Wednesday, December 16, 2015

INSTINCTIVE VELCRO - THE NEW AND IMPROVED YOU



WHO AM I?
Instinctive behavior is built-in, an “automatic” for you. Instinct is the way you are, the way you roll, how you do things. If you excel, then you on the easy path. If not, life is hard.An ash road.
“Choice architecture” makes use of in-built instincts to guide you through the supermarket of life. Scientists arrange shelves to meet up with behavioral patterns. The instinct that commonly motivates you is pleasure. Because it is “automatic, instinctive” behavior is that during which you are essentially sleeping, “going through the motions” as they say, “doing what comes naturally.” It is what makes animals migrate.
Instinctive behavior is the most difficult to change. “Muscle memory” – how you walk, use your hands, sit, jump, swing a baseball bat are very hard to change. That’s why few people are willing to put in the time and energy to attempt to change. That is why addiction is so powerful.
But, you can change. You can go from hardwired to instinctive velcro. Really?  Isn’t “hardwired” permanent? Forever? Nope. Depends on how lazy you are. You can re-model your heart after a cardiac blockage. You can build new neurons to overcome addiction or habitual behavior like smoking, changing your stance in boxing, or your swing in baseball. You gotta want it.

WHY AM I HERE?
Instinct says: you must always remain just as you are for this to work out for the best. Just go do the same round of golf on the same golf course with the same clubs at the same time day after day. Stay with the same group of friends. Watch TV, don’t read (you don’t read very well.) You can’t learn another language, lose weight, learn to use the computer. Stay in your comfort zone. You are still that inner 10 year old, this is how you’ve always done things. That inner child would be very afraid if you abandon them. Better to suffer the fear, shame or accept your “averageness” of sticking with the past than changing something.
When things become routine, rote – when they become “automatic” you can reach a level of performance in which you are “stuck” When you feel, “This is as good as it gets.” The “trap” of instinct has got you. Animals live in instinct which for them is permanent.
Velcro? Are you kidding me?
The first step to change is the desire to change. The recognition that you are habituated, working on instinct. Velcro gives you the opportunity to make adjustments, renew, refresh, create a new attitude, altar, adjust slightly. “Make all things new.”

WHY AM I HERE?
One must not remain comfortably in anything. One must overcome the desire to remain “good” at something. You must always find the edge of instinct, the moment when something from the past is brought into the present.
     The “Speed Bag” is how boxers change their instinctive footwork. Hour after hour they change their balance, move their feet and punch all at the same time. They re-model the neurological patterns. Baseball players re-learn how to stand or swing in the box and undo patterns learned in childhood.  “Pick and roll” exercises become instinctive for the life-long basketball player. Any of these exercises may be called a “spiritual practice” – they are repetitive, they require a certain mental attitude of expectancy, they are a preparation.
Do something like this and you will meet your worst features when you focus on changing one instinct or habit. They naturally emerge. They want you to stay as you are. This is too hard. You’re no good at it.
     When the spiritual practice you undertake gets beyond those parts of your instinctive self and eventually you do change the instinctive just slightly – then it is possible that your spiritual practice may become a spiritual experience. Surprise! A new and improved you emerges. 

© Copyright 2015, Jean W. Yeager
All Rights Reserved

TH3 SIMPLE QUESTIONS: Slice Open Everyday Life

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Wednesday, November 25, 2015

RECENT AMAZON.COM REVIEWS


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Th3 Simple Questions - Slice Open Everyday Life by Mr. Jean W. Yeager.
116 pages, 45 chapters
Honestly I have been in a slump for awhile when it comes to reading books until I got my hands on this one... let's just say this amazing book found me and I am ecstatic that it did. The style of short essays or "slices" each with the "Who am I", "Why am I here", and "What do I want", format took me by surprise as it was an energizing way to read and process thought provoking concepts with each "slice" only being a few pages long and the analogies were artfully presented as real life experiences to which most anyone can relate.
My favorite slice was "Dandelion Wine: Alchemical Batting Practice" as I fully immersed myself into this "slice" with my own imagery which I could completely relate to as it left me with the warmth of sunshine still in my mind. All of the "slices" were masterfully crafted without needing page after page of extra words to get the author's intended thought provoking points across.
Mr. Jean - Willie Mays would have been impressed with "Another Willie Mays Miracle" as you hit this one "out of the park" worth reading more than once...... 5 Stars
Many Thanks :=}
Mark Krausman - Goodreads Reviewer 

Recent reviews on Amazon.com
https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/community
1. 
Jean Yeager's simple little gems November 5, 2015
Full disclosure: the author is a friend and neighbor and has asked me to review this book. He provided the copy for review. When I first looked at the book, I saw that it was a mere 116 pages and I thought I could just sit down and read it in about an hour or so. I was wrong. The reader COULD just pick up the book and start reading and go straight through to the end. The reader might have some appreciation of the genius of the book, but likely not. As the author puts it, each entry is a slice of life to be taken up by the reader for reflection/contemplation or what have you.
The book is a work of unexpected genius. JY has taken the best of his blog entries from January to June of 2014 and packaged them into this unassuming little volume. He uses a particular style that can really draw the reader in. He asks, in each entry, 3 questions. They are: Who am I? Why am I here? And, What Do I Want?
Who am I? can be a very simple aspect of life such as, "The Midnight Shift" to something much more complicated, such as, "The Monsters That Keep Us All Safe." From there he speaks in the first person as if he were, for example, "The Midnight Shift" and describes just who he is and why he is here and what he wants of the reader.
It is pure brilliance how JY manages to bring the reader to consider aspects and meanings of things often not noticed or go taken for granted in everyday life, cuts them into "slices" and offers the reader the opportunity to stop the ordinary flow of his/her thinking and seriously consider some things and their meaning for themselves, the readers, things they have not likely pondered before.
The book is provocative and thoughtful. It is an open invitation to look at life in an entirely new way. I give it my highest recommendation. It should be in the library of anyone who consider themselves to be reflective. It also makes a great starting point for people who may never have given much thought to their lives and what is going on around them.

2. 
Much to mull over! September 6, 2015
The questions may be simple, but the explorations thereof can be profound, thought-provoking, maybe even life-changing. Jean turns the spotlight on many aspects of life today, highlighting facets of our culture that influence us whether consciously or unconsciously. See 'I am the mask' or, read 'I am grass' for a powerful indictment of pastoral policy, its results and demands. Are we deaf? On the other hand, "Dandelion wine" was definitely inspirational for me.

You'll want to own this book so you can return to various sections to peruse them once again, be intrigued, challenged and inspired. Plus, there's the privilege of gaining some insights into the soul of another human being... in this case, Jean himself.
 3. 
A small book with large wisdom August 9, 2015
very interesting book providing new perspectives

Monday, November 16, 2015

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES- FECKLESS, FEARLESS, FOOLHARDY OR COURAGEOUS?

Some say the Democratic Presidential candidates were "feckless" in their response to what to do in response to the terrorist attack in Paris the night before.
     "Feckless" means "weak spiritless, worthless."

Others say Republican Presidential candidates would be "fearless" in their response to what to do in response to terrorist attacks in Paris the night before.
     "Fearless" means
free from fear, caution or concern; ready to plunge imto battle."

Some say to rush in is "Foolhardy".
     "Foolhardy" means "daring without judgment."

All would agree we need "courageous" leadership.
     "Courageous" means "firmness of mind and purpose." "Courageous spirit" suggests "less vitality than mettle to keep up one's morale indefinitely."

What say you?


(c) Copyright 2015, Jean W. Yeager
All Rights Reserved

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

WHY IS BEING HUMAN NEVER ENOUGH?



WHO AM I?
A slippery double bass riff. A whining blues-harp. A backbeat, fair and lovely with its own kind of truthful spine upon which the heart of a woman could recline. Her head nods slowly in time. In time. In time with her heart and the feelings in the music. The 7th chords open the captured heart, the obligations, duties, anger at bosses, slave masters, kings and shift leaders. The rhythm moves her fingers. What is unlocked in the heart of woman, or a man, and makes the flesh respond? Something intimate. Something human. When I brush her neck and down her arm, she chills and turns with a shiver and a “don’t do that” smile. Sometimes the human touch is too much. The music, for a moment, replaces the reality in which the human spirit lives.
Once alive, kings, queens, tribal leaders, slave masters, bosses, parents, family bullies were humans with hearts and hands and heads. They “ruled” people personally. “Their” people. They had power in their hands. They angrily raged against enemies who opposed them. They struck fear in our hearts, brutalized and, betrayed. They were alive. They were the mortal face of power. Evil, strong, good or bad they were not anonymous power. They were not distant, indiscriminate. They commanded and we obeyed. You knew whose face looked out of power eyes, who wore the crown, earned or privileged.
Your labor was due to them, you worked for them day, night, round the clock, work until you dropped, no time off unless the Lord or Master took a break. Compensation? What is the compensation for obedience under threat? They gave you enough, or let you keep enough, to stay alive. Slave wages, indentured, indebted, tied, work was not freely given. Freedom did not belong to the worker. Had justice been invented. You’d never know it. Justice and rights were for the ruling class.
But, power shifted. The rights of man arose. Despots died at the hands of the common folk in uncommonly brutal ways as their despotism demanded. The king is dead. Their Power was released. Was it shared?

WHY AM I HERE?
Kingless times and the “rights of man”. Which men? The “rule of law” made by the privileged put the privileged on the thrones. Gave the privileged the rights. Kingdoms were transformed and the once human despots operated behind corporate veils. Then science gave them economics that showed how profits were to be made. Profits, is what were the power was renamed? Power measured by profits still measured blood.  What is the cost of slave labor? Corporations joined their power with politics and freed the workers. Then workers had freedom without power. They paid the old slave wages, never enough to live on, take it or leave it. The same old nickel and dime now costs more.
Power now: dehumanized, industrialized, and corporatized. Computers, robo-calls, answering machines, media are all human-less agents of power. The same power. No specific person does me ill, but I am harmed by chains of corporate actions. Bound by chains. And, the human being has not changed. Still breathe, still bleed.
Deed are visited upon us all, and what is there to do? How can I swear vengeance for an uninspiring corporate heart? How can I make a defective product, or a chain store pay in blood? The chains have bound more, captured villages, hold communities back. Pay no taxes. Move the money to their castles. Hire few. Rob many. There once were kings who ruled our lands who could be hanged. But how in the world can vengeance be had when corporate amorality unfurls? Corporate faux-kings plot against us, inhuman faces over international lands, evil, strong, good and bad. No corporate face, no human eyes. Anonymous power in thrall o’re the world.
Corporate strategies are not about virtues, only what can be measured in quarterly profits. Outsource every expense. Damn the quality, cut the costs. Offload all responsibility, to whom? People? Let the people pay for toxic waste. Let individual residents, citizens – the humans in a place - pay to clean up what corporations leave behind. That’s just the cost of having corporate jobs! Corporate adultery? Of course, undulating behind the corporate veil with legislatures. Corporate sentimentality? None. Love? Compassion? Musicality? Not possible. Not human! What reigns in the heart of a corporation? Fear of being found out for the crime. But, even then, the individual corporate leaders are protected by the law. Let me go bankrupt and someone else pays. Golden parachutes.  Hidden.

WHAT DO I WANT?
The slippery double-bass riff, the whining blues-harp. The backbeat, fair and lovely, a truthful spine upon which the heart can recline is the product of a human group not motivated by economic opportunism. Our community can be that band blowing sweet. A band, restauranteur, gardener, shop keeper, barber, bookkeeper, carpenter, handy man, the self-employed, the healer, the farmers markets; independently outside the secret hand of Adam Smith, not buying into corporate greed, seeking only to meet our local need. Not hidden by corporate veils. Not anonymous. You know them. Creators of the family’s 7th chords which open, open so much, open the corporate-minimum wage doors, unlock the corporate chains and chain stores that otherwise bind our hearts, hands and brains. Makes life livable for the human spirit here, and competes against the anonymous corporate slaver selling cheap because he’s stolen from another over there.
Hubris, power, anonymity, and greed are what the corporate Board must feed. But the human-sized, the locally based mom’n’pops operate on things called virtues, human values, remember those?  That’s what binds us to us and us to them. Do unto others. Golden Rules. Corporations suck capital from our local lands and feed giant banks in banking centers where conglomerates amass riches to fund bigger projects, create bigger profits, bigger waste, bigger collapses. Too big to fail. What a threat? As if we don’t already have hard times. Hard scrabble. Hard luck.  Really? The bigs needs the bigs and the bigs crush the littles and ignore the locals.
We have collisions of the moral and the amoral. Friction of self-interest. How can a company have morals without a conscience or a soul? In the confluence of the grocery store we see the battle waging. The bankers, the morbid profiteers, the bigs versus the locals. Let’s choose human-sized. Let’s choose the local. Let’s choose the eyes into which we can look. Those who leave their capital locally, in local banks, to pay local workers, fairly, not minimum, another motive – not only about profit.

© Copyright 2015, Jean W. Yeager
All rights Reserved

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Sunday, July 19, 2015

WHY DO I ALWAYS WIND UP WITH LOSERS LIKE YOU?



WHO AM I?
As an infant, I squalled in order to get fed again. Research has shown that infants usually are not really hungry, they just want to be held – they are just learning how to manipulate their parents or minders.  Ah, deception from birth goes on.
     When I was 10 or 12 years old, I deeply studied the art of deception or “sleight of hand.” I spent hours practicing to “palm” a quarter, and hide coins between my fingers. On Sunday, the “Lord’s Day”, the only day I was forced to wear a long-sleeve shirt, I tried to perfect that old “slip-the-card-up-the-shirtsleeve” trick, something I thought the Lord might get a kick out of. It was only a sleight deception, right?
     Later, I actually stole change from where my father emptied his pockets on his dresser. One Saturday when he was mowing the lawn, I stole a dollar bill from his wallet – just to see if I could do it.  He never said anything. Deception seemed innocent, like a game.
     Then, I bought practical jokes of all sorts: cans with spring-loaded “snakes”, whoopie cushions, and “exploding” cap-loaded lipstick, and plastic vomit which “shocked” my other into feigned horror. Innocent, right? Fun stuff.
     My favorite comic books were all about deception: Superman, Batman, The Flash were all about individuals who were not who they said they were – they were really Super Heroes. Super Heroes are the ones who have great powers – and they are all deceivers who don’t have to be themselves, or maybe thgemselves is really a lie. Today, kids age 10 -12, love Harry Potter, another example of someone with extraordinary abilities who can’t stand “ordinary” people.
     In our teenage years – and perhaps beyond - we seem to grow and become dissatisfied with ourselves. We long to be far more beautiful, stronger, smarter and more capable than our reality. We image ourselves – imagine – ourselves greater than our skinny legs, big ears, long noses, cowlicks, and zits. Ordinary is boring. Being perfect is better.
Well, dating when beer is involved is deception in motion -  “You tink Ting-Tong ugry?!” - “there are no ugly girls at closing time”.
     In college, I studied drama and acted in plays – more deception. I majored in Radio-TV-Film and excelled in the art of illusion in broadcasting. When I graduated, I got a job in advertising where I was paid to be deceptive – and outright lie – called persuasion.
     I was a high flyer! There was a future, a whole potential!

WHY AM I HERE?
There are two sides of our brain – a right and left hemisphere. The right is the impulsive, spontaneous quick thinking side; the left is the home of reflective thinking, structured thinking, and planning.
     Deception makes use of quick thinking which is our normal thinking-style in our rapid, media soaked society. In research studies, some 80% of quickly made decisions are shown to be wrong. It is this side of the brain to which advertising, media and computers appeal. You won’t find slow-thinking on TV.
Advertising suggests we find happiness through purchasing – and happiness is the #1 motivation for us. The quintessential advertising message which I once saw painted on the side of a liquor store is “Buy-Here-Now.”
We make wrong decisions when we “need” something or feel we lack in some way. There are lots of financial “come-ons” sound like they will make us happy, but really they are not what we think they are. But, we don’t take the time to slow down and think them through carefully. But, I was a high flyer, I knew how to make decisions, boy! I had potential!
Life is always this struggle between fast and slow thinking, emotions or intentions. We need exercises to help us be able to do both fast and slow thinking. But we don’t have time to slow down.
Our emotions are torn by deceptive feelings which move rapidly: sympathies and antipathies, friendships, bullying and love-affairs which thrash about, flip-flopping this way and that over time.
We believe we must do something urgently: we need something to make us feel better, we need wars to keep us safe and we need them quickly! “Fix-Me-Now!” What we get is addiction to urgency and drugs.
Life seems to be built up with deception upon deception. One quickly created experienced deception “covered” by another quickly created deception because we’re embarrassed because of our first mistake. We cover our personal deceptions one after another with denial. It gets worse.

WHAT DO I WANT?
Catathesis is a Greek term for a “drop” of some sort. This is how life deceives us. This drop starts our path of initiation. When we are at the “top of our game” – say when we graduate from college - we have expectations that since we have “graduated” life will at least deliver to us opportunities for our future. We are ready, or so we think.
This is not what happens. We are deceived by this vanished expectation, our step up – our next step, our trajectory The next step in our development is the catathesis – the drop, a humbling. We may have been at a peak, living in a fine college dorm, on loan money or scholarship, we had dates and parties, we looked fine, we played and loved and learned. Suddenly, catathesis – we drop into the rat hole, the darker way, the way down, all the way down to the bottom, the way we dread and can’t believe we find ourselves there. On the way down we see the losers around us. “Why do I find myself with losers like you?” Here we must do anything to survive, but what we have to do bottom-jobs and not what we thought we would be doing. It is a hole. We are way down.
As Bob Dylan wrote, “How does it feel? How does it feel? To be on your own? With no direction home? Like a complete unknown? Like a rollin’ stone?”
No one wants us. It feels like we are weightless. There is no push or pull around us. We can’t make anything happen. The phone doesn’t ring. We feel suddenly we have made a wrong choice somewhere. We were deceived. They never told us about this. How will we ever work our way out of this hole? Work our way out of the debts and depths? We make little, we try to make a living. We scrape by. Time begins to slip away. Maybe we’re in our 30’s now. We feel like our lives are being wasted. Who are these losers?
Catathesis – a drop, we are in a depression. Or, is it a trench? Alice falls a long way.
     All addicts come to this point. “But I’m not addicted,” you say! And, what were you not addicted to? To the belief that you alone were in control of your destiny? This is the deception of the deception. Welcome to the path of initiation. Getting conscious of your deception is the first step in stopping your deception. "Pride goeth before the fall."

© Copyright 2015 – Jean W. Yeager
All Rights Reserved