samadhisoft.com

My wife’s in New Zealand and so I’ve been running the business here alone. And business has been slow for us like it’s been for most everyone. So, I’ve cut our workers back to 32 hours a week and I’ve been using our part-time sales staff less and less. The idea, of course, is to cut our outgoing money flow until it roughly matches our incoming. Assuming I can hit the balance, we can tread water indefinitely until things sort themselves out.

Yesterday, I had a sales person in and we only did about $150 in sales for the day and the weather was beautiful. A Saturday, 73 degrees Fahrenheit, fluffy white clouds - in short, everything one could want. But, in spite of all of that, only a few folks came in all day.

Today, rain was forecast and I let our sales person go for the day (actually, I called last night and told them not to come in). And, indeed, after a somewhat gray morning, the skies opened up in the afternoon and rain arrived by the buckets.

And sales?

Five times what we sold yesterday.

Now, that’s still not a large amount of sales compared to what we normally do on weekend days in high season when the economy’s healthy. But, it was a lot better than yesterday. So, I was busy most of the day talking to folks and just dealing with it all. And then, as the skies opened and the rains came, they kept on coming in. And I was amazed - but willing to keep selling.

So, in the end, the last customer left just at closing time and I was happy though I was pretty throughly wet by then.

I went around and passed out paychecks, turned off the automatic irrigation systems and finally got in the house and out of my wet clothes.

This week’s total sales were better than they’ve been for several weeks and we may actually have hit balance this week between our burn rate and our sales income. Of course, that doesn’t mean much. It is the average of whether you are winning or losing over many weeks that matters. And we’re still waiting for that fortune cookie to be delivered.

One small consolation … I understand it is pouring in New Zealand too <smile>.

Later - this same day.

Another small but very significant (to us) bit of news.

After three years of effort, Sharon and I have secured permanent residency status in New Zealand. From now until the ends of our lives, we have the right to live and work in New Zealand, if we wish.

We want to retire there after we’ve sold the nursery business and now it is guaranteed that we can go when we are ready. What a beautiful thing this is to finally see manifested.

If you are going to have a drink tonight - raise one for us.

Cheers!

Sharon and I were sitting together on a plane about to land in Denver. The plane began to bank right in preparation for landing and somehow I could see the banking indicator in front of me. The plane kept banking over further and further and then it began to nose down steeply. I was also able to see right through the nose of the plane so I could see the ground below. I was thinking this was an interesting thing for a jet to do but that it doesn’t look good.

Awakening

I found myself walking hand in hand with Sharon about a block or so outside the airport buildings. It was twilight and there weren’t many people about. I realized I had no idea how I’d gotten there and I said so to her.

She relied, “I don’t either.” We weren’t upset or emotional about this - just amazed that we should find ourselves somewhere with no idea how we’d gotten there.

We walked towards the buildings and Sharon glanced out into the open spaces to the right and said, “Maybe that’s the reason.” Off in the distance, it seemed like something had happened. It was hard to see in the semi-dark but it looked like there was a big dark area with a small pale of smoke above it. I looked and saw what she meant and said, “Maybe.”

We went into the buildings and up some stairs. I was feeling light somehow and I imagined that I could fly and a moment later, I was floating beside her as she climbed the stairs. I said, “Look, I’m flying.” She began to fly with me as we went up.

I realized now that we might be dead and that we could do new things. I couldn’t think why we needed to be at the airport any more so I suggested that we simply pass through the next door we came to and that on the other side we’d pop out into our own place. And we did.

Home

When we entered the room, I thought I recognized it but I was only partially sure that it was ours. It seemed familiar but strange at the same time. I had the sense we were renting it though I knew we owned our place.

Then we went out and we were walking at night in the neighborhood and talking about all of this strangeness. I remember weaving our way through a narrow passage between some bushes and saying, “Gosh, I don’t know what we do like this. Do we eat? Do we sleep? It’s really bizarre.” She didn’t know either.

I began to wonder, as we walked through a crowd of people, if we could influence them. Make them aware of us. I wondered what it would be like to walk through them. Would I see their insides? I pulled my keys out of my pocket and realized I had physical possession of them and I wondered what the boundaries were between what we could effect and what we couldn’t.

We walked and talked some more about various things like food and water and after awhile, I said, “This will be a problem because we have a place to stay right now but it won’t stay ours.”

I continued, “I mean we’re not here to pay a mortgage or rent so we won’t have a place that’s ours.”

She said, “Yeah, this is probably the sort of thing that forces people to move onto their next reincarnation. We just won’t have anything to do here after awhile.”

Loss

Then the dream jumped again, and we were laying there face to face in bed. And I finally realized, after all this walking around as a ghost, how sad it was and that I was going to be forced to advance and leave this life and this relationship with Sharon behind.

I grabbed her and held her really close and began to cry really hard because I loved her and didn’t want to lose her.

Later

Later, after I awake from crying in my dream and I got up and recorded all of this, I went back to bed and dreamt again.

I found that I was looking up at a squarish church steeple somewhere in California and on the steeple a banner was hung that said, “Cull Ghats“.

I awoke again and lay there and thought about what “Cull Ghats” might mean. And I realized that it was, somehow, the title of the dream I’d just had about the crash.

R.,

A few more thoughts along the same lines I talked about previously.

All of humanity’s history has been a series of incremental advances along multiple paths; business, social organization, military, agriculture, technological, etc. In all of this, the thought has primarily been to advance, empower and grow.

Now, for the first time in humanity’s history, we have filled the planet and have begun to hit various unyielding limits; water, food, oil, pollution, as well as limits having to do with how much impact we can have on the biosphere without causing huge shifts in the demographics of various species and even causing their extinctions.

It is clear, if humanity wants to continue to live indefinitely on this planet, that we are going to have to shift from a growth and advance strategy in all we do to one predicated on establishing a steady-state and sustainable balance with the biosphere around us.

We cannot use renewable resources faster than they can regenerate. We cannot occupy more of the planet’s surface than is consistent with allowing the rest of the planet’s biology to exist and flourish. These both imply that our population has to come down to some sustainable number and be held there. We have to come up with ways to govern ourselves that are consistent with establishing and maintaining these essential balances. Nation against nation, system against system is not compatible with long term survival. The ultimate goal and purpose of government in an enlightened world should be to secure all of our futures (we and all the rest of the planet’s biology) and maintain the balance.

We could, if we cut our population to sustainable levels and learned to live within a sustainable footprint on this planet, exist here for tens of thousands of years and maintain a decent quality of life for all those who are alive at any specific point in time. We do not have to give up comfort or technology - we just have to dial our impact on the planet back to sustainable levels and stay with in those levels.

Anything that the Gates Foundation or any other forward looking organization works on that does not include long term goals like these is likely in the big picture to just be a shuffling of our problems from one place to the other rather than a real indefinite-term planet-wide solution to how our species is going to solve the problem of learning to live here without fouling our nest for ourselves and all the other species that depend on this planet’s biosphere.

I was reflecting last night on conversations I’d had with two different people recently. The subjects had been the environment, the state of the world, and the likely directions history will take in the near future.

Both my friends clearly understand the situation that we (humanity) are in. They are not denialists in any sense of the word- they really get what’s going on.

But, I noted, they were both emotionally distressed about it. And that their distress was causing them to waffle back and forth between seeing the situation we’re in clearly and then switching around to trying to ameliorate it by saying something like, “Well, humanity has tremendous powers of creativity - surely we’ll think of a way to avoid these problems.”

Watching them squirm got me to thinking about what it was that was making them squirm.

One of my friends has older parents who live in a major metropolitan area and she’s made a commitment to them and to herself to live near them in their closing years. She’s also dependent upon them financially as well. Later, when they’ve passed on, she will be able to live where she wants and how she wants - but for now, she’s made commitments that tie her to this city.

My other friend had been thinking very seriously about immigration to New Zealand as a result of his analysis of the world’s situation. But, after a lot of agonizing and thinking about his extended family here on the U.S., he decided that he couldn’t simply abandon them and go off to save himself. So, he’s decided, out of love of family, to stay here with all of them and face the hard times together.

To me, it looks like both of these folks have the same problem. They’ve both made emotional decisions to stay but at the same time, they are both confronted with convincing reasons why they should go. Cognitive dissonance is the result. And the way that the mind tries to reduce cognitive dissonance in a situation like this is to try to reinterpret the data that suggests they should leave into something less convincing.

It seems to me that their rational mental processes are being distorted by the presence of emotional non-negotiables in the mix.

When this first occurred to me, it seemed like a bit of an epiphany and I spent several hours over the next day or two noodling it over. In the end, I saw that it was no epiphany at all but just something I’ve known about and acknowledged forever. It’s just that I hadn’t quite looked at it from this angle before - especially as it relates to how people see the world’s current situation.

On the web site Al Gore’s put up about his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth“, he has a quote that I’ve admired since I first saw it.

It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

- Upton Sinclair

This captures a lot of what I though was my epiphany.

When, in the past, I’ve asked myself why people seem so obtuse about seeing the state of the world right in front of their eyes, I’ve assigned the cause to a variety of things like ‘He’s a Republican.‘ or ‘He’s a Libertarian.‘ or ‘He’s a right-wing Christian.‘ or “He has no understanding of science.‘. Or any of a long list of other reasons.

But, amazingly, I’d never seen that all of these folks, just like you and me and everyone else, are encumbered by any number of emotional non-negotiable factors that limit their ability to process the data before them solely on its own merits. We are all twisted by our emotional attachments.

Men who run corporations and have their identities and all of their finances tied up in those endeavors cannot think objectively about the good or ill that corporations do in the world.

People who cannot move away from an area of danger (like my two friends), cannot see the data indicating the danger they are in clearly without cognitive dissonance. And that cognitive dissonance generates stress which the mind will try to lessen how ever it can.

Religious conservatives have staked their faith on the fact that God has everything well under control so how can they objectively view information that shows things are getting badly out of control around them?

Libertarians believe that free markets will find appropriate solutions for all conceivable problems so how can they assimilate the fact that the financial sieves that are multinational corporations and Globalization are steadily increasing the wealth of the very few at the expense of the many.

I’ve had to smile privately at Republican friends of mine as they held forth on the merits of less government and free markets. And then I watched them stress as they tried to explain why all these ‘free’ corporations and ‘free’ markets, which only care about next quarter’s numbers, are sending all of our jobs and manufacturing overseas to the benefit of their bottom lines but to the ultimate degradation of the country and the lives of those who live here.

I recall reading a Buddhist tract a long time ago. It said something like,

“One can only see what one is looking at clearly when one doesn’t care what one sees.“

Yep, that about sums it up. And we, all of us, are emotional creatures who are emotionally bound to certain ideas, creeds, places, points-of-view and whatever. And all of us, therefore, are not clear and rational thinkers to the extent that these emotional non-negotiables warp our rationality.

I don’ think any of this changes my prognosis for the world. I still think it is bleak. Perhaps, even more so given that I now see that many (most, all) of us are incapable of rational perceptions due to our emotional attachments. But, it does, perhaps, make the problem a bit clearer.

Recently, in New Zealand, there were reports and that Asian people in Auckland were considering banding together and forming vigilante groups to combat crime in their area. Their complaint was that the police were ineffective and that they, the Asian folks, were being targeted by criminal groups.

The fellow, Mr. Peter Low, who was at the center of the effort to organize vigilante defenses, in my opinion, went too far and created a media firestorm when he suggested that Asians could hire Chinese Triads to protect them. Chinese Triads, if you didn’t know, are similar to the Japanese Yakusa or, perhaps, the Italian Mafia. Secret societies with more than a little involvement in criminal activities.

Soon after, many of the people he was trying to defend were disowning him and the entire thing went nuclear in the press and basically melted down.

I found all of this interesting, to a point. I think Mr. Low may have been justified in organizing local people to defend themselves but I think he was clearly over the top to suggest bringing in outside Triad enforcers to defend Asian interests. He might as well have suggested importing the La Cosa Nostra.

So why am I blogging about this? Because it made me reflect on the fact that I, personally, only believe in the law … to a point.

The law is suppose to be a common set of rules we have all basically agreed upon to keep order in our societies. Of course, we could quibble for hours that that’s not how it often works, but that is the basic idea and intent. And that’s good - it benefits us all, when it works well.

But, I’ve often reflected that if the law breaks down and fails to protect my interests, I am not going to passively watch myself or those I love be abused. I have limits and beyond those, I will look out for myself.

Some would have us believe that this sort of thinking is anti-social and that we should always passively rely on society’s systems to look after us - even when they are failing us. They would have us believe that no matter what the justification, taking things into one’s own hands is bad. Personally, I don’t feel that way.

There will always be those who think they are above the law and that they can act with impunity against us because of their age, their associations, their money or their political clout.

Have you never encountered the 16 year old with an attitude? He’s been breaking the laws and causing mayhem since he was 11 and he knows the juvenile courts won’t do anything to him more than a slap on the wrist. His parents either think he’s a saint, no matter what he does, or they are utterly disinterested. In any case, he has no fear, no limits, no self control and no respect for anyone who’s not prepared to do him more violence than he can do them.

Would you think me anti-social and very un-liberal, if I said I think a two by four on a dark night in an alley might help sort him out?

My wife tells me about what it was like in the 50’s and 60’s to grow up in small town Kansas in the American Midwest. Everyone carried guns there. Every pickup truck sported a rifle rack with a rifle in the back window. And folks left their doors unlocked and there was very little serious crime of any sort.

I long ago read most of Ayn Rand’s books and then outgrew them. But, Rand said one thing that has always stuck with me. She said (paraphrased), “They cannot oppress you unless you consent to it.”

I judge myself as quite liberal in most of my feelings and beliefs but there are definitely some exceptions to this pattern.

Your comments, as always will be appreciated.

Here, amid the weeds
of these centuries, I rise.
Seeking light and duration
up from the soil and seas of another world.

The long rise; the single cell, the multiple,
fleet of form and bright of eye, we gather
and rise in complexity and imagination
beneath the wheeling sun above
and the shifting plates, below.

Again and again, we come to self-consciousness
spewing poetry and conquest, cities and literature.
Proud and driven, we sing the animal’s song
in a higher key; procreating, building, consuming.

Always the rise, always the fall beneath a different star.
Technological children, impulsive and uncontrolled.
Pressed by those same biological imperatives
that fueled our rise from the mud and the struggle.

Those same imperatives freed by our intelligence,
those same imperatives pushing us from behind
while we stare into the mirror of our imagined future
thinking ourselves Gods as we sleepwalk to our end.

Thinking we are aware, imagining that we see the game.
Looking for enemies without the gate
when they are no further than our next desire, within.
Rising on our imperatives before we plunge on that sword, the same.

I have been here before and I will come again
beneath different stars with different eyes and chemistry.
I have yearned for immortal freedom before
and died by my own hand or claw, and these imperatives.

Someplace among the stars, I will rise and transcend
the very reproductive urges that gave me birth.
I will become not the arrow of evolution but
the intentional form of a greater wisdom
as this dirt finally finds the path of immortality
and all that lies beyond, to the end of time.

gallagher
21Jun08
Monroe


- from Samadhimuse:   

A couple of years ago, if you had asked me what the world’s biggest problems were, I would have listed quite a few things - but corporations would not have been among them. At that point in time, they were such a part of the background that I hadn’t really ’seen’ them.

But, today, I’d list corporations as among the biggest problems mankind is facing.

If you train a dog to be a junkyard dog and to attack anyone who comes onto the premises, that’s fine. The dog serves a purpose. But to create such a dog and not control it is criminal.

Corporations are like that. And, note here that I am not talking about small entities where the original founders are still involved in the day to day activities like Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream or such. I’m talking here about large publicly traded companies with boards of directors and thousands of stock holders.

What are corporations, that I should give them such a bad rap? We all know what they are, if we just think about it. They are entities that are created and that exist to seek profit for their shareholders. And the people running them are judged and retained or dismissed based on how well they maximize return-on-investment for the shareholders.

So, why is a corporation like a junkyard dog? Because they will seek the path of the highest profit at each decision juncture. If the choice is between what’s good for the company’s bottom line or what’s good for people - they will always go for the bottom line - unless the economic consequences of the potential PR fall-out might outweigh the profits gained. And even with that latter consideration - it will still be a consideration based on where the maximum profit lies in the situation.

So, is this an evil thing? No, no more that the junkyard dog, once trained, is evil for doing what he was trained to do. It’s just a plain and simple fact that corporations are about profits - not people. They are like that junkyard dog or the sharp pocket-knife in your pocket. They can be very useful in the right situation and they can cause serious harm when they are misused or uncontrolled.

The problem with corporations in today’s world is that they are largely uncontrolled. Especially in the U.S. The economic power of many of them rival or exceed the economic power of many sovereign nations today. This is a very bad thing. We have loosed great slobbering junkyard dogs of Capitalism on the world and now we stand about surprised that

- Our rain forests are being cut down
- Our fisheries are being destroyed
- Our atmosphere is being polluted by excessive CO2

And on and on. If you look what’s behind many of the world’s big problems today, you will find corporations and their decisions.

So, am I outing myself as anti-Capitalism with all of this rant? Nope. I clearly recognize that Capitalism and corporations produce the vast majority of the wealth and innovations in our world. I’m not advocating here to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. No, I’d just like to suggest that it is time in our human history to recognize that unleashing corporations and letting them do what they do unconstrained - is a very bad idea.

The right approach is to make corporations subordinate to a higher level of control. And that higher level of control would have as its highest priority, the good of mankind. We’re not talking Communism here. We’re not even talking robust Socialism here. We’re just saying that the highest level of decision-making in this world cannot be controlled by entities whose primary purpose for existing is to seek profit. It must be controlled by folks whose primary concern is for the well-being of all of us - humanity.

Would this or should this ‘kill’ Capitalism and corporations and their ability to create wealth and innovation? No. The aim of those at the top should be to leave the Capitalistic elements run free so long as their decisions do not run counter to the highest good for humanity. If this was well and evenly applied, then all the world’s corporations would still operate on a level playing field and would not lose competitive advantage against each other. Their range of action would be restricted but the restrictions would apply equally to all of them.

Idealistic balderdash, you say? Impossible to implement, you say? Perhaps. But, in the end, I think we have no choice but to do this or something not unlike it. Because, the way we are going, we are on a history train bound for deep disaster.

Places like Wal-Mart sell the schlock they do because they’ve decided to try to own the low end of the market and that’s simply how you do it at that end of the market. They will advertise to convince you that their product quality is high, that their products are equivalent to those sold by others, they will shop for their stock at the cheapest places they can find, they will cut quality, they will ignore problems, they will ignore human rights abuses in the factories that supply them, they will intentionally mislead the public if necessary and they will do all of this with a clean conscience - because all of it improves their bottom line - and that’s all that matters at the end of the day to them.

If we piss and moan about their lack of integrity and their lack of caring about people - we’re really just trying to reason with a junkyard dog. And that dog only has one purpose in life - to bite you if you are unwary and get too close.

- I’ve written a fair amount about New Zealand on this blog over the last few years. My wife and I intend to retire there, so I have a special interest in the place. Below is an article from the New Zealand Herald about why folks are drawn to New Zealand.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Lifestyle biggest drawcard to NZ

New Zealand’s relaxed lifestyle is the leading reason people come here to live, according to new statistics.

Statistics New Zealand’s longitudinal immigration survey put lifestyle (44 per cent) at the top of the list of reasons people want to live here.

The climate or clean and green environment came in second at 40 per cent, with a desire to provide a better future for children following at 39 per cent.

The survey showed 93 per cent of permanent migrants indicated they were satisfied or very satisfied with life in New Zealand, while almost the same amount said they planned to stay for three years or more.

More…

“Some physicists still find quantum mechanics unpalatable, if not unbelievable, because of what it implies about the world beyond our senses.   The theory’s mathematics is simple enough to be taught to undergraduates, but the physical implications of that mathematics give rise to deep philosophical questions that remain unresolved.   Quantum mechanics fundamentally concerns the way in which we observers connect to the universe we observe.   The theory implies that when we measure particles and atoms, at least one of two long-held physical principles is untenable.   Distant events do not affect each other, and properties we wish to observe exist before our measurements.   One of these, locality or realism, must be fundamentally incorrect.”

- From Seed Magazine, “The Reality Tests” by Joshua Roebke, June 2008

This is a personal post about a decision I came to tonight. Nothing earth shaking - I’ve just decided to let go of one of my life’s deep pleasures - because it is time.

Tonight, I decided I’m done with racquetball; a sport I’ve played with great love and enjoyment for 35 years; since I first learned it in college.

It’s the last time I will move through space with millions of my neurons tracking the ball, predicting its trajectory, noting where the other players are, developing moment to moment strategy, estimating timing, ensuring balance while moving, knowing the three dimensional space around me and experiencing the coordination of this beautiful body that the Beloved has given me.

The last time to feel the swing, estimate the force, think where I want the ball to go and be conscious and observant in the midst of the execution of neural programs that have been deepening themselves in this body and mind for most of my life. Neural sequences that flow like a ballet that I am privileged to watch from the inside. Intimate and possessive and pleased that this, this beauty and passion and animal joy are mine to feel.

I’ve loved this sport deeply for so many years. I’ve played it left handed, I’ve played it right handed, I’ve taught it to two sons and to many friends. I’ve played it in competition and I’ve played it for fun. And if my body has strength today at 60, it is largely because of the many years I’ve danced the light three-dimensional fanstastic with that flashing blue ball.

Thanks you, my Beloved, for these experiences .

So tonight, after an hour of hard play with men much younger than myself, I realized that I was lucky, yet again, in that I hadn’t blown out my knee or damaged my elbow.

There’s been a deep truth looking me in the face for sometime now. I’ve had surgery on both knees from the hard sports I’ve played. The most recent operation just last year. I’ve blown out my lower back and my left wrist rubs bone against bone at the base of the thumb.

I know that every time I play now, I risk going through a door marked “permanent damage - no return”.

I don’t want to have my knee replaced but, if I blow one of them out again, that’s the likely outcome.

Right now my right elbow just hurts from the power swings that I should have given up at 40 and that I’m still slamming at 60. And maybe the next time, that ache may not go away in a week. Maybe next time, something will tear away.

At 60, I’m beginning to think about conservation. My body is no longer invincible and sure to heal flawlessly. I could, in a careless or unlucky moment, lose serious functionality for the rest of my life.

Right now I can walk, my hands work and I can do real work and do it well. Right now, my body is strong and sound despite all the hard use I’ve given it. I’m thinking that these things, this functionality, has a deep value to me and the quality of my remaining life.

And I know that every time I play now, I am gambling them.

Tonight, as I drove home from playing, I weighed these things against the desires of that old athlete. The one that loves the dance, loves the airborne turn in the air and the racquet’s sweep and the feeling as it all comes together as the racquet finds the ball and physics and neural magic unfold together in the hanging moments of light and sound.

And I decided that in spite of this love, it is time. Time now, before I buy myself a deep regret in exchange for ‘just one more game’.

I’ve had a good long run - far better than most folks in this life and there is much I still want to do in these next decades and I need the functionality of this body to see me through those things.

So be it then. I’m giving my racquetball gear to my son, Christopher and I’m going to let go of something I’ve deeply loved, as of tonight.

Thank you, Beloved, for all of these experiences. You have given me such a rich and varied life and I am very deeply grateful. Even for this. For it is all part of life.