four qualities of a teacher: GALE

in Thanissaro bhkkhis article on finding a good teacher, he lists four qualities to look for.

wisdom

1. generosity (aware and giving)

2. actions matter

virtue

3. doesnt deliberately LIE, and if so, is ashamed

4. even handed in applying rules (to themself, others, people they like and don't like).

acronym: GALE, generosity, actions, lying, and even-handed. 

on generosity, it's actually more or most important than they can recognize generosity whenever present, however small.  if a villain does a small kindness, the teacher can see both the kindness and the larger harm. the opposite is to see nothing positive just because a person is not liked. 

on actions matter, this is a belief that actions matter, that consequences matter. this is what is largely meant by Karma/Karma in the Buddhist canon. the opposites are that everything is fate and our actions don't matter. or, that one can do some chants or good deeds to erase the consequences of their actions.

on lying, it's straightforward in part: don't lie. but the way Thanissaro Bhikkhu presents it, he emphasizes having shame if you do lie. I think this is more pertinent, since modern culture excuses lots of little lies. it acknowledges that people do lie. it sets a bar: even if you catch a teacher in a lie, see if they admit to it and fess up. they should show shame, rather than justification and digging in. the opposite is shameless lying, and also convenient lies.

one even handedness, this means they aren't partisan in applying rules. for example, they don't justify some people's shady actions because they are friends or beneficial to our cause, but then denounce the other side's same actions. this is the anti hypocrite and anti double-standard rule. the opposite is partisanship. 

Is it easier to find an educated human than a heedful human?

As I wrap up my time in Kansas, I have an insight that has taken a long time to uncover. Laughably long, because it's easy to see once it is pointed out.

I have historically valued and lauded intelligence and education and knowledge. If someone has a PhD or 10 years of experience in something, that seems the most amazing. I then make the leap that they can see things with incredible nuance and discernment. That last step is not quite accurate.

I've seen and discerned how many "educated" folks aren't careful and aren't trustworthy. They know the vocabulary to a large extent. They know what other people know. They know lots of facts. But I have also seen them prone to shortcuts. Prone to anti-intellectualism. They are nannies (status quo rule followers) rather than nerds (investigators of how things work and how they can break). With stature, that gives them an excuse. "I know a lot, so just trust me on this one". I had a very senior economist from MIT glibly say that "energy efficiency doesn't work" to dismiss a line of inquiry. How can you trust someone as an umpire and gatekeepers who would be so uncareful in their words?

Education and deep experience is rare. This is true for Masters degree holders as well as Master Plumbers. And just using that title, which takes a lot of effort to get, it would seem like finding people of deep education is very rare. In the USA, this is probably about 1 to 3% of the population who have Masters or are masters of something.

But heedfulness is rarer.

This is puzzling in a way because heedfulness is cheap and requires no special equipment or tuition fees. To get a master's degree or to become a master tradesperson, that typically requires 12 years of normal schooling and then another 6-10+ years is specialty schooling. But, to be heedful, one might even have no schooling. One needs to look, observe, and act carefully. That is enough. If your job is to gather water from the local well, doing that job heedfully means taking it seriously and doing a good job. One can even have fun with it. But one can't use fun as an excuse to be non-heedful, to excuse mistakes and carelessness.

And, that's part of the thing with society. Modern society, with it's consumer siren song, celebrates carelessness and mistakes (that you get away with). Ancient society did similar things, so it wasn't a world where "things were so much better before XYZ". Very few cultures have emphasized heedfulness. In a weird way, all the religions and all the cultures that promoted "duty" to family or tribe were teaching some elements of heedfulness, albeit inadvertently. So, I do agree (also in a weird way) that the reactionary Christians in America are actually (inadvertently) teaching some heedfulness when they try to promote "traditional Christian values". Or, if I were looking for heedful kids, I'd find more coming out of a church then coming out of an Instagram feed; even a progressive Instagram feed.

So heedfulness is rarer than erudite education. I'm not sure on the number, but my guess is approx 1 out of 1000 or less. 

These days, I am trying to hone my heedfulness meter so I can find these folks. My main difficulty is that my heedfulness meter is biased to people who are heedful in the way I am. If they are heedful in a way that looks very different, it's very easy for me to miss them.

Lastly, and Topeka and Cornell has taught me this, heedfulness is not very correlated with education or social status.  You can find a lot of unheedful people who are doctors or policy makers. They are probably good enough for their jobs, but I wouldn't trust them to be gentle or careful when tempted by pleasure, greedy, or revenge.

Uudr 

Happiness is tricky, some questions to ask

Happiness is tricky and messy. Here are some questions to ask to look at your happiness:

Is your happiness based (only) on your own actions or depends on the actions of others?

Is your happiness bsed on your mind and mind's actions? Or dependent on comforts of the body?

Is your happiness in conflict in the happiness of others? This can be looked at both shallowly and deeply.

Shallowly: are you looking for some positionality or possession that someone else covets? If so, there can only be one winner.

Deeply: is your happiness dependent on the exploitation of others, indirectly?

Deep and edgy: is your happiness dependent on the exploitation of others, directly, but you look the other way?

(Note: your survival is likely dependent on harm to others, and this is unavoidable. It can be lessened, but dont get in fights about who is is holier than others. Your happiness does not need to depend on harm to others, because your happiness (in the buddhist perspective) actually does not depend on your survival)

A lot of happiness is self-indulgence, disguised as reasonableness, masking grandiosity and greed.

Due dilligence is good and consent is good, but neither are really sufficient if you want to be very heedful.

unperturbable

No matter what the conditions are outside, you don't have to suffer.

You find a basis for happiness beyond the touch of conditions.

That's the part of the dharma that is off the charts.

From Thanissaro Bhikkhu - 080819 A Dhamma Map.mp3

Brene Brown is 90-95% helpful, perhaps?

Brene Brown is 90-95% helpful. I think that's higher than me! She is well studied, well-researched. But she is not 100% helpful. Barely anyone is 100%. Even God and the Bible or <insert your favorite holy text> is fallable, even if only because your interpretation of the text is fallable.  So this idea of wise-judgment or discernment is pretty essential, regardless of if you are Buddhist or not. Taking something in whole-hog can be dangerous. See my post on NVC.


Let's take a specific example:

https://brenebrown.com/resources/atlas-of-the-heart-list-of-emotions/
A list of 87 emotions and about 8 anti-patterns for empathy (e.g., fake empathy)

As I read through her list, I'm struck by how much the emotions are about emotional narratives. They aren't (all) raw emotions. They are emotions with context and reactions and justifications or avoidance. So they are complex emotions; they are the emotions then mixed with contact with stories/ego, and then secondary emotions, and then maybe social context.

It seems, to me, like she is missing some basic things from the list of 87. And overemphasizing the secondary emotions.

She doesn't have unsafe (and safe). Some might not call these emotions, but in trauma work, that sense of safety is beyond words, possibly before emotions, and hard wired into the Amygdala, the Limbic system, and various midbrain structures. Most people don't experience "unsafe" by itself because they are primed to then go to the reaction. Often fear. Or frustration. Or blame. These, Brown lists. But a big part of Buddhism (IMHO) is to be able to experience safe and unsafe in it's raw form. And then to watch the chain of the brain.

In Buddhism we have Vedana, translated as feeling tone or emotions. A buddhist innovation seems to be to separate into 3 categories:  Pleasure and Pain and Neutral (or neither). Pleasure and pain are not directly listed in Brown's list, but there are synonyms or subcategories included. Again, the subcategories may be elaborations, and hence in Buddhism, they are seen as possible unhelpful elaborations: me-making and my-making, the chain of clinging or papanca.

The overemphasizing is the small space she gives to neutral. She has "calm" and "contented" and a few others. In my Buddhism, I've noticed how much of life is inherently neutral and impersonal. And how much my own story making is what turns it into something positive or negative, and personal. This distinction is lost in Brown's roadmap.

To praise Brown's work, it is excellent at helping people feel more. In the investigation phase of meditation, it's very good to ask whether one is feeling any of those 87 emotions. It's a tremendous vocabulary, and I think it's eye opening to read. One might spend a day or even a week on each one. So, in explore mode, these 87 are great.

In a normative sense, it can be problematic. Brown's arc is one of progress and change and healing. And so it is asking us to privilege and reinforce some emotions while trying to move away from others. Buddhism has some similar prescriptions. We are encouraged to give up anger (or a specific type of anger, to be precise), for example.  But, in both Brown's map and Buddhism's map, we really ought to look at and deeply understand that anger. We are looking toward transformation and resilience. Not avoidance or "smash".  That subtle distinction can easily get lost.

Her take on "more empathy"... again, probably 90-95% helpful. But some cautions.

There are people where more empathy is 100% helpful for right now. And there are people where more empathy is not helpful. A prime example is people in trauma; getting more into empathy and in touch with their emotions is not exactly the optimal trauma treatment. It starts with getting people safe in their bodies. It then goes toward something about "reintegration" and a "window of tolerance". For some people, it can be very story-based. And for those people, Freudian approaches can be very helpful. But for some people, Freudian approaches are "too much, too fast" and they can shut down. Because shut down can be a sever setback, we want to be extra, extra careful.

It is skillful to have empathy for people's lack of empathy. And there are ways of reading Brown's work that allows for those grey areas; and there are ways to read it that tend to exorcise those grey areas, which creates it's own clinging, judgment, hiding of our own judgments, etc etc etc.

A Pascal-ian Wager, 95%

So, I think approaching Brown as 90-95% helpful is very beneficial, because one is asked to look and judge for themselves. In the first pass of learning, you just copy and try to get bearings. But the 95% tells you that you can't memorize everything and that's the end. You gotta "be the scientist" and test it out to see if you get the effects. Sometimes you won't get the expected effect, and the 95% rule says, "that's good, keep looking".

If it turns out Brown was 100% correct, you haven't really lost anything. Looking with a careful, discerning eye gives you more knowledge. Knowledge form doing the work and checking, not just ingesting the work.

ON SHAME

Buddhism's take on shame is helpful to sharpen some of Brown's research on shame. Brown sees shame (in my reading) as universally negative, and some may say she has been a powerful force to bring light to the issue of shame. Shame leads people to hide and feel stuck. These are not fun experiences/emotions, so people (in a humanistic and human-centered way) might look to get rid of shame. One might say she is the leader of the war on shame.

To the extent that this "war on shame" is accurate (I think she probably has more nuance, and I am glossing it over and focusing on her main message, not her careful, technical work, which I appreciate), I think it overreaches. Buddhism talks about healthy shame, where we hurt someone or did something we ourselves consider unskillful. In those cases, we are "ashamed" of our actions. The thought of doing it again gives us a sick feeling in the stomach. And that shame protects us; it keeps us from doing the thing again. In that case, shame doesn't beat ourselves up.

One might say that this "shame" stuff is just an issue of using different definitions. Yes and no. Brene Brown's early books on shame talk about what should be defined as shame? Does embarassment count? Is regret shame? I think she settles on some element of hiding. And, yes, if we make a mistake and can openly admit it, then this is a best case scenario. We share with friends and don't feel hiding-shame. This may be optimal, but is it necessary or even common place. I don't think so. If we told a big lie and hurt other people, and we feel shame, we might have some desire to hide it and put it behind us. Angulimala, the Buddhist era serial killer (999 thumbs), probably felt shame about his past as a serial killer once he became a monk, and an accomplished monk at that. As the story goes, people he had hurt would shun him and throw things at him, even when he was highly attained. As he was an arahant, he probably could see that his serial killing had ripple affects, that it chained these people he had hurt to cling to anger and thoughts of revenge. So he might be double ashamed, ashamed at his actions and ashamed at the impacts of fermenting anger in those he hurt.

To be ungenerous to Brene's work to make a point, Brene acolytes (just like NVC acolytes) might say that Angulimala has to get rid of that shame. What would that even mean? To their credit, they don't mean that Angulimala should stop feeling ashamed by bypassing the pain he caused. But it's be easy for an inpatient follower to use Brene's work as a sort of bypass: "Brene says don't be ashamed. You can't tell me I hurt you because that causes me shame". A more patient follower might acknowledge mistakes but then encourage Angulimala to embrace the story or to find a way not to hide. This is probably useful in general, but has a couple of backfires and gotchas. Angulimala, having become an arahant, has gone beyond that tactic; he is beyond the stories and identification. His shame is only to the extent that it makes him careful and heedful in his actions. On the other side, there are apologists or even PTSD people who can get stuck in their stories. So even a transformative story of healing from shame can backfire. Cognitively, it may work. But in the limbic system and the emotions, it can have no effect.