Didn't take long

I woke up this morning in Marka, Jordan at the house of my friend thinking I might listen to Regina Spektor or something. Marka is somewhere between a suburb and a slum on the outskirts of Amman, a place with ubiquitous 7 to 11 year olds constantly embarking on imaginative adventures. It is definitey not on any tourist map, and has all the charm of cities in the third world where community still plays a greater role than productivity. My host has a small place there, at which he shares with Suleiman and his wife, the friend that I mentioned in my last post.

So, I woke up and went to my bag, and well my ipod's not there. After shuffling around for a minute, I notice that all my books are out of order and one of them actually has a huge tear in the cover.

Flashback to last night. We get home about in the late evening, and there are four guys in the living room hanging out. It doesn't take long for Suleiman (with Raed translating) to ask me again about meditation and Buddhism. It is basically in the form of a challenge. They are questions like "What do you get out of meditation?" "If you found out that your path was wrong, and another was right would you be willing to convert?" And leading questions to suggest that there could not be any other explanation for existence than God as interpreted by the Prophet Muhammad. So, I answer as asked and explain that I have gained a tremendous amount from my path of meditation, and it has lead me to be a stronger, better, more peaceful person. But, I am seeking truth in any form, and I am happy to accept anything that builds on my experience. At this point my part in the discussion was done. For the next 20-30 minutes one of the guests took up the ecumenical argument, while Suleiman took the "one true path" argument. I listened intently trying to pick up any words I knew and absorb as much Arabic as I could.

It eventually ended with the guest saying, calling Suleiman a word that I inquired the meaning of. He said, it means "a person with no sense."

So, eventually everyone went home and we went to sleep.

Back to this morning: Now there is a little part of me that would like to have my ipod back, but anyone that has had anything stolen knows that it is the sense of betrayal that is the much more bothersome. It makes you feel stupid for trusting a person, and besides making you less likely to trust, makes you less likely to care.

Once when I was in Nicaragua speaking to an uncle of mine who was a businessman related what he thoguht was the biggest thing keeping the country from growing. He believed that it was centrally a culture of corruption. From the rich to the poor, if there was an opportunity to steal it is universally taken. From a meal to trinkets to investment. Any effort at social improvement was inevitable undermined by everyone taking a piece.

Depending on the person, I can see how it wouldn't take long before a person integrated this into their worldview, and simply gave up on acting for social betterment.

However, that is the only way we have ever moved forward. Fighting crime, but at the same time fighting the tendency to view society through the lens of our own disappointment. To see the world for its reality and its possibiilty at the same time.

In Jordan

I've been in Jordan for a few days now. The first night I stayed at the hotel of a friend of a friend. It was a nice night. I talked with some french travelers that were on their way to Thailand and Myanmar, and spent a lot of time the next morning trying to communicate with some Arab teenagers that spoke virtually no English (called Ingileeze in Arabic).

The person that I've been staying with since then, Raed, has been awsome in a "The Godfather" like way. He is obviously tremendously well connected, and while is a business man by profession, spends a large part of his daily life getting favors done for people. Got your car repossessed? Have a GPA that is not to your liking? Need a visa? Have awful credit? Trouble with the law? Raed's your man. His English is very good since he lived in Canada for a number of years which is where his brothers live. He is the sort of man that puts a lot of pride and dignity into the way he carries himself. He has been in a suit the entire time we've been here.

He has been tremendous to me. I wish I knew more Arabic so I could beat him to the taxi fare or check once in a while.

We stayed with a friend of his the last couple nights. It wasn't till the next morning that Raed told me that his wife is currently in the hospital after having had a newborn baby. It struck me as especially strange, just because his friend, Suleiman seemed like the consummate bachelor, loud and boisterous, welcoming in an informal and a manner that conveyed a freedom from responsibility.

I have gathered that the distinction between male and female society is a very distinct one.

I'll write more later...
ps the hummus and falafel is very good.

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.