Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz is changing. From the left-most US city, we are moving towards bigness, dealing with a smaller economy by setting hungry policies for the dollars of others and withdrawing support for the values of innovation, creativity, smallness, and volunteering. By implementing the plans of the Community Programs Committee, we will be concentrating power in large professionalized service delivery agencies.

We are not learning lessons from the national failures.

I'm discouraged by the short-sighted survival mode that the funding guidelines committee has approved especially here where there is so much involvement in spirituality and holism and ecology.

When pragmatism trumps the values of community and connection to create a professionalized safety net, the quality of life here will degrade.

An example of the kind of exclusion is in the city's new health focus area where the old-fashioned physical and mental health silos prejudices against people who experience moods swings, fear, voices and visions by segregating mental health from physical health. A result of this segregation has been, on average, 15 years of potential life lost.

By assuming emotional well being is somehow separate from diet and exercise and cancer, separating things we can touch prejudices against feelings and fears. Just consider all the effort to get people to go for help which they are ashamed of wanting, ashamed because of the selfishness behind the carve out, carved out to get separate funding by separating out the people who would be helped. 

Can you feel stigma?

Sometimes people don't ask for help because of prejudice, because of concerns about discrimination, because of shame. Mostly it's because of shame. I think using real words that connect with real feelings would set an example for someone feeling as if life had lost all value. I don't think many people *feel* stigma. Stigma is a concept from sociology that carries no emotional burden, makes it easier to distance ourselves from shame. The mental health field uses it all the time, for distancing. I think changing the language of campaigns would ground them in real experience and further the willingness for people to reach out.

Hope

My understanding is that the human body is optimized for environmental conditions of about five thousand years ago, that we haven’t quite caught up with ourselves. Animals have a fear and survival response that they seem to immediately be able to turn off once the perceived danger is no longer present. Humans seem not yet able to turn off that switch, and for some humans the stress response continues to reverberate and amplify.

I wonder if meditation practices, prayer, and other forms of self-talk are trying to wire the brain so that we can turn off the fear response when we don’t any longer need it, install a balance to the auto-response to fear with an off switch.

I also wonder whether there is a distinction between adaptation, acceptance and awareness. Because cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable, if there seem to be no options, we accept, justify to ourselves, rationalize. But if there seem to be options, we maintain dissonance, stress, ... so it seems to me that the whole self-help/improvement industry sustains unhappiness and dissatisfaction (suffering) by emphasizing hope, change, grasping for tomorrow, averse to today.

I think there can be a two-fold (at least) track towards a unified theory of understanding everything - the deterministic/logic/science/rational/law method we tend to value most; and a merger/oneness/butterfly/self-organizing/awe/mystery track which is woven throughout the former, might even be the mesh on which the former is built and on which it depends. Not as mutually dependent as warp and woof, rather a framework which once the thinking structure is built fades away, is not necessary for the structure but is necessary for a new or different structure and is necessary to rebuild if the existing structure is destroyed.

What might be the impact of fewer degrees of separation?

Webmind values the reunification program because individual reunifications increase global net happiness.*. I think the idea is that individual joy leverages into global joy.

More broadly, it seems there would be fewer degrees of separation between individuals, between communities, between countries, a stepped up version of social networking. And thus more peace, because species don't fight as much with their own kind.

But what about rage within families, honor killings, Boznia, Rwanda, … ?

Is this what consciousness brings when it overrides earlier adaptations?

Now I'm wonder about the impact of fewer degrees of separation.

* Sawyer, WWW:WATCH, p 300

1989 Mood Matters purpose statement

The specific purposes of the association are to

• establish a resource network
• define a system of early warnings when the high times begin to move quickly
• keep up with the most current in medications
• talk about changes in life expectations
• share our own art and writings
• perhaps move towards community actions, and, ...
• provide a haven

http://peoplewho.org/moodmatters/

Optisolv – towards a good release

Optisolv – towards a good release

To increase social acceptance of the actions of people with subjectively life-limiting expectations who want to die at their own convenience.

My experience, while perhaps much different from yours, ought nonetheless to be given credence and stand on its own merit. Do not impose your fears or your faiths on me. What I decide is what I want.

Fearful righteous people insist on rationality and competence and elapsed time before acting because the alternative is unimaginable, literally impossible to even contemplate, too chaotic, a full threat to social structure. If humans could kill impulsively without contemplation, if they'd kill themselves, they'd also kill me. That permission would destroy our sound structure, so therefore we forbid non-violent means of choosing to die. We allow shooting, jumping, hanging, crashing, but not swallowing and sleeping.

Depression is a straw man. If depression is a medical illness it should not be isolated as the only illness for which one is expected to keep treating and suffering. At a minimum, we must Include depression as an accepted reason for ending life. There must be lots of choice about undergoing technology-driven life extensions. Premature death makes an assumption about statistically average life expectancy; choice is about an individual decision about sufficiency; choice is a satisfactory fulfillment of a desire to stop.

Rewiring?

Are Buddhist practice and other forms of meditation rewiring for the next evolutionary step?

Does meditation begin to reprogram the hard-wired fear auto-response.

Are all the lowering-stress practices merely indoctrination, a denial of a harsh society. Is death denying is part of today's unreality?

Hope thus becomes a stressor, a perpetuation of illusion, a rejection of the real.

Do practices like Buddhist meditation dim the amplitude of the switch between stress and resisting acting on the stress, creating consonance?

I wonder.