Free your mind, the rest will follow

Pat Macpherson, Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly; David G Allen, Wise Up (BBC.com, 6-2-14)

“You can’t shut it up by trying to shut it off.” [Observe it without judgment.] (Thinkstock)

 

Is it Zen, or just the art of getting things done?

The new hot trend in Silicon Valley office culture is a Buddh-ish encouragement of workplace mindfulness. Guided meditation is the new free cafeteria meals.

 

But David G Allen, author of the international bestselling productivity bible, Getting Things Done, has been teaching people how to reach higher levels of cognitive thinking for almost two decades. Like Eastern [Buddhist] mindfulness, his solution is simple but challenging to fully implement.

If that doesn’t raise any follow-up questions you can stop reading and get to it. But the truth is most people don’t know how to clear their mind.

 

Combat expat homesickness

Buddhism encourages you to focus on the breath or a single thought to calm the mad monkey screeching in your skull. Such practice has been empirically shown to strengthen emotional resilience and increase happiness.

 

But then the nagging thoughts start to creep in. You know the ones. Not big thoughts, but the mundane, seemingly benign nagging mental memos: “Did I send that email?” “I need to tell my boss something before the meeting.” “What was that idea I had this morning in the shower?” “I know I’m forgetting something.”

 

“We have to shut the mundane up,” Allen said to me in a phone interview a few months after we met on a stage in Austin, Texas, in the US at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival to discuss his well-known productivity method. Allen’s route to freeing the mind of its detritus is a more practical one than prescribed by most religions.

 

Would you work here?

“The strange paradox is you actually have to use your mind to shut your mind up,” he said. But not by meditation or mantras. “You can’t shut it up by trying to shut it off. What you have to do is [ask yourself,] ‘Why is this on my mind?’” More

What is "art"? (cartoons, illusions...)

Amber Larson, CC Liu, and Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly; the artist Saara (Arkiharha)

Saara (Arkiharha) pondering art and free expression in Finland (Weekday-Illusion)

 

The fun Finnish cartoonist, devi, and graphic artist noticed our coverage. Saara is an obscure but prolific talent. We love her work, which can be found at many outlets like such as Arkiharha and such as Weekday-Illusion (our nod to awkward beauty pageant contestant Miss South Carolina).
 
She is expressing herself in her work and in a letter to us:

 

"Susse" (Saara/Arkiharha/flickr)

"Wow, it's crazy to find a post full of my pictures and comics! Nice analysis, too. Maybe I kinda succeeded to pass on my thoughts in a visual way, because you get the idea from most of them -- even when they are written in Finnish!"
 
See Wisdom Quarterly coverage here: My cartoon ART is your perception

REPLY: Saara, send in art you are eager for the world to see, like your beautiful sketches of the Buddha. We would be overjoyed to feature more.

 

Comic vignettes as art "Kuva" (Saara/Arkiharha/flickr)

If you have "class" you know a bottle of "fine" wine and classical string instruments like a Stratavarious are the only things to sip or listen to. But you're wrong. Science says you're wrong. So surely when you add that only oil on canvas can be art and not no people pleasing cartoony comics, you're wrong, too. Don't tell us. We like classical. Tell it to science:

 

The way to get people to better enjoy craapy fermented grape juice that sells for thousands of dollars is to say it sells for more. Just a better bottle and a price change, or serving it with an elegant story of its venerable origins, its pedigree, is enough to make it "taste" better. How classy of study participants.

Can comics and webcam colors be called art?

fMRI scans prove bad alcohol actually tastes better when it's two-buck-chuck krup is said to be something more expensive and classy. Expensive wine tastes better. Let's call it "neuromarketing." Marketers have known about this effect for years regarding other foods. Before they started loading fruit juices with added flavorants (cynically called "natural flavors" not because they're natural but because they synthetically mimic something "natural" rather than something artificial) and artificial colorants.

My doggy, my doggy...oh, you've come back! "Sarjis 12.8"  (Saara/Arkiharha/flickr)

 

Vegan Food Fest, Los Angeles

Flavorless red colors make things taste better. Blindfolded we might not be able to tell a difference or say which drink is what fruit. We use color as a clue, and it works. The flavor of dull tasting juice is brightened just by brightening its color. Such is the illusion we live in and the hypnotic states we fall into every other moment.

If we would meditate, we could emerge and be dehypnotized.

Hungry ghost, psychic ("Bobb")

But we love our illusions, delusions, and dreams. And we would directly-personally-verifiably find that we are (w)holistic beings, not mind (intangible processes)/body (senses) possessing spirits like it seems.

 

Today a study is making headlines saying that an old Stradavarius violin sounds no better than a modern one. In fact, if one believes this study, the modern one sounds better. More musicians prefer it. (But maybe they are voting for the one they think is the Strad which is the one they fear the study would find inferior?)

The Distortions

It's all how we look at the world we are creating each and every without realizing what we're choosing. Art can sensitize and teach us as we clear our mental perception of the distortions/perversions (Wisdom Quarterly). "Hiljattain päivitetty" (Saara/Arkiharha).

Audio Test: Can we tell the difference between expensive and overpriced instruments?

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace

Pat Macpherson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Rosecrans Baldwin (npr.org); Nikil Saval

What are you doing? - I'm just happy to see you. - I can tell. You're outta here because you're nothing more than a third cousin to a chimp, Macpherson. Soundly Coldhotcar said so!*

Hell hath many names... Hades, Gehenna, Niraya, and can be very ironic in Buddhism.

 

So long, palace, riches, and power!

Man was not meant to waste away in quiet desperation in a cubicle. Woman, maybe. Probably not either. That is what "work" in the West has become. We have been cubed. 

To think I, like Siddhartha, could cut the cord and go. Go on a quest. Become a truthseeker. But my boss is calling, and she doesn't like to be kept waiting no matter what I'm doing. 

 

Hello, severe austerities and peace.

"Macpherson, what are you doing?!" Thinking 'bout bananas? "Here's a notepad; take some dictation!"

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." Uh-oh. This is going to be a long one. Good thing NPR/SCPR never stops whispering in the background. Author Nikil Saval proves it wasn't always like this. There was a time when a person could earn a right livelihood doing something more than shuffling papers from the in-box to the out-box before the clock on the wall lets us go for the day.

NPR is not good for dogs, but humans like it where Free Speech Radio is not available.

Cubed

Cubed (Nikil Saval)

I was fresh out of college, working at a Web design company. The office had an open layout. We all shared long tables. I did have a window that looked onto a stone wall. Otherwise, I was given a computer, a drawer, and a fancy ergonomic chair.

Then, about a month into the job, my hands completely froze over the keyboard. I couldn't move my fingers for half a minute, in the grip of my very first panic attack. I'd wonder later, was I simply not cut out for office work? Or was office work not cut out for anybody at all:

• AUDIO (Rosecrans Baldwin, NPR)
• LISTEN NOW: Nikil Saval interviewed by Rachel Martin (Weekend Edition Sunday)

Soundly Coldhotcar (Sonali Kohlhatkar) with Dr. Jared Diamond

*(Uprising Radio) In The Third Chimpanzee (newly reissued for young adults in April 2014), Pulitzer Prize-winning author and UCLA researcher Jared Diamond (famous for Guns, Germs, and Steel) explores how humans fit among other animal species and also what sets us apart. He explains how we have evolved in our behaviors to perpetuate our genes into future generations, how and why we developed language, culture, art, and what the future holds for the human race given our evolutionary past.

Mt. Everest to close for the season (audio)

Seth Auberon, Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly; T.J. Raphael, The World (pri.org)

Dangerous Mt. Everest (Kristoffer Erickson/news.nationalgeographic.com)

  

Yeti hunters, Everest, 1954 (dailymail.co.uk)

Sherpas -- members of a Himalayan ethnic group renowned for their skill at high-altitude climbing -- are crucial to operations on Mount Everest.

They earn a mere $3,000-5,000 risking their lives helping others scale the mountain during each two-to-three-month climbing season. They do on a regular basis what others pay to accomplish just once in a lifetime, putting their lives at great risk for affluent clients due to poverty they are never able to emerge from.
 

Last Friday, an avalanche roared down a climbing route on Everest, killing 13 Sherpa guides and leaving three others missing. When it occurred the Sherpas, who have centuries of history in Nepal's alpine region, were working at 21,000 feet, fixing ropes and preparing the path ahead of peak mountaineering season.

 

Tibet's Rongbuk Buddhist monastery with Mt. Everest in background (wiki commons)

 

Who climbs Mt. Everest without a Sherpa?

As the Sherpa community mourns the loss of family members and friends, the group is considering an unprecedented move: a strike.

On Sunday, disappointed by the Nepali government’s offer of 40,000 rupees ($408) as compensation for the families of each of the dead, some Sherpas gathered at Everest’s base camp to propose a “work stoppage” that could disrupt or cancel the 334 expeditions planned for the 2014 climbing season.

Ellen Barry, South Asia Bureau Chief for The New York Times, says while Sherpas have lived with these conditions for many years, last week's accident changed things.

"I think just the magnitude of the loss of life from Friday's accident has prompted very unusual decisions," she says. More