The Mysterious Journey of Waking Up, Part 2 from Prosperos Video on Vimeo.
I invite you to consider my approach to the challenge of “tribalism” that we face today in our swiftly changing world.
You will learn how to connect with the universal ESSENCE that is always calmly centered within you. ESSENCE is personally available to you and yet, it is not “tribal”.
(www.theprosperos.org)
“If you know better, do better.”
–Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American poet, singer, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. Wikipedia
“If your hair’s on fire, act like your hair’s on fire.”
–Senator Nina Turner
Nina Hudson Turner (born December 7, 1967) is an American politician from Ohio. A member of the Democratic Party, she was a Cleveland City Councillor from 2006 to 2008 and an Ohio State Senator from 2008 until 2014. She was the Democratic candidate for Ohio Secretary of State in 2014 but lost in the general election. Wikipedia
Nautilus|getpocket.com
SuperStock / Getty Images
Violence has been the sire of all the world’s values,” wrote poet Robinson Jeffers in 1940. “What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine the fleet limbs of the antelope? What but fear winged the birds, and hunger jeweled with such eyes the great goshawk’s head?”
We’ve taken these metaphors for evolution to heart, reading them to mean that life is a race to kill or be killed. “Darwinian” stands in for “cutthroat,” “survival of the fittest” signifies survival of the ruthless. We see selective pressures that hone each organism for success and drive genetic innovation as the natural order of things.
Two Models of Evolution: The early interpretation of Darwinian evolution as life-or-death contest is being complemented by an understanding of the importance of cooperation. Photo by Martin Harvey / Auscape / Getty Images.
But we know now that that picture is incomplete. Evolutionary progress can be propelled both by the competitive struggle to adapt to an environment, and by the relaxation of selective forces. When natural selection on an organism is relaxed, the creative powers of mutation can be unshackled and evolution accelerated. The relief of an easier life can inspire new biological forms just as powerfully as the threat of death.
One of the best ways to relax selective forces is to work together, something that mathematical biologist Martin Nowak has called the “snuggle for survival.” New research has only deepened and broadened the importance of cooperation and lifting of selective pressures. It’s a big, snuggly world out there.
***
The fitness of a species can be thought of as a multi-dimensional landscape defined by its compatibility with its environment. The species’ place within that landscape is determined by parameters like its fertility, metabolism, strength, and so on. A “peak” in this landscape represents a place in parameter space where a species’ fitness is high, a “valley” where it could be on the brink of extinction. The slopes of the features are also important. A broad, gentle hill in the fitness landscape would represent an area where the population could mutate and still survive; a narrow ridge would indicate a razor-thin set of possibilities, where even a small change could plunge an individual with a new mutation off a cliff. When selection is relaxed, the fitness landscape itself changes, such that thin precipices broaden out to plateaus. Once a selective constraint is lifted off a trait, the population is able to explore a wider array of possibilities in related traits, and evolution may improvise more freely.
Selection can be relaxed by environmental factors, like a drop in predator numbers. But populations can also relax selection on themselves through their own behavior. A 2017 study conducted by researchers at the University of Sheffield tried to untangle the interplay between behavior and evolution by looking at a decidedly simple behavior in mice: huddling for warmth. The scientists simulated a population of mice, specifying their insulation and metabolic rate, and whether they were loners or huddlers. They tasked an evolutionary algorithm to optimize each population’s metabolic cost while maintaining an ideal temperature range.
The harsh environment didn’t drive the evolution of the behaviors—the behaviors enabled the colonization of harsh environments.
In the case of loners, the solution space allowing mice to efficiently maintain adequate temperatures was tiny. This is doubly problematic for a species. First, if the viable solution space is restricted, it’s much harder for evolution’s random walk to strike upon—“like finding a needle in a haystack.” And secondly, once a solution is found, it’s harder to explore subsequent, potentially beneficial mutations. When a species is inching along a narrow ridge in the fitness landscape, any false step could push it toward extinction. In the researchers’ model, huddling for warmth served to relax selection on the animal’s insulation, allowing genes controlling their metabolism to vary more without compromising their ability to maintain an optimal temperature. This softened the fitness peak, so that successive generations could rapidly explore a broad swath of the fitness landscape and accumulate a greater variety of mutations, providing a richer gene pool that might later be selected for in future times of environmental change. Of course, relaxing selection can also serve to increase the load of potentially deleterious mutations, so there is a tradeoff. But when selection is relaxed and populations are freer to explore the fitness landscape, they may stumble on large adaptive innovations faster.
The authors draw a parallel with the evolution of warm-blooded animals from cold-blooded reptiles. It seems likely that an offshoot of reptiles evolved an insulating factor serving to relax selection—like fur or large body mass—before they began maintaining high body temperatures. Small warm-blooded animals face a great metabolic challenge, as their ratio of surface area to volume is so high that they radiate an enormous amount of heat. Once insulation was in place, the metabolism of proto-mammals was freer to mutate and hit upon stable body temperatures. And when they “discovered” warm-bloodedness, they realized a massive advantage: The first mammals could reliably hunt and forage at night, opening entirely new niches and ultimately resulting in a wildly successful class of animals. The authors argue that by huddling, mice effectively form a “super organism”—sharing heat to behaviorally approximate the benefits inherent to larger organisms without having to evolve a larger body, allowing their metabolism more freedom to change. Of course, computational studies must be taken with a grain of salt—given any model’s requisite assumptions and simplifications—though they allow us to simulate experiments that would take millennia to unfold in nature.
By studying the phylogenetic history of related species, we can begin to correlate the interplay of behaviors with evolutionary dynamics in the real world. In 2017, scientists from Lund University, in Sweden, analyzed the breeding strategies of 4,000 bird species, tracking their movements into new ecosystems using known genetic relationships between the birds. It’s long been known that cooperative-breeding strategies are common in harsh environments. The assumption was that difficult conditions encouraged species to evolve sociable behaviors (at least toward relatives). But what if this presumed causality had it backward? By analyzing the historical migrations of birds, the researchers discovered that species that had already evolved cooperative behaviors in a benign environment were twice as likely to have moved into a harsh one than non-cooperative breeders. The researchers speculate that cooperation buffers against unpredictable breeding seasons, allowing already social populations to be more successful in invading new niches. The harsh environment didn’t drive the evolution of the behaviors—the behaviors enabled the colonization of harsh environments.
***
We tend to conceive of life as separate from its habitat: The environment is a kind of container, and life is like a liquid that adapts to fill it. Sir Arthur Tansley introduced the concept of the ecosystem in 1935. He believed nature operated like a machine, and so, like an engineer, sought to map the flow of energy and matter through life and its environment. But an ecological niche is not, as I’d gathered from building shoebox dioramas in second grade, the raw physical parameters of an animal’s environment: salinity, alkalinity, humidity, temperature. It’s a web of relations, not just between a species and its habitat, but also with all the other species co-existing in the same space. A niche is no less dynamic than evolution is, contrary to Tansley’s mechanistic vision. “Palaeontologists often say that a burst of diversity in the fossil record simply ‘filled in ecological space,’ as if each new species simply took up residence in a square of a pre-existing chessboard,” writes paleobiologist Douglas Erwin. He suggests that a better analogy is that species build the chessboard themselves. Corals, for example, form their own protective niche by building reefs, which slow currents and reduce erosion on themselves. Reefs also serve to house countless other species, many of which have in turn evolved behaviors to protect corals. If an organism can modify its niche—by altering itself or its relationships with other species—it has the chance to build the world in which its future progeny will evolve, reshaping it to better ensure their survival.
Evolution is not a weapons race, but a peace treaty among interdependent nations.
One striking example of this kind of relationship emerged as a mystery during the dawn of microbiology. In the 19th century, bacteriologists cultured microbes using what was, at the time, cutting-edge technology: a warm vat of meat juice. Physician Robert Koch recognized that such broths likely harbored many different bacterial strains, and he surmised that if the bacteria were given a solid medium on which to grow, different colonies might be separated from each other and studied individually. He split a potato with a sterilized knife and smeared scrapings from an ill patient’s lesions onto it, creating the first solid culture. As different colonies formed, he isolated each onto a separate potato slice, but only a fraction of the divided strains survived alone.
It’s now estimated that 98 percent of bacterial species cannot be singly cultured in a lab, a constraint that is not a purely academic problem: It’s massively hampered the discovery of new biomedical compounds. Our best antibiotics have been stolen from bacteria themselves; after millions of years of co-evolution, many bacteria have evolved highly effective poisons to thwart one another. But if we can’t grow most strains in labs, we can’t isolate the potentially useful compounds they produce. Until 2015, we hadn’t discovered a new class of antibiotic since 1987, and because bacteria evolve so rapidly, many have grown resistant to the antibiotics we’ve employed the past 30+ years. There are doubtless many reasons bacteria resist lab life, but chief among them is the fact that, in the wild, bacteria are not self-sufficient: They’ve co-evolved to depend on each other. It may seem precarious, from the vantage point of natural selection, for species to require each other to survive, but the overwhelming ubiquity of interdependence suggest it must have serious advantages. The Black Queen Hypothesis describes one such possibility.
In the Black Queen model, organisms shed genes coding for functions that other species in the environment already provide. It’s a foil to the better-known Red Queen hypothesis, which posits that organisms are subject to a sort of evolutionary arms race, ever adapting new weapons and defenses just to avoid extinction. Though evolution is often characterized as a forward march of complexity, organisms actually shed genes quite often. Biological functions are metabolically costly to maintain, and if they aren’t strictly necessary, they’re best excluded from a genome. (The Black Queen Hypothesis takes its name from the game of Hearts, wherein players try to avoid picking up the queen of spades to avoid a particularly heavy penalty.) A canonical illustration of the Black Queen Hypothesis is found in two free-floating marine cyanobacteria, Synechococcus and Prochlorococcus. They use photosynthesis to feed themselves but are both harmed by a toxic byproduct of the process, hydrogen peroxide. An enzyme that can neutralize hydrogen peroxide, catalase peroxidase, is particularly costly to produce. And, though both need it to survive, only Synechococcus carries the genes for it. Synechococcus mops up all the hydrogen peroxide in the environment, while Prochlorococcus enjoys protection at an energetic discount.
Helper species like Synechococcus can become keystone species in an ecosystem. Because they provide a common good necessary for many species, they may come to be shielded from competition by the species that rely on them, as happens with corals. The success of Prochlorococcus is directly dependent on the relative abundance of Synechococcus. If it begins to outgrow its helper, its numbers will be culled by an increase in hydrogen peroxide. The chessboard has changed: Existence is not a zero-sum game. Shedding the genes for catalase peroxidase confers a substantial energetic benefit to Prochlorococcus, and, as we’ve seen, relaxing selection on a species may allow it to explore new functions in other realms.
Evolution at Work: Technology that enables cooperation has accelerated the evolution of our species.
Long periods of harmonious co-existence may be the evolutionary precursor for true symbiotic relationships. Billions of years ago, another ancient cyanobacteria was engulfed and “domesticated” by an ancestor of plants. It shed most of the genes it needed for an independent existence and became what we now know as the chloroplast. In return for a safe environment, these chloroplasts performed photosynthesis for their hosts, fueling a new form of life that eventually spread over much of the Earth. It’s likely this same kind of division of labor was a seed for the development of multicellular organisms. Here, evolution is not a weapons race, but a peace treaty among interdependent nations.
***
You and I may never have evolved if it weren’t for relaxed selection. Humans have created a unique global niche where we are largely shielded from selective forces: Agriculture staves off starvation, medicine protects us from disease, cultural norms promote group harmony. Our evolution has been profoundly influenced by our selection-buffering behaviors. For instance, the appearance of some modern human features appears to be correlated with a rise in energy consumption, linked to the introduction of meat in our diet. Our ancestor Homo erectus began eating significantly more meat than its predecessors, yet its jaws and teeth were made for crushing tough plant matter and ill-adapted for chewing flesh. This species, it seems, was using tools not only to hunt but also to process meat (and, possibly, using fire to cook it). Energy-rich meat relaxed selection on our metabolism and digestive system—we could devote tenfold less time to chewing vegetation—which paved the way for our modern physiology. Our teeth, jaws, and guts shrank, allowing more energy to be allocated to our swelling brains, which necessitated a protracted, calorie-rich childhood to fully develop. Armed with crude but effective hand axes, Homo erectus shifted its evolutionary destiny. In humans and other animals that learn socially, selection buffering is especially powerful: Adaptive habits, like huddling for warmth and using tools to prepare food, can sweep through a population much faster than genomic changes.
Our genomes continue to be affected by culture to this day. Take the lactase gene, which codes for the enzyme that digests lactose in milk. While it’s present in all human genomes, it has traditionally been turned off after infancy, when children stop nursing. But relatively recently in our natural history, several different groups that farmed cattle evolved the ability to digest lactose throughout their lives, enabling access to a new, valuable form of nutrition. Today it is the descendants of those groups who can drink milk as adults without ill effects.
As humans collected into ever larger groups, the discovery of increasingly complex technology was accelerated. In high-density settlements, artisans and innovators could specialize in their crafts and exchange ideas. Selection for tool development has had an associated pressure on our ability to co-exist peacefully in large numbers, and aggressive, uncooperative individuals may have been selected against. We’ve become, by most accounts, a gentler, more cooperative species over time. Our testosterone levels, for instance, appear to have dropped, judging by the brow size of our fossilized predecessors. Some scientists suggest that the emergence of complex human culture amounts to us having, effectively, domesticated ourselves.
For those most invested in the old-school Darwinian view of the survival of the fittest and violence as virtue, then, the message is clear: Just relax.
Kelly Clancy studies neuroscience as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Basel, in Switzerland. Previously, she roamed the world as an astronomer and served with the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan. She won the 2014 Regeneron Prize for Creative Innovation for her work designing drug-free brain therapies.
This article was originally published on March 23, 2017, by Nautilus, and is republished here with permission.
January 06, 2020 (hbr.org)
I was sitting across the table from a Silicon Valley CEO who had pioneered a technology that touches many of our lives — the flash memory that stores data on smartphones, digital cameras, and computers. He was a frequent guest on CNBC and had been delivering business presentations for at least 20 years before we met. And yet, the CEO wanted to sharpen his public speaking skills.
“You’re very successful. You’re considered a good speaker. Why do you feel as though you need to improve?” I asked.
“I can always get better,” he responded. “Every point up or down in our share price means billions of dollars in our company’s valuation. How well I communicate makes a big difference.”
This is just one example of the many CEOs and entrepreneurs I have coached on their communication skills over the past two decades, but he serves as a valuable case in point. Often, the people who most want my help are already established and admired for their skills. Psychologists say this can be explained by a phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Simply put, people who are mediocre at certain things often think they are better than they actually are, and therefore, fail to grow and improve. Great leaders, on the other hand, are great for a reason — they recognize their weaknesses and seek to get better.
The following tips are for business professionals who are already comfortable with giving presentations — and may even be admired for their skills — but who, nonetheless, want to excel.
1) Great presenters use fewer slides — and fewer words.
McKinsey is one of the most selective consulting companies in the world, and one I have worked with many times in this area. Senior McKinsey partners have told me that recent MBA hires often try to dazzle clients with their knowledge — and they initially do so by creating massive PowerPoint decks. New consultants quickly learn, however, that less is much more. One partner instructs his new hires to reduce PowerPoint decks considerably by replacing every 20 slides with only two slides.
This is because great writers and speakers are also great editors. It’s no coincidence that some of the most memorable speeches and documents in history are among the shortest. The Gettysburg Address is 272 words, John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech was under 15 minutes, and the Declaration of Independence guarantees three unalienable rights — not 22.
Key takeaway: Reduce clutter where you can.
2) Great presenters don’t use bullet points.
Bullet points are the least effective way to get your point across. Take Steve Jobs, considered to be one of the most extraordinary presenters of his time. He rarely showed slides with just text and bullets. He used photos and text instead.
Experiments in memory and communication find that information delivered in pictures and images is more likely to be remembered than words alone. Scientists call it “pictorial superiority.” According to molecular biologist John Medina, our ability to remember images is one of our greatest strengths. “We are incredible at remembering pictures,” he writes. “Hear a piece of information, and three days later you’ll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65%.”
Key takeaway: Complement text on slides with photos, videos, and images.
3) Great presenters enhance their vocal delivery.
Speakers who vary the pace, pitch, and volume of their voices are more effective, according to a new research study by Wharton marketing professor, Jonah Berger.
In summary, the research states that effective persuaders modulate their voice, and by doing so, appear to be more confident in their argument. For example, they raise their voice when emphasizing a key message, or they pause after delivering an important point.
Simply put, if you raise and lower the volume of your voice, and alternate between a high pitch and low pitch while delivering key messages, your presentation will be more influential, persuasive, and commanding.
Key takeaway: Don’t underestimate the power of your voice to make a positive impression on your audience.
4) Great presenters create “wow” moments.
People don’t remember every slide and every word of a presentation. They remember moments, as Bill Gates exemplified back in 2009 in his now famous TED talk.
While giving a presentation on the efforts of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to reduce the spread of malaria, Gates stated: “Now, malaria is, of course, transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here just so you could experience this.” And with that, he walked out to the center of the stage, and opened the lid from a small jar containing non-infected mosquitoes.
“We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit.”
This moment was so successful in capturing his audience because it was a surprise. His audience had been expecting a standard PowerPoint presentation — complete with graphs and data. But what they got instead was a visceral introduction to the subject, an immersive experience that played on their emotions.
Unexpected moments grab an audience’s attention because the human brain gets bored easily. According to neuroscientist, A.K Pradeep, whom I’ve interviewed: “Novelty recognition is a hardwired survival tool all humans share. Our brains are trained to look for something brilliant and new, something that stands out, something that looks delicious.”
Key takeaway: Give your audience something extra.
5) Great presenters rehearse.
Most speakers don’t practice nearly as much as they should. Oh, sure, they review their slides ahead of time, but they neglect to put in the hours of deliberate practice that will make them shine.
Malcolm Gladwell made the “10,000-hour rule” famous as a benchmark for excellence — stating, in so many words, that 20 hours of practice a week for a decade can make anyone a master in their field. While you don’t have nearly that long to practice your next presentation, there’s no question that the world’s greatest speakers have put in the time to go from good to great.
Consider Martin Luther King, Jr. His most famous speeches came after years of practice — and it was exactly this level of mastery that gave King the awareness and flexibility to pull off an advanced speaking technique: improvisation. King improvised the memorable section of what is now known as the “Dream Speech” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. When he launched into the “I have a dream” refrain, the press in attendance were confused. Those words were not included in the official draft of the speech they had been handed. King read the mood of his audience and, in the moment, combined words and ideas he had made in previous speeches.
It’s believed that King gave 2,500 speeches in his lifetime. If we assume two hours of writing and rehearsals for each one (and in many cases he spent much more time than that), we arrive at the conservative estimate of 5,000 hours of practice. But those are speeches. They don’t take into account high school debates and hundreds of sermons. King had easily reached 10,000 hours of practice by August of 1963.
Key takeaway: Put in the time to make yourself great.
Never underestimate the power of great communication. It can help you land the job of your dreams, attract investors to back your idea, or elevate your stature within your organization. But while there are plenty of good speakers in the world, using the above tips to sharpen your skills is the first step to setting yourself apart. Stand out by being the person who can deliver something great over and over again.
Carmine Gallo is the author of Five Stars: The Communication Secrets to Get from Good to Great (St. Martin’s Press). He is a Harvard University instructor in the department of Executive Education at the Graduate School of Design. Sign up for Carmine’s newsletter at carminegallo.com and follow him on Twitter @carminegallo.
L: An image of former Alaska governor and 2008 presidential candidate Sarah Palin that appears in FRONTLINE’s documentary, “America’s Great Divide.” R: An image of President Donald Trump / Getty Images.JANUARY 10, 2020byPatrice Taddonio Digital Writer & Audience Development Strategist, FRONTLINE
The rise of online misinformation, shared on social media and designed to stoke fear and inflame divisions, gained major national attention in connection with the 2016 presidential election. Continued blurring of the line between fact and fiction has helped to define the political era that has followed.
But a new FRONTLINE documentary traces the use of online misinformation at high levels of the American political conversation back years further: to Sarah Palin, a former Alaska mayor and the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate.
“She is the first of a generation of politicians who live in a post-truth environment. She was, and there’s no polite way to say it, but a serial liar,” Steve Schmidt, who helped lead John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and pushed him to choose Palin as his running mate, tells FRONTLINE in the upcoming documentary America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump.
“She would say things that are simply not true, or things that were picked up from the Internet,” the former GOP operative, who had also worked as a campaign adviser to President George W. Bush, continues. “And this obliteration of fact from fiction, of truth from lie, has become now endemic in American politics. But it started then.”
Schmidt and Palin have clashed in the years after the campaign ended, each accusing the other of mischaracterizations.
Palin’s role in exploiting America’s divisions (including on social media) and paving the way for the rise of President Donald Trump is explored as part of America’s Great Divide — a two-night, four-hour special premiering Jan. 13 and 14 on air and online that shows how the country’s increasingly divisive politics over the past decade have led to this moment.
Plain-spoken and not “too high-brow,” Palin entered the national political scene as a “almost a pre-Trump” and “electrified that GOP base like no one I had ever seen,” former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly says in this excerpt from the series:
The McCain-Palin ticket wouldn’t prevail in the 2008 election, but the anti-establishment fervor Palin had tapped into only grew. The next year, as President Barack Obama made health care reform a priority, Palin re-emerged. This excerpt from the series explores how she exploited fear with a new phrase that went viral — “death panels” — and how she took to Facebook to spread the false claim directly to her audience:
“She was a maven on Facebook. The original politician who saw that you could skirt the media and you could get the message out unfiltered, uncut to the public was Sarah Palin,” Alex Marlow, editor-in-chief of the hard-right outlet Breitbart News, tells FRONTLINE.
As America’s Great Divide goes on to explore, talk-radio and right-wing media ran with Palin’s false claim — and a new model for exploiting the country’s divisions through the spread of online misinformation and the blurring of fact and fiction was born.
For the full story on how that new model would help usher in the age of Donald Trump, watch America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump. From FRONTLINE filmmaker Michael Kirk, a veteran chronicler of U.S. politics who with his team has made nearly 20 documentaries on the Obama and Trump administrations, the series traces the growth of a toxic political environment that has paralyzed Washington and dramatically deepened the gulf between Americans — and holds political leaders across two presidencies accountable for their role.
The series is essential viewing as the 2020 election year dawns, providing gripping and crucial context for the present moment. In tandem with its premiere, and as part of the FRONTLINE Transparency Project, FRONTLINE will also publish a digital collection in video and text of more than 20 extended interviews that were conducted for the making of the series — offering in-depth accounts of history unfolding.
America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump will be available first, in its entirety, at pbs.org/frontline, at pbs.org and on the PBS Video App. Stream the full two-part, four-hour series there beginning Mon., Jan. 13 at 6 p.m. E.S.T./5 p.m. C.S.T. The series premieres on PBS stations Mon., Jan. 13 and Tues, Jan. 14 at 9 p.m. E.S.T./8 p.m. C.S.T. (check local listings).
This story has been updated.
Even moss is appreciated by the mindful Japanese. Credit: Andrew Whitehead/Alamy.
As the sleek shinkansen bullet train glided noiselessly into the station, I watched a strange ritual begin. During the brief stop, the conductor in the last carriage began talking to himself. He proceeded to perform a series of tasks, commenting aloud on each one and vigorously gesticulating at various bits of the train all the while.
So what was he up to? You could say he’s practicing mindfulness. The Japanese call it shisa kanko (literally ‘checking and calling’), an error-prevention drill that railway employees here have been using for more than 100 years. Conductors point at the things they need to check and then name them out loud as they do them, a dialogue with themselves to ensure nothing gets overlooked.
Japanese train conductors practice shisa kanko, pointing at what they need to check and then naming it out loud. Credit: Trevor Mogg/Alamy.
And it seems to work. A 1994 study by Japan’s Railway Technical Research Institute, cited in The Japan Times, showed that when asked to perform a simple task workers typically make 2.38 mistakes per 100 actions. When using shisa kanko, this number reduced to just 0.38 – a massive 85 percent drop.
Mindfulness is moment-to-moment awareness.
This may seem a long way from mindfulness, which in recent years has become synonymous with what the Japanese call zazen – meditating cross-legged on a cushion. But according to Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he founded its renowned Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979, mindfulness is “not really about sitting in the full lotus… pretending you’re a statue in the British Museum. Simply put, mindfulness is moment-to-moment awareness.”
And this present-moment awareness has been deeply ingrained into the Japanese psyche for centuries. You don’t hear people talk about it, but it manifests itself in myriad ways.
In tea ceremony, participants take time to notice the design of the cup. Credit: Lonely Planet/Getty.
Tea ceremony, haiku and cherry-blossom viewing, for instance, all share a heightened appreciation of the moment. In tea ceremony, participants take time to notice the design of the cup before drinking and appreciate the decoration of the tea room, which reflects the foliage and blooms of the month. But beyond that, the ceremony celebrates the fact that this moment with this person in this place will never happen again.
This moment with this person in this place will never happen again.
Haiku poetry, a Japanese literary tradition dating back to the 17th Century, elevated this celebration of the present moment to a world-renowned art form. Haiku poets attempt to capture the moment’s essence in just 17 syllables, using evocative images from nature to convey a Zen-like sense of sudden enlightenment. The most famous one is Matsuo Basho’s frog haiku, which translated from Japanese reads:
An old pond
a frog jumps
the sound of water
And nowhere is this celebration of the moment more evident than in cherry-blossom viewing, which sweeps the nation like a fever every spring. Why such excitement? Precisely because the blossoms are so fleeting, lasting only a week or so. “Transience forms the Japanese sense of beauty,” said Zen priest and garden designer Shunmyo Masuno.
Transience is celebrated in dozens of lesser-known practices too, such as moon viewing. You can’t help but admire a country that sets aside a special evening in September for contemplating the full moon. Or that holds lavish festivals to give thanks for the work done by inanimate objects, including everything from old kitchen knives to calligraphy brushes and even used sewing needles.
Transience forms the Japanese sense of beauty.
And there are the growing ranks of Moss Girls. Inspired in part by Hisako Fujii’s best-selling book, Mosses, My Dear Friends, moss-viewing has become increasingly trendy, especially with young women, who go on guided tours to Japan’s lush moss-carpeted forests. This goes way beyond just stopping to smell the roses: Moss Girls get down on hands and knees with a loupe to contemplate the lovely growths.
Nowhere is this celebration of the moment more evident than in cherry-blossom viewing. Credit: Angeles Marin Cabello.
And while to the less mindful among us moss may seem insignificantly small, no Zen garden is complete without its moss-covered rock or stone lanterns. It’s the living embodiment of wabi-sabi – the spirit of humble, rustic impermanence that defines Japanese aesthetics.
But there’s more to Japanese mindfulness than gazing at bugs and blooms. Countless practical applications govern virtually every aspect of daily life, all designed to help you ‘be in the now’. At school, days begin and end with a short ceremony, where greetings are exchanged and the day’s events are announced. Before and after each class, students and teacher stand, bow and thank each other. And before starting the lesson, students are asked to close their eyes to focus their concentration.
Similarly, construction workers engage in collective stretches to limber up for the day’s work. In the office, a colleague will tell you ‘Otsukaresama‘, (literally ‘you’re tired’), as a way of saying thanks for the work you’ve done. At meetings, hand someone your meishi (business card) and they’ll examine it carefully and make a comment, never dreaming of just sticking it in their pocket.
These practices are a way of what Kabat-Zinn calls ‘purposefully paying attention to things we ordinarily never give a moment’s thought to’. They help keep you conscious of where you are and what you are doing throughout the day, rather than stumbling from one hour to the next on autopilot, focused only on going-home time.
Zen gardens embody wabi-sabi, the spirit of humble, rustic impermanence. Credit: Angeles Marin Cabello.
Like so much of Japanese culture, the roots of all these customs lie in Zen. “Mindfulness has been part of the Buddhist tradition for centuries,” said Takafumi Kawakami, priest at Kyoto’s Shunko-in temple. In the Kamakura Era (1185-1333), Zen became popular among the samurai class and had a formative influence on the arts, including tea ceremony, flower-arranging and landscape gardening. In the Edo Era (1603-1868), a time of peace, Zen found its way into the education of common people.
For its practitioners, Zen is an attitude that permeates every action: bathing, cooking, cleaning, working. “Every activity and behaviour in daily life is a practice [of Zen],” said Eriko Kuwagaki of Shinshoji Temple in Fukuyama, Hiroshima Prefecture.
A delightful old Zen story, collected in Paul Reps’ 1957 anthology of Zen texts, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, illustrates this point. After studying to be a Zen teacher for many years, Teno went to visit Nan-in, an old Zen master. It was raining heavily and, as is customary, Teno left his clogs and umbrella in the entrance before entering Nan-in’s house.
Every activity and behaviour in daily life is a practice [of Zen].
After greeting each other, Nan-in asked Teno: “Did you leave your umbrella to the left or right of your clogs?” Unable to answer, Teno realised he was still a long way from attaining Zen, and went away to study for six more years.
For its practitioners, Zen is an attitude that permeates every action. Credit: Shinshoji Zen Museum and Gardens.
Most of us might not want to take things quite so far. Nevertheless, Nan-in’s question remains relevant, as more and more researchers are discovering that present-moment awareness not only boosts stress resilience and well-being, but also lowers levels of anxiety and depression.
Leah Weiss, a senior teacher at Stanford University’s Compassion Cultivation Program, is one of a growing number of experts who advocate ‘mindfulness in action’. This is something to be practiced throughout the day, rather than just for 10 minutes’ meditation. Weiss described it as “becoming mindfully aware of your thoughts, feelings, and surroundings even while you’re engaged in some other activity.”
So how can we put a little more mindfulness into our lives? Start with something simple, like a bit of pointing and calling before you leave home in the morning. Lights off? Check. Windows closed? Check. Money? Check. Phone? Check. You’ll never forget your keys again.
Then maybe you’ll have time to stop and notice the moss.
Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified moss as lichen. We regret the error.
This article was originally published on May 9, 2017, by BBC Travel, and is republished here with permission.
Issued on: 1/12/2020 – France24.com
Iranian protesters and newspapers piled pressure on the country’s leadership and riot police stepped up their presence in Tehran on Sunday after Iran’s military admitted that it had mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian airliner.
Riot police fired teargas at thousands of Iranians who had taken to the streets late on Saturday in the capital and other cities, many chanting “Death to the dictator”, directing their anger at Iran’s top authority, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Images and reports of the protests were carried by state-affiliated news agencies, alongside videos on social media.
Tehran residents told Reuters that police had stepped up their presence in the capital on Sunday morning.
“Apologise and resign,” Iran’s moderate Etemad daily wrote in a banner headline on Sunday, saying the “people’s demand” was for those responsible for mishandling the plane crisis to quit.
All 176 people aboard the flight, many of them Iranians with dual citizenship, were killed.
Protests erupted after Saturday’s admission that the military accidentally shot down the Ukraine International Airlines plane minutes after take-off on Wednesday, when Iranian forces were alert for U.S. reprisals after tit-for-tat strikes.
For days, Iranian officials had vigorously denied it was to blame, even as Canada, which had 57 citizens on the flight, and the United States said their intelligence indicated an Iranian missile was to blame, albeit probably fired in error.
Iran’s president said it was a “disastrous mistake” and apologised. But a top Revolutionary Guards commander added to public anger about the delayed admission, when he said he had told the authorities a missile hit the plane the day it crashed.
Challenges
Another moderate daily Jomhuri-ye Eslami, or Islamic Republic, wrote in an editorial: “Those who delayed publishing the reason behind the plane crash and damaged people’s trust in the establishment should be dismissed or should resign.”
Criticism of the authorities in Iran is not unusual, but it tends to stay in narrow boundaries.
The press attacks and protests add to challenges facing the establishment, which in November faced the country’s bloodiest unrest since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
As Saturday’s protests spread across Iran, including major cities such as Shiraz, Isfahan, Hamedan and Orumiyeh, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Twitter: “We are following your protests closely, and are inspired by your courage.”
“There cannot be another massacre of peaceful protesters, nor an internet shutdown. The world is watching,” he said, posting his tweets in both Farsi and English.
Britain said its ambassador in Iran had been briefly detained on Saturday by the authorities in Tehran. A news agency said he was detained outside a university for inciting protests.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab called it “a flagrant violation of international law.”
“The Iranian government is at a cross-roads moment. It can continue its march towards pariah status with all the political and economic isolation that entails, or take steps to de-escalate tensions and engage in a diplomatic path forwards,” he said.
Protests inside Iran followed a build-up of tension between Iran and the United States, which withdrew from Tehran’s nuclear pact with world powers in 2018 and then re-imposed sanctions that have steadily crippled the Iranian economy.
‘Horrific’
On Jan. 3, a U.S. drone strike in Iraq killed prominent Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, responsible for building up Iran’s network of regional proxy armies in Iraq and beyond, and Tehran responded with missile strikes on U.S. targets in Iraq.
No U.S. soldiers were killed, but in the tense hours after that, the Ukrainian Boeing 737 was cleared to take off from Tehran airport and then brought down by a missile fired in error by an operator who mistook the plane for an attacker.
“Shooting down a civilian aircraft is horrific. Iran must take full responsibility,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said.
Trudeau said Iranian President Hassan Rouhani had committed to collaborating with Canadian investigators, working to de-escalate tensions in the region and continuing a dialogue.
Public fury at Iran’s authorities grew as questions about the plane crash mounted. Iranians on social media asked why officials were busy fending off criticism from abroad rather than sympathising with grieving families. Others asked why the plane was allowed to take off at a time of high tension.
Amirali Hajizadeh, a senior commander of the Revolutionary Guards, a parallel military set up to defend the nation and the system of theocratic rule, said he had asked for civilian planes to be grounded but his request was not heeded.
Soleimani’s death in a U.S. drone strike had drawn huge crowds of mourners on to the streets in Iran, which Iranian officials said showed public support for the leadership.
But Saturday’s protests and the public reaction to the downed airliner have shattered the image of national solidarity. Demonstrators tore up pictures of the slain general.
(AFP)
I have been thinking about time lately, as I watch the seasons turn and wait for a seemingly endless season of the heart to set; I have been thinking about Ursula K. Le Guin’s lovely “Hymn to Time” and its kaleidoscopic view of time as stardust scattered in “the radiance of each bright galaxy” and the “eyes beholding radiance,” time as a portal that “makes room for going and coming home,” time as a womb in which “begins all ending”; I have been thinking about Seneca, who thousands of seasons ago insisted in his Stoic’s key to living with presence that “nothing is ours, except time.”
And yet there is something odd about this notion of time as property. We are asked to give things time; we speak of taking time — time off of something, time toward something. But how do we give or take this fine-grained sand that slips through the fingers the moment we try to cup it? Perhaps time is not so much the substance in the hand as the substance of the hand; perhaps Borges was right in his sublime refutation of time: “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
How, then, do we befriend the thing that both destroys us and is us?
That is what poet, painter, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) explores with great subtlety of sentiment in a passage from his timelessly rewarding 1923 classic The Prophet (public library), which also gave us his abiding wisdom on the building blocks of true friendship, the courage to weather the uncertainties of love, and what may be the finest advice ever offered on parenting and on the balance of intimacy and independence in a healthy relationship.
Kahlil Gibran, self-portrait
When an astronomer beckons Gibran’s protagonist to speak of time, the Prophet responds:
You would measure time the measureless and the immeasurable.
You would adjust your conduct and even direct the course of your spirit according to hours and seasons.
Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing.
Yet the timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness,
And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.
And that that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.
Art by Lia Halloran from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print.
In a sentiment that calls to mind Patti Smith’s elegant meditation on time, transformation, and the seasons of the heart, he adds:
And is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless?
But if in your thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons,
And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.
Complement with Gibran on silence, solitude, and the courage to know yourself, then time travel a century ahead with the fascinating contemporary neuropsychology of how time perception modulates our experience of self and a touching recording of Neil Gaiman reading Le Guin’s ode to timelessness to his 100-year-old cousin.