Listen to the podcast or read the transcript here:

http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/236-buddhist-geeks/episodes/48011-dharma-music-sound-like

Lucky recently spoke with More Than Sound about how his practice inspires and influences his creative projects.

In 2005 I was a part of a recording project in Burma. The goal of the trip was to document older monks, nuns, and lay people describing their meditation experiences. We called this The Wisdom Preservation Project. The vast majority of those recordings were in Burmese and have yet to be translated. Happily, we were able to record many jewels of wisdom for posterity before the these elder practitioners passed on (some of them have already).

Throughout this trip we stayed in monasteries and retreat centers and so I had the good fortune to record some young nuns as they were studying their lessons. Chanting is used as a memorization technique. Part of the training of Theravadan monks and nuns includes not dancing, singing, or making/listening to music or any kind of entertainment show.  So, while they don’t think of this chanting as music, there is voice and rhythm.  Though this is a more traditional Buddhist context than Dhamma Gita, they are both young people are using sound and Dhamma together. Here are the nuns and their chanting:

There’s one track on Dhamma Gita – Faith by Michaela Lucas (featuring Sogyal Rinpoche teaching) – where Rinpoche is talking about all the delusional perceptions of Samsara (the cycle of death and rebirth) – which, if you think about it means like everything we see and experience here while alive. Everything? Delusion? Holy crap.

So driving into work this morning listening to this part of Faith I recalled a version of this, from what I think was the Zen teachings of Bodhidharma, somewhere in the vast stacks of the internet: “You can’t find the Buddha with the mind, there’s no use looking – the mind only finds more mind.” You simply can’t find what is real with what is delusion. How could you? It’s impossible!

All at once it occurred to me, finally, what that Borges story El Disco (The Disk, not The Disco) meant. Read it 10 years ago perhaps. All of a sudden – Sogyal, Bodhidharma, El Disco! Delusion!

PS – found that page and while my direct quote may have been more or less apocryphal, there was this attributed to Bodhidharma: ‘A Buddha doesn’t observe precepts. A Buddha doesn’t do good or evil. A Buddha isn’t energetic or lazy. A Buddha is someone who does nothing, someone who can’t even focus his mind on a Buddha. A Buddha isn’t a Buddha. Don’t think about Buddhas. If you don’t see what I’m talking about, you’ll never know your own mind.’

Let’s all hang in there. Happy Friday!

Section 5 – Social Connectivity in Preparedness Training

Leonard Marcus asks in the beginning of this podcast: “How do we get different groups of people to work together?” Once a group of people has learned to work as a unit by going through the processes outlined earlier, how does this group make sure that it will be able to reliably function when asked to work together with other groups of people with with distinct personalities, perspectives and methodologies?

Section 4 – Risk, Uncertainty and Experience

In the last decade, the public health profession has often been called on to prepare for unprecedented emergency events. As public health officials face off against global pandemics and the threat of chemical/biological weapons, the unpredictable nature of the emergency becomes a grave concern. And to compound this problem, the brain responds to uncertainty in the same way as it responds to a known danger.

In these new and ever-changing times, what’s the best way for an emergency worker to prepare for the unprecedented event?

The recent dust-up around GoodGuide’s report on Mr. Squiggles, their subsequent retraction, and all the chirping and squeaking from both ends of our consumer and anti-consumer culture misses the point. Read all about the methods, issues.

The debate misses the point that included in GoodGuide’s study were these results:

Bakugan 7-in-1 Maxus Dragonoid                     466-807 ppm    Chromium

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Bakugan 7-in-1 Maxus Helios                        143-756 ppm    Chromium

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Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Laughing Farm             193 ppm      Chromium

———————————————–    ———–    ——–

Zhu Zhu Pet Hamster Mr Squiggles                    93-106 ppm    Antimony

———————————————–    ———–    ——–

International Playthings My First Purse (Purple)      76 ppm      Antimony

The highest ‘safe’ (provided you trust the US government to regulate these things) levels of both chromium and antimony for adults are 60 ppm. We didn’t hear a foul called by the folks over at Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Laughing Farm. They’re too busy having an amazingly good time. The Bakugan people didn’t even respond, and their Dragonoid (yeah it’s like a dragon and android, super-sweet) thingies seem to pretty much be made of chromium.

The coolest thing to come out of this, besides hearing grown men say ‘Mr. Squiggles’, was that the makers of Mr. Squiggles – St. Louis-based Cepia LLC – released their environmental hazard tests for little Squiggles: http://www.zhuzhupets.com/Zhu%20Zhu%20Pets-EN71.pdf – to prove that he’s clean.

Great. This is the sort of thing for which GoodGuide exists. For a company to release this info is very rare, and for a company to even have this info on hand is rare. GoodGuide exists to create transparency, and they did with Mr. Squiggles. Guaranteed the folks at Bakugan don’t have it, or don’t want it out there for people to read. So Cepia wins. Mr. Squiggles wins. Companies who are out in front of this wave of consumer knowledge will win, and they’ll win through transparency.

So kudos, GoodGuide – it’s probably not a happy scene there today, no Laugh & Learn Laughing Farm, no. But through adversity we learn our impacts. So it is.

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Section 3: Getting and Staying “In The Zone”

In this section, Goleman discusses new neurological evidence that suggests that humans are more receptive to emotional signals than was previously believed. Therefore, it is very important for leaders to set an emotional tone that will serve each phase of the crisis management. Whatever the emotional tone is at the top, that tends to ripple down through the levels of command. What you as a leader have done (or not done) to establish chemistry within the group, will determine the functionality of the group when there are high stakes.

Section 2 – Four Key Skill Domains For Leadership
In this section Dan Goleman discusses four important areas of expertise that are essential to effective leadership:

1) Emotional Self-Awareness - Recognizing your own inner state is the first step to being able to draw on past successes and failures. Maintaining access to this decision matrix allows for informed, clear-headed decisions in the heat of the crisis.

2) Emotional Self-Management - Because this decision-matrix is non-verbal, staying cool in the moment (and avoiding the “amygdala-hijack” that we heard about in the last section) allows a leader to trust his gut sense of how to handle the challenging situation.

3) Empathy – How adept you are at seeing things from various perspectives can determine your own effectiveness as a leader during emergency situations as well as during the team-building (prework) phase.

4) Leadership style – Of the five styles that Goleman mentions here (Visionary, Coaching, Affiliative, Consensus, and Command & Control), there is no one single style that will serve you well in all situations. Knowing how to utilize them in different situations is the key to tapping into the potential of every person and improving your team’s Group IQ.

Section 1: Applied Emotion

In this first section, Goleman describes why effective emergency response requires “the intelligent application of emotion.” He offers a neurological explanation for why cognitive intelligence is often rendered irrelevant in our response to highly stressful situations. During these events, the brain’s decision-making center shifts from the left prefrontal cortex (which usually governs logically and analytically) to the amygdala, the brain’s emergency response center. Since they are rooted in deep-seeded biological survival tactics, reactions typically generated by the amygdala are strong, sudden and emotional, and they often lead to poor decisions. In order to be effective in emergency situations, responders must learn to resist the “amygdala hijack” and remain calm and focused enough to draw on necessary expertise to devise an innovative solution.

Hannaford’s newest store, which opened July 25th in Augusta, Maine, is the first supermarket in the world to be Platinum-certified by the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). Their use of geo-thermal heating and cooling, solar power, and recycled and locally-sourced materials is part of a movement helping to create a more sustainable world, and they deserve recognition for their commitment to reducing their environmental footprint. As this eco-friendly building opens its doors, many other supermarkets are following suit. The Whole Foods in Sarasota, Florida has been LEED certified with a Silver rating, and Food Lion just broke ground on a store in Columbia, South Carolina that is on track to LEED certification. As the green building and retail food industries forge new partnerships, this progress highlights a growing void: the lack of a common set of guidelines to transparently access the sustainability of the wide range of ecological, health, and social impacts involved with food production and distribution.

True, we have the Certified Organic label, which has made advances in restricting the use of toxic chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers on our food. But the Organic certification system fails to recognize the wider ecological impact of a product. “Saying the product is organic is not enough anymore,” says UC Berkeley Industrial Ecologist and GoodGuide founder Dara O’Rourke. “In 2009, you need to know, okay, it’s organic – but is it healthy? Was it produced locally? How far did it get shipped?” Much of the organic food that is bought every day in the U.S. actually comes from China. Newsweek reported last year that while there are 21 separate agencies that claim to certify organic farms in China, only one of them is considered legitimate outside of the country. Consider this with the fact that it’s estimated that roughly half of the organic garlic we import is coming from China. It’s hard to imagine all that garlic is certified by the recognized agency, and all this is complicated by the fact that our government doesn’t keep track of the country and farm of origin of organic food imports. In fact, we only even inspect a little over 1% of all food imports. A few years ago, Wal-Mart had to pull a bunch of Chinese produce labeled organic from its Chinese stores after they tested it and found out it was loaded with pesticides.

Ironically, even in the US, as the organic label becomes more in demand, organic farms have been further industrialized to produce higher yields, and we begin to see more Certified Organic products with questionable ecological impacts. So with the rise of “industrial organics”, comes a whole new crop of organic food mass-produced by companies with unproven ecological accountability and questionable workers’ rights practices.

Organizations like Fair Trade and TransFair USA have been established to ensure fair wages and treatment for farmers and are working towards making more of the food they supply organic. But both these systems lack a comprehensive view of the product – from its origins to its packaging and disposal, and thus fail to recognize the depth and breadth of the product’s impacts. Moreover, the Fair Trade label is only applied to certain industries that are especially susceptible to worker exploitation, more often than not in developing nations. For the rest of the food supply, there is no established method of accessing and certifying a truly sustainable supply chain.

It seems to me that we need to recognize and confront the health and social impacts associated with our food supply while giving equal attention to the ecological impacts. Right now, the best we as consumers can do to gain insight into the broad range of consequences associated with a given product is to do the research ourselves.

Fortunately, there are rating systems that can help consumers assess the various impacts of products. GoodGuide is a rating system designed by O’Rourke that rates products in three categories: social, health, and environmental, and organizes them according to users’ preferences in each area. As O’Rourke states in Ecological Awareness, GoodGuide provides “the most comprehensive, and credible information in the world to shoppers right at the moment when they’re making a decision about a product or company.” GoodGuide has recently added food to their ratings, and though the information is incomplete, it’s a step toward a comprehensive system.

There is a growing portion of consumers willing to pay more for healthy and sustainable food. As these changes are recognized by the large food retail companies, they begin to adapt their own practices to match the evolving buying habits of their customer base. With the help of a comprehensive certification system, supermarkets could select their products based on verified information instead of unregulated claims. And as large food retailers develop relationships with sustainable food producers, their support drives down prices of sustainable food and makes it economically feasible for more of the customer base. As the price of sustainable options drops closer to that of unverified products, we begin to reach an important watershed, where companies who do not adapt will be left behind as consumers favor the sustainable product that is now affordable as well.

In Great Britain, the shifting marketplace, driven by the desire for more data on carbon impacts, is helping to push the sustainable movement towards this important watershed mark. Sir Terry Leahy, CEO of Tesco, Great Britain’s largest supermarket chain, has implemented a store-wide rating system that tracks the carbon emissions associated with all 70,000 of their products. This embrace of transparent practices is spreading within Britain to the point where, according to Daniel Goleman in Ecological Intelligence, “the British government has undertaken an initiative to create a uniform measure for evaluating the carbon footprint of not just foods but a wide variety of consumer goods.” (pg 114)

In developing this initiative, called the Carbon Trust, the British Government has taken an important step towards developing a comprehensive rating system that, with the cooperation of other governments and companies around the world, could develop into a LEED-style certification system. The comprehensive nature of the LEED system is what makes it so effective, and the food industry would be wise to take a cue from the green-building industry and put more energy into developing an integrative product certification system.

MTSP

We’ve been thinking a lot here at MTSP about Ecological Awareness – specifically about Life Cycle Assessment and transparency as a manifestation of the system – our system or production – becoming aware of itself: developing its industrial consciousness. There’s a neat article we linked to some days back more or less about this idea from a Buddhist perspective.

I have a few questions. First – what do we think we are? In environmental discussion there’s an assumed, sublingual distinction made between the environment and humans – both as beings and in terms of the things we make and use.

There’s this great line from Michael Lerner at the end of ‘Environmental Health, Human Healing’, where he’s talking about how environmentalists mention we need to save the world – he says “The Earth doesn’t need saving – we do.” I think this gets at the issue quite well – we tend to anthropomorphize things far outside of their real existence. To know the true reality of anything it is necessary to be that thing – all we know is ourselves. We are conscious of this knowing to varying degrees at various times, but the knowing never changes.

Max Plank wrote all about the issues with this anthro-centric tendency a century ago. This tendency seems to emerge because life as experience is radically subjective – and so we see the polar bear is sad, and the Earth is sick. Maybe. Maybe not. Disney had a lot to do with this too, in my opinion.

Ok. My friend was just up in Juneau doing beaver-control at Glacier National Park and the salmon were running. He was watching grizzly bears fishing, and said they would pick up the female salmon, bite into them and eat the eggs, then eat the brain, and then throw the fish away. This is while other bears are staving in BC.

Save the wasteful bears! Nature is us, and we are it.

If we’re part of nature – (everything that lives and all of the things those things live on – though we usually picture fields of grass, as though grass were the big, fresh deal) – our actions are part of nature. It’s not like Chevron and Target Superstores are organic life forms, but they are ‘naturally occurring’. Or are they divine? Supernatural? They’re at least as natural as wasteful bears. To think there is an earth without everything we’ve ever done is a little out there.

Titch Nat Hann, quoting Wittgenstein wrote: “There’s no president without the country”. There’s likewise no environment without an us. If a Walmart appears in the forest, and there’s no one there to shop it, does it make a profit? No! The answer is no, it doesn’t.

What am I getting at? If we’re part of nature – if experience is subjective – if Disney was started by human beings – as we come to be more aware of what we do, and more careful that what we do not kill or hurt anyone else, and not make the polar bears sad, we help only ourselves. But that’s great, because we are us, after all.

Here’s to mindfulness!

I’ve heard this example: When we’re young, we’re told and shown that it’s bad to cross the street without looking. So we don’t do it. Our mom gets mad. So we don’t. As we grow up we realize it’s not bad but we still look, to avoid getting squished. Because who wants to get squished? No one!

See the same thing with the environmental movement, perhaps. All this doom and gloom about losing our planet – mom’s mad! She’s not going to take your Target Superstores anymore! Wise up, or she’ll kick you ass! As we get older we perhaps realize that this may not be true. Maybe we just don’t want to get squished. One can have compassion for this viewpoint. Still, the old caveat remains: beware a lack of humor – it always masks some attempt at controlling others.

This is why the truly inspiring rationality and equanimity of Greg Norris is so needed right now: (Audio Clip!). You can’t retroactively punish ‘corporations’ or ‘consumers’ for doing what they’ve ‘done’ to the planet. The workable viewpoint is let’s try to not get squished. Supporting solutions, instead of attacking problems. Does the heart good.

- Max

In the final segment of their discussion, Goleman introduces “empathic concern” and what social neuroloscience has taught us about different individuals’ capacity for compassion. Brilliant expands on these cutting-edge studies with examples from his life that have lead him to observe a distinction between “smart” and “wise” individuals. Finally, Brilliant closes by sharing inspirations from his past that have instilled in him a working model of “Compassionate Capitalism,” and how the tools of the business world can be used to serve the sick and poor.