Blog Archives

Self-Responsibility during the Pandemic

3/23/2020

Each of us has a responsibility to ourselves, our family, our friends, and everyone who comes across our path. It is only people who can either contain the virus or spread it. If all people acted responsibly, the virus would come to a halt.

Therefore all people should follow these rules:

1. If you have any of the following symptoms, stay home and call your doctor. If you can, get tested. If you are around other people, wear a face mask.
   - loss of sense of smell
   - diminished sense of food taste
   - fever
   - dry cough
   - difficulty breathing, shortness of breath

2. If you have been exposed to someone who is infected, stay at home for 14 days and check for the symptoms. The virus takes 2-14 days to incubate.

3. Regardless whether you are infected or not, wash your hands frequently for at least 20 minutes, or use generous amount of hand sanitizer.

4. Regardless whether you are infected or not, wear a face mask whenever you are in an enclosed space (store, office, public transportation) with other people. Although a regular face mask is not the best, it will help protect you from air-borne droplets.

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Preparing a Child for Life

3/18/2020

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How is a child guided through life so as to experience peace and happiness — which is different from financial success — rather than fear, anxiety, and other forms of mental suffering? Is that possible in the world we live in?

The answer is, yes. And it all depends on his upbringing, his family life.

The myth of childhood is that it is a happy, carefree time. But typically it is neither carefree nor happy; it is instead fraught with insecurity. I wrote a book several years ago, Raising a Happy Child, that seeks to change this fact of human development by fundamentally altering the quality of the relationship between parents and children.

Recently, when my niece and her husband had their first baby, I sent congratulations and offered the following “benediction” for their child.

“May the love and nurturing he receives from his parents and family provide him with the inner strength, security, and self-love to withstand the challenges he will face in the world we live in.

May he know from Kabbalah that his true self is the divine essence … light, goodness, loving ... and may he always return home to that essence throughout his life.

May he grow up to be a mensch, a credit to himself and to humanity.”

Let me address each of these points. First, what becomes of our lives is overwhelmingly a function of learned experience ... from our family, our peers, and the larger culture ... but first and foremost from our parents.

The vast majority of parents are good people and would not do anything intentionally to harm their child. But parents are people who are a function of their own upbringing and learned experience. They have their own fears, frustrations, angers, and desires. And they see things through the lens of that experience and those emotions, which in turn impacts how they interact with their children. The result is children who do not feel loved unconditionally, are as a consequence insecure, and grow up to become insecure adults who do not love themselves unconditionally. This is the primal basis of our fears and neuroses.

Bottom line, what we have is a dynamic of insecure parents raising insecure children who become insecure adults who raise insecure children who … It is a vicious cycle, and there are few things more important to the future wellbeing of mankind than breaking this cycle.

How can I say there are few things more important than this? Because all the world’s dysfunction … all the hatred, violence, prejudice, fear, whatever … is a function of people’s insecurity. (See my posts, “The Root of All Abuse and Violence - Insecurity,” “Insecurity Is the Cause of Social Conflict and War,” at PreservingAmericanValues.blogspot.com) For example, some people may exhibit huge egos, but they are in reality insecure children. Some are so overwhelmed by their insecurity that they turn to dark forces to protect themselves and become evil, divesting themselves of all their humanity.

I should note that when I speak of “unconditional” love this does not mean that parents should simply lavish praise on their children, give them what they want, or be uncritical of their children. Direction and criticism are important parental functions; the question is how they are given and in what context. The point is that children should never have any question that they are loved, even when they’re told they’ve done something they shouldn’t have.

The first benediction thus places the focus on parents’ responsibility to provide children with the nurturing they need to become secure, strong children and adults with good self-esteem and a clear understanding their inner ethics and morality. For more on how parents can achieve this, read Raising a Happy Child.

Before continuing, I should note that this child-rearing advice is contrary to much advice and certainly common practice. If we are honest, we will admit that the commonality of most families is not an ambiance of love and respect but rather stress and various forms of dysfunction. Modern parents often seek to prepare their children for life in a hostile world by making sure they have talents which they can weaponize to defeat the competition and have barriers to block both perceived attacks on themselves and thought of the interests of their fellow man. Such people grow up lacking humanity.

The second benediction speaks to the potential importance of religion in our lives. But not organized religion, unfortunately. All the mystical traditions of the three Abrahamic faiths … Gnosticism/
Christianity, Kabbalah/Judaism, Sufism/Islam … plus of course Buddhism and Hinduism teach the same basic spiritual premise: that all men are born with the divine/Buddha essence as their true self and that the true nature of man is thus peace and goodness. The lesson of organized religion is quite different.

They all further teach that what happens once they are born is that they become exposed to life experiences that form the ego, neurosis, and mental suffering. His true self becomes hidden from him. Only man can save himself, and he does that be reconnecting with his heart, his divine/Buddha essence.

The final benediction prays that the baby grows up to be a “mensch.” Mensch is a Yiddish word that basically means a decent human being, someone who acts with kindness towards his fellow man and leads an ethical life. This has in modern times become more of a social inheritance than a religious one. For example, I definitely learned to be a mensch from my parents, not from my involvement with Judaism as a youth. This is basically why most Jews are Democrats; they tend to have a more liberal, caring disposition to the lot of their fellow man.

But anyone can be a mensch, regardless of religion or ethnic background. Because to be a mensch really means to be a human being, not just in form/body, but in substance/heart.

Being a mensch all comes back to how we are raised. We will not act with kindness towards our fellow man and lead an ethical life if we are insecure and beset by neuroses. If we do not know that our true self is our heart, and that our heart is light, goodness, humility, compassion, gratefulness, love, faith, joy, contentment, strength, courage, and wisdom. If we do not reconnect with the divine/Buddha essence within us.

What we have come to accept as the human condition is not human nature, it is human nurture. It is how mankind has developed, how we have been raised, the culture we live in.

We have to live and work in the culture, we have to interact with it daily. But that does not mean that we have to live our lives on its terms. We can be true to our true selves, to our divine/Buddha essence, and still function in this culture, Actually, from a mental perspective, we will function much better in this culture with this changed persona, our true self, than with our old persona.

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Being Present - No What If’s or Imagining the Future

3/10/2020

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I have written a number of posts in the past about the importance of being present in the moment, of its centrality to finding peace and happiness in the moment … which is really all one has.

One of the greatest obstacles to being present in the moment is our fear or anxiety about the future. Why do we have that fear? The future obviously cannot be known with certainty, and that is a source of anxiety.

Because our ego-mind cannot accept that. It wants control; it wants certainty. And so it bombards us with an endless series of “what if’s,” trying to imagine the future. For many of us, the ego-mind always seems to imagine the answer to these questions negatively. It has no faith because something or many things in our life experience has robbed us of faith in ourselves and certainly of others.
And so when the ego-mind starts this process, one must stop. Take a few moments and take some deep breaths. Center yourself. Bring yourself back to the present.

Be aware that all of this ego-mind chatter is just thought, not reality. The only thing one can have regarding the future is thought, conjecture. The fact that such thought is based on past life experience does not make it reality-based. How often have you thought negatively about the future, only to find out that something positive occurred? The past is not a guide to the future. Because the future is unknowable, such thought is classic mental masturbation.

So don’t let yourself go there. Say “no” to the ego-mind’s never ending questions.

But as always, when you stop something, when you free yourself from some negative action of your ego-mind, your most replace it with something positive. That means connecting with your heart and offering yourself joy in the moment. By taking pleasure in the moment regardless of what is going on. By being in touch with the positive energy in your heart. By releasing all desire that your life be different in any way from the way it is right now at this moment. By being aware of all you are grateful for. By loving yourself unconditionally and having compassion for yourself.

This is not easy. The ego-mind is very powerful and persistent. One must remember that you have identified with your ego-mind your whole life. Only recently have you begun knowing that your heart is your true self, not your ego-mind. So it will take a great deal of discipline and strength to say “no” to the ego-mind. But ultimately, if you want to be at peace and happy, if you want to free yourself of the anguish that you have experienced throughout your life, you just have to do it … say “no” to your ego-mind.

As the Zen monk who trained me always said, “The choice is yours.” Whether you suffer or not does not depend on what is going on around you or what situation you find yourself in, it depends on your attitude, on your state of mind.

But beware! Don’t blame yourself for suffering. Buddhists do not participate in the blame game. You do not blame the world for your suffering and anxiety. Neither should you blame yourself. As I have often written, blame or guilt requires that you do something of your own free will. Because our ego-mind is programmed by our life experiences to be the way it is, we have only a small area of true free will. As Ernestine, the Flip Wilson drag persona used to say, “The devil made me do it!”

We only expand that free will when we disassociate ourselves from our ego-mind and connect with our heart, our true self. Then we have the choice the monk spoke of. But again, we should not blame ourselves for not taking such action, for not disassociating ourselves, because the ego-mind is so powerful and deeply rooted. All we can ask of ourselves is that we do the best we can.

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