The Lost Soldiers

Hola Everybody,
I have a splitting headache and I never get headaches -- never. I’m going to find a dark, quiet place and just lay my head down....

Lost

Former Japanese soldier, Hiroo Onoda (r), offering his sword  as an expression his surrender 30 years after WW II was over.

I read somewhere once that getting lost is the best way to find yourself.
 -- Joanne Clancy

During the height of the Japanese occupation of the Pacific during WW II, there were tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers scattered over literally thousands of tiny islands. As the tide of war shifted, many of these island strongholds were defeated or overrun, but some were entirely missed. On some islands, small groups of soldiers or isolated survivors hid in caves in dense inaccessible jungle areas.

Eventually, the war would come to an end. But since these survivors had no way of knowing, they continued living as if the war was still being fought, maintaining military protocol, totally isolated, yearning for the day when they would be reunited with their command.

In the years immediately following the war, many of these soldiers were found by natives, or discovered when they shot at fishing boats. As the years passed, these discoveries became less frequent, the last having been found thirty years after the war had ended.

Try to put yourself in such a soldier’s position. His government had called on him to protect his country from an external threat, trained him, and sent him to a jungle island. And as a loyal citizen he served answered this call and survived many battles through the hard years of war. When the war ended, he kept honoring this call, fighting a war that he didn’t know had ended, surviving against great odds. Despite the heat, the disease, the insects, and the rains, he carried on, still loyal to the orders given to him by his government.

It would be easy to laugh at such a soldier and consider him stupid for continuing to fight a war that had been over for years. The question became, how should such a soldier be treated?

Whenever one of these soldiers was located, the first contact was always made by someone who had been a high-ranking officer. He would dust off his old uniform and samurai sword and take a military boat to the area where the soldier had been sighted.

The officer would walk through the jungle, calling out for the soldier until he was located. When the soldier was found, the officer would thank the soldier, with tears in his eyes, for his loyalty and for continuing to defend his country. Only after some time would the soldier gently be told the war was over and that his country was again at peace, so he would not have to fight anymore.

When he reached home, he would be given a hero’s welcome, with parades and medals, and crowds thanking him and celebrating his sacrifices.

Many of us would view these lost soldiers as weird and even crazy, fighting a war that had long been over. Yet who can deny their intention was noble -- to protect and serve their country? Although they were doing the best they could with what they knew and, however useful their behavior may have once been, the war was over and their actions no longer served a purpose.

Laugh you might, but there are times we all are like those lost soldiers. We all have feelings or behaviors that once may have served a useful purpose when we were younger, and we continue even when they are no longer useful to us.

Some of us find ourselves still fighting battles with their parents long after they have died. We may find ourselves reacting in the workplace with behaviors developed to deal with an older brother, or the school bully. People who have been hurt sometimes learn to mistrust others so well that they have great difficulty trusting others who love them deeply. Some of us have been hurt so deeply that even saying the words, “I love you,” is a near impossibility.

All of us do things we sometimes consider stupid or limiting -- things that get in our way. Sometimes we feel inadequate and angry when we think that’s a dumb thing to feel. How many of us also occasionally see our friends and relatives doing stupid, harmful, even weird things? I think we tend to see it better in others than in ourselves. They should know better, some of us sneer.

We are the lost soldiers. Welcome to a war that has been over for a long time, my friends.

What often happens is that we usually respond to these behaviors by trying to get rid of them, criticizing ourselves mercilessly in the process:

“You ought to be able to stop smoking!”

“You should be able to lose weight!”

“You’re so stupid for not feeling more self-confident.”

“I get so pissed at getting these migraines!” 

All we know is that these responses often act as obstacles and serve no useful purpose except to get in our way.

However, like the lost soldiers, all our behaviors at one time served a useful purpose. Cognitive linguists talk about “frames,” the mental structures we build in order to make sense of reality. These frames are very important to us and sometimes they’re not even based on evidence but values. I can talk till I’m blue in the face, showing you that what you view as a table really isn’t a table, but if you developed a certain “frame” for a table, you will dismiss the evidence and keep the “frame.”

For me, the key to effective change is to use reframing techniques. Maybe we can think of a frame as part of a map. We create maps early in our lives so that we can navigate the territory. But what happens when the territory has changed and our maps have lost their relevance? What happens mostly is that people keep the maps and mistake the map for the territory.

I see this tendency in myself and others all the time.

The most important part of this reframing method is making the following assumption: that every behavior or feeling you have, no matter how bizarre or stupid it seems, has some useful and important, positive function or intention. It may seem ridiculous but it is a powerful assumption that makes inner healing possible. It helps us turn problems and limitations into assets and allies. I think the important part of the lost soldiers’ story is that they were treated gently with compassion. In the same way, we need to bring the same gentleness and compassion to the lost soldiers of our souls.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Interdependent Origination

Hola mi Gente,
I had an awful, almost crippling headache today. I almost never get headaches. I don’t know how I held it together.

Everything is Everything

The fear of letting go prevents you from letting go of the fear of letting go.

This is the doctrine at the heart Buddhism. You see, my dear reader, it goes this way: you are a unstable collection of coincidences held together by a desperate and irrational clinging. There is no center -- no center at all. Everything depends on everything else, your body depends on the ecology, your thoughts depend on whatever conditioned debris floats in from the media, your emotions are mostly from the reptilian end of your DNA.

Your intellect, dear reader, is a chemical computer that can’t add up a zillionth as fast as a pocket calculator. Even your best side is a superficial piece of social conditioning that will fall apart as soon as your significant other leaves with the money in the bank account, the economy fails and you get the sack, or you get conscripted into some village idiot’s war, or they give you the news about your brain tumor. To name this combination of self-pity, vanity, and despair self is not only the height of conceit, it is also proof that we’re a deluded species.

We are in a trance from birth to death. Burst the balloon and what are you left with? Emptiness.

It’s not only us -- this radical principle applies to the whole sentient world. Dependent origination is not exactly everyone’s cup of tea, I admit. But it does have a compelling point: stop for a moment, still yourself, listen -- in other words, meditate just a little -- and you will find yourself on a planet you no longer recognize. Those needs and fears you thought were the very foundation of your existence turn out to be no more than bugs in your software.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Evolution's End

Hola mi Gente,

Sometimes I read stuff I’ve written in the past and I wonder, Who wrote this? LOL This was written some years ago.

* * *

Evolution’s End

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

-- Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

I think people who know me are under a false impression that I don’t watch TV. Actually, I watch tons of TV. My TV is on if I’m home. I watch a lot of garbage too: shit like Miami Vice reruns (don’t do it)!

I think people are under a false sense of security, thinking that if they don’t watch TV that they are somehow immune from its influence. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a theory, for example, that an element of a culture or behavior -- what some psychologists call memes -- can be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means. For me, this means that unless you have been totally deprived, you are not immune from the larger external forces that shape our culture. I actually think keeping yourself ignorant of what goes on the boob tube is probably not a good strategy if you want to understand, say, how collective consent is manufactured.

While we all like to think we’re different, or smarter, or more unique, we are not. Like it or not, we are, in many respects, just like the next person, statistically just as prone to social pressure as the average Jane. Doubt me? Well, I'm not in the mood to get all that deeply into it, but I’m sure you throw away more shit than you’re conscious of -- whether you want to or not. As a society, we let out a collective fart that’s choking the rest of the world. Scientists call it climate change. A big part of the crisis of climate change is that we consume disproportionately more when compared to the rest of the world.

We rationalize purchasing gas-guzzlers because “we have to drive the kids around,” or some such nonsense. We drive to work when we can take public transportation. We are the target of so many messages -- about 80,000 a day -- that we’re barely aware of them. And all this shit seeps in. It is not a matter of whether we buy into it or not, but rather, the degree to which we have been conditioned by these messages.

I don’t think the television is necessarily an evil thing. Television, radio, and the internet -- all media -- become problematic when we succumb to the impulse to become passive. And that’s the aim of marketing -- to condition us to become passive consumers. The rationale here is that becoming passive consumers is good for the economy. In fact, the population most targeted are children and marketers are extremely effective at molding the minds of our children. While you are worrying about sex, your children are being conditioned to become mindless slaves to an economic system that will shred them psychologically. In fact, children’s programs contain the heaviest concentration of commercials.

When my son was young, I would use TV as a tool for learning opportunities. Buffy the Vampire Slayer became an opportunity to discuss a whole slew of interesting and relevant adolescent issues. Everything from sex, to peer pressure, to the “horrors” of what it is to be a teenager in a postmodern world gone slightly mad. The X-Files was an opportunity to have discussions about conspiracy theories and the importance of questioning authority.

For my son, watching TV became an opportunity to learn basic ideas about cultural studies and critical theory, and it was fun mostly because he didn’t know he was “learning.” The drug commercials were the best and often the butt of our “critical analysis.” You know those commercials where there would be some woman in a filmy sun dress traipsing through a field of flowers selling a pill? Then, towards the end of the commercial, there would be like a 30-second rapid-fire sotto voce disclaimer listing all these awful side effects? Like, anal leakage -- what the fuck is anal leakage?! We would have a lot of fun, deconstructing the messages TV was trying to embed into our brains.

I think what I was teaching my son (and myself) was to be an active observer. I was teaching him how to form questions, to be a critical thinker. In this sense, TV was a tool for learning and we were fully aware of what was going on at some larger cultural level and in that way, were able to inoculate ourselves -- to a degree -- from the mindless push to consume.

I do not know where I got this idea, maybe it was the influence of my Tantric practice in which everything -- even what we consider negative -- can be utilized in the service of waking up. Shit, even fertilizer has its use, right? And isn’t waking up (not to be confused with analyzing, which is merely mental masturbation) -- isn’t waking up what evolving is all about?

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…