There was a strange odor in the car, like someone had pooped in it. And, then she spoke, and out came a whiff of such unbelievable smell. Instinctively and subtly I touched my nose and winched—curse be my strong sensory acuity honed over my meditation practice!
Now, do you tell the person or not? It depends. In the end I did in a nice way. In the meantime we were going to have a Mandingo do, which, except for baby-regression over the papayas, there was not going to be frothing and slurping at the mandibles.
Brushing one’s teeth alone may not help with bad breath—also known as halitosis. For some people the problem runs deeper—no pun intended.
Memsahib was and still is (across the Atlantic) an extremely passionate and, by extension, very greedy in all her enterprises, including eating. The problem is as we grow older our metabolism slows down and, if you take in more than necessary to burn for fuel for daily activities, the excess has to go somewhere. Often the extras are sent into storage, resulting in big stomachs, swollen faces, and wide enormous buttocks. Since the storage process takes time, the excess food piling in the stomach turns to literal putrid pit latrines. Hence, the deep and nauseating foul breath oozing out of Mother Halitosis.
In the end, food, which has pleasure properties to encourage body nourishment for survival, morphs into suffering of obesity, foul smell and possible encounters with diabetes and other organ malfunctions. At the same time, the brain organ, for one, produces a mind that is cloudy, full of negative emotions of anger, revenge and resentfulness, inter alia.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Friday, June 24, 2011
Mind over Mood
Lately there have been a series of teenagers committing suicides after relentless taunting on the Internet social networks. A son of Bernie Madoff committed suicide because he couldn’t handle the disgrace following the story of his father’s billion-dollar chicanery blanketing the old and new media outlets. Politicians and other public figures are often subjected to withering calumnies on the tabloid media that could burn lesser mortals to ashes. Personally, I have had my fair share of vicious and malicious attacks on one Internet social media site. The latest began with my posting some relatively contrarian out-of-the-box points of view. A man (probably with the support of “enemy” bevy of rodents burrowed in the underworld of gossip dens), in such high-octane apoplectic rants, inveighed against me about my supposedly undistinguished life history: my family relationship and my gallivanting philandering loser self.
First, admittedly, when one throws the kitchen sink at you, there is an instantaneous instinctive reaction. Thanks to the evolutionary properties we are all endowed with. Notice and observe the moods that course through your body. How you deal with them is a function of your trained or untrained mind. You don’t want to lose balance and a commitment to your mission.
Mindful of my reactive moods, I asked the questions: Who is this guy? What mind state is he operating on? What are his motivations? How do I handle the situation?
I take the view that often the attacker or attackers do not know your core self, and yet have the temerity to focus on your life. Often these people have serious problems of their own. They are bullies full of inadequacies. Their morbid exercise may not be a Freudian projection, a defense mechanism for protecting oneself against anxiety arising from undesirable feelings of some forms of emotional and mental perturbations. It is more a Functional projection of some inner turmoil on to others in ways that is perceived to promote one’s survival enterprise. (Kenrick, “11).
Life always has choices. We do the best we can with what we have at the time. Assuming you have a handle on the fight-flight automatic evolutionary gift, get on a game plan of what I call Mind-over-Mood:
-Size up the situation
-Experience and become friendly with your moods in the moment
-What are your automatic thoughts on the incident?
-Evaluate the thoughts: concrete versus phantoms
-What alternative thoughts, if any, are there?
-Decide on a course of action
Here are some options:
1-Keep quiet and refuse to engage. Depending on your temperament, this may be a course of action that can shut up the perpetrator because he cannot rant against a silent wall.
2-Go toe-to-toe with the red-eyed monster on his reframing of the issues. Chances you will be in a shouting match, talking pass one another until hell freezes over. This is because both of you are operating at different chunking levels of basic premises to allow for genuine discussion. (Linden, ’97).
3-Stand up to the bully, but not on his terms of framing the issues. This was my choice. The dude chunked to two lateral levels
a. Superman coming to expose the evil me
b. Superman coming to save me from myself
I, on the other hand, chunked up to: What the fuck is this creature, I have never met or know doing with my family and my life? Fuck off!
Ab initio, we were not discussing anymore but talking to ourselves. And so, began the odyssey: He, proud of himself for having all kinds of unflattering information about me. Some double-headed cobras were in a state of orgasmic delirium from the pungent gunk gushing from the man’s rear-end orifice. I threw some stinging jabs a la Ali. That got him madder and madder. There were hints that he believed he was actually doing me a favor—a tell-tale sign to his mental state. End of story.
4-Where profits in money or votes are involved, or if you are so inclined, you might mount a counter-intelligence offensive and dig out muck on the perpetrator. There is always information on anybody that can be manipulated and twisted without context. So, you might play what the dude called “matches” with matches.
In the end it boils down to having a core and unshakable believe in who you are. Once you have that then “a word is not experience” or “a map is not the territory.” In the process of protecting your mood you might consider some loving-kindness mental exercise to ease your disgust of your “enemy.” You don’t want to flood your system with dangerous cortisol that can be triggered when the body senses real or imagined dangers. You are now a Teflon—a mind warrior—protected even in death.
First, admittedly, when one throws the kitchen sink at you, there is an instantaneous instinctive reaction. Thanks to the evolutionary properties we are all endowed with. Notice and observe the moods that course through your body. How you deal with them is a function of your trained or untrained mind. You don’t want to lose balance and a commitment to your mission.
Mindful of my reactive moods, I asked the questions: Who is this guy? What mind state is he operating on? What are his motivations? How do I handle the situation?
I take the view that often the attacker or attackers do not know your core self, and yet have the temerity to focus on your life. Often these people have serious problems of their own. They are bullies full of inadequacies. Their morbid exercise may not be a Freudian projection, a defense mechanism for protecting oneself against anxiety arising from undesirable feelings of some forms of emotional and mental perturbations. It is more a Functional projection of some inner turmoil on to others in ways that is perceived to promote one’s survival enterprise. (Kenrick, “11).
Life always has choices. We do the best we can with what we have at the time. Assuming you have a handle on the fight-flight automatic evolutionary gift, get on a game plan of what I call Mind-over-Mood:
-Size up the situation
-Experience and become friendly with your moods in the moment
-What are your automatic thoughts on the incident?
-Evaluate the thoughts: concrete versus phantoms
-What alternative thoughts, if any, are there?
-Decide on a course of action
Here are some options:
1-Keep quiet and refuse to engage. Depending on your temperament, this may be a course of action that can shut up the perpetrator because he cannot rant against a silent wall.
2-Go toe-to-toe with the red-eyed monster on his reframing of the issues. Chances you will be in a shouting match, talking pass one another until hell freezes over. This is because both of you are operating at different chunking levels of basic premises to allow for genuine discussion. (Linden, ’97).
3-Stand up to the bully, but not on his terms of framing the issues. This was my choice. The dude chunked to two lateral levels
a. Superman coming to expose the evil me
b. Superman coming to save me from myself
I, on the other hand, chunked up to: What the fuck is this creature, I have never met or know doing with my family and my life? Fuck off!
Ab initio, we were not discussing anymore but talking to ourselves. And so, began the odyssey: He, proud of himself for having all kinds of unflattering information about me. Some double-headed cobras were in a state of orgasmic delirium from the pungent gunk gushing from the man’s rear-end orifice. I threw some stinging jabs a la Ali. That got him madder and madder. There were hints that he believed he was actually doing me a favor—a tell-tale sign to his mental state. End of story.
4-Where profits in money or votes are involved, or if you are so inclined, you might mount a counter-intelligence offensive and dig out muck on the perpetrator. There is always information on anybody that can be manipulated and twisted without context. So, you might play what the dude called “matches” with matches.
In the end it boils down to having a core and unshakable believe in who you are. Once you have that then “a word is not experience” or “a map is not the territory.” In the process of protecting your mood you might consider some loving-kindness mental exercise to ease your disgust of your “enemy.” You don’t want to flood your system with dangerous cortisol that can be triggered when the body senses real or imagined dangers. You are now a Teflon—a mind warrior—protected even in death.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Glimpses into the Out-group Homogeneity
Friday, June 17, 2011Glimpses into the Out-group Homogeneity*
http://the-liberalmanifesto.blogspot.com/
Wes Nisker posits that in the journey to self-discovery and understanding of our behaviors, the fundamental place to start with is to pose the question: “Who am I?” This is not about me, the teacher, the footballer or what have you. It is about getting some idea to the questions: Where do I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? The answer to “Who am I?” is “…of vital importance to our happiness and well-being. How at ease we feel in our body, mind and the world, as well as how we behave toward others and the environment all revolve around how we view ourselves in the larger scheme of things.”
Scientific researches are increasingly proving what has long been hypothesized that beneath the veneer of civilization and culture, our behaviors are functionally primal and inclined towards basic survival and procreation as a means of gene succession.
Take the case of Ugandans: Most of us have received formal education and many make claims to religious faith. The majority pay allegiance to Christianity whose basic tenet is “Love thy neighbor.” However, from the same mouth that sings the glory to the Christ, the champion of ‘Love thy neighbor,” also gushes morbid coded venoms, such as: “Those people,” “You people,” “The Anyanya (not the ones of the 50’s and 60’s Sudan),” “A good Muganda is a dead one,” or “Biological substances (forgetting we are all biological organisms).” We have insulted one another, we have killed one another, and we have hogged power and suppressed others. All the while saddling the other with being primitive. All the while some have been good parents, good sons, good friends, good church goers, good priests and imams, and may have even been generous to a fault. What is going on?
It is seems that we are not one Self. We have multiple selves or rather may be sublevels of or forms of the mundane Self. Often we negotiate each sublevel appropriately for the occasion. Often we don’t and, at the extreme end, may even be pathological.
And this brings us back to “Those people,” a euphemism for painting the “others” with one brush of Out-group Homogeneity—“you have seen one, you have seen them all.” In my childhood eyes, for example, I could not figure out the physical differences between people in the Indian community. This persisted until eventually I began to recognize individual differences. What was happening was that I could only use my limited cognitive resources to interactions and differentiations within the larger in-group of the black population of my lottery win.
As an adult, did this phenomenon of seeing no differences in the out-group disappear or still lies dormant somewhere in the labyrinthine hard-drive of my amazing brain?
It seems the Out-group Homogeneity has been horned over millions of years for survival: Those people came from over the river and brought diseases. So, stay way from them. When they came, our crops failed. Their women are witches. Those people came and rampaged through the village, killing males and old women, and carrying away young girls. They are our sworn enemy; never marry into their clan.
While Out-group Homogeneity has served us well, it also has its dark sides. Princes of darkness and demagoguery can take it and use it to destroy a group. History is full of it. The latest mayhems in Bosnia and Rwanda are testimonies to that. Many Acoli in Uganda and abroad feel that they have been subjected to the same. We risk relationships when we dismissively say it never happened, which then feeds into the “they-and-us” divide. Similarly, carping in discordant harangues may not win sympathetic ears and has the same “they-and-us.” effect.
So, it doesn’t seem that my childhood outlook vanished from my mind. It is undercover and could easily pop up as a default state at times of stress. Whether I use it or not, depends on whether I train myself or somebody has trained me to use alternative skills in conflicts. If I do, and you do, it will mean “taking whole” in the situation and we become super-cooperators**, which seems to be a much stronger and elegant survival tool.
*Douglas T. Kenrick, ‘11
**Nowak & Highfield, 11
http://the-liberalmanifesto.blogspot.com/
Wes Nisker posits that in the journey to self-discovery and understanding of our behaviors, the fundamental place to start with is to pose the question: “Who am I?” This is not about me, the teacher, the footballer or what have you. It is about getting some idea to the questions: Where do I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? The answer to “Who am I?” is “…of vital importance to our happiness and well-being. How at ease we feel in our body, mind and the world, as well as how we behave toward others and the environment all revolve around how we view ourselves in the larger scheme of things.”
Scientific researches are increasingly proving what has long been hypothesized that beneath the veneer of civilization and culture, our behaviors are functionally primal and inclined towards basic survival and procreation as a means of gene succession.
Take the case of Ugandans: Most of us have received formal education and many make claims to religious faith. The majority pay allegiance to Christianity whose basic tenet is “Love thy neighbor.” However, from the same mouth that sings the glory to the Christ, the champion of ‘Love thy neighbor,” also gushes morbid coded venoms, such as: “Those people,” “You people,” “The Anyanya (not the ones of the 50’s and 60’s Sudan),” “A good Muganda is a dead one,” or “Biological substances (forgetting we are all biological organisms).” We have insulted one another, we have killed one another, and we have hogged power and suppressed others. All the while saddling the other with being primitive. All the while some have been good parents, good sons, good friends, good church goers, good priests and imams, and may have even been generous to a fault. What is going on?
It is seems that we are not one Self. We have multiple selves or rather may be sublevels of or forms of the mundane Self. Often we negotiate each sublevel appropriately for the occasion. Often we don’t and, at the extreme end, may even be pathological.
And this brings us back to “Those people,” a euphemism for painting the “others” with one brush of Out-group Homogeneity—“you have seen one, you have seen them all.” In my childhood eyes, for example, I could not figure out the physical differences between people in the Indian community. This persisted until eventually I began to recognize individual differences. What was happening was that I could only use my limited cognitive resources to interactions and differentiations within the larger in-group of the black population of my lottery win.
As an adult, did this phenomenon of seeing no differences in the out-group disappear or still lies dormant somewhere in the labyrinthine hard-drive of my amazing brain?
It seems the Out-group Homogeneity has been horned over millions of years for survival: Those people came from over the river and brought diseases. So, stay way from them. When they came, our crops failed. Their women are witches. Those people came and rampaged through the village, killing males and old women, and carrying away young girls. They are our sworn enemy; never marry into their clan.
While Out-group Homogeneity has served us well, it also has its dark sides. Princes of darkness and demagoguery can take it and use it to destroy a group. History is full of it. The latest mayhems in Bosnia and Rwanda are testimonies to that. Many Acoli in Uganda and abroad feel that they have been subjected to the same. We risk relationships when we dismissively say it never happened, which then feeds into the “they-and-us” divide. Similarly, carping in discordant harangues may not win sympathetic ears and has the same “they-and-us.” effect.
So, it doesn’t seem that my childhood outlook vanished from my mind. It is undercover and could easily pop up as a default state at times of stress. Whether I use it or not, depends on whether I train myself or somebody has trained me to use alternative skills in conflicts. If I do, and you do, it will mean “taking whole” in the situation and we become super-cooperators**, which seems to be a much stronger and elegant survival tool.
*Douglas T. Kenrick, ‘11
**Nowak & Highfield, 11
Sunday, June 5, 2011
The Liberal Manifesto
This is a sister blog that is worth checking:
http://the-liberalmanifesto.blogspot.com/
The Liberal Manifesto
The Liberal Manifesto is a blog that endeavors to work for Uganda’s Freedom, Equality, Fairness, Progress and Happiness—the essence of any 21st Century enlightened people. While Museveni relies largely on his infamous troika of cooking stones as the bedrock of his rule deluged with anxieties and intrigues, we believe that the pentathlon principles are the foundation mortar for transforming a society. Courage, Objectivity, Fairness and Open-mindedness will guide us in dissecting issues.
The Liberal Manifesto focus is on the individual—and by extension, the entire population. Assuming maps of reality differ from one person to the next, the questions we ask are: What does freedom, equality, fairness, progress and happiness mean to a Ugandan man or woman? Hopefully, in time, we will come to a collective consensus map of reality that gives more empowering choices for actions to the individual.
The Liberal Manifesto believes that we are all born Free to realize our individual potentials. We also believe everyone’s main objective is Happiness, however defined.
As a member of society the individual’s Freedom and Happiness have in time hinged on societal advancement and promotion of Equality, Fairness and Progress—lack of which have often led to imbalance and disharmony.
Uganda, at its core, is now in state of disharmony and imbalance. The Liberal Manifesto’s work to help steer the Uganda to harmony and balance is cut out. We know the historical nightmares. We know the characters that are taking the ship towards a precipice.
John Dermatini says that there are seven areas that show up in every society and in every person: Intellect, Culture, Vocation, Finance, Social, Spiritual and Health. Any time a person or society is disempowered in five of those areas, they will be overpowered. Any society that has been suppressed, there is usually lack of Intellectual, Vocational, Financial and Physical Strength. Where do many Ugandans stand today?
Our individual narratives form the stories of our lives. My identity, your identity is informed from each of our stories to date. Superimposed on this identity are cultural narratives and stories that gel into the collective identity of a society. Narratives, Stories and Identities are the raw data from whence realities emanate. Our challenge is to be cognizant of those narratives, stories and identities to incorporate what we perceive as the liberal universal sense of Freedom, Equality, Fairness, Progress and Happiness.
No opinion is off-limits as along as it is not vapid tirades that do not elegantly advances pro and counter arguments. We especially would like to know from those who think or believe that the status quo is tenable.
http://the-liberalmanifesto.blogspot.com/
The Liberal Manifesto
The Liberal Manifesto is a blog that endeavors to work for Uganda’s Freedom, Equality, Fairness, Progress and Happiness—the essence of any 21st Century enlightened people. While Museveni relies largely on his infamous troika of cooking stones as the bedrock of his rule deluged with anxieties and intrigues, we believe that the pentathlon principles are the foundation mortar for transforming a society. Courage, Objectivity, Fairness and Open-mindedness will guide us in dissecting issues.
The Liberal Manifesto focus is on the individual—and by extension, the entire population. Assuming maps of reality differ from one person to the next, the questions we ask are: What does freedom, equality, fairness, progress and happiness mean to a Ugandan man or woman? Hopefully, in time, we will come to a collective consensus map of reality that gives more empowering choices for actions to the individual.
The Liberal Manifesto believes that we are all born Free to realize our individual potentials. We also believe everyone’s main objective is Happiness, however defined.
As a member of society the individual’s Freedom and Happiness have in time hinged on societal advancement and promotion of Equality, Fairness and Progress—lack of which have often led to imbalance and disharmony.
Uganda, at its core, is now in state of disharmony and imbalance. The Liberal Manifesto’s work to help steer the Uganda to harmony and balance is cut out. We know the historical nightmares. We know the characters that are taking the ship towards a precipice.
John Dermatini says that there are seven areas that show up in every society and in every person: Intellect, Culture, Vocation, Finance, Social, Spiritual and Health. Any time a person or society is disempowered in five of those areas, they will be overpowered. Any society that has been suppressed, there is usually lack of Intellectual, Vocational, Financial and Physical Strength. Where do many Ugandans stand today?
Our individual narratives form the stories of our lives. My identity, your identity is informed from each of our stories to date. Superimposed on this identity are cultural narratives and stories that gel into the collective identity of a society. Narratives, Stories and Identities are the raw data from whence realities emanate. Our challenge is to be cognizant of those narratives, stories and identities to incorporate what we perceive as the liberal universal sense of Freedom, Equality, Fairness, Progress and Happiness.
No opinion is off-limits as along as it is not vapid tirades that do not elegantly advances pro and counter arguments. We especially would like to know from those who think or believe that the status quo is tenable.
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