Matt my Mate: When does Copenhagen start?

Adelaide, Australia.

Dear Matt,

Does anyone know when the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change begins? I thought it had begun 125 days ago (inside joke for those who followed the countdown on Facebook) when some of us were worrying that not much was being done about it, or at least it didn't feel like it. Since August, 2008, right during the Water Summit in Sweden, Climate Change was picking up. Even The Economist started changing its editorial profile about the topic and had "a climate change of opinion," as they so masterfully put it in one article's title. And then, it happened...

The stock market crashed, as painfully as it could, and left us all thinking and rethinking so many things about our daily lives, that we were globally caught up in the discussion. So, the year that we should have spent generating dialogue about an issue as rupturing in our civilization as the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change that starts today, we spent it talking about how come the market also crashes when it spends more than what it earns. Just like me. The greatest loss was all the rich synergies that could have been developed globally during this last year if we would have shared together that grandiose information apparatus humanity has created called the media for a common purpose.

The media is boring and manipulative and uninformative sometimes because there is really nothing that serious to report about. The media is not what is stupid. It is those of us who follow it as if it was a religion. I bet no responsible and serious media enterprise that covers world affairs has in its mission statement: "to make people believe in us." That is a mission statement that would be impossible to achieve in a community of highly-educated people that would not cross a dime unless there was sufficient proof that, under any reputable methodology, it could be considered probably or absolutely true that what is being presented in the media is, in fact, TRUE. Otherwise, they -the hypereducated- would take the information with the superficiality it deserves. And then start digging before forming an opinion, even before starting the pandemic of fear that usually adrenalizes us all en masse pandemonium, like when Michael Jackson passed away.

I am sure he would have preferred that all the energy and all the love (L-O-V-E) and all the time and money spent into the question of whether he was really dead or not or sick or not or murdered or not or rich or not or bald or not, or black or not, we would have used it to generate empathy across our borders (especially the mental borders) and try to think how can we prevent the ever-growing death tolls of natural disasters around the world. We all lose when we lose someone. Even if we are already numb to the suffering of others, we can still remember, as a glitch in our intoxicated brains, that if someone suffers, we all suffer. Our species will not evolve symbiotically if we disregard one another. We are not going to be better if we defeat ourselves to death.

That's why we need to change.

One idea that just popped to my mind (or I read about it in The Advertiser of Adelaide today, I can't really say...) is what if we divide the political responsibility of the decision-making process regarding climate change. There may be regions with far less territory and population than some small world states that would prefer to be left alone the way they are right now, without having or needing to change anything in their lifestyles because of others. Like for example, indigenous communities around the world that have earned their right to be in our current stage civilization, precisely because they proved to be sustainable (in fact, self-sustainable, as most didn't do much trade with other groups) for thousands of years.

Or it could be that some territorial unities are so contaminating to the world environment that they deserve a different treatment than the rest, with more financial and technological assistance to transform its industry from highly polluting to restorative, or higher taxation on specific emissions to that particular place, or recommendations about the species of trees that should be planted in that area to reforest it in 40 years from now. We need to go back to the forests, back to the jungles. We need to go back to building under the shade and protecting the pine trees that cut the strong winds from the mountain. We need to go back to drinking water from the tap and not fear our baby developing a respiratory condition. The same way a human being 100 years ago would not have liked to see a dear one being poisoned.

We have been poisoning ourselves. But that's nothing new. We are not going to get anyone off their chair by saying that. We smoke, we drink alcohol, we use combustion engines, we use electricity, we recharge batteries, we buy and buy and buy clothes and shoes and shit that piles up in desks and drawers and closets and attics, and warehouses and garbage dumps. So we are the problem. It is our responsibility. The tough challenge is that many of us are self-destructive (suicidal in slow motion) and many are skeptic. Fortunately, few are ignorant. So it is not a matter of intellect, but a matter of attitude (skeptics) and a question of punishment (in the case of the ones that match with suicidal conduct, like smoking tobacco or driving under the influence of alcohol.)

Now, before you throw your first rocks at me and start labeling me with post-Sept. 11-jargon about the extremist morality of my religion, it is important to remember that societies that are with us for over 5000 years do know the way better than those that have been here for less than 500 (in one word, all colonies, including the entire American continent except Guatemala and Bolivia, the two countries that still have a majority of indigenous people among their state population) [Congratulations, Mr. Evo Morales, for your re-election in Bolivia!]. Millenary civilizations know the way already, and the ones that are not, have been the ones ruling the industrialized planet for far too little time in their cultural existence. They have not prepared to flourish as a species and they seem doomed to extinction as well. I refer to the West (the wild, wild West...) And they won't die alone. With them, goes the rest of us. Therefore, there is no "Us" and "Them" (it sounds SOOOOOO last decade already...) anymore, but a "We" pronoun that stands for humanity. So part of our responsibility shall be to respect our elders -the more ancient ones among our cultures- to listen to them, to listen to the experience they have accumulated living much longer than us and through other harsher times. Let's ask them questions. We are facilitators in the process of having them show us the way. For that, we must learn to listen. To understand that pain will always be there once you get old, but a comforting hug or a phone call or a smile can make pain feel so much better for a bit.

If we were responsible at a smaller political level, it would be easier to participate. Plus, it would be more ethical, because the politicians in charge don't have that much to lose. They are not at the very top with the cherry in their mouths. It would be a lot more people like you and I gathering at night once a week and reading a few e-mails a week and making transformative decisions for the state of the environment as perceived from our smaller territorial unity.

In a country like Australia, this would be fairly easy. The country is so massive that 20 million people are divided in smaller groups that control vast amounts of territory. But in a country like Costa Rica, where are we jammed over each other for lack of planning and infrastructure to help secondary cities develop faster, then it is very difficult to make our communication more effective for problem-solving because we have to speak too loud to be heard, so we are unable to listen to anyone else. And everybody thinks they have a better opinion than the expert, be it a president, a football coach, a policeman, or your own freaking mother that gave birth to you. So, splitting the decision-making process into municipalities would result, in the case of Costa Rica, in 81 grassroot-think-tanks working voluntarily for the diagnosis, prognosis and transformation of the state of the local environment. So guess what would happen in Parque Nacional Las Baulas in Playa Grande, Guanacaste, when there is a municipal referendum to decide what to do with the freaking park. Didn't guanacastecos decide to join Costa Rica precisely in that same way? Was it any less civilized in 1824 than it would be today?

And then maybe the people from Beijing -or, for that matter, from the Chaoyang district where I used to live until last Month- would have to pay far more taxes than others in less polluted communities. And I don't mean that everybody has to pay more taxes. I mean those who individually contribute more with the environmental degradation. The poor have paid a heavy burden drinking dirty water and not having access to medication and dying young or violently. There would be far less suffering in the world if we would all die of old age, when your relatives have had years and years to say goodbye to you before simply fading in your sleep, like angels die. Not out of typhoid fever or diarrhea or cancer or AIDS or murdered. Imagine what the world would be like if all nations would have agreed to a human rights charter that started: "Every person has the right to die of old age..." Then we would be talking.

A brief note on the rich paying like poor: if the rich would pay 1% more -a small burden for most- than what they already pay (or if they only paid what they had to pay, without legal tricks to shake off the civic and moral responsibility of helping others help themselves) (and I include myself among the rich, definitely. After all I have seen out in some of the poorest places on Earth, I consider myself very rich -and privileged, and blessed- for the wealth that has surrounded me all my life), they could relieve a very heavy burden on hundreds or thousands or millions of people. Some burdens are life-threatening even at a young age, like the 1000 children under 5 that die every hour of a preventable disease, like malaria or tuberculosis. It is not that anyone wants to make the rich any less rich. It is empirically known that stealing is not sustainable. It is that the rich ignore the immense power they have to help heal the lives of so many others, perhaps because we the rich do not spend that much time coexisting with the poor. If we did, we would perfectly well know with how very little we could do so much for so many others. It is a question of morality. But not because we are immoral, but because we are ignorant of the conditions in which others live.

Every state, every province, every district, every municipality, every town hall, every neighbor gathering would permit far greater dialogue and creative search for synergies to deal with the environmental situation of the smaller community. And it would also allow, in very many cases, allow for a very rich and constructive interaction between the rich and the poor.

As professor Galtung used to say: "Sometimes, to solve a small problem you must make it bigger, and to solve a big problem you must make it smaller."

Cheers, Mate!

Medición ecológica del PIB

La medición ecológica del PIB

Antonio Burgués Terán

Álvaro Cedeño Molinari

El término chino para la palabra “crisis” es “wei ji”, que significa tanto crisis como oportunidad. Creen en el Lejano Oriente que se deben aprovechar las crisis como un cambio para mejorar lo que no andaba bien. La civilización ha llegado a un punto de inflexión no sólo en cuanto a la forma de crecimiento económico, sino al contenido cualitativo en cuanto a su efecto sobre la calidad de vida –vida en su sentido amplio- donde los índices económicos tradicionales ya no son suficientes.

El Dr. Daniel Goleman, padre intelectual del concepto de inteligencia emocional, ha publicado un libro recientemente bajo el título “Inteligencia ecológica,” puntual para los tiempos que vive el planeta en términos de crecimiento e impacto ambiental. En dicho libro, elabora en torno a un concepto que merece la pena considerar. Habla de la “transparencia radical” como un principio de información que vinculará más cercanamente a productores y consumidores, introduciendo “una apertura sobre las consecuencias de las cosas que hacemos, vendemos, compramos y desechamos, que va más allá de las zonas de confort actuales de la mayoría de negocios.” Este intercambio de información sobre el impacto ecológico de todos los actos del comercio “presentará un camino económico aún no recorrido: aplicarle al impacto ecológico de las cosas que compramos los mismos estándares de transparencia requeridos, por ejemplo, en estados financieros.” Agregaríamos, también, en sistemas de gobierno.

¿Cuáles son los incentivos para ser transparentes o para calcular e incluir el impacto ecológico de productos y servicios en la información divulgada en todo intercambio comercial? Esencialmente, tener la posibilidad de tomar decisiones más inteligentes y éticamente correctas en cuanto a la huella ecológica que cada ser humano deja, a veces de manera perdurable, en su vida cotidiana.

Una medida semejante provocaría, de inmediato, la necesidad por parte de la política económica de los países, de incluir programas ecológicos como parte del PIB, así como incorporar índices de medición del impacto ecológico o del desempeño ambiental de cada economía. Esto permitiría saber, con transparencia radical, si un país está efectivamente creciendo a 8% anual, o si, por el impacto ambiental que genera dicho crecimiento, estaría más bien decreciendo económicamente. Se hablaría entonces de recesiones ecológicas también, lo cual guardaría armonía con el medio ambiente.

Así como hay índices de calidad de vida, de felicidad, de desempeño ambiental, de calidad de la educación pública, o del nivel de seguridad ciudadana, también debe haber un índice de crecimiento sostenible que refleje, en términos del PIB, el impacto ecológico que tiene la economía sobre los recursos naturales, renovables o no.

El concepto de país desarrollado deviene en aspectos de conservación. Ya no basta medir la economía en términos de volumen monetario, sino, también, en términos de preservación de los recursos renovables como el aire, el agua potable, la tierra fértil, la cobertura boscosa, la biodiversidad, y la gestión integral de residuos, entre otras. Como ha dicho Yvon Chouinard, fundador de la marca de ropa ecológica Patagonia, “no se puede hacer negocios en un planeta muerto.” Costa Rica, por ende, es un gran ejemplo de desarrollo, pues ha logrado crecer económicamente preservando en buena medida su desempeño ambiental, aumentando su cobertura boscosa y creando conciencia, incluso a nivel de política pública, de su enorme riqueza en biodiversidad. Estos logros sólo hacen más urgente e importante enfocar esfuerzos en atender las áreas por mejorar, como la protección de mantos acuíferos, transformar la producción agrícola para que tenga un menor impacto contaminante, proteger legalmente las zonas de mar patrimonial con mayor riqueza en biodiversidad, y reeducar a la población en cuanto a la gestión integral de residuos domésticos, industriales y hospitalarios.

Este cambio en las metodologías de medición de los indicadores económicos fungiría como herramienta para la búsqueda de cooperación internacional entre países y transversal entre sectores privado, público y no gubernamental, siguiendo el principio de cooperación ganar-ganar que se ha popularizado. Aquellos proyectos que requieran más atención o que sean más susceptibles de generación de riqueza económica y ecológica serían los que recibirían prioridad en las agendas de desarrollo domésticas e internacionales del país.

Al cambiar las reglas de medición, también cambiarían las reglas de juego y habría quizás una variación entre ganadores y perdedores. Las sociedades más responsables que inviertan en su futuro ecológico, o en su crecimiento económico incorporando variables ecológicas, subirían su valor y serían más susceptibles de recibir cooperación internacional y atraer inversión extranjera directa. Es aquí precisamente adonde intersecan el Consenso de Costa Rica y la Paz con la Naturaleza, dos planteamientos que han encabezado la cruzada costarricense en este cuatrienio a cargo de la política exterior.

El primer compromiso para poder asumir su responsabilidad con el planeta por parte cualquier país ecológicamente deficitario debe ser el de asumir la responsabilidad con la calidad de vida de sus propios ciudadanos y las futuras generaciones. De otra forma, y como lo ha mencionado recientemente la revista The Economist, “…el subsidio de prácticas insostenibles es una licencia para robar de una generación a la próxima” (Tricks of the Trade, 2 de noviembre de 2009.) Esa responsabilidad debe ser traducida en índices más concretos de economía, que a su vez también permitirían generar índices particulares, sectoriales y por empresa y medir su impacto ecológico.

Varios han planteado ya este tema. Joseph Stiglitz, Premio Nóbel de Economía, acuñó el término “asimetría de la información” como la teoría de cómo la información da forma a la operación de los mercados. Sugiere que las brechas de información en el intercambio comercial resultan en una falla que atenta contra la eficiencia y la justicia de los mercados.

En este nuevo siglo la economía hay que concebirla como un todo, y al servicio de todos los seres humanos. Eso es así aún para los incrédulos sobre los efectos que la economía cortoplacista tiene sobre la ecología y la calidad de vida de todos nosotros, usuarios y actores activos y pasivos de la economía y del medio ambiente.

La virtud de esta medición a los activos nacionales en el PIB les da transparencia con esta y con futuras generaciones para crear un país más social y ecológicamente responsable y con liderazgo a nivel mundial.

La gran oportunidad que representa la crisis económica y ecológica que vive nuestra civilización demanda ideas innovadoras y virtuosas. Son quizás ideas a las que les ha llegado su tiempo. Las nuevas generaciones tienen incorporado el valor ecológico en sus expectativas, y cada vez será más relevante y significativo el derecho humano a un medio ambiente sano, según lo consagra nuestra Constitución Política en su artículo 50. Tarde o temprano esto se va a dar, gracias al sentido de conciencia y responsabilidad de las nuevas generaciones. A ellos, nuestro voto de apoyo.

The Paradigm of Disobedience

The emergence of the internet has seen an acceleration in the shift from the old paradigm -where people were obedient to either the law, religion, public policy, ethics, morality, science, elders, peers, information or truth- towards a new paradigm where there are growing numbers of people and groups that are disobedient to the old constraints. We could call it the paradigm of disobedience.

The role of the internet has been critical, because it has allowed isolated individuals to connect with clusters of like-minded people that share similar beliefs. Religions used to be the predominant social cohesion based on belief systems, but today in any human activity there is room for a new belief system to be created and offer cohesion to its followers.

Networks have proliferated, both in number of groups and in number of members, followers, believers. A few decades ago, people would devout some time every day or every week to follow a religion. Today, they invest that time into following their networks, their groups. We could call it a tribe, as it is a group of people that has one common thread that bonds them together: their beliefs on a particular topic.

It is no wonder why non-governmental organizations have multiplied tenfold in the last two decades (the internet lifespan), and the number of members has increased exponentially. These organizations are composed of people that no longer expect or obey the way governments run societies, so they take matters into their own hands and try to execute solutions for socioeconomic problems, sometimes even appealing to violence. NGOs are the institutional symbol of the paradigm of disobedience.

When paradigms are broken not by individuals but by larger groups of people that get together to go their own way, it represents an opportunity to enrich the interaction among people, which, today, does not necessarily happen in physical spaces only, but takes place more and more by virtual means. They become magnets for others and are open for admitting new members in most cases, as long as they follow an internal code, whether written or not.

So, we see a proliferation of protestant churches, different sects, more NGOs, growing cells of terrorist organizations, clusters of scientists and researchers, political movements, or simple groups of social network followers, some of which count their members in the hundreds of thousands already.

This new paradigm of disobedience poses additional threats, risks, challenges and opportunities for local and global governance. In the old paradigm, governments had the authority and the power to conduct societies, nations, even the international community, in a particular direction through international public policy and the corresponding laws. Today, that authority is being questioned, the power is diminishing, and the compliance of individuals and networks to such policies and laws is more and more difficult to enforce.

The mandatory question is how will societies be organized during and after this surge of disobedience. Perhaps all governments should be openly discussing this. Otherwise, they will realize, a couple more decades down the road, that they are no longer the ones in charge.

BLINK

BLINK: DECISION-MAKING ACCELERATOR FOR A BETTER LIVING

I. What is BLINK? BLINK is many things. It is a book by Malcolm Gladwell (the author of The Tipping Point). It is the description of a decision-making process that combines awareness, research, a high-speed brain and knowledge. This essay refers to these four points. BLINK is also the word that describes an instant (a two-second period of time) in which one becomes aware of a thought that implies a decision. Mainly, for me, BLINK is the one change in my life that will clearly save me years of time in my life in decision-making processes. This is one of those things I have learned that I consider so good that I want to share it with everyone.

II. What does the book say? The book is an academic research, with footnotes and endnotes the way academic papers do, documenting everything they say. This increases dramatically the reliability of the things that are said that are true. Fortunately, what is most important about it is not the book itself, but the practical implications it may have. So, my idea is not to share the contents of the book. You can read the book if you want to know more about it. I will explain the process that I created after reading the book and relating to the book’s contents.
To say a bit more about the book, it is a masterpiece. It is written with much care and dedication, with endless hours of research, of very delicate research. It is delicious to read because of how marvelous every page turns out to be, regardless of how boring the topic we thought it might be. It is also a page-turner. You want to get to the end the moment you begin. In my experience, I reached the end of the book but the mentality and knowledge and the results of reading it are still on going. I would say BLINK is the one book that has changed my way of thinking on my list of Top 10 mind-changing books of the last three years.

III. How does BLINK work? The mind receives a vast number of impulses collected by the senses of sight, hearing, speech, taste and smell. Apart from these, there are other self-generated impulses in the brain: our thoughts. Most of them are triggered, or at least strongly influenced by our emotions. When we see cow, we immediately project that cow to our emotional library to match it with something we already know and remember, see what it feels like, and decide which attitude to take from then on. This entire process of developing an attitude about something takes two seconds –at the most – from the moment you are in presence of that “thing” until the time you make your decision. Two seconds. Finally something you can do several times while you hold your breath. You can do it while you sleep, while you play cards, while you exercise. Actually, the ideal of BLINK is that you train yourself to do it so often that you train your mind until it becomes a habit. All it takes is a little bit of knowledge, some degree of self-awareness and a little bit of self-discipline.

a. Knowledge: as I mentioned before, this process starts by identifying a moment in life and become aware of it. The moments will come to you. You don’t have to go after them. For example, when you know your favorite team is playing a very exciting match tonight, there are times during the day when you think: “shite, what if my team loses?” The first two seconds after you ask the question, as long as you remain focused on searching for an answer, will become sufficient information you need to get the process started. Remember that the process we are aiming for is how to improve our decision-making process specifically regarding speed, but not only. It also has to do with approximation of success through the process, and the simplification of something that human beings have been historically so ineffective at doing: making decisions. And if you still feel you have been good enough at it, why not try to improve it even more, reducing the time invested in making decisions to a few seconds a day?
b. Self-awareness: BLINK is not possible if there is no capability to stop at that very instant to take control over the process itself, and not let emotions run freely, drifting the focus of concentration away from the decision-making process. It is not easy, but it is easy to learn. You have to program your mind to this. First, close your eyes and remember the first memory you remember about today. Freeze the film and focus on that picture. You see a picture, which is a summary of an event or a series of events that were taking place simultaneously in your life. Have you ever been traveling and had a picture taken of yourself? How much do you remember from that instant? You remember that big plaza. It was a park and there was a main entrance where one had to pay to get in. From the outside it looked spectacular. Certainly not something one sees on a daily basis back home. It was simply breathtaking. Also, you remember if you were having money problems, if you were hungry or stuffed or with diarrhea or if you had not slept much or if you had been kissing the person taking the picture the night before. You also remember the weather, rainy, foggy, hot, cold; you remember the noise, where you bought those shoes, who’s birthday it was and you forgot to call that day; or tried and didn’t manage.
All this collection of memories comes from a picture. Well, your mind also stores pictures. The difference is that, your mind has so much more “memory” than a camera that it stores entire videos, thousands and thousands of them, so you don’t have to remember what a picture reminds you of, but you can actually see the entire video, as long as you want, of all the details that relate to this event you are remembering.
Upon remembering this, one reaches a point in the video where the video reaches its end (which you also remember) and you give it a positive or negative value. Why? Because it is a human characteristic to value-base our events and circumstances so we can conduct ourselves through the path of what we consider “good”.
So, one can BLINK and in two seconds know if a cow makes you feel good or bad. Perhaps not everything is as easy as a cow if you have seen many all your life. You can already say that you like cows. Period. Or that you don’t, and you don’t question it anymore. [Should you? That’s a different topic that can also help in decision-making process improvement, mainly regarding quality of the decisions made.]
The importance about self-awareness, in my opinion, has more to do with taking control over the process than becoming introspective. One area in which self-awareness is fundamental is in conflict analysis. We all have conflicts every day, small ones, like what shirt to wear, and big ones, like having a car accident. No matter how big or small our conflicts are, it is difficult for us to become aware of them. Remember denial stage: first thing we do is pretend and believe there is no conflict. So, once we identify the conflict, we are one step closer to its solution than when we still believed there was none.
Once you have identified a conflict or a situation that is bringing you stress, you are setting yourself in the line of BLINKing to solve it. How? The moment you identify a conflict, you must project it into the future. How bad can this go? What is the worst-case scenario (WCS)? Your brain has the capability to “show” you this WCS in two seconds. Then, your brain will process the event and trigger emotions in you. You could let yourself go with those emotions of WCS and feel “bad”, frustrated, depressed, scared, worried. Or you can stop after that BLINK, press pause before the feelings go rampant around your system, and think about your best-case scenario (BCS). Your BCS will also trigger emotions that will most likely be associated with “good”, comfortable, positive, enjoyable. Still, don’t let them take you away from this decision-making process you are in. Remember you are making decisions, so you can’t waste valuable time in your life feeling emotions about a future that DOES NOT EXIST (WCS and BCS are a product of your imagination only; those events you BLINKed do not exist in reality).
Then, once you have identified WCS and BCS you can decide which way to go. It could very well be that your WCS is not so bad, so you don’t fear much going the wrong way. Or it could be that your BCS is not so good, so it is not worth the effort going in that direction. The important thing is that you already felt, if only for an instant, what it feels like to be in that WCS or BCS so you can make decisions right now to avoid or approach those scenarios.
c. self-discipline: it is very important to develop the strength to be able to stop emotions when they start running wild after picturing a WCS or a BCS. The way you train your mind to do this is the exact same way you train your mind or your body to do everything: through practice. Try it out whenever you feel happy or sad about the future. Suppose, for example, that you have a sentimental partner that lives in a different country than you do. Imagine you meet him/her one day and ask him/her if s/he thinks the two of you are going to meet again. Imagine your partner responds “I don’t know”. You feel very sad because you really wanted to see him/her again, and s/he doesn’t know if you two are going to meet again (which is in fact true, because no one knows anything about the future). Still, you make a big drama in your head (far longer than the two seconds you need) and you let your emotions run wild, thinking how much you are going to miss your partner, and you end up crying out of the frustration of losing him/her.
Now, suppose after having this episode of sadness, four years later you end up marrying this partner, and you live happily ever after. Was it worth all the suffering of that day you cried because you didn’t know if you would see him/her again? Not really. Especially if you think you were able then to picture a BCS (marrying your partner) and considering the possibility that it could eventually happen in the future. The idea is not to create false expectations or illusions, but to think about the WCS and the BCS. If you cried because your partner said there was no certainty you two would meet again in the future, you pictured your WCS but failed to do the same with your BCS. Four years later, this failure proves that if you would have BLINKed your BCS you could have avoided all that unnecessary suffering.
This is very important, because the more self-discipline you have, the faster and easier it will be for you to stop a BLINK after two seconds to use it as valuable information to make a decision. If you let your emotions run wild, controlling them later will be more difficult than after a short two seconds.

IV. Making decisions: whenever we make a decision, we are choosing from a universe of options (at least two, but in many cases an unlimited amount), which means we are basically taking one and leaving all the rest behind. That’s how the world works. Every time we buy a pair of shoes, we are not choosing to buy dozens of other pairs that are sitting on the same rack as the one you chose. How did you choose them?
When making decisions, we choose what we think is best according to our knowledge, to our thoughts, our feelings, our wishes. Sometimes, even when we know everything about something and we think it will be the best and we have the most positive feelings about it and we wish for it intensely, we might make a decision and not succeed at it. This failure has to do with how the decision adapts to your reality. The shoes you bought might not be as good as you thought they were going to be. You might have to cancel the trip you were going to make for your vacation even though you had already paid tickets and hotels. The future is unexpected, so no matter how well we plan a decision, it might turn out to be not as “good” as we expected it to be.
So, when making decisions we always have to remember that they are not permanent states, but temporary. Every decision you make is temporary, as long as its consequences can be reversed along the way. For example, jumping off a plane without a parachute is a decision that most likely may not be reversed. But choosing a professional career or a spouse or a car, have a higher degree of reversibility.
Then, you could make a decision without really thinking much about the future and it could result in a very good decision. For example, suppose you have the opportunity to present an exam to become an official translator for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. You don’t really want to do it, you don’t see or understand the purpose, but in the long run, ten years down the road, you can look back at the benefits and think everything you wouldn’t have had if you wouldn’t have made that decision.
From these two last thoughts we conclude that no matter how well or unwell you prepare a scenario for making a decision, the result can still be unexpectedly good or unexpectedly bad for you. This does not mean that life is “a box of chocolates”, as Forrest Gump used to say (“you never know what you are going to get”). There are many ways of influencing your circumstances, through your decision-making processes, through your attitude, to conduct your life on the path you designed for yourself.
What BLINK suggests is that no matter how much time you invest in making decisions, they can still come out to be very bad, so why not learn how to invest only two seconds per decision so you at least don’t lose so much time in the process, and then concentrate on adjusting the circumstances, or better, your attitude towards your circumstances.

V. The origin of fear: one of the most important things to consider about life is the origin of fear. One cannot understand what one does not know. The biggest problem with fear is that we ignore its origins. The origin of fear is a BLINK where we fail to take control over the process and, especially, over the emotions. This BLINK of fear is an instant, two seconds, during which one projects into the future an event or a circumstance that has happened to you or to someone else something that you would dislike experiencing. So, if a snake bit a neighbor and you saw how his leg became after the bite, you BLINK for two seconds, see the WCS, and you make that WCS a reality in your future. But the process goes so out of hand, emotionally, that you start fearing snakes, even though you normally don’t see them and you normally don’t hear of many people being bit by snakes around the places you normally visit. Still, you make a BLINK a reality.
The emotions of this kind of BLINK are so powerful, so out of control, that the fear takes control over you, to the point of physical impact: you cry, you yell, you shiver, you ask for help. Do you remember when you were a child and had nightmares that you called your parents to come in your rescue? What was the origin of that fear? You had a dream, probably a projection of something you heard or saw or created out of your imagination, then you woke up and shifted that picture into reality. Then, in those two first seconds, instead of taking control of the process, we give in to the emotions that start running wild to the point that we cry and we yell for help, even though that vision does not exist in reality.
Then, the process of BLINKing is very useful to overcome fear. First, choose something you fear. For example, flying on an airplane. I am afraid because I would not want my plane to crash into a building and die. That event that I saw became a projection from outside of myself into my personal future. So, when I get on a plane, I think I am going to crash into a building. But this fear exists only because I saw that happening. If I didn’t, most likely that wouldn’t be my fear. Still, I can BLINK for two seconds and realize that the origin of this fear comes from the outside and from the past. None has a direct relationship on me, except if I allow this to happen. Then, I can change my attitude after those two seconds and understand that the odds of crashing into a building while flying on a plane are so small that we can almost say “that will never happen to me”. Fear, then, is eliminated, uprooted where it is born, in our minds. We uproot it taking away the structure that holds fear, which is fantasy, imagination, past and outside world.

November 23, 2005

Cambio Climático: adaptación o mitigación?

Solía ser partidario de que la adaptación y la mitigación debían ser procesos simultáneos, principalmente porque debemos salvarnos nosotros (adaptación) y asegurarnos de no heredar un problema mayor a las siguientes generaciones (mitigación). Sin embargo, así como ahora se sabe que no es que nos quedaremos sin agua sino que cambiará el ciclo del agua en el planeta entero, también hay lugares donde es más urgente la mitigación (Estados Unidos y China, los dos gigantes contaminantes) que la adaptación (Maldivas y Costa Rica, pequeños y de fragilidad geográfica o ecosistémica).

Hago un llamado de atención para que seamos proactivos como país y empecemos a hablar -ojalá después de pensar un poco- sobre la adaptación al cambio climático. De todas maneras, es altamente probable que nuestro país ya sea neutral en emisiones de carbono.

También es importante que sepamos que la iniciativa no tiene que surgir del gobierno. Puede también surgir de la sociedad civil y de la empresa privada.

Quién se apunta?

A breath of fresh air

Imagine you are practicing that sport of free diving, where you dive deep down into the ocean without equipment to assist your breathing. You must hold your air, despite the increasing pressure and the burning of oxygen in your lungs to your blood. Suddenly, you realize you are short of air, you start feeling a pulse behind your eyes, your throat feels a growing pressure between holding back and wanting to breathe -knowing well you can't since you are dozens of meters below sea level- and you wonder what to do.

My wife says she wants to be "normal" again, meaning she doesn't have to question whether she will have free access to internet tools and websites.

I never knew what I had in Costa Rica until I left to study peace and conflict transformation in Norway for a couple of years. Costa Rica is a demilitarized nation, and I only knew what it meant when I was gone and when I started studying the causes of war and the consequences of having military armies, both in developed and in developing nations.

Now that I have moved again I have started to realize the treasures we have in Costa Rica with our democratic system, where we can be certain that every four years, every citizen will have the right to vote for the candidate of their choosing to lead the country. Where you have a Constitution that guarantees your individual freedoms, your civil and political rights, your human rights.

There are many things to improve in our system. Yes. Definitely. A lot of work to do. It is not time to fail, falter or rest. We must be aware of what we already have, to know that progress and transformation and sustainable development will start from a very strong, solid base that our ancestors have already constructed. It is the inheritance we have received and we must do the best we can to make it better, to multiply our talents, to think about what we will inherit onto the generations yet to be born.

I inhale deeply and enjoy the smell and taste of clean, fresh, free air.

Until next proxy.

Explotación de Parques Nacionales

El planeta ha llegado a un punto de inflexión respecto a su sostenibilidad, la cual depende principalmente de la humanidad, quien, sin ser su mayor poblador en número de especies o en peso total de especímenes, ciertamente sí es su principal amenaza. Somos la única especie que se desarrolla insosteniblemente. Similar a como lo hace una plaga o un virus.

También somos la única con la virtud de la conciencia para transformar nuestras acciones y orientarlas hacia la sostenibilidad.

Costa Rica tiene un liderazgo marcado a nivel mundial en generación de energías renovables. Ha llegado la hora de hablar del tema de la explotación de los recursos de los Parques Nacionales, en merecidas mayúsculas. Pronto será hora de calcular la densidad vegetal de nuestros Parques Nacionales y demás zonas boscosas del país, para vender certificados de conservación ambiental, de captación de carbono, de generación de oxígeno y de almacenamiento de agua limpia. Sería esto posible ya con la legislación actual sobre Parques Nacionales? También hay que empezar a dialogar, con madurez, no con afán de bochinche estilo "reality show", sobre la posibilidad de transformar, en el transcurso del presente siglo, el origen de nuestras fuentes de energía predominantemente hidroeléctrica a energía geotérmica. Por dos razones: primero, las cuencas hidrográficas, aunque se encuentren fuera de zonas protegidas, también son bienes demaniales. O sea, le pertenecen al Estado. Merecen protección como lo que son. Las represas representan una visión sin igual por parte de sus creadores. Nos dan el orgullo de decir hoy que 93% de nuestra electricidad es renovable. En eso, le llevamos un siglo de ventaja a la mayoría de países del mundo. Sin embargo, no podemos llevar esa valiosa solución al absurdo de crear represas en todos los ríos. Entonces, cuál es el límite? La segunda razón es que en nuestro pequeñísimo territorio nacional existen al menos nueve volcanes activos, y todos son Parques Nacionales. La energía que de ellos proviene para generar electricidad es prácticamente inagotable. Costa Rica podría convertirse, con un nuevo golpe de visión nacional, en exportadora de energía tal como lo es hoy Noruega con su petróleo. Sólo que nosotros lo podemos hacer con energía renovable Y limpia. Para ello, debemos valorar cuál es la mejor forma de realizar factibilidad, de minimizar el impacto ambiental y además compensarlo con otras medidas de conservación como por ejemplo, aumento de la educación ambiental y de sostenibilidad en escuelas, colegios y universidades. Tanto la venta de certificados por conservación como la explotación del subsuelo volcánico podría hacer al país alcanzar el desarollo económico de un brinco. Estamos por ver si ya tenemos el desarrollo sociopolítico necesario para tener esa visión sin igual, que sí se tenía hace medio siglo. Esperamos que así sea.

Vivir después de la vida

Cuentan las leyendas de algunos historiadores navales que a inicios del Siglo XV, el Emperador chino envió una flota de cientos de buques a surcar los mares en busca de riquezas. En aquellos viajes –continúan las leyendas- los buques chinos alcanzaron todos los rincones del planeta intercambiando bienes, prácticas y costumbres en las interacciones con otras comunidades.

Hoy, seis siglos después, la pequeña gran Costa Rica se ha embarcado en una aventura similar, ya no en barcos, pero sí con China. Hasta las costas pacíficas de Asia ha llegado un contingente costarricense que trajo consigo una multitud de riquezas en forma de arte; una muestra de la cultura patria que se intercambia con la china en una puesta en escena llena de gracia.

La obra se titula “Amighetti”, y es un homenaje al acervo artístico de este gran hombre que fue don Francisco. El espectáculo era de danza, con nueve bailarines que parecían cientos; con elásticos movimientos llenos de clase y de trópico que invitaban a sentir en la intimidad de la butaca el deseo de libertad expresado en el escenario. Esa forma de ser costarricense, esa cultura cálida de darse brazos, besos y abrazos, estremeció a los que fuimos testigos de una pequeña ventana de Costa Rica que se abrió en Pekín el viernes de noche.

Dicen que nadie sabe lo que tiene hasta que lo pierde. Cuán cierto es cuando se trata del terruño. Esta representación artística nos transportó de vuelta al país, con un magnífico juego de luces que semejaban atardeceres de noviembre y celajes de febrero, y claros de luna de alguna noche romántica. El romance de esta noche fue con la música, que provocó la danza y jugueteó con los artistas, con una melodía y otra y otra, que parecían ser mías y de nadie más.

La poesía narrada fue el pasaporte visado para transportarse a Costa Rica a recordar viejos tiempos, y algunos otros tan viejos que sólo cuentan historias de antaño. Historias de amas de casa que aman, de enamorados que se enamoran, de seducción, de pasión y de silencio, enmarcadas entre lienzos recordando  el pincel y la gubia de don Francisco. 

Probablemente –sugiere Amighetti- morir es estar solo // quedarse con los labios sellados // mientras pasan aquellos, los que cantan // los que besan y aman…

En aquella disyuntiva entre guardar silencio y querer romperlo para sabernos vivos, cayó liviana y luminosa en mi regazo la vida y obra del gran artista.

…Dormir en una colina // con los ojos abiertos y el corazón paralizado // mientras estalla el sol // con pétalos de llama.

Esa lumbre de su vida la sentí profundamente en un teatro en Pekín, a pocos pasos del majestuoso Templo del Cielo, donde el Emperador venía en el solsticio de invierno a orar por las buenas cosechas.

Su cosecha, amigo Amighetti, tan buena, tan prolija, me transportó por varios instantes a la vida que viví en aquella Costa Rica.

Wealth equality

Last century, societies around the world were profoundly transformed towards more social justice and economic equality of its citizens. Social security, labor laws and access to public education became consistent pillars of socioeconomic development. Slavery saw its definitive end.

Towards the end of the century, the computer revolution of the 90s created a tool that made the average employee many times more efficient. At the beginning of the present century, software development and information and communication technologies (ICTs) revolutionized yet again the employee's capacity to produce far more in the same period of time, and far better than only 15 years before. Nowadays, in fact, work is ubiquitous. An e-mail or a phone call can be taken during the commute or while on vacation, at night, at home, or abroad. 

The combination between formal education and the know-how to use ICTs and software has prompted the arrival of the knowledge era that the world is living today. Connectivity has become a must for governments, private enterprises -mainly transnational ones- academic institutions, NGOs, etc. Despite poverty indexes, countries across the world, from Latin America to China, India and Africa, have access to the benefits of connectivity that the more developed world is also having. 

Nevertheless, despite this exponential enhancement of productivity in employees, instead of this representing the possibility to work less time or earn more for the time worked, the average employee is working more hours (24/7) earning in disproportion to their hyper-effectiveness. 

If this hyper-effectiveness is multiplying the wealth that is being created globally, and employees are still earning a salary without regard of their productivity, this means that the widely acclaimed exploitation that socialists and communists abhorred during the communist hype of the previous century has only gotten much worse. 

As long as the working classes do not come to this realization, then the status quo is safe. Problem is, the present global economic crisis has accelerated awareness on behalf of employees who have lost their jobs or felt threatened to lose it, or have seen how rich some people have become in the last decade and how they have gotten away with wrongdoing in the last few months with the bursting of the financial bubble. 

This awareness has triggered millions of people worldwide to feel cheated. The longer this recession lasts, and the more consumption contracts, the more people will become aware of this unequal situation regarding their work and the retribution they obtain from it.

The world was unable to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the death of communism, because capitalism, as we knew it, lies on its deathbed too. These are the times to review, far more carefully, the political and economic positions around the center of the ideological spectrum. Perhaps it is even time for economists and journalists to start researching more seriously the other half of Adam Smith's capitalist proposition, yet to be discovered: The Theory on Moral Sentiments, where Smith spoke about ethics, morality and justice for capitalism to work as a sustainable system. 

Meanwhile, let's just hope for more equality in wealth distribution, as there is no doubt that in wealth creation humankind has already proven successful. 

Afghanistan: careful strategy

President Obama has launched a new strategy to tackle the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It seems this Administration is taking this battlefront quite seriously, and this is what had to be done. 

There is no single-handed solution for this conflict. During the Taliban regime, even fellow Afghan Muslims were victims of their oppression and extremism with which they interpreted the Qu'ran. That seemed to be yet another turning point of a country that has suffered repeated invasions, poverty and scarcity for decades. 

Additionally, during the last couple of decades the country has become one of the world's largest producers of poppy seed, raw material to manufacture heroin. 

Now, this Taliban extremism has overflowed across the Pakistani border, where frequent terrorist attacks have been destabilizing the country politically and militarily. The greatest risk of all would be to see an extremist organization in control of nuclear weapons, as Pakistan does have. Therefore, the need for action was urgent, and the strategy must be bold. 

Apart from the additional 4000 military trainers and the 17,000 soldiers that the US will deploy in the country, and the US$1.5 billion a year that the country will give to Pakistan as cooperation to fight the extremist insurgency there, the United Nations must act accordingly with diplomatic action to gear nonmilitary power towards the transformation of the conflict and the development of Afghanistan. 

It is not a country easy to run, and not a conflict easy to be transformed. Twelve local tribes coexist in the country, and they have had two generations of people living under the law of the bullet, fighting the Soviets in the seventies and eighties, and now dealing with the homegrown Taliban and what they consider to be American invaders. 

Perhaps the most important objective is to empower both the Afghani and the Pakistani governments, and to eradicate the form of extremism that seeks to destabilize through terrorist action. Most important of all, though, is to offer a peaceful society for new generations of Afghani people, to allow them to develop with healthcare, with proper education, with the necessary tools and financial resources to make it a sustainable economy. 

Eradicating poppy seed production is only good if it can be substituted by another product that can employ people and ensure them a formal source of income. 

It is not much of a war but a nation-building strategy what Afghanistan has needed for decades. Let's hope this time it comes out right. 

Marca Costa Rica

En tiempos de globalización, resulta paradójicamente importante distinguir a los países individualmente pese a la colectivización de la comunidad global. Quizás esto responda a la regla tácita de los procesos interculturales de que "las semejanzas nos unen; las diferencias nos enriquecen."

En décadas recientes esta percepción nacional se ha comercializado, pues hay diversos factores de la economía internacional que hacen más atractivo a un país que a otro en la puja por atraer turismo, promover exportaciones, atraer inversiones, en fin, distinguirse de entre el gran concierto de naciones en el que vivimos en la actualidad. 

La marca de un país -o la percepción que el público general tiene- no es constante. Oscila invariablemente entre las marcas de buena percepción y las de mala percepción. 

Un país que tiene regularmente una buena marca-país a nivel mundial es Brasil. En cualquier rincón del mundo alguien sabe de Pelé o de Ronaldo o de Ronaldinho, que son sinónimo de éxito, de calidad, de triunfo. 

Un país como Estados Unidos, que durante la mayor parte del siglo XX tuvo una excelente marca-país, parece haberla perdido durante la última década, quizás como consecuencia de la invasión a Irak y la renuencia a firmar el protocolo de Kioto sobre cambio climático. 

En el caso de Costa Rica, la marca de este país ha sido tradicionalmente reputada. Es importante reconocer las causas, sobre todo para fijar el rumbo para la nueva imagen que el país querrá posicionar a nivel mundial por los próximos veinte años. Durante quince años fue muy exitosa la campaña turística de "sin ingredientes artificiales." Sin embargo, la globalización demanda una imagen-país que trascienda unos cuantos sectores productivos y se enfoque en elaborar una marca que distinga lo hecho en Costa Rica como un reflejo de lo que crece y vive en el país. 

Cuando se lanzó aquella campaña publicitaria, Intel no se había instalado en el país todavía. Esta semana, que la compañía lanza al mercado su nuevo procesador Nehalem, se debe hacer del conocimiento del mundo entero que un equipo de 70 ingenieros costarricenses de la firma trabajaron en la investigación y desarrollo de este procesador, llamado a ser el primero de una generación ambientalmente amigable de microprocesadores. O sea, aún con ingredientes artificiales, Costa Rica se destaca a nivel mundial. 

Si bien el país está preparándose para salir de un letargo de 15 años en materia de telecomunicaciones, pasando de una red celular TDMA a una de tercera generación en cuestión de un año, en materia de generación de energías renovables el país tiene décadas de ventaja a nivel mundial. Esto es importante de mencionar considerando que, así como la gran revolución de los noventas fue la informática y la computación y la de esta década ha sido la de las tecnologías de información y comunicación (TIC), la próxima gran revolución aparentemente será la de la generación de energía renovable. 

En este ámbito, Costa Rica ya produce el 93% de su electricidad a partir de fuentes renovables, entre las cuales destacan mayoritariamente la generación hidroeléctrica, la energía geotérmica, la energía eólica y la energía por biomasa. Mientras otros países del mundo luchan por buscar formas económicamente viables de reducir su huella de carbono en el cada vez más contaminado medioambiente planetario, Costa Rica está procurando convertirse en el primer país carbono-neutral para el 2021, año del bicentenario de su independencia. 

En materia de pobreza, Costa Rica parece haber encontrado una fórmula bastante eficaz para controlar esta patología socioeconómica. Eliminó sus fuerzas armadas hace 60 años, priorizó desde entonces el gasto público en salud y educación, y mantiene un régimen democrático reconocido como el más antiguo de América Latina. 

Es importante resaltar el tema de la desmilitarización. Mientras el gasto militar del planeta ya alcanza los 1.2 billones de dólares (en inglés, trillion dollars), el gasto de Costa Rica es cero. Peor aún, cuando se revisan las Metas de Desarrollo del Milenio fijadas por las Naciones Unidas en el año 2000 y los costos para alcanzarlas, con ese dinero en armas se podrían cumplir todas las metas ocho veces. Así lo ha desacado vehementemente el presidente Óscar Arias Sánchez, Premio Nóbel de la Paz, ante la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas, acto en el cual presentó la propuesta para crear el Consenso de Costa Rica, un pacto mundial por medio del cual los países en vías de desarrollo que reduzcan su gasto militar para destinarlo a salud y educación serán mejor considerados para recibir cooperación de los países desarrollados. 

Esto no quiere decir que en Costa Rica se viva sin violencia. La violencia es inherente al ser humano, por lo tanto nos corresponde a nosotros mismos aprender a lidiar con ella. Lo que sí es cierto es que Costa Rica ha descartado, constitucionalmente, verse involucrado alguna vez en un conflicto bélico con cualquier otro estado vecino. Esto también quiere decir que en Costa Rica no es posible realizar un golpe de estado, pues no hay ejército para sustentarlo. Parafraseando al presidente Arias, las madres costarricenses pueden estar tranquilas de saber que jamás verán a sus hijos morir en la guerra. 

El tema de la paz por desmilitarización es tan actual hoy como lo fue hace 60 años. Hoy en día también es indispensable el tema de la paz con el medio ambiente, y Costa Rica busca compartir con el mundo la fórmula que la hacen merecedora de un impresionante quinto lugar en el Índice de Desempeño Ambiental. Por ello, la presente administración Arias Sánchez ha lanzado la iniciativa Paz con la Naturaleza para demostrarle al mundo cómo se logra el desarrollo socioeconómico de manera sostenible. El liderazgo que el país ha alcanzado en las últimas dos décadas en campos como ecoturismo, reforestación y biodiversidad, sólo se comparan con el liderazgo que el país asumió desde hace 60 años cuando empezó a reservar áreas naturales para la conservación y la reserva biológicas. En la actualidad, más del 25% del territorio son áreas de conservación, uno de los porcentajes más altos del mundo. 

Sin afán de agotar el tema, se conoce poco lo que han sido las culturas prehispánicas en Costa Rica. Sin embargo, se han encontrado en el territorio nacional decenas de milenarias esferas de piedra que datan de una época en la que ninguna otra civilización conocida comprendía el concepto de la esfericidad. Este gran aporte a la humanidad que data de más de dos mil años atrás es un referente histórico de la fertilidad que ha brotado del ser humano que ha ocupado estas tierras. 

Así, con algunos ingredientes artificiales, siempre con la paz como rector y el desarrollo sostenible como objetivo, Costa Rica atrae importantes inversiones transnacionales que buscan esa paz y ese desarrollo alcanzado por el empleo de una mano de obra libre, saludable, educada, democrática, pacífica, quizás los elementos esenciales para que brote la creatividad, pilar fundamental de la innovación. También, la fertilidad de la tierra respetada por las manos y las mentes que la labran produce miles de bienes agrícolas, industriales y agroindustriales que trascienden las fronteras de más de 140 países del mundo. 

Eso es lo que significa "hecho en Costa Rica." Esa marca y esa imagen son las que se deberían divulgar para que el planeta entero se informe y se forme percepciones que hagan honor a la verdad de lo que se cree que es un modelo de desarrollo eficaz y sostenible. 

The Power of Now

A quoted summary of Eckhart Tolle's book. 

“All that arises passes away” (A Buddhist monk)

Chapter 1: You are not your mind

"The word “god” has become a closed concept. The moment the word is uttered, a mental image is created."

"Does it point beyond itself to that transcendental reality, or does it lend itself too easily to becoming no more than an idea in your head that you believe in, a mental idol?"

"It is only a small step from the word Being to the experience of Being."

"Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don’t realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal."

"This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being. It also creates a false mind-made self that casts a shadow of fear and suffering."

"Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking."

"The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly – you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is a disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken over."

"Have you found the “off” button?"

"You also realize that all the things that truly matter – beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace – arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken."

"Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease."

"When a thought subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream – a gap of 'no mind.'”

"Create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation."

"There is one certain criterion by which you can measure your success in this practice: the degree of peace that you feel within."

"So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger."

"About 80 or 90 percent of most people’s thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy."

“This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. What characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It seems stronger than you. It also gives you a false sense of pleasure, pleasure that invariably turns into pain.”

“It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it – who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there.”

“No-mind is consciousness without thought.”

“The simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don’t know how to think but because they don’t know how to stop thinking!”

“The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgments and interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not.”

“If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at that time.”

“Often a vicious cycle builds up between your thinking and the emotion: they feed each other.”

“Emotion literally means ‘disturbance.’ The word comes from the Latin emovere, meaning ‘to disturb.’”

“Emotions, being part of the dualistic mind, are subject to the law of opposites. This simply means that you cannot have good without bad.”

 

Chapter 2: Consciousness: The way out of pain

“The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.”

“The pain that you create now is always some form of non-acceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is.”

“The mind cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening. Time and mind are in fact inseparable.”

“The accumulation of time in the collective and individual human mind also holds a vast amount of residual pain from the past.”

“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have.”

“Accept – then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.”

“You can assume that virtually everyone you meet or know lives in a state of fear.”

“The secret of life is to ‘die before you die’ – and find that there is no death.”

 

Chapter 3: Moving deeply into the Now

“Dysfunction sets in when you seek your self in your mind and mistake it for who you are.”

“To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.”

“The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now.”

“All forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.”

“Presence is the key to freedom, so you can only be free now.”

“Find out if you have any problem at this moment. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes, but now. Do you have a problem now?”

“Problems are mind-made and need time to survive. They cannot survive in the actuality of the Now.”

“It is impossible to have a problem when your attention is fully in the Now.”

“As there are no problems in the Now, there is no fear either.”

“You cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it.”

“In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the oldest and most beautiful spiritual teachings in existence, non-attachment to the fruit of your action is called Karma Yoga. It is described as the path of ‘consecrated action.’”

 

Chapter 4: Mind strategies for avoiding the Now

“To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.”

“Anything unconscious dissolves when you shine the light of consciousness on it.”

“Your unhappiness is polluting not only your own inner being and those around you but also the collective human psyche of which you are an inseparable part.”

“The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space.”

“Once a mind pattern, an emotion, or a reaction is there, accept it. You were not conscious enough to have a choice in the matter. That’s not a judgment, just a fact. If you had a choice, or realized that you do have a choice, would you choose suffering or joy, ease or unease, peace or conflict?”

“How is it possible that humans killed in excess of one hundred million fellow humans in the twentieth century alone? Humans inflicting pain on such magnitude on one another is beyond anything you can imagine. And that’s not taking into account the mental, emotional an physical violence, the torture, pain, and cruelty they continue to inflict on each other as well as on other sentient beings on a daily basis.”

“Once you realize that a certain kind of food makes you sick, would you carry on eating that food and keep asserting that it is okay to be sick?”

“To complain is always non-acceptance of what is.”

“Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it’s no longer a mistake.”

“Are you worried? Do you have many ‘what if’ thoughts? You are identified with your mind, which is projecting itself into an imaginary future situation and creating fear. There is no way that you can cope with such a situation, because it doesn’t exist.”

“It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.”

“Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is true prosperity. It cannot come in the future.”

“When you are on a journey, it is certainly helpful to know where you are going or at least the general direction in which you are moving, but don’t forget: The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment.”

“The sooner you realize that your outer purpose cannot give you lasting fulfillment, the better.”

“Only the present can free you of the past. More time cannot free you of time. Access the power of Now. That is the key. None other than the power of your presence, your consciousness liberated from thought forms.”

“What is essential is your conscious presence. That dissolves the past.”

 

Chapter 5: The state of presence

“Understanding presence is being present.”

“Zen masters use the word satori to describe a flash of insight, a moment of no-mind and total presence.”

“No civilization has ever produced so much ugliness.”

“Egoic mind has become like a sinking ship. If you don’t get off, you will go down with it.”

“’The teacher and the taught together create the teaching.’”

“Silence is an even more potent carrier of presence; to listen to the silence, wherever you are, is an easy and direct way of becoming present.”

“If you are drawn to an enlightened teacher, it is because there is already enough presence in you to recognize presence in another.”

 

Chapter 6: The inner body

“The ‘illusion of the self’, as the Buddha calls it, is the core error: to believe that you are nothing more than your physical body and your mind.”

“Don’t get stuck on the level of words. A word is no more than a means to an end. It’s an abstraction.”

“If you focus your attention in the body as much as possible, you will be anchored in the Now.”

“Unless you stay present – and inhabiting your body is always an essential aspect of it – you will continue to be run by your mind. The script in your head that you learned a long time ago, the conditioning of your mind, will dictate your thinking and your behavior. You may be free of it for brief intervals, but rarely for long. This is especially true when something ‘goes wrong’ or there is some loss or upset. Your conditioned reaction will then be involuntary, automatic, and predictable, fueled by the one basic emotion that underlies the mind-identified state of consciousness: fear.”

“What matters is not whether you can attach a mental label to an emotion but whether you can bring the feeling of it into awareness as much as possible. Attention is the key to transformation – and full attention also implied acceptance. Attention is like a beam of light – the focused power of your consciousness that transmutes everything into itself.”

“Place your attention on feeling the emotion, and check whether your mind is holding on to a grievance pattern such as blame, self-pity, or resentment that is feeding the emotion. If that is the case, it means that you haven’t forgiven. Non-forgiveness is often toward another person or yourself, but it may just as well be toward any situation or condition – past, present or future – that your mind refuses to accept.”

“Yes, there can be non-forgiveness even with regard to the future.”

“Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life – to allow life to live through you. The alternatives are pain and suffering, a greatly restricted flow of life energy, and in many cases physical disease.”

“Non-forgiveness is the very nature of the mind, just as the mind-made false self, the ego, cannot survive without strife and conflict. The mind cannot forgive. Only you can.”

“Feeling will get you closer to the truth of who you are than thinking.”

“When you inhabit your body, it will be hard for unwanted guests to enter. ’Flood’ your body with consciousness.”

“Don’t just think with your head, think with your whole body.”

“When you are listening to another person, don’t just listen with your mind, listen with your whole body. Feel the energy field of your inner body as you listen. That takes attention away from thinking and creates a still space that enables you to truly listen without the mind interfering. You are giving the other person space – space to be. It is the most precious gift you can give.”

 

Chapter 7: Portals into the unmanifested

“Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be.”

“Everybody pays attention to the things in space, but who pays attention to space itself?”

“Pay attention to ‘nothing.’”

“Nothing could be more awe-inspiring and majestic than the inconceivable vastness and stillness of space, and yet what is it? Emptiness, vast emptiness.”

“When you are utterly and totally present, you encounter it as the still inner space of no-mind. Within you, it is vast in depth, not in extension. Spacial extension is ultimately a misperception of infinite depth – an attribute of the one transcendental reality.”

“Buddhist saying: ‘If there were no illusion, there would be no enlightenment.’”

 

Chapter 8: Enlightened relationships

“You are waiting for an event in time to save you. Salvation is not elsewhere in place or time. It is here and now.”

“True salvation is a state of freedom – from fear, from suffering, from a perceived state of lack and insufficiency and therefore from all wanting, needing, grasping, and clinging. It is freedom from compulsive thinking, from negativity, and above all from past and future as a psychological need.”

“It is easier to recognize the source of negativity in your partner than to see it in yourself.”

“The romantic love relationship seems to offer liberation from a deep-seated state of fear, need, lack, and incompleteness that is part of the human condition in its unredeemed and unenlightened state.”

“On your physical level, you are obviously not whole, nor will you ever be: you are either a man or a woman, which is to say, one-half of the whole.”

“Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to – alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person – you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain.”

“Intimate relationships do not cause pain or unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you. Every addiction does that.”

“The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way.”

“The bond that connects you with that person is the same bond that connects you with the person sitting next to you on a bus, or with a bird, a tree, a flower.”

“True communication is communion – the realization of oneness, which is love.”

“Whenever your relationship is not working, whenever it brings out the ‘madness’ in you and in your partner, be glad. What was unconscious is being brought up to the light. It is an opportunity for salvation.”

“The relationship then becomes your sadhana, your spiritual practice.”

“If you react at all to your partner’s unconsciousness, you become unconscious yourself. But if you then remember to know your reaction, nothing is lost.”

“Never before have relationships been as problematic and conflict ridden as they are now.”

“If you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world.”

“When your partner behaves unconsciously, relinquish all judgment. Judgment is either to confuse someone’s unconscious behavior with who they are or to project your own unconsciousness onto another person and mistake that for who they are.”

“To relinquish judgment does not mean that you do not recognize dysfunction and unconsciousness when you see it. It means `being the knowing’ rather than ‘being the reaction’ and the judge. You will then either be totally free of reaction or you may react and still be the knowing, the space in which the reaction is watched and allowed to be.”

“Instead of fighting the darkness, you bring in the light. Instead of reacting to delusion, you see the delusion yet at the same time you look through it.”

“Being the knowing creates a clear space of loving presence that allows all things and all people to be as they are. No greater catalyst for transformation exists. If you practice this, your partner cannot stay with you and remain unconscious.”

“If you both agree that the relationship will be your spiritual practice, so much the better. You can then express your thoughts and feelings to each other as soon as they occur, or as soon as a reaction comes up, so that you do not create a time gap in which an unexpressed or unacknowledged emotion or grievance can fester and grow.”

“Learn to give expression to what you feel without blaming. Learn to listen to your partner in an open, non-defensive way. Give your partner space for expressing himself or herself. Be present.”

“Accusing, defending, attacking – all those patterns that are designed to strengthen or protect the ego or to get its needs met will then become redundant.”

“Giving space to others – and to yourself – is vital. Love cannot flourish without it.”

“When you have removed the two factors that are destructive to relationships – when the pain-body has been transmuted and you are no longer identified with mind and mental positions – and if your partner has done the same, you will experience the bliss of the flowering of relationship.”

“Instead of mirroring to each other your pain and your unconsciousness, instead of satisfying your mutual addictive ego needs, you will reflect back to each other the love that you feel deep within, the love that comes with the realization of your oneness with all that is. This is the love that has no opposite.”

“The light is too painful for someone who wants to remain in darkness.”

“When the mind took over and humans lost touch with the reality of their divine essence, they started to think of god as a male figure. Society became male-dominated, and the female was made subordinate to the male.”

“You are responsible for your inner space now – nobody else is – and that the past cannot prevail against the power of the Now.”

“If a woman is still holding on to anger, resentment, or condemnation, she is holding on to her pain-body.”

“The stronger the ego, the more distant you are from your true nature.”

“If you then develop a sense of identity based on your gayness, you have escaped one trap only to fall into another.”

 

Chapter 9: Beyond happiness and unhappiness there is peace

“Seen from a higher perspective, conditions are always positive. To be more precise: they are neither positive nor negative. They are as they are. And when you live in complete acceptance of what is, there is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in your life anymore.”

“Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs? (Marcus Aurelius)”

“Through forgiveness, which essentially means recognizing the insubstantiality of the past and allowing the present moment to be as it is, the miracle of transformation happens not only within but also without. A silent space of intense presence arises both in you and around you. Whoever or whatever enters that field of consciousness will be affected by it, sometimes visibly and immediately, sometimes at deeper levels with visible changes appearing at a later time.”

“You dissolve discord, heal pain, dispel unconsciousness – without doing anything – simply by being and holding that frequency of intense presence.”

“Most of the so-called bad things that happen in people’s lives are due to unconsciousness. They are self-created, or rather, ego-created. I sometimes refer to those things as ‘drama.’”

“When you feel guilty or anxious, that’s drama.”

“Most people are in love with their particular life drama. Their story is their identity. The ego runs their life. They have their whole sense of self invested in it. Even their – usually unsuccessful – search for an answer, a solution, or for healing becomes part of it. What they fear and resist most is the end of their drama. As long as they are their mind, what they fear and resist most is their own awakening.”

“Dissolution is needed for new growth to happen. One cannot exist without the other.”

“All conditions are highly unstable and in constant flux, or, as the Buddha put it, impermanence is a characteristic of every condition, every situation you will ever encounter in your life. It will change, disappear, or no longer satisfy you.”

“The most essential kind of knowledge is not yet widely accessible.”

“Happiness and unhappiness are in fact one. Only illusion of time separates them.”

“The whole advertising industry and consumer society would collapse if people became enlightened and no longer sought to find their identity through things. The more you seek happiness in this way, the more it will elude you.”

“To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness.”

“Being takes you beyond the polar opposites of the mind and frees you from dependency on form. Even if everything were to collapse and crumble all around you, you would still feel a deep inner core of peace. You may not be happy, but you will be at peace.”

“If ‘you’ – the mind – did not believe that unhappiness works, why would you create it?”

“Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry, or hard-done-by person. You will then ignore, deny, or sabotage the positive in your life. This is a common phenomenon. It is also insane.”

“No other life-form on the planet knows negativity, only humans, just as no other life-form violates and poisons the Earth that sustains it.”

“I have lived with several Zen masters – all of them cats. Even ducks have taught me important spiritual lessons. Just watching them is meditation.”

“Occasionally, two ducks will get into a fight. The fight usually lasts only for a few seconds, and then the ducks separate, swim off in opposite directions, and vigorously flap their wings a few times. By flapping their wings they were releasing surplus energy, thus preventing it from becoming trapped in their body and turning into negativity. This is natural wisdom, and it is easy for them because they do not have a mind that keeps the past alive unnecessarily and then builds an identity around it.”

“Yes, recurring negative emotions do sometimes contain a message, as do illnesses. Any changes that you make, whether they have to do with your work, your relationships, or your surroundings, are ultimately only cosmetic unless they arise out of a change in your level of consciousness.”

“What is the purpose of irritation? None whatsoever. Why did you create it? You didn’t. The mind did. It was totally automatic, totally unconscious. Why did the mind create it? Because it holds the unconscious belief that its resistance, which you experience as negativity or unhappiness in some form, will somehow dissolve the undesirable condition.”

“Somebody says something to you that is rude or designed to hurt. Offer no resistance. It is as if there is nobody there to get hurt anymore. That is forgiveness. You become invulnerable. You can still tell that person that his or her behavior is unacceptable, if that is what you choose to do. But that person no longer has the power to control your inner state. You are then in your power – not in someone else’s, nor are you run by your mind.”

“Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender.”

“When you accept what is, every moment is the best. That is enlightenment.”

“At the level of Being, all suffering is recognized as an illusion. Suffering is due to identification with form. Miracles of healing sometimes occur through this realization, by awakening Being-consciousness in others.”

“Compassion is the awareness of a deep bond between yourself and all creatures. You share the vulnerability and mortality of your physical form with every other human and with every living being.”

“One of the most powerful spiritual practices is to meditate deeply on the mortality of physical forms, including your own. This is called: Die before you die.”

“Nothing that was real ever died, only names, forms, and illusions.”

“On the level of form, you share mortality and the precariousness of existence. On the level of Being, you share eternal, radiant life.”

“To have deep empathy for the suffering of another being certainly requires a high degree of consciousness but represents only one side of compassion. It is not complete. True compassion goes beyond empathy or sympathy. It does not happen until sadness merges with joy, the joy of Being beyond form, the joy of eternal life.”

“Teach through being, through demonstrating peace. You become ‘the light of the world,’ an emanation of pure consciousness, and so you eliminate suffering on the level of cause. You eliminate unconsciousness from the world.”

“Who you are is always a more vital teaching and a more powerful transformer of the world than what you say and more essential even than what you do.”

“Without a profound change in human consciousness, the world’s suffering is a bottomless pit.”

“Make sure that you carry no resistance within, no hatred, no negativity. ‘Love your enemies,’ said Jesus, which means ‘have no enemies.’”

“Once you get involved in working on the level of effect, it is all too easy to lose yourself in it. Stay alert and very, very present. The causal level needs to remain your primary focus, the teaching of enlightenment your main purpose, and peace your most precious gift to the world.”

 

Chapter 10: The meaning of surrender

“Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation.”

“Acceptance of what is immediately frees you from mind identification and thus reconnects you with Being. Resistance is the mind.”

“A visual analogy is this: you are walking along a path at night, surrounded by a thick fog. But you have a powerful flashlight that cuts through the fog and creates a narrow, clear space in front of you. The fog is your life situation, which includes past and future; the flashlight is your conscious presence; the clear space is the Now.”

“If you find your life situation unsatisfactory or even intolerable, it is only by surrendering first that you can break the unconscious resistance pattern that perpetuates that situation.”

“Surrender is perfectly compatible with taking action, initiating change, or achieving goals. But in the surrendered state a totally different energy, a different quality, flows into your doing. Surrender reconnects you with the source-energy of Being, and if your doing is infused with Being, it becomes a joyful celebration of life energy that takes you more deeply into the Now.”

“Through non-resistance, the quality of whatever you are doing or creating is enhanced immeasurably. The results will then look after themselves and reflect that quality. We could call this surrendered action. It is not work as we have known it for thousands of years. As more humans awaken, the word work is going to disappear from our vocabulary, and perhaps a new word will be created to replace it.”

“No truly positive action can arise out of an unsurrendered state of consciousness.”

“In the state of surrender, you see very clearly what needs to be done, and you take action, doing one thing at a time and focusing on one thing at a time.”

“Acknowledge that there is resistance. Be there when it happens, when the resistance arises. Observe how your mind creates it, how it labels the situation, yourself, or others.”

“Negativity, unhappiness, or suffering in whatever form means that there is resistance, and resistance is always unconscious.”

“If you were conscious, that is to say totally present in the Now, all negativity would dissolve almost instantly. It could not survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence.”

“Through surrender, spiritual energy comes into this world. It creates no suffering for yourself, for other humans, or any other life form on the planet.”

“Non-resistance doesn’t mean doing nothing. All it means is that any ‘doing’ becomes non-reactive. Remember the deep wisdom underlying the practice of Eastern martial arts: don’t resist the opponent’s force. Yield to overcome.”

“The ego believes that in your resistance lies your strength, whereas in truth resistance cuts you off from Being, the only place of true power. Resistance is weakness and fear masquerading as strength. What the ego sees as weakness is your Being in its purity, innocence, and power. What it sees as strength is weakness. So the ego exists in a continuous resistance-mode and plays counterfeit roles to cover up your ‘weakness,’ which in truth is your power.”

“Time and pain are inseparable.”

“Choice implies consciousness – a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice.”

“The mind, conditioned as it is by the past, always seeks to re-create what it knows and is familiar with. Even if it is painful, at least it is familiar.”

“The mind adheres to the known. The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it.”

“As long as your mind with its conditioned patterns runs your life, as long as you are your mind, what choice do you have?”

“How will you know when you have surrendered? When you no longer need to ask the question.”