spiritual provincialism.
The truths of Eastern spirituality are now no more Eastern than the
truths of Western science are Western. We are merely talking about human consciousness and its possible states. My purpose in writing this book
is to encourage you to investigate certain contemplative insights for
yourself, without accepting the metaphysical ideas that they inspired in ignorant and isolated peoples of the past.

----

A final word of caution: Nothing I say here is intended as a denial
of the fact that psychological well-being requires a healthy “sense of
self”—with all the capacities that this vague phrase implies. Children
need to become autonomous, confident, and self-aware in order to form
healthy relationships. And they must acquire a host of other cognitive,
emotional, and interpersonal skills in the process of becoming sane and
productive adults. Which is to say that there is a time and a place for
everything—unless, of course, there isn’t. No doubt there are
psychological conditions, such as schizophrenia, for which practices of
the sort I recommend in this book might be inappropriate. Some people
find the experience of an extended, silent retreat psychologically
destabilizing.<ref>The research on pathological responses to meditation is quite sparse. Traditionally, it is believed that certain stages on the contemplative path are by nature unpleasant and that some forms of mental pain should therefore be considered signs of progress. It seems clear, however, that meditation can also precipitate or unmask psychological illness. As with many other endeavors, distinguishing help from harm in each instance can be difficult. As far as I know, Willoughby Britton is the first scientist to study this problem systematically.</ref>

Again, an analogy to physical training seems apropos: Not everyone is suited to running a six-minute mile or bench-pressing his own body
weight. But many quite ordinary people are capable of these feats, and
there are better and worse ways to accomplish them. What is more, the
same principles of fitness generally apply even to people whose
abilities are limited by illness or injury.

So I want to make it clear that the instructions in this book are
intended for readers who are adults (more or less) and free from any
psychological or medical conditions that could be exacerbated by
meditation or other techniques of sustained introspection. If paying
attention to your breath, to bodily sensations, to the flow of thoughts, or to the nature of consciousness itself seems likely to cause you
clinically significant anguish, please check with a psychologist or a
psychiatrist before engaging in the practices I describe.

== MINDFULNESS ==
''It is always now.'' This might sound trite, but it is the truth. It’s not quite true as a matter of neurology, because our minds are built upon layers of inputs whose timing we know must be different.<ref>Consider the sensation of touching your finger to your nose. We experience the contact as simultaneous, but we know that it can’t be simultaneous at the level of the brain, because it takes longer for the nerve impulse to travel to sensory cortex from your fingertip than it does from your nose—and this is true no matter how short your arms or long your nose. Our brains correct for this discrepancy in timing by holding these inputs in memory and then delivering the result to consciousness. Thus, your experience of the present moment is the product of layered memories.</ref> But it is true as a matter of ''conscious experience.'' The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to
understand if you want to be happy in this world.

But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth—overlooking it,
fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to ''become'' happy,
fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at
pleasure, recoiling from pain—and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running. As a consequence, we spend our
lives being far less content than we might otherwise be. We often fail
to appreciate what we have until we have lost it. We crave experiences,
objects, relationships, only to grow bored with them. And yet the
craving persists. I speak from experience, of course.

As a remedy for this predicament, many spiritual teachings ask us to
entertain unfounded ideas about the nature of reality—or at the very
least to develop a fondness for the iconography and rituals of one or
another religion. But not all paths traverse the same rough ground.
There are methods of meditation that do not require any artifice or
unwarranted assumptions at all.

For beginners, I usually recommend a technique called ''vipassana'' (Pali for “insight”), which comes from the oldest tradition of Buddhism, the Theravada. One of the advantages of ''vipassana'' is that it can be taught in an entirely secular way. Experts in this
practice generally acquire their training in a Buddhist context, and
most retreat centers in the United States and Europe teach its
associated Buddhist philosophy. Nevertheless, this method of
introspection can be brought into any secular or scientific context
without embarrassment. (The same cannot be said for the practice of
chanting to Lord Krishna while banging a drum.) That is why ''vipassana'' is now being widely studied and adopted by psychologists and neuroscientists.

The quality of mind cultivated in ''vipassana'' is almost always
referred to as “mindfulness,” and the literature on its psychological
benefits is now substantial. There is nothing spooky about mindfulness.
It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant.
Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and
memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness.<ref>F. Zeidan et al. 2011. “Brain Mechanisms Supporting the Modulation of Pain by Mindfulness Meditation.” Pain 31: 5540–48; B. K. Holzel et al. 2011. “How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action from a Conceptual and Neural Perspective.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6: 537–59; B. Kim et al. 2010. “Effectiveness of a Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy Program as an Adjunct to Pharmacotherapy in Patients with Panic Disorder.” J Anxiety Disord 24(6): 590–95; K. A. Godfrin and C. van Heeringen. 2010. “The Effects of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy on Recurrence of Depressive Episodes, Mental Health and Quality of Life: A Randomized Controlled Study.” Behav Res Ther 48(8): 738–46; F. Zeidan, S. K. Johnson, B. J. Diamond, Z. David, and P. Goolkasian. 2010. “Mindfulness Meditation Improves Cognition: Evidence of Brief Mental Training.” Conscious Cogn 19(2): 597–605; B. K. Hölzel et al. 2011. “Mindfulness Practice Leads to Increases in Regional Brain Gray Matter Density.” Psychiatry Res 191(1): 36–43.</ref> We will look more closely at the neurophysiology of mindfulness in a later chapter.

''Mindfulness'' is a translation of the Pali word ''sati.'' The term has several meanings in the Buddhist literature, but for our
purposes the most important is “clear awareness.” The practice was first described in the ''Satipatthana Sutta,''<ref>Nanamoli, orig. trans., and Bodhi, trans. and ed. 1995. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya. Boston: Wisdom Publications.</ref> which is part of the Pali Canon. Like many Buddhist texts, the ''Satipatthana Sutta'' is highly repetitive and, for anything but an avid student of Buddhism, exceptionally boring to read. However, when one compares texts of this
kind with the Bible or the Koran, the difference is unmistakable: The ''Satipatthana Sutta'' is not a collection of ancient myths, superstitions, and taboos; it is a rigorously empirical guide to freeing the mind from suffering.The
Buddha described four foundations of mindfulness, which he taught as
“the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of
sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of pain and grief, for the attainment of the true way, for the realization of Nibbana” (Sanskrit, ''Nirvana''). The four foundations of mindfulness are the body (breathing, changes in posture, activities), feelings (the senses of pleasantness,
unpleasantness, and neutrality), the mind (in particular, its moods and
attitudes), and the objects of mind (which include the five senses but
also other mental states, such as volition, tranquility, rapture,
equanimity, and even mindfulness itself). It is a peculiar list, at once redundant and incomplete—a problem that is compounded by the necessity
of translating Pali terminology into English. The obvious message of the text, however, is that the totality of one’s experience can become the
field of contemplation. The meditator is merely instructed to pay
attention, “ardently” and “fully aware” and “free from covetousness and
grief for the world.”

There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that
it expresses a specific kind of passion—a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is,
above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual.
Being mindful is not a matter of ''thinking'' more clearly about experience; it is the act of ''experiencing'' more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or
body—thoughts, sensations, moods—without grasping at the pleasant or
recoiling from the unpleasant. One of the great strengths of this
technique of meditation, from a secular point of view, is that it does
not require us to adopt any cultural affectations or unjustified
beliefs. It simply demands that we pay close attention to the flow of
experience in each moment.

The principal enemy of mindfulness—or of any meditative practice—is
our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts. The
problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without
knowing that we are thinking. In fact, thoughts of all kinds can be
perfectly good objects of mindfulness. In the early stages of one’s
practice, however, the arising of thought will be more or less
synonymous with distraction—that is, with a failure to meditate. Most
people who believe they are meditating are merely thinking with their
eyes closed. By practicing mindfulness, however, one can awaken from the dream of discursive thought and begin to see each arising image, idea,
or bit of language vanish without a trace. What remains is consciousness itself, with its attendant sights, sounds, sensations, and thoughts
appearing and changing in every moment.

In the beginning of one’s meditation practice, the difference between ordinary experience and what one comes to consider “mindfulness” is not very clear, and it takes some training to distinguish between being
lost in thought and seeing thoughts for what they are. In this sense,
learning to meditate is just like acquiring any other skill. It takes
many thousands of repetitions to throw a good jab or to coax music from
the strings of a guitar. With practice, mindfulness becomes a
well-formed habit of attention, and the difference between it and
ordinary thinking will become increasingly clear. Eventually, it begins
to seem as if you are repeatedly awakening from a dream to find yourself safely in bed. No matter how terrible the dream, the relief is
instantaneous. And yet it is difficult to stay awake for more than a few seconds at a time.

My friend Joseph Goldstein, one of the finest ''vipassana''
teachers I know, likens this shift in awareness to the experience of
being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are
sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall. Your
perception is unchanged, but the spell is broken. Most of us spend every waking moment lost in the movie of our lives. Until we see that an
alternative to this enchantment exists, we are entirely at the mercy of
appearances. Again, the difference I am describing is not a matter of
achieving a new conceptual understanding or of adopting new beliefs
about the nature of reality. The change comes when we experience the
present moment prior to the arising of thought.

The Buddha taught mindfulness as the appropriate response to the truth of ''dukkha,'' usually translated from the Pali, somewhat misleadingly, as
“suffering.” A better translation would be “unsatisfactoriness.”
Suffering may not be inherent in life, but unsatisfactoriness is. We
crave lasting happiness in the midst of change: Our bodies age,
cherished objects break, pleasures fade, relationships fail. Our
attachment to the good things in life and our aversion to the bad amount to a denial of these realities, and this inevitably leads to feelings
of dissatisfaction. Mindfulness is a technique for achieving equanimity
amid the flux, allowing us to simply be aware of the quality of
experience in each moment, whether pleasant or unpleasant. This may seem like a recipe for apathy, but it needn’t be. It is actually possible to be mindful—and, therefore, to be at peace with the present moment—even
while working to change the world for the better.

Mindfulness meditation is extraordinarily simple to describe, but it
isn’t easy to perform. True mastery might require special talent and a
lifetime of devotion to the task, and yet a genuine transformation in
one’s perception of the world is within reach for most of us. Practice
is the only thing that will lead to success. The simple instructions
given in the box that follows are analogous to instructions on how to
walk a tightrope—which, I assume, must go something like this:

# Find a horizontal cable that can support your weight.
# Stand on one end.
# Step forward by placing one foot directly in front of the other.
# Repeat.
# Don’t fall.

Clearly, steps 2 through 5 entail a little trial and error. Happily,
the benefits of training in meditation arrive long before mastery does.
And falling, for our purposes, occurs almost ceaselessly, every time we
become lost in thought. Again, the problem is not thoughts themselves
but the state of thinking ''without being fully aware that we are thinking.''

As every meditator soon discovers, distraction is the normal
condition of our minds: Most of us topple from the wire every
second—whether gliding happily into reverie or plunging into fear,
anger, self-hatred, and other negative states of mind. Meditation is a
technique for waking up. The goal is to come out of the trance of
discursive thinking and to stop reflexively grasping at the pleasant and recoiling from the unpleasant, so that we can enjoy a mind undisturbed
by worry, merely open like the sky, and effortlessly aware of the flow
of experience in the present.

=== How to Meditate ===

# Sit comfortably, with your spine erect, either in a chair or cross-legged on a cushion.
# Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and feel the points of contact between your body and the chair or the floor. Notice the sensations associated with sitting—feelings of pressure, warmth, tingling, vibration, etc.
# Gradually become aware of the process of breathing. Pay attention to wherever you feel the breath most distinctly—either at your nostrils or in the rising and falling of your abdomen.
# Allow your attention to rest in the mere sensation of breathing. (You don’t have to control your breath. Just let it come and go naturally.)
# Every time your mind wanders in thought, gently return it to the breath.
# As you focus on the process of breathing, you will also perceive sounds, bodily sensations, or emotions. Simply observe these phenomena as they appear in consciousness and then return to the breath.
# The moment you notice that you have been lost in thought, observe the present thought itself as an object of consciousness. Then return your attention to the breath—or to any sounds or sensations arising in the next moment.
# Continue in this way until you can merely witness all objects of consciousness—sights, sounds, sensations, emotions, even thoughts themselves—as they arise, change, and pass away.

Those who are new to this practice generally find it useful to hear instructions of this kind spoken aloud during the course of a meditation session. I have posted guided meditations of varying length on .

== THE TRUTH OF SUFFERING ==
I am sitting in a coffee shop in midtown Manhattan, drinking exactly
what I want (coffee), eating exactly what I want (a cookie), and doing
exactly what I want (writing this book). It is a beautiful fall day, and many of the people passing by on the sidewalk appear to radiate good
fortune from their pores. Several are so physically attractive that I’m
beginning to wonder whether Photoshop can now be applied to the human
body. Up and down this street, and for a mile in each direction, stores
sell jewelry, art, and clothing that not even 1 percent of humanity
could hope to purchase.

So what did the Buddha mean when he spoke of the “unsatisfactoriness” (''dukkha'') of life? Was he referring merely to the poor and the hungry? Or are
these rich and beautiful people suffering even now? Of course, suffering is all around us—even here, where everything appears to be going well
for the moment.

First, the obvious: Within a few blocks of where I am sitting are
hospitals, convalescent homes, psychiatrists’ offices, and other rooms
built to assuage, or merely to contain, some of the most profound forms
of human misery. A man runs over his own child while backing his car out of the driveway. A woman learns that she has terminal cancer on the eve of her wedding. We know that the worst can happen to anyone at any
time—and most people spend a great deal of mental energy hoping that it
won’t happen to them.

But more subtle forms of suffering can be found, even among people
who seem to have every reason to be satisfied in the present. Although
wealth and fame can secure many forms of pleasure, few of us have any
illusions that they guarantee happiness. Anyone who owns a television or reads the newspaper has seen movie stars, politicians, professional
athletes, and other celebrities ricochet from marriage to marriage and
from scandal to scandal. To learn that a young, attractive, talented,
and successful person is nevertheless addicted to drugs or clinically
depressed is to be given almost no cause for surprise.

Yet the unsatisfactoriness of the good life runs deeper than this.
Even while living safely between emergencies, most of us feel a wide
range of painful emotions on a daily basis. When you wake up in the
morning, are you filled with joy? How do you feel at work or when
looking in the mirror? How satisfied are you with what you’ve
accomplished in life? How much of your time with your family is spent
surrendered to love and gratitude, and how much is spent just struggling to be happy in one another’s company? Even for extraordinarily lucky
people, life is difficult. And when we look at what makes it so, we see
that we are all prisoners of our thoughts.

And then there is death, which defeats everyone. Most people seem to
believe that we have only two ways to think about death: We can fear it
and do our best to ignore it, or we can deny that it is real. The first
strategy leads to a life of conventional worldliness and distraction—we
merely strive for pleasure and success and do our best to keep the
reality of death out of view. The second strategy is the province of
religion, which assures us that death is but a doorway to another world
and that the most important opportunities in life occur after the
lifetime of the body. But there is another path, and it seems the only
one compatible with intellectual honesty. That path is the subject of
this book.

== ENLIGHTENMENT ==
What is enlightenment, which is so often said to be the ultimate goal of meditation? There are many esoteric details that we can safely
ignore—disagreements among contemplative traditions about what, exactly, is gained or lost at the end of the spiritual path. Many of these
claims are preposterous. Within most schools of Buddhism, for instance, a buddha—whether the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, or any other
person who attains the state of “full enlightenment”—is generally
described as “omniscient.” Just what this means is open to a fair bit of caviling. But however narrowly defined, the claim is absurd. If the
historical Buddha were “omniscient,” he would have been, at minimum, a
better mathematician, physicist, biologist, and ''Jeopardy''
contestant than any person who has ever lived. Is it reasonable to
expect that an ascetic in the fifth century BC, by virtue of his
meditative insights, spontaneously became an unprecedented genius in
every field of human inquiry, including those that did not exist at the
time in which he lived? Would Siddhartha Gautama have awed Kurt Gödel,
Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and Claude Shannon with his command of
mathematical logic and information theory? Of course not. To think
otherwise is pure, religious piety.

Any extension of the notion of “omniscience” to procedural
knowledge—that is, to knowing how to do something—would render the
Buddha capable of painting the Sistine Chapel in the morning and
demolishing Roger Federer at Centre Court in the afternoon. Is there any reason to believe that Siddhartha Gautama, or any other celebrated
contemplative, possessed such abilities by virtue of his spiritual
practice? None whatsoever. Nevertheless, many Buddhists believe that
buddhas can do all these things and more. Again, this is religious
dogmatism, not a rational approach to spiritual life.<ref>However one bounds the concept of enlightenment, there is no escaping the fact that most traditional accounts of it, Buddhist and otherwise, attribute a variety of supernormal powers to spiritual adepts. Is there any evidence that human beings can acquire abilities like clairvoyance and telekinesis? Apart from anecdotes offered by people who are desperate to believe in such powers, we can say that the evidence is impressively thin. Traditionally, gurus and their devotees have sought to have it both ways: The guru will display various siddhis (Sanskrit: “powers”) to entertain and persuade the faithful—but never in such a way as to meet the tests of true skeptics. We are invariably told that to produce miracles on demand would be a crude misuse of a guru’s office. The dharma (Sanskrit: “way” or “truth”), after all, is more precious and profound than worldly powers. No doubt it is. But this doesn’t stop most gurus from taking credit, or their devotees from bestowing it, whenever random coincidences occur.</ref>

I make no claims in support of magic or miracles in this book.
However, I can say that the true goal of meditation is more profound
than most people realize—and it does, in fact, encompass many of the
experiences that traditional mystics claim for themselves. It is quite
possible to lose one’s sense of being a separate self and to experience a kind of boundless, open awareness—to feel, in other words, at one with
the cosmos. This says a lot about the possibilities of human
consciousness, but it says nothing about the universe at large. And it
sheds no light at all on the relationship between mind and matter. The
fact that it is possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself should be a
great finding for the field of psychology, but it lends absolutely no
credence to the claim that Jesus was the son of God, or even that God
exists. Nor does it suggest that the “energy” of love somehow pervades
the cosmos. These are historical and metaphysical claims that personal
experience cannot justify.

However, a phenomenon like self-transcending love does entitle us to
make claims about the human mind. And this particular experience is so
well attested and so readily achieved by those who devote themselves to
specific practices (the Buddhist technique of ''metta'' meditation,
for instance) or who even take the right drug (MDMA) that there is very
little controversy that it exists. Facts of this kind must now be
understood in a rational context.

----

The traditional goal of meditation is to arrive at a state of well-being that is imperturbable—or if perturbed, easily regained. The French monk Matthieu Ricard describes such happiness as “a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind.”<ref>M. Ricard. 2007. Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill. New York: Little, Brown, p. 19.</ref>

The purpose of meditation is to recognize that you already have such a mind. That discovery, in turn, helps you to cease doing the things that produce needless confusion and suffering for yourself and others. Of
course, most people never truly master the practice and don’t reach a
condition of imperturbable happiness. The near goal, therefore, is to
have an ''increasingly'' healthy mind—that is, to be moving one’s mind in the right direction.

There is nothing novel about trying to ''become'' happy. And one ''can'' become happy, within certain limits, without any recourse to the
practice of meditation. But conventional sources of happiness are
unreliable, being dependent upon changing conditions. It is difficult to raise a happy family, to keep yourself and those you love healthy, to
acquire wealth and find creative and fulfilling ways to enjoy it, to
form deep friendships, to contribute to society in ways that are
emotionally rewarding, to perfect a wide variety of artistic, athletic,
and intellectual skills—and to keep the machinery of happiness running
day after day. There is nothing wrong with being fulfilled in all these
ways—except for the fact that, if you pay close attention, you will see
that there is still something wrong with it. These forms of happiness
aren’t good enough. Our feelings of fulfillment do not last. And the
stress of life continues.

So what would a spiritual master be a master ''of''? At a minimum, she will no longer suffer certain cognitive and emotional
illusions—above all, she will no longer feel identical to her thoughts.
Once again, this is not to say that such a person will no longer think,
but she would no longer succumb to the primary confusion that thoughts
produce in most of us: She would no longer feel that there is an inner
self who is a thinker of these thoughts. Such a person will naturally
maintain an openness and serenity of mind that is available to most of
us only for brief moments, even after years of practice. I remain
agnostic as to whether anyone has achieved such a state permanently, but I know from direct experience that it is possible to be far more
enlightened than I tend to be.

The question of whether enlightenment is a permanent state need not
detain us. The crucial point is that you can glimpse something about the nature of consciousness that will liberate you from suffering in the
present. Even just recognizing the impermanence of your mental
states—deeply, not merely as an idea—can transform your life. Every
mental state you have ever had has arisen and then passed away. This is a first-person fact—but it is, nonetheless, a fact that any human being
can readily confirm. We don’t have to know any more about the brain or
about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world to
understand this truth about our own minds. The promise of spiritual
life—indeed, the very thing that makes it “spiritual” in the sense I
invoke throughout this book—is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off knowing. What we need to become happier and to make
the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer
understanding of the way things are.

The moment we admit the possibility of attaining contemplative
insights—and of training one’s mind for that purpose—we must acknowledge that people naturally fall at different points on a continuum between
ignorance and wisdom. Part of this range will be considered “normal,”
but normal isn’t necessarily a happy place to be. Just as a person’s
physical body and abilities can be refined—Olympic athletes are ''not'' normal—one’s mental life can deepen and expand on the basis of talent
and training. This is nearly self-evident, but it remains a
controversial point. No one hesitates to admit the role of talent and
training in the context of physical and intellectual pursuits; I have
never met another person who denied that some of us are stronger, more
athletic, or more learned than others. But many people find it difficult to acknowledge that a continuum of moral and spiritual wisdom exists or that there might be better and worse ways to traverse it.

''Stages'' of spiritual development, therefore, appear
unavoidable. Just as we must grow into adulthood physically—and we can
fail to mature or become sick or injured along the way—our minds develop by degrees. One can’t learn sophisticated skills such as syllogistic
reasoning, algebra, or irony until one has acquired more basic skills.
It seems to me that a healthy spiritual life can begin only once our
physical, mental, social, and ethical lives have sufficiently matured.
We must learn to use language before we can work with it creatively or
understand its limits, and the conventional self must form before we can investigate it and understand that it is not what it appears to be. An
ability to examine the contents of one’s own consciousness clearly,
dispassionately, and nondiscursively, with sufficient attention to
realize that no inner self exists, is a very sophisticated skill. And
yet basic mindfulness can be practiced very early in life. Many people,
including my wife, have successfully taught it to children as young as
six. At that age—and every age thereafter—it can be a powerful tool for
self-regulation and self-awareness.

Contemplatives have long understood that positive habits of mind are
best viewed as skills that most of us learn imperfectly as we grow to
adulthood. It is possible to become more focused, patient, and
compassionate than one naturally tends to be, and there are many things
to learn about how to be happy in this world. These are truths that
Western psychological science has only recently begun to explore.

Some people are content in the midst of deprivation and danger, while others are miserable despite having all the luck in the world. This is
not to say that external circumstances do not matter. But it is your
mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality
of your life. Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it.

Scientists and skeptics generally assume that the traditional claims
of yogis and mystics must be exaggerated or simply delusional and that
the only rational purpose of meditation is limited to conventional
“stress reduction.” Conversely, serious students of these practices
often insist that even the most outlandish claims made by and about
spiritual masters are true. I am attempting to lead the reader along a
middle path between these extremes—one that preserves our scientific
skepticism but acknowledges that it is possible to radically transform
our minds.

In one sense, the Buddhist concept of enlightenment really is just
the epitome of “stress reduction”—and depending on how much stress one
reduces, the results of one’s practice can seem more or less profound.
According to the Buddhist teachings, human beings have a distorted view
of reality that leads them to suffer unnecessarily. We grasp at
transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the
future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that
doesn’t exist. This is stressful—and spiritual life is a process of
gradually unraveling our confusion and bringing this stress to an end.
According to the Buddhist view, by seeing things as they are, we cease
to suffer in the usual ways, and our minds can open to states of
well-being that are intrinsic to the nature of consciousness.

Of course, some people claim to love stress and appear eager to live
by its logic. Some even derive pleasure from imposing stress on others.
Genghis Khan is reported to have said, “The greatest happiness is to
scatter your enemy and drive him before you, to see his cities reduced
to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather to
your bosom his wives and daughters.” People attach many meanings to
terms like ''happiness, '' and not all of them are compatible with one another.

In ''The Moral Landscape, ''I argued that we tend to be
unnecessarily confused by differences of opinion on the topic of human
well-being. No doubt certain people can derive mental pleasure—and even
experience genuine ecstasy—by behaving in ways that produce immense
suffering for others. But we know that these states are anomalous—or, at least, not sustainable—because we depend upon one another for more or
less everything. Whatever the associated pleasures, raping and pillaging can’t be a stable strategy for finding happiness in this world. Given
our social requirements, we know that the deepest and most durable forms of well-being must be compatible with an ethical concern for other
people—even for complete strangers—otherwise, violent conflict becomes
inevitable. We also know that there are certain forms of happiness that
are not available to a person even if, like Genghis Khan, he finds
himself on the winning side of every siege. Some pleasures are
intrinsically ethical—feelings like love, gratitude, devotion, and
compassion. To inhabit these states of mind is, by definition, to be
brought into alignment with others.

In my view, the realistic goal to be attained through spiritual
practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of no
further efforts but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst
of whatever is happening. If you can do that, you have already solved
most of the problems you will encounter in life.

<references />

Teaching

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Never Help: Engage, Enable, Empower and Connect. -- Carlos Miranda Levy

@HAltaica 
"Teaching people is not about telling them what to do, but helping them. You don't help someone by telling them what to do, but by explaining what to do, why you do it, and then letting them figure it out for themselves. Not hovering around someone and knitpicking." -- @Imago3d

@Imago3d 
Replying to @HAltaica 
I believe that's how most teachers teach. That's how I was taught. That's how I teach. I try not to give everyone all the answers, but I do supply the tools, know how, and a push in the right direction.

3:25 PM - 16 Oct 2018

Main Page

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The Path

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Rather than the Middle Path of Gautama or 'the "ambrosial path" of Nanak'<ref>http://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/Baba_Sri_Chand</ref> The path of the Wholly Marine's is the scenic route.
<references/>

The Wisdom of Lao Tzu

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“I know a bird can fly, a fish can swim, and an animal can run. For that which runs, a net can be fashioned; for that which swims, a line can be strung. But the ascent of a Dragon on the wind into heaven is something which is beyond my knowledge. Today I have met Lao-Tzu, who is perhaps like a Dragon. Among the Chinese, particularly, the Taoists, the Dragon is the symbol of Kundalini Shakti, the primordial force.”

As said by Confucius, upon meeting Lao-Tzu Bo-Yang, the founder of Taoism, in the fifth century BC.

There now follows a series of quotations attributed to Lao-Tzu, which sagely demonstrate why he appears to have had such an impact upon the famous Chinese philosopher and many others the world over.

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

“Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream.”

“Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.”

“At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.”

“Because one believes in oneself, one doesn’t try to convince others. Because one is content with oneself, one doesn’t need others’ approval. Because one accepts oneself, the whole world accepts him or her.”

“Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.”

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

“Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habit. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”

“Act without expectation.”

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

“Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment.”

“By letting go it all gets done.”

“To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.”

“Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.”

“Accomplish but do not boast, accomplish without show, accomplish without arrogance, accomplish without grabbing, accomplish without forcing.”

“To a mind that is still the whole universe surrenders.”

“I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men.”

“There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent.”

“Men are born soft and supple; dead they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail.”

“Because of a great love, one is courageous.”

“Knowledge is a treasure, but practice is the key to it.”

“I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.”

“Loss is not as bad as wanting more.”

“Muddy water, let stand, becomes clear.”

“Water is the softest thing, yet it can penetrate mountains and earth. This shows clearly the principle of softness overcoming hardness.”

“Those who flow as life flows know they need no other force.”

“What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.”

“Your own positive future begins in this moment. All you have is right now. Every goal is possible from here.”

“To understand the limitation of things, desire them.”

“Great acts are made up of small deeds.”

“One who is too insistent on his own views finds few to agree with him.”

“The Way to do is to be.”

“He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.”

“If a person seems wicked, do not cast him away. Awaken him with your words, elevate him with your deeds, repay his injury with your kindness. Do not cast him away; cast away his wickedness.”

“So the unwanting soul sees what’s hidden, and the ever-wanting soul sees only what it wants.”

“If you show yourself, you will not be seen. If you affirm yourself, you will not shine. If you boast, you will have no merit. If you promote yourself, you will have no success.”

“Stop leaving and you will arrive. Stop searching and you will see. Stop running away and you will be found.”

“If you correct your mind, the rest of your life will fall into place.”

“If you want to know me, look inside your heart.”

“Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing.”

“As soon as you have made a thought, laugh at it.”

“Close your mouth, block off your senses, blunt your sharpness, untie your knots, soften your glare, settle your dust. This is the primal identity.”

“To see things in the seed, that is genius.”

“Perfection is the willingness to be imperfect.”

“Respond to anger with virtue. Deal with difficulties while they are still easy. Handle the great while it is still small.”

“Some lose yet gain, others gain and yet lose.”

“Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. When we don’t see the self as self, what do we have to fear?”

“If you are untrustworthy, people will not trust you.”

“When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.”

“Boasting of wealth and virtue brings your demise.”

“Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.”

“If you want to lead them you must place yourself behind them.”

“All streams flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. Humility gives it its power. If you want to govern the people, you must place yourself below them. if you want to lead the people, you must learn how to follow them.”

“Empty your mind of all thoughts. Let your heart be at peace. Watch the turmoil of beings, but contemplate their return.

Each separate being in the universe returns to the common source. Returning to the source is serenity.

If you don’t realize the source, you stumble in confusion and sorrow. When you realize where you come from, you naturally become tolerant, disinterested, amused, kindhearted as a grandmother, dignified as a king. Immersed in the wonder of the Tao, you can deal with whatever life brings you, and when death comes, you are ready.”

“Every step is on the path.”

“Do not conquer the world with force, for force only causes resistance. Thorns spring up when an army passes. Years of misery follow a great victory. Do only what needs to be done without using violence.”

“The master observes the world but trusts his inner vision. He allows things to come and go. He prefers what is within to what is without.”

“The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that. What is grievance? The baggage of old thought and emotion.”

“He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.”

“When pure sincerity forms within, it is outwardly realized in other people’s hearts.”

“If there is to be peace in the world, There must be peace in the nations. If there is to be peace in the nations, There must be peace in the cities. If there is to be peace in the cities, There must be peace between neighbors. If there is to be peace between neighbors, There must be peace in the home. If there is to be peace in the home, There must be peace in the heart.”

“There is a time to live and a time to die but never to reject the moment.”

“Free from desire, you realize the mystery caught in the desire, you see only the manifestations.”

“Be like water.”

The creation of information

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Assume that the only thing you know about a man with two kids is that at least one of the kids is a daughter. What is the probability that the other kid is a daughter as well? (Boys and girls are assumed to be born equally often.)

After the first impulse ("1/2 of course!"), it becomes clear that it is only 1/3. The problem can be mapped to a situation where from the multitude of families with two children, only those with M/M are ruled out, while the equally often cases F/F, F/M and M/F remain, making F/F only one third of all remaining cases.

But now, meet Mr. Smith. I don't know much about him (except that he has two children), but when he approached me, he told me: "I am so happy! Victoria just got the scholarship she wanted!"

Now what is the probability that Victoria has a sister?

Since I only know that Mr. Smith has two children, and one is obviously a girl, I am tempted to map this onto the two-daughter-problem, leading to the answer "1/3".

But wait! What if I ask Mr. Smith first, if Victoria is his elder daughter? Assume his answer is yes (and ignore any problems with twins - even then one is typically a few seconds "older" than the other). So now I know that from the cases (F/F, F/M, M/F), M/F also drops out. And now, the probability for F/F just rose to 1/2.

Okay, but what if his answer is no? Then Victoria is the younger one, and F/M drops out. Again, the probability rises to 1/2.

So I'm going to just ask him: "Well, Mr. Smith, is Victoria your elder daughter? Wait - don't answer, because whatever you may answer, it doesn't matter. The probability just rose from 1/3 to 1/2."

Or, even better, I do not even have to ask him, just thinking about the question will shift probabilities to 1/2, which means that the original probability for Victoria having a sister must already have been 1/2. But then the mapping to the two-daughter-problem is obviously false.

----
Suppose you flip a coin that you know nothing about it's fairness twice.

Knowing that the first flip is heads tells you no information about the second flip.

Knowing that the second flip is tails tells you no information with the first flip.

Knowing that at least on of the one of the first two flips is heads tells you no information with the other flip.

Knowing that at least on of the one of the first two flips is tails tells you no information with the other flip.

Knowing that at least one of the first two flips is heads tell you no information about the first flip.

Knowing that at least one of the first two flips is heads tell you no information about the second flip.

Knowing that at least one of the first two flips is tails tells you no information about the first flip.

Knowing that at least one of the first two flips is tails tells you no information about the second flip.

If you Know that at least one of the first two flips is heads and one of the first two flips is tails and the first flip is heads how do you know the second flip is tails?

The purpose of life

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TOoHNA holds that [[Actuality]] has an increasing [[Channel Capacity]] and that the purpose of life is to fill that Channel.

WMOM:LiaA:chap10

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==WHO OWNS THIS PLACE?==
Broadly speaking, there are three catagories of owners in the typical American corporation. THe first group, those normally though of as owners, invest mere cash in the business. The second, because they have dedicated their working years to the cooperation, invest their lives and their gifts in the corporation, invest their lives and their gifts in the cooperation. The third group, essential contributors to the cooperation, invest some special skill or talent or creative energy and have a strong comitment to the cooperation, but part-time.

To understand a cooperation, we must understand the characteristics of its owners as expressed through their management and through their personal behavior. If anyone is to serve the cooperation, either as a professional consultant or as a full-time employee and owner, that person must understand the attitudes of ownership.

What should be our attitude of ownership? Are the owners committed to short-term or long-term performance? Physical growth or maturity? To what kind of management process is the ownership committed? Do they think of work as an illness or an opportunity? In the sense of ideas and special talents, do they see their role as stewards or possessors? In the sense of the complex environment in which we all work and live, are the owners dedicated to serving people or to accumulating money and things? In other words, is mere material accumulation and measurement what life is all about for the owners?

One perception of ownership appeared in a recent business magazine, when the president of a privately owned company was asked if his tactics would be different if he were running a public company. His response was "If I knew my compensation next year would be based on this year's return on equity, hell no, I wouldn't act the same. You've only got a few years at the top in a public company to make your killing. You want to put every penny on the bottom line to wind up with the juiciest retirement package you can get."

One sees an admirable counterpoint in a thoughtful book, Servant Leadership by Robert Greenleaf, an executive with AT&T for twenty years. "Love is an undefinable term, and its manifestations are both subtle and infinite." It has only one "absolute condition: unlimited liability! As soon as one's liability for another is qualified to any degree, love is diminished by that much." (Servant Leadership, New York: Paulist Press, 1977, p.38)

Owners are liable for hard assets and also a legacy for their corporate heirs. At Herman Miller, owners and corporate heirs are often the same people, as are owners and employees. This began to happen more than twenty years ago when stock was sold to a small group of executives who were making a career commitment to the company.

Today we are one of the few public companies in the United States where 100 percent of full-time regular employees in U.S. who have completed one year of service are stockholders. These two roles bring responsibilities and rewards.

A dtory I once heard illustrates this idea. A friend of mine used to teach in Harlem. He thought it might be a good idea to take these city kids out to the country for a week camp. One of the first things he did, not unnaturally, was to organize a baseball game.

A curious thing happened. Nobody would play in the outfield. He soon discovered the reason for this: The outfield was surrounded by woods where all sorts of unknown dangers lay. My friend assigned two kids to each outfield position. One would hold the glove; one would watch the woods. Each person and each duty was essential. And the game went on.

At Herman Miller, there is an owner and an employee in every position. Because everybody acts sometimes as employee and sometimes as owner and sometimes as a little of both, employee-stockholders complement the participative management process which we have had since 1950. The Scanlon Plan, introduced under the leadership of Dr. Carl F. Frost, is in a vary real sense the paradigm of employee ownership.

Employee stock ownership is essential to a declaration of identity. Motivation is not a significant problem: Herman Miller employees bring that with them by the bushel. But people need to be liberated, to involved, to be accountable, and to reach for their potential. We believe that more and more working owners are winning the struggle for identity and meaning against anonymity and frustration.

Employee stock ownership is clearly a competitive reality. Nothing is being given. Ownership is earned and paid for. The heart of it is profit sharing, and there is no sharing if there are no profits. Risk and reward are connected logically and fairly.

There is no smug condescension at play here. Rather, there is a certain morality in connecting shared accountability as employees with shared ownership. This lends a rightness and permanence to the relationship of each of us to our work and to each other.

Stock ownership is a marvelous vehicle for involving an entire family in the career of those of us who work for cooperations. There is a compelling coherence to reasons for employee ownership.

There are also some clear implications. There is risk personally and there is risk corporately. While it's great to work for gains, one also has to be ready for the losses.

Recently an employee and owner at Herman Miller, a woman working on her master's degree at Aquinas College, told me how a couple of her instructors who work at other companies asked, "What is the bottom line on the Scanlon Plan?" I suggested that she call their attention to the first section of that year's annual report, interviews conducted, edited, and printed without either review or approval on my part. Some companies might find this kind of risk unbearable, but it is a kind of risk taken constantly by employee-owners in a good participative process. More often than not, the results more than justify the risk.

Another implication is that everybody must live up to some important expectations. In the position of owners, we become more accountable for our personal performance. Owners cannot walk away from concerns. So, the accountability of all of us begins to change.

Ownership demands increasing maturity on everyone's part. Maturity is probably expressed best in a continually rising level of literacy: business literacy, participative literacy, ownership literacy, competitive literacy. The group of owners committed to the same organization, to the same goals, to the same value systems must be knowledgeable in many areas. Ownership demands a commitment to be as informed about the whole as one can be.

In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are. At Herman Miller we are committed to doing everything we can to grow both as employees and owners. As those two roles merge, adversarial postures--labor versus consumer--will begin to disappear. The merging of employees and owners is already happening in many places.

The capitalist system cannot avoid being better off by having more employees who act as if they own the place.

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==COMMUNICATE!==
In most vital organizations, there is a common bond of interdependence, mutual interest, interlocking contributions, and simple joy. Part of the art of leadership is to see that this common bond is maintained and strengthened, a task certainly requiring good communication. Just as any relationship requires honest and open communication to stay healthy, so the relationships within cooperations improve when information is shared accurately and freely.

The best way to communicate the basis of a cooperation's or institution's common bonds and values is through behavior. Communication through behavior happens all the time. With large organizations spread out all over the world, we must have additional ways to communicate besides behavior, especially to communicate intangible and crucial and fragile information to widespread groups of people.

What is good communication? What does it accomplish? It is a prerequisite for teaching and learning. It is the way people can bridge the gaps formed by a growing company, stay in touch, build trust, ask for help, monitor performance, and share their vision. Communication clarifies the vision of participative ownership as a way of building relationships within and without the cooperation.

Good communication is not simply sending and receiving. Nor is good communication simply a mechanical exchange of data. No matter how good the communication, if no one listens all is lost. The best communication forces you to listen.

At the root, communication and one of its forms, language, are commitments to a convention, a culture. Dishonest or careless communication tells us as much about the people involved as it does about anything else. Communication is an ethical question. Good communication means a respect for individuals.

The real challenge is to make good communication a handy and well-used tool. Then you are likely to pick it up and use it without thinking.

Our grandson once locked himself in the bathroom. Despite his mother's best efforts to get the door open, she failed. She called in the police, who also failed to open the door. (All the while, our grandson kept reaching under the door to touch his mother's hand. Talk about good communication!) Finally his mother called the fire department. By the time the fire trucks arrived, there was quite a scene on the front lawn. The firemen promptly broke down the door with their axes, tools they certainly know how to use.

When our son Chuck arrived, at the height of the suspense, he could not quite figure out what was happening. There was no fire or smoke, but his bathroom door and its frame were in shambles.

At the office the next day, he was complaining to a colleague about the damage. The colleague observed that there might be a management lesson in the story. "A fireman has two tools, an axe and a hose. If you call him, you're going to get one."

Everybody is more likely to use familiar trusted tools. Among a leader's most trusted and familiar tools are communication skills. Whether or not we use them well is another question, and like the fireman's axe, skillful communication comes with obligations.

A number of obligations go along with good communication. We must understand that access to pertinent information is essential to getting a job done. The right to know is basic. Moreover, it is better to err on the side of sharing too much information than rick leaving someone in the dark. Information is power, but it is pointless power if hoarded. Power must be shared for an organization or a relationship to work.

Everyone has a right to, and an obligation for, simplicity and clarity, through truth is sometimes a real constraint, and courtesy inconvenient. But make no mistake--these are the qualities that allow communication to educate and liberate us.

We are obligated to do with several things:a respect for the English language, an acknowledgment that muddy language usually means muddy thinking and that our audience may need something special from us. The art of scrutiny will uncover what I call "third-class mail," missives without meaning. Junk mail serves no more purpose in corporate setting than it does in our homes.

If we think of good communication as a tool and remember these obligations, we can avail ourselves of a way to expand our work and our lives. Tools do something. And so does communication. Communication performs two functions, described by two "action-prone" words: educate and liberate.

"Educate" comes from two Latin words that mean "lead" or "draw out." Good communication draws out of us an awareness of the meaning of working together. We cannot do good research and development, we cannot make decisions, we cannot get orders--we simply cannot do business without learning what we expect from each other.

Teaching and learning underlie business literacy and action. Business literacy is the "why" of what cooperations do, and the action is the "what" they do.

How else does communication educate us? Good communication can educate us to the realities of our economy and the need for our performance within that economy. Only through good communication can we learn the needs and demands of our customers.

Only through good communication can we convey and preserve a common corporate vision. Communication can sharpen, embody, and help enact that vision. We all understand that in our family and corporate lives the absence of comment and question and response and opinion is a powerful communication. These are just a few examples of how good communication can educate us.

Good communication liberates us to do our jobs better. It is as simple s that. Good corporate communication allows us to respond to the demands placed on us and to carry out our responsibilities. This really means, too, that leaders can use communication to free the people they lead. To liberate people, communication must be based on logic, compassion, and sound reasoning.

This rationality extends to the system of words and signs that a company and its customers adopt together. Good, lucid communication means commitment to the same symbols of good work and success. Plato said that a society cultivates whatever is honored there. Let us make no mistake about what we honor. If these symbols are understood, we can and do enable each other.

As a culture or a cooperation grows older and more complex, the communications naturally and inevitably become more sophisticated and crucial. An increasingly large part that communication plays in expanding cultures is to pass along values to new members and reaffirm those values to old hands.

A cooperation's values are it's life's blood. Without effective communication, actively practiced, without the art of scrutiny, those values will disappear in a sea of trivial memos and impertinent reports.

There may be no single thing more important in our efforts to achieve meaningful work and fulfilling relationships than to learn and practice the art of communication.

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==PINK ICE IN THE URINAL==
Every year in April, at the time of the Masters Golf Tournament is Augusta, the state of Georgia hosts about forty national and international industrial leaders for a one-week tour of the state. The purpose of the tour is to entice industry to move to Georgia. Two or three days at the Masters is an effective way to encourage participation in the tour.

Over the years the tour has been effective. Georgia has an outstanding record of bringing new industry to the state. Since Herman Miller has a plant in Roswell, just northeast of Atlanta, one year we were invited to be one of the host industries.

Naturally, we formed a committee to make plans for this event. In the discussion of the committee, one well-meaning person suggested that one way to dress up the facility was to put pink ice in the urinals. Dispite the good intentions behind this idea, I take pink ice as a signal. Would pink ice in the urinals really help attract more industry to Georgia?

Some months ago, I was on what is known in the financial industry as a "dog and pony show." Our team was in Boston, making a presentation to some sophisticated financial analysts. After the presentation and during the question-and-answer period, one of the analysts said to me, "What is one of the most difficult things that you personally need to work on?" He seemed very surprised when I said, "The interception of entropy."

I am using the word "entropy" in a loose way, because technically it has to do with the second law of thermodynamics. From a corporate management point of view, I choose to define it as meaning that everything has a tendency to deteriorate. One of the important things leaders need to learn in to recognize the signals of impending deterioration.

I have made a list of these signals over the years. As you read this list, remember that many people in large organizations relish apathy. They often fail to see the signs of entropy:
*a tendency towards superficiality
*a dark tension among key people
*no longer having time for celebration and ritual
*a growing feeling that rewards and goals are the same thing
*when people stop telling tribal stories or cannot understand them
*a recurring effort by some to convince others that business is, after all, quite simple (The acceptance of complexity and ambiguity and the ability to deal with them constructively are essential.)
*when people begin to have different understandings of words like "responsibility" or "service" or "trust"
*when problem-makers outnumber problem-solvers
*when folks confuse heroes and celebrities
*leaders who seek to control rather than liberate
*when the pressures of day-to-day operations push aside our concern for vision and risk (I think you know that vision and risk can never be separated.)
*an orientation toward the dry rules of business school rather than a value orientation that takes into account such things as contribution, spirit, excellence, beauty, and joy
*when people speak of customers as impositions on their time rather than as opportunities to serve
*manuals
*a growing urge to quantify both history and one's thoughts about the future (You may be familiar with people who take a looks at a prototype and say, "In 1990 we'll sell $6,493,000 worth"--nothing is more devastating because then you plan either to make that happen or to avoid it.)
*the urge to establish ratios
*leaders who rely on structures instead of people
*a loss of confidence in judgment, experience, and wisdom
*a loss of grace and style and civility
*a loss of respect for the English language

If you and your cooperation are committed to being as good as you can be, beware of pink ice in the urinals.

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==WHAT'S NEXT?==

At times in business, the congruence of principles and practice--or their incongruence--comes sharply into focus. Reviewing performance is a time like that, a time to ask what we are trying to do, evaluate how we are doing, and then ask "What's next?"

Performance reviews, done well, are a good way of reexamining goals, realigning principles and practices, and gauging progress. Everyone should do this. Reviewing performance should be done in a timely way, with the direct involvement of the person whose performance is being reviewed. Both the people and the process should be directed toward reaching human potential.

For jobs easily described and work easily measured, there are good procedures to follow in cooperations and institutions. But many jobs, especially those entailing responsibility for leadership of the cooperation or institution, are not black-and-white, cannot be measured easily, and must be examined over long periods of time.

Leaders, in a special way, are liable for what happens in the future, rather than what is happening day to day. This liability is difficult to measure, and thus the performance of leaders is difficult to measure. Though we do need to review past results and processes, the emphasis on the duties and performance of leaders has to be on the future. It is especially hard to remember that today's performance from a leader succeeds or fails only in the months or years to come. Much of a leader's performance cannot be reviewed until after the fact.

Today's trust enables the future. We also enable the future by forgiving the mistakes we all make while growing up. We free each other to perform in the future through the medium of thrust.

I recently led a discussion group of about fifteen people at Herman Miller. We had introduced a "just in time" inventory-management program. One of the women in the group asked if I understood and was committed to this program. My answer was I did not understand it completely but was committed to its success. This gave her pause. She was trying to figure out a tactful way of asking me how that could possibly be true.

When I asked her what her job was, she said that she worked in the engineering department. "How are things going there?" I asked. "Just fine," she daid. I asked her if I should be comfortable about what was going on in the engineering department, and she told me that, by and large, I could be.

Then I asked if she was comfortable about the way I was doing my job. She told me that she was, Catching the drift of the conversation, she added quickly that she did not understand everything I did. It was quite easy for the two of us, under the watchful eyes of the group, to agree that it was not necessary for us to understand completely what the other did or was accountable for. We could, nevertheless, be wholeheartedly committed to each other's role and each other's success.

As the group talked this idea over, we realized that, while understanding is an essential part of organized activity, it just is not possible for everybody to know everything and understand everything. The following is essential: We must trust one another to be accountable for our own assignments. When that kind of thrust is present, it is a beautifully liberating thing.

Even trust will not make the nature of the future more certain. But the uncertain nature of the future does not necessarily make leadership a hazardous occupation. Many of the things in this book might be discussed in a thoughtful and effective way when linked with corporate strategy. Philosophy can, and should, be put into practice.

An effective CEO will review the performance of the senior management team. As part of a covenantal relationship, every leader must review the performance of the people he or she leads, and no doubt there are many ways of doing this. Usually I send members of my management team a list of requests and questions ahead of time. Anything else they wish to bring to the review is fine with me. Our agreement is always "no holds barred."

Here are some requests I have made to each senior manager before the performance review.

*Please prepare a brief review, one or two pages, of how you feel you have done in comparison to your annual plan. What is the most important achievement in your area?
*Please prepare a one-page or shorter statement of your personal management philosophy. Describe your personal plans for continuing education and development for the coming year.
*Please think about ways for us to approach our accountability (with many others) for the future of the cooperation, and our joint accountability for your future career in the cooperation. What kind of changes will be required by the growth picture we are plotting?
*Review your thoughts on team building at the senior management team level, commenting perhaps on parity in responsibility, in accountability, in compensation, and as part of our succession plan. What ideas do you have for things we should reflect on at future senior management retreats?
*Prepare to discuss your thoughts on our competition and where we need to respond to it and what our response should be. Perhaps the following can trigger your thinking: Who is creeping up on us? How do various competitors beat us out? In product, service, selling capability, marketing and advertising, dealer distribution, or price?
*Please describe for me what you think your role at Herman Miller can be as one of the "corporate storytellers" who play an active role in transmission of the corporate culture. What do you think this corporate culture is?
*How can I personally have more time to focus of such things as strategy, our value system, participation, continuity, and team building?
*Please identify five key projects and/or goals you have as a key leader at Herman Miller and in which you feel I can be of help or support.

Simply asking questions is another important part of performance reviews. Asking the right questions is a knack that needs working on. Here are a few questions I have asked my senior managers to consider.

*Would you be willing to share your philosophy of management with your work team?
*What are a few of the things that you expect most and need most from the CEO?
*What do you want to do (to be)? What are you planning to do about it?
*Who are you? How do you see yourself personally, professionally, and organizationally?
*Does Herman Miller need you?
*Do you need Herman Miller?
*What are you doing to realize the potential of our Scanlon Plan philosophically, functionally, educationally, and in the management of relationships?
*If you were "in my shoes," what one key area or matter would you focus on?
*What significant areas are there in the company where you feel you can make a contribution but feel you cannot get a hearing?
*What have you abandoned?
*Do you have any feeling of failure in any particular area?
*What two things should we do to work toward being a great company?
*What should grace enable us to be?
*What will you do in the coming year to develop your three highest-potential persons (and who are they)?
*In the past year, what, from the perspective of integrity, most affected you personally, professionally, and organizationally?
*What are three signals of impending entropy you see at Herman Miller? What are you doing about it?
*What are three examples of budding synergy in your area and how we can capitalize on them?

Finally, I think there is value in considering thoughts from other leaders, leaders not necessarily in the same area as one's own. Mohandas Gandhi once wrote that there were seven sins in the world: wealth without work; pleasure without conscience; knowledge without character; commerce without morality; science without humanity; worship without sacrifice; politics without principle. Performance considered in light of those seven sins would be a well-reviewed performance indeed.

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==SOME THOUGHTS FOR CEOS WHO BUILD BUILDINGS==
How does one transform verbal and often abstract statements into steel and stone? We are all familiar with how the Greeks and the Romans left the marks of their culture in architecture. The Mayans, too, expressed their culture in distinctive buildings. Broadly, you might say that architecture deals with the relationship of people and the environment. As a company, Herman Miller deals with that relationship every day.

In thinking about facilities and their relation to corporate culture, I consulted my dictionary about the word "culture." From a number of choices, most of which had to do with biology, I selected this statement: "A particular state or stage of civilization." To me this definition links rather nicely to the idea of a corporate culture, but leaves me with a question: How should we think about man-made facilities as a state or stage of civilization?

You can frequently be helped in efforts to understand a problem by asking yourself questions. Here are a few about physical places and social places. These questions lead me to think about the working environment in a variety of ways:

*Does what I do count?
*Does what I do make a difference to anybody?
*Why should I come here?
*Can I be somebody here?
*Is there for me any rhyme or reason here?
*Can I "own" this place?
*Do I have any rights?
*Does coming here add any richness to my life?
*Is this a place where I can learn something?
*Would I show this place to my family--or am I ashamed to show it to them--or does it just not matter?
*Is there anybody here I can trust?
*Is this place open to my influence?
*Does it help to understand architecture as a societal response?

The physical environment matters a great deal, but it is not as important as the management environment. The physical environment is likely to be a consequence of certain elements of the management environment. In that sense the facility will reflect the context of a cooperation, its leadership, and its values.

During a time of financial strain in the economy and in the company, an employee-owner at Herman Miller asked why we had spent so much money on three ponds surrounding our main site in Zeeland, Michigan. In short, this person was asking how these ponds reflected our company and its values, a question he had every right to ask.

Buildings do not exist in a vacuum, and neither did these ponds. The ponds exist to gather runoff created by the roofs of our buildings, to keep our neighbors' land from flooding, and to satisfy local land use laws. They furnish a ready supply of water in case of fire. They form a beautiful addition to our site. We even have a company picnic around them.

These ponds, only a small part of Herman Miller's facilities, reflect our people. All facilities should make this kind of sense in their contexts. In turn, facilities should create a context for a state or stage of corporate civilization.

Facilities can aspire to certain qualities as an expression of a civilization. Some of these qualities are readily apparent. Some are not.

A facility should be a place that people can possess. Taking possession of the facility in which we work is closely linked to the ideas of ownership. There is a fundamental difference, after all, between owners and renters. It is fair to say that renters are no-fault owners.

Facilities should enable and empower people to do their best. Facilities, like managers, should be vulnerable. They should encourage a rising level of knowledge about corporate life: literacy about business, the competition, relationships, and ownership. Our facilities must encourage lavish communications.

A facility should be a place of realized potential. It should be a "high touch" place. A place where we connect persons to each other and to technology in an effective and human way.

Now, having said all of those things, some philosophical and some practical, about facilities and the corporate culture, is there a way to be specific? Of course there is. We should make it our goal to create an environment that

*encourages an open community and fortuitous encounter
*welcomes all
*is kind to the user
*changes with grace
*is person-scaled
*is subservient to human activity
*forgives mistakes in planning
*enables this community (in the sense that an environment can) to reach continually toward its potential
*is a contribution to the landscape as an aesthetic and human values
*meets the needs we can perceive
*is open to surprise
*is comfortable with conflict
*has flexibility, is nonprecious and nonmonumental

It is important that we be prudent stewards of corporate assets and at the same time avoid savings at the cost of good long-range planning and a quality environment.

It is important that we keep future options open. This will demand real discipline because there is always a great drive to pin everything down if possible.

It is important that everyone understand the context in which our facilities function and the context and value they create for us.

It is important that we avoid an overcommitment or rigidity to a single function or need. Experience has shown us that we need varying utilization patterns open to us and that we need open-ended growth possibilities. One of our goals is to build the indeterminate building.

Another goal is to ask the right questions about facilities. Perhaps Bucky Fuller did it best.

Buckminster Fuller, the philosopher, inventor, and designer (I have never quite known exactly what to call Bucky!) was touring a new building that an excellent architect, Norman Froster, had just completed in the English countryside. Norman had carefully prepared for the visit and had asked his staff to anticipate every question Bucky could possibly pose. As Norman and Bucky approached the building, which looked as if it could have been a huge extrusion landed in the meadow by a giant helicopter, Norman reviewed in his mind all the answers, all the angles.

Bucky went along silently as they moved through the impressive building. At last he turned and pierced Norman with his steady, twinkling gaze and asked simply, "How much does it weigh?"

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==To MAKE ONE VICE PRESIDENT, MIX WELL...==
The art of leadership dwells a good deal in the future, in providing for the future of the organization, in planting and growing other leaders who will look to the future beyond their own. These future leaders, at some point in their careers, receive the title of vice president. They are important to the daily operations of a cooperation or an institution, but their future is vital to the future of the group. Picking vice presidents with all these conditions in mind is not easy.

A few years ago, faced with the talk of choosing several new vice presidents, I composed a memo to my senior management team. The decisions to be made in the process of choosing vice presidents are significant both for the people involved and for the organization. We are not only setting the tone and direction concerning management and leadership competence, we are dealing very specifically with the legacy we will leave.

With that in mind,I suggested three groups of thoughts that had to be dealt with i meeting this important challenge.

Fist, the cooperation requires several things from leaders in making this decision. The cooperation requires:

*that the position be clearly one with responsibility and accountability on the officer level
*that the establishment of this officership be a signal to the organization of the significance of the responsibility and of its importance to the future of the cooperation
*that the person who fills this position demonstrate not only personal performance and achievement but also the potential for continuing growth and accountability
*that this appointment be more a matter of expectancy and challenge than of reward, personally, professionally, organizationally
*that we interpret thoroughly to the organization each appointment

Second, the organization requires several things from the people chosen to be candidates for future leaders. These people must briing to their responsibilities certain characteristics, traits that should be present in all leaders, traits talked about in this book. A future leader:

*has consistent and dependable integrity
*cherishes heterogeneity and diversity
*searches out competence
*is open to contrary opinion
*communicates easily at all levels
*understands the concept of equity and consistently advocates it
*leads through serving
*is vulnerable to the skills and talents of others
*is intimate with the organization and its work
*is able to see the broad picture (beyond his own area of focus)
*is a spokesperson and diplomat
*can be a tribal storyteller (an important way of transmitting our corporate culture)
*tells why rather than how

Third, beyond being a spokesperson in our organization, the new vice president should share in the basis for our values. He or she should be able to advocate Herman Miller's unique character to the world at large and within the cooperation. The candidate should understand and speak for:

*the corporate value system
*good design (in all its facets)
*participative management
*the human and ethical expression of the character of this cooperation

Since sending the memo, several of the people I work with have suggested some further ideas to consider in the situation of choosing vice presidents. THese additions come from a variety of experience and, as one of the people put it, "from having been burned." Here are their observations.

*The only kind of leadership worth following is based on vision.
*Personal character must be uppermost.
*If we are going to ask a person to lead, can we determine ahead of time whether he or she has gaps between belief and practice, between work and family?
*When talking about leadership, one always ends up talking about the future, about leaving a legacy, about followers. In other words, leadership intertwines the most important aspects of an organization: its people and its future. We need, therefore, to proceed very slowly and carefully.
*When choosing officers, provide for possible failure and a graceful withdrawal. Promotion to officership should be decided in a group, with no slim majority. The process should include complete commitment and no reservations. After all, the way we move managers around, you may inherit a work team that you cannot,or will not want to lead.
*What does the company physician say about the candidate?
*What do the person's peers have to say?
*Would you seed out this person as a key resource on an important task force?

These are important additions. Choosing leaders is the most vital and important matter cooperations and institutions face. What characteristics of a good leader will you add?

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==WHY SHOULD I WEEP?==
Do grown men weep? Sure. Should grown men weep? Of course. Anyone in touch with reality in this world knows there are lots of reasons to weep. We weep over triumphs and over tragedies. Most good people weep over admirable actions and deplorable ones.

Some people might say "Why should Max weep? He's the Chairman and CEO. What problems could he possibly have?" Well, my joys and sadnesses may not be the same as everyone else's, but that does not make them any less real, believe me. Let me tell you about a good reason I had recently for weeping.

Our officers and director-level managers, sixty or seventy people, get together quarterly to review results, discuss plans, examine ideas and directions.

Shortly before one of these meetings, I had received a wonderful letter from the mother of one of our handicapped employees. It was a touching letter of gratitude for the efforts of many people at Herman Miller to make life meaningful and rich for a person who is seriously disadvantaged. Because we have a strong, albeit a quiet, effort going on in the company to empower the disadvantaged and to recognize the authenticity of everyone in the group, it seemed to be a good idea to read this letter to the officers and directors.

I almost got through this letter but could not finish. There I stood in front of this group of people--some of them pretty hard-driving--tongue-tied and embarrassed, unable to continue. At that point, one of our senior vice presidents, Joe Schwartz--urbane, elegant, mature--strode up the center aisle, but his arm around my shoulder, kissed me on the cheek, and adjourned the meeting.

That is the kind of weeping we need more of. There is, unfortunately, another kind of weeping. Some years ago, one of our very competent managers left our headquarters to oversee a major installation in a large city. We wanted to give him all the help we could. One of our senior people asked him what he needed. The manager replied, "Tell the people at headquarters, when I call, to answer the phone and not treat me like a customer."

Well, that's enough to make one weep.

There are. I suspect, many people who don't weep. Why? These people are not intimate with their work. They must not be trying to live up to their potential. They must think they cannot fail. They have no covenant with their group.

There are people who weep tears different from the two kinds I have talked about. There are tears of frustration and chagrin. That kind of weeping we can do without.

What do we weep over? What should we weep over? By now, having read this far could probably predict that I would make a list. Here are some things we probably ought to weep about:

*superficiality
*a lack of dignity
*injustice, the flaw that prevents equity
*great news!
*tenderness
*a word of thanks
*separation
*arrogance
*betrayal of ideas, of principles, of quality
*jargon, because it confuses rather than clarifies
*looking at customers as interruptions
*leaders who watch bottom lines without watching behavior
*the inability of folks to tell the difference between heroes and celebrities
*confusing pleasure with meaning
*leaders who never say "Thank you"
*having to work in a job where you are not free to do your best
*good people trying to follow leaders who depend on politics and hierarchy rather than on trust and competence
*people who are gifts to the spirit

It would be easy to add some of the things under entropy in "Pink Ice in the Urinal." What would you add?
Why should you weep?

WMOM:LiaA:chap2

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= What Is Leadership? =

The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say
thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant and a
debtor. That sums up the progress of an artful leader.

Concepts
of leadership, ideas about leadership, and leadership practices are the
subject of much thought, discussion, writing, teaching, and learning.
True leaders are sought after and cultivated. Leadership is not an easy
subject to explain. A friend of mine characterizes leaders simply like
this: "Leaders don't inflict pain; they bear pain."

The goal of
thinking hard about leadership is not to produce great or charismatic or well-known leaders. The measure of leadership is not the quality of the head, but the tone of the body. The signs of outstanding leadership
appear primarily among the followers. Are the followers reaching their
potential? Are they learning? Serving? Do they achieve the required
results? Do they change with grace? Manage conflict?

I would like to ask you to think about the concept of leadership in a certain way.
Try to think about a leader, in the words of the gospel writer Luke, as
"one who serves." Leadership is a concept of owing certain things to the institution. It is a way of thinking about institutional heirs, a way of thinking about stewardship as contrasted with ownership. Robert Greenleaf has written an excellent book about this idea, Servant Leadership.

The art of leadership requires us to think about the leader-as-steward in
terms of relationships: of assets and legacy, of momentum and
effectiveness, of civility and values.

Leaders should leave behind them assets and a legacy. First, consider assets; certainly leaders owe assets. Leaders owe their institutions vital financial health, and the relationships and
reputation that enable continuity of that financial health. Leaders must deliver to their organizations the appropriate services, products,
tools, and equipment that people in the organization need in order to be accountable. In many institutions leaders are responsible for providing land and facilities.

But what else do leaders owe? What are artful leaders responsible for? Surely we need to include people.
People are the heart and spirit of all that counts. Without people,
there is no need for leaders. Leaders can decide to be primarily
concerned with leaving assets to their institutional heirs or they can
go beyond that and capitalize on the opportunity to leave a legacy, a
legacy that takes into account the more difficult, qualitative side of
life, one which provides greater meaning, more challenge, and more joy
in the lives of those whom leaders enable.

Besides owing assets
to their institutions, leaders owe the people in those institutions
certain things. Leaders need to be concerned with the institutional
value system which, after all, leads to the principles and standards
that guide the practices of the people in the institution. Leaders owe a clear statement of the values of the organization. These values should
be broadly understood and agreed to and should shape our corporate and
individual behavior. What is this value system based on? How is it
expressed? How is it audited? These are not easy questions to deal with.

Leaders are also responsible for future leadership. They need to identify, develop, and nurture future leaders.

Leaders are responsible for such things as a sense of quality in the
institution, for whether or not the institution is open to influence and open to change. Effective leaders encourage contrary opinions, an
important source of vitality. I am talking about how leaders can nurture the roots of an institution, about a sense of continuity, about
institutional culture.

Leaders owe a covenant to the cooperation
or institution, which is, after all, a group of people. Leaders owe the
organization a new reference point for what caring, purposeful,
committed people can be in the institutional setting. Notice I did not
say what people can do—what we can do is merely a consequence of what we can be. Corporations, like the people who compose them, are always in a state of becoming. Covenants bind people together and enable them to
meet their institutional needs by meeting the needs of one another. We must
do this in a way that is consonant with the world around us.

Leaders owe a certain maturity. Maturity as expressed in a sense
of self-worth, a sense of belonging, a sense of expectancy, a sense of
responsibility, a sense of accountability, and a sense of equality.

Leaders owe the corporation rationality. Rationality gives reason and mutual
understanding to programs and to relationships. It gives visible order.
Excellence and commitment and competence are available to us only under
the rubric of rationality. A rational environment values trust and human dignity and provides the opportunity for personal development and
self-fulfillment in the attainment of the organization's goals.

Business literacy, understanding the economic basis of a cooperation, is
essential. Only a group of people who share a body of knowledge and
continually learn together can stay vital and viable.

Leaders owe people space, space in the sense of freedom. Freedom
in the sense of enabling our gifts to be exercised. We need to give each other the space to grow, to be ourselves, to exercise our diversity. We need to give each other space so that we may both give and receive such beautiful things as ideas, openness, dignity, joy, healing, and
inclusion. And in giving each other the gift of space, we need also to
offer the gifts of grace and beauty to which each of us is entitled.

Another way to think about what leaders owe is to ask this question: What is it without which this institution would not be what it is?

Leaders are obligated to provide and maintain momentum. Leadership comes with a lot of debts to the future. There are more
immediate obligations as well. Momentum is one. Momentum in a vital
company is palpable. It is not abstract or mysterious. It is the feeling among a group of people that their lives and work are intertwined and
moving toward a recognizable and legitimate goal. It begins with
competent leadership and a management team strongly dedicated to
aggressive managerial development and opportunities. This team's job is
to provide an environment that allows momentum to gather.

Momentum comes from a clear vision of what the cooperation ought to be, from a
well-thought-out strategy to achieve that vision, and from carefully
conceived and communicated directions and plans that enable everyone to
participate and be publicly accountable in achieving those plans.

Momentum depends on a pertinent but flexible research and
development program led by people with outstanding gifts and unique
talents. Momentum results when a cooperation has an aggressive,
professional, inspired group of people in its marketing and recruitment units. Momentum results when the operations group serves its customers in such a way that the customer sees them as their best supplier of tools,
equipment, and services. Underlying these complex activities is the
essential role of the financial team. They provide the financial
guidelines and the necessary ratios. They are responsible for equity
among the various groups that compose the corporate family.

Leaders are responsible for effectiveness. Much has been
written about effectiveness—some of the best of it by Peter Drucker. He
has such a great ability to simplify concepts. One of the things he
tells us is that efficiency is doing the thing right, but effectiveness
is doing the right thing.

Leaders can delegate efficiency, but
they must deal personally with effectiveness. Of course, the natural
question is "how." We could fill many pages dealing with how to be
effective, but I would like to touch on just two ways.

The first
is the understanding that effectiveness comes about through enabling
others to reach their potential—both their personal potential and their
organizational or institutional potential.

In some South Pacific cultures, a speaker holds a conch shell as a symbol of a temporary position of authority. Leaders must understand
who holds the conch—that is, who should be listened to and when. This
makes it possible for people to use their gifts to the fullest for the
benefit of everyone.

Sometimes, to be sure, a leader must choose
who is to speak. That is part of the risk of leadership. A leader must
assess capability. A leader must be a judge of people. For leaders
choose a person, not a position.

Another way to improve
effectiveness is to encourage roving leadership. Roving leadership
arises and expresses itself at varying times and in varying situations,
according to the dictates of those situations. Roving leaders have the
special gifts or the special strengths or the special temperament to
lead in these special situations. They are acknowledged by others who
are ready to follow them. (See "[[WMOM:LiaA:chap5|Roving Leadership]].")

Leaders must take a role in developing, expressing, and defending civility and values. In a civilized institution or corporation, we see good manners, respect for persons, an understanding of "good goods," and an appreciation of
the way in which we serve each other.

Civility has to do with
identifying values as opposed to following fashions. Civility might be
defined as an ability to distinguish between what is actually healthy
and what merely appears to be popular. A leader can tell the difference
between living edges and dying ones.

To lose sight of the beauty of ideas and of hope and opportunity,
and to frustrate the right to be needed, is to be at the dying edge.

To be a part of a throwaway mentality that discards goods and ideas, that
discards principles and law, that discards persons and families, is to
be at the dying edge.

To be at the leading edge of consumption, affluence, and instant gratification is to be at the dying edge.

To ignore the dignity of work and the elegance of simplicity, and the
essential responsibility of serving each other, is to be at the dying
edge.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is reported to have said this about simplicity: "I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side
of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other
side of complexity." To be at the living edge is to search out the
"simplicity on the other side of complexity."

In a day when so much energy seems to be spent on maintenance and manuals, on bureaucracy and meaningless quantification, to be a leader is to enjoy the special
privileges of complexity, of ambiguity, of diversity. But to be a leader means, especially, having the opportunity to make a meaningful
difference in the lives of those who permit leaders to lead.

WMOM:LiaA:chap3

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= Participative Premises =
What is it most of us really want from work? We would like to find the most effective, most productive, most rewarding way of working together. We would like to know that our work process uses all of the appropriate and pertinent resources: human, physical, financial. We would like a work process and relationships that meet our personal needs for belonging, for contributing, for meaningful work, for the opportunity to make a commitment, for the opportunity to grow and be at least reasonably in control of our own destinies. Finally we'd like someone to say "Thank you!"

Business has been moving for many years—and it will continue to do so—from a posture and a practice of management through power to a process of leadership through persuasion. This, of course, tends to make the use of formal organizational power out-of-date.

I believe that the most effective contemporary management process is participative management. Participative management is glibly discussed these days in a number of magazines and books, but it is not a theoretical position to be adopted after studying a few journals. It begins with a belief in the potential of people. Participative management without a belief in that potential and without convictions about the gifts people bring to organizations is a contradiction in terms.

Participative management arises out of the heart and out of a personal philosophy about people. It cannot be added to, or subtracted from, a corporate policy manual as though it were one more managerial tool.

Everyone has the right and the duty to influence decision making and to understand the results. Participative management guarantees that decisions will not be arbitrary, secret, or closed to questioning. Participative management is not democratic. Having a say differs from having a vote.

Effective influencing and understanding spring largely from healthy relationships among the members of the group. Leaders need to foster environments and work processes within which people can develop high-quality relationships—relationships with each other, relationships with the group with which we work, relationships with our clients and customers.

How does one approach the problem of turning the ideals about relationships into reality? There are no guaranteed formulas, but I would propose five steps as a starting point. Surely, you will revise and add to the list.

Respect people. This begins with an understanding of the diversity of their gifts. Understanding the diversity of these gifts enables us to begin taking the crucial step of trusting each other. It also enables us to begin to think in a new way about the strengths of others. Everyone comes with certain gifts—but not the same gifts. True participation and enlightened leadership allow these gifts to be expressed in different ways and at different times. For the CEO to vote on the kind of drill press to buy would be foolish. For the drill press operator (who should be voting on the kind of tool to use) to vote on whether to declare a stock split would be equally foolish.

Understand that what we believe precedes policy and practice. Here I am talking about both our corporate and personal value systems. It seems to me that our value system and world view should be as closely integrated into our work lives as they are integrated into our lives with our families, our churches, and our other activities and groups.

Many managers are concerned about their style. They wonder whether they are perceived as open or autocratic or participative. As practice is to policy, so style is to belief. Style is merely a consequence of what we believe, of what is in our hearts.

Agree on the rights of work. Each of us, no matter what our rank in the hierarchy may be, has the same rights: to be needed, to be involved, to have a covenantal relationship, to understand the corporation, to affect our destiny, to be accountable, to appeal, to make a commitment. I will say more about the rights of work in the next chapter.

Understand the respective role and relationship of contractual agreements and covenants. Contractual relationships cover such things as expectations, objectives, compensation, working conditions, benefits, incentive opportunities, constraints, timetables, etc. These are all a part of our normal life and need to be there.

But more is needed—particularly today when the majority of us who work can properly be classified as volunteers. The best people working for organizations are like volunteers. Since they could probably find good jobs in any number of groups, they choose to work somewhere for reasons less tangible than salary or position. Volunteers do not need contracts, they need covenants.

Covenantal relationships enable cooperations and institutions to be hospitable to the unusual person and to unusual ideas. Covenantal relationships enable participation to be practiced and inclusive groups to be formed. The differences between covenants and contracts appear in detail in [[WMOM:LiaA:chap6|“Intimacy."]]

Understand that relationships count more than structure. Every educational institution goes through periodic evaluation by some sort of accreditation committee. A small college with which I have been associated went through such an evaluation recently. The committee's report noted an especially high level of trust between the president, who was to retire soon, and the faculty. To create this trust with the next president, the committee recommended that the college make the necessary changes in their “structure.” The president was justifiably amused. Structures do not have anything to do with trust. People build trust.

Finally, one question: Would you rather work as a part of an outstanding group or be a part of a group of outstanding individuals? This may be the key question in thinking about the premises behind participation.