further on the approach to the trip

Before I left for this trip and part of the reason it was prompted, was that I had noticed that I had been primarily surrounding myself with people similar to myself. Throughout my life I’ve been driven more by pursuits of understanding and wisdom than anything else. Social skills aren’t really all that relevant to understanding of transcendent truth, so I never really developed them fully. I had always wanted to make systematic and enduring change in the world, but my approach was similarly academic and detached.

Over the last year a variety realizations have made clear to me that you can’t really help anyone without understanding them. The trip around the country, the learning of Arabic in the Middle East and Chinese in China is designed around that effort to respect and be able to listen with compassion to people from completely different cultures. But since I’ve left DC it has been more than just an effort to learn about people, it has been a shift in the emphasis of how I frame each conversation.

This conscious openness to the experiences of others has yielded at least two huge benefits. The first is that people are more interested in what you have to say when they know that they have been heard and understood. The second is that it greatly increases the ability to see the potential in people. In everyone there is the tendency to judge. It is necessary to decide what to prioritize, how to manage our time, and whom to associate with. But the tendency to judge also limits perspective. It tries to categorize people as their current predominant characteristics instead of see them for what they can be. The nature of conscious inquisitiveness allows you to the aspects of whoever you are communicating with not only for the qualities that they are currently manifesting, but also lets you see the aspects about them that are not manifested and what may be holding them back from nurturing them. My aspirations all have to do with the improvement of society, and I am already appreciating how valuable it is to be able to see that potential.

a general picture

i was about to send out an e-mail on my blog, and realized I should give a general impression of what I'm doing.

I left Washington, DC almost a month ago and have been making my way across the country at a combination of friends couches and people I've met through www.couchsurfing.com (an amazing website by the way). I am currently in Washington State visiting one of my very best friends and playing with his extremely cute 8 month year old. It is my 12th stop, and probably my most relaxed.

Soon before I left DC I decided to make an effort to be consciously open to everything I can learn from people. For my entire life up until now, I had been very diligently seeking the answers to questions I found important mostly surrounding trying to define for myself what an ideal society would look like and how to concretely get us there. Even as I began to piece together an answer to those questions, I was still very focused on learning and developing this answer. In a social context, this translated into being interested in people who could teach me something about that end or who were interested in seeking the same answers.

I think two things inspired the desire and effort to listen to people without imposing my own priorities on the relationship. The first was a realization that the only way to ever solve the problems of society was to understand people in a very personal sense through listening. The other is the realization after working in government, that you'll never be able to understand everything and the importance of trust and delegation in working in government, and a desire to improve my ability to communicate to people about their priorities instead of mine.

So, the plan is to travel the country until Christmas, and then move to the Middle East. The plan is to spend 4 months there and 4 months in China, but I might extend my time in the Middle East. I'll talk more about that plan, later, but wanted to give a general impression of my approach to my plans.

Toto, we’re not in California anymore

So, I’m driving through western Nebraska, listening to the early 90’s song “What is Love?” (Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more) doing the head bobbing thing from Saturday Night Live, and the upbeat female dj comes on to say “bringing you the best hits from the Reagan era.” You just wouldn’t hear that in California. Politically, we remember it not for the relentless optimism and nobility with which he saw our country, but with how far his actions fell from that idyllic vision. In many ways we still have very real reminders of how far his policies fell short of his vision as both Governor and President. While Governor he cut funding for mental institutions causing many of them to close down and send mental patients into the street. It is not a long walk you need to take in the Tenderloin to know that we still haven’t fixed the problem. While President, the courting of Saddam Hussein, the illicit and illegal arms trafficking to Iran, the closeness to a number of oppressive and autocratic governments in Latin American can’t help but betray the nobility of purpose he so effectively communicated to the country. Foreign policy is a complex network of relationships, and the reality of brokering among the international stage is that you have to deal with some awful dictators, but the reality is that cold war politics of the international powers ignored what was best for the country and set many of them back decades because of our intervention. We have the refugees to prove it. He left us in economic ruin for the sake of huge tax cuts for the rich. I don’t say this to condemn Reagan, only to diffuse the idyllic glare his specter still emits. It is unfair to our own sense of history and what we can learn from it to pretend that he gracefully ended the cold war, and united the country around a vision. Because it wasn’t like that, and his conflicted legacy doesn’t belong in my 80’s head-bobbing parties.

On my way into Utah, I was listening to the radio in the Salt Lake City Area. An ad came on to celebrate Toys for Tots 60-year anniversary and encourage people to give toys for children who might not otherwise get them. It was a fairly standard Toys for Tots commercial, talking about lighting up a child’s Christmas, and encouraging people to give a toy. But the end jumped out at me. Someone somewhere felt compelled to provide justification for giving a needy child a toy. The end of the commercial ended with something like “Your toy will help a young child grow up into a responsible productive, patriotic citizen.” Wow. It is a sad day when we can’t even feel compassionate to poor kids without justifying it to ourselves that this child will be more likely to subscribe to the value set that I currently subscribe to. It just strikes me as a very conditional and disingenuous compassion they are appealing to.

a good place to meditate

On my way out of Nashville, I stopped to meditate at a Church of Christ in a small town near the Kentucky border called Clarksville.

They were very gracious and let me use their Chapel. In the hallway they had posts of a number of missionaries to various third world countries and the specific people they were helping to get a better education or home. When I got to the bathroom they had a number of pamphlets called "The truth about...." They were about things like the accuracy of creationism, and faults with evolution. It disappointed me a little. I had seen statistics of the percentage of Americans that don't believe in evolution being very high, but what really diappointed me wasn't that people didn't believe that we evolved. In the end I am far more concerned about people being good, selfless people working to improve themselves than I am at whether they want to understand the structure, history, and intricacies of the natural world.

What disappointed me was that you had obviously well intentioned people spending so much effort fighting extremely well documented and scientifically rigorous evidence. It disappointed me because everything I find respectable and admirable in religion is the humility that it brings. The understanding that there is so much you don't know, that you are powerless in so many ways should bring about a dissolution of attachment and ego. For the most part religion puts forth a set of moral principles, that inspire us to be greater than ourselves, that place faith in us that we are at root pure human beings and that we can manifest these qualities through earnestly dealing with our problems. Good works naturally follow.

But when I saw the little anti-evolution pamphlets, they didn't represent those things in religion. They represented just about the complete opposite. They represented an unwillingness to reevaluate one's assumptions and an obstinate rejection of any evidence to the contrary.

So, I began thinking about why. How did a religion that Jesus based on the refocusing of religion on the essentials of faith, works, and walking on a path to become closer to God get so caught up in a debate trying to disprove the people who spend their lives searching out truth and accuracy in the natural world, who hold themselves to the highest standards of rigor?

The answer, of course, is that if you start to question the accuracy of one part of the Bible, it opens the door to doubt more. When the ultimate guide is a set of consecrated words, if one allows doubt of any of those words it allows for doubt of them all. Also, with most sects of Christianity, the emphasis is so heavy on faith, that doubt is not only a hinderance to being able to focus on God's work, it itself is anathema.

Of course in sects of Christianity that have decided to focus on the parts of the Bible they find compelling, human beings with all their flaws and limited perception are making those calls. What claim to purity do they have before what is annointed as the words of God? But then again, what claim did any of the people who chose what was included and excluded from the Bible have to interpreting God's words?

The biggest problem it seems to cause is that when a person gets into the defensive, argumentative, bigoted frame of mind, they are less likely to grow as people, understand themselves, and become closer to (what a Buddhist perceives as) God. It is that frame of mind that emphasizes the ego, arrogance, and judgment completely counter to what religion is all about.

In the end the problem is rooted in the nature of most Christianity today, where faith is supreme and walking the path of personal development is on equal or lower footing. Such a huge emphasis on faith seems like it will inevitable lead to a great emphasis on convincing yourself and others that you are right at the expense of dedication to working to overcome all the flaws that come with being human.

However, I really do have only the greatest respect for the millions of amazing Christians in the world who take their faith as a way to develop all the good qualities. It seems like an inevitably torturous struggle, though, because you are given a conception of who you are supposed to be, but not a concrete path to get there. All the impure habits have only suppression as the alternative.

Imbued with Christianity

I'm sitting at a cafe in Nashville waiting to meet my second couchsurfing host. The kind of coffee shop whose Berkeley equivalent would be mostly vegan. The decor wreaks of revolutionary spirit. But when you look a little closer you see that the paintings on the wall, though avant guarde, have names like "The Fall of the Lord" and "Jesus Christo."

We are across the street from a small liberal arts college with a focus on the arts. So the clientele is almost exclusively college students. It has been a few hours, and I can think of at least three different conversations on religion--a sermon, or making plans around going to mass.