The Hold of Loving Kindness

Through my experience with my Asperger’s six year old and the professionals who work with him, I’ve learned two types of restraint holds. They’re both referred to as the small child restraint hold, but one is empowered with loving kindness and the other by self-righteous, domineering force. As you can imagine, they’re both similar in their physical executions. The difference is in the attitude of the restrainer. The one backed by loving kindness has a much more difficult approach, but once mastered, the remaining moves require much less effort and exertion than the hold of self-righteous, domineering force.

The approach in the hold of loving kindness is to withhold judgement. Regardless of what we may have just witnessed, we do not judge the child as being bad, evil, or inherently dangerous. The only thing we acknowledge to ourselves is that the immediate behavior must be stopped. We move in with confidence that we are capable of stopping the behavior, and infuse that child with loving kindness. In swift confidence, we hold the child, speaking soothing and gently, reassuring them that love lives in their hearts and gives them gentle hands. For a young child, distraction towards a safe, productive activity should be the focus. At this age, they’re only practicing. Whatever they practice is what will become automatic, so more time spent in friendly, happy play and less time spent on drama is better.

The hold of loving kindness has a calm and quiet nature. It doesn’t allow any party involved to feed upon the drama of conflict or competition. Our society is addicted to the adrenalin rush caused by drama and competition. It’s evident by the violent and stirring movies we support, by the rough games we invent, by the thrill rides, and the weapons we stockpile, subconsciously imagining ourselves to be Rambo – fighting our way out of any situation, but the fight never ends. We live in constant fear of retaliation – constantly pumped with that adrenalin. It’s like we thrive on conflict. We create it. We bait and blame others, and overreact. The stress is tearing us apart on both the individual physical/mental level as well as the societal level. When we exercise a small child restraint hold, if we approach it with a stressed out attitude of competition and domination, they’ll mirror that attitude and fight to the point of physical exhaustion. If we approach with low-key loving kindness, they’ll relax as we relax. They’ll become gentle as we model gentle.

The hold of loving kindness can be practiced with larger children, too, on a metaphorical level. If a child tries to manipulate you with threats, the approach is to remain calm. Don’t provide the reinforcing jolt of adrenalin with a dramatic reaction that will only fuel their fire. Don’t engage in a contest by making a threat back. Silently assess their capability of carrying out the threat, and the seriousness of the consequences if they succeed. Reduce the risk by changing the environment if necessary, and quietly inform others to recruit their vigilance and support.

Our example is our most powerful message. The tools we gather indicate our identity. How can we claim we want peace and health while embracing tools for injury and death? We must walk the path we wish them to follow. We must show them the way.

You can FLY!

I was standing at the receptionist at my son’s old doctor’s office, waiting to pick up records I had asked them to fax to his new doctor over a week ago when I overheard the woman at the next window complaining that she had not received the right card in the mail.

Relaying her struggle to the wizard behind the glass she pleaded, “Do other people have this problem?”

The woman sheltered beyond desk and thick glasses denied flatly. “No. Only you.”

I lost the battle to maintain my dumbness. “It’s not just you.” I cajoled. “They tell everybody that. We’re all struggling with stuff that gets screwed up all the time, but if you ask, they insist it never happens. They always tell you that you’re all alone. It’s only you.”

She shot me a baffled glance. I continued brazenly. “At least you didn’t order a TV and wind up with an assault rifle.”

Was I just rambling wildly? No. It all happened. Just a couple days ago, the Huffington Post ran a news story about a man in Washington DC who ordered a TV online through Amazon only to have a high-powered assault rifle left at his apartment door a few days later. Good thing he found it before the neighborhood kiddies, or someone on the edge just waiting for a sign from God to reek havoc. At least they don’t come with sample bullets.

What would anyone even do with a gun like that? You can’t shoot it outside a range, so why keep one at home? They should come with automatic notification of emergency services if they are ever shot outside of a range. With all our fancy technology, surely we can make bullets that automagically call for emergency backup. Wouldn’t legitimate defenders welcome such advancements?

We were at the doctor’s that day transferring our records on the advice of a friend to see a different physician, an older gentlemen more accurately intuitive and thorough in his investigations. Howard had been struggling with violent outbursts at his morning camp. Just that day he had jumped on the back of another child his age. The boy had tapped him on the shoulder and accidentally touched his face when Howard turned around. Howard brandished a nasty admonition to which the boy retorted. That’s how the fight got started. When I’d arrived to picked him up, he had lulled about helplessly, laughing at times until I picked him up and took him out without his car games. I could only carry so much. I thought it would be a nice lesson in natural consequences. For my efforts, I painfully lost fistfuls of hair to the writhing, screaming rebel in my arms. Maybe what I really needed were painkillers. I’ve read 80% of painkillers are consumed by people in my country. Maybe this is why people need to get high.

I wrestle with the decision to put Howard on drugs. The professional who completed the evaluation suggested a mood stabilizer, but nothing comes without side effects. I don’t want to stifle his creativity and intelligence. He makes spring action lego cars that move of their own with hinged doors and other details far beyond a “normal” boy who just turned six. I don’t want to dull his sharp edge. I appealed to his natural intellect, hoping to encourage self-control and higher morality.

“Howard, you have so much potential. You could be a hero.”

“But how would I fly?” He piqued curiously.

I was caught off guard such a natural inquiry. He’d never seen The Avengers. How did he even know they flew? Do they, still? The answer rolled in like the soothing morning mist.

“You can fly.” I promised. “The first step to flying is to treat other people well. Do the right thing. Be generous and helpful.” I offered. “After awhile, people will start to look up to you. You’ll see it in their eyes. They’ll look at you differently. You’ll be able to tell that you’re flying when everyone is looking up to you.”

That’s the best way to get high. If we all worked together, we could give each other contact buzzes. Rather than admitting no fault, and making people feel like “It’s them”, we could start admitting we’re not infallible and realize it’s life, but it’s not that bad. There’s a lot to rejoice in, especially when we love instead of target one another.

Thrive or Writhe?

The divisive movie Thrive, released on November 11, 2011 by Proctor & Gamble’s Foster Gamble aroused my suspicions as being a part of the satanic takeover. It seemed based on the same loopy philosophy espoused by Alice Ann Bailey with their tribute to Lucifer, the fallen “solar angel”. Thrive advocates its own conspiracy, arousing fear and suspicion with its accusations that “they” are trying to take over.

There are many things I don’t buy into with Thrive. They would have you believe that the Universe contains endless useable energy suppressed by a powerful contriving elite. To convince people of this, they mix truth with lies. There is such a thing as dark energy, but at this stage, we don’t even know what it is, and there’s no practical way to harness it. We can pursue alternatives to fossil fuels, but no one has made a magical machine that harnesses free energy out of thin air. It’s a hoax. While I admire Tesla as a man of great style and intelligence, there’s a lot of evidence that he was a bit insane, as many stylish intelligent people are. He kept carrier pigeons towards the end of his life during the early years of WWII that made his Manhattan apartment a mess. Tesla was bound by the same physical laws of our existence that bind us all. There’s no miraculous lost technology that’s going to save us. We’re making great leaps and bounds with quantum entanglement, and the dark states of solar cells that have increased the efficiency of panels. We should continue to pursue those promising paths. Wasting energy on the idea that there’s an evil elite that is plotting against the world population is not going to turn on the lights any time soon.

The hypocrisy of that statement when compared with my satanic takeover opener is not lost on me. Though some may glorify the myth of Lucifer just as some believe in unicorns, there’s not much evidence that they’re making significant progress towards any evil world domination. For the most part, the idea that world leaders are involved in a satanic cult is a red herring, distracting from the simple, age old problem that people are just plain greedy and power hungry.

Another turn off for me with Thrive is Foster’s “discovery” of the nasty practice of eugenics. This is nothing new. He should know all about it since his family was a huge advocate of it in post WWII. Rather than trying to reinvent himself as the savior of the world, perhaps he should issue a public apology. That might be a start towards his reconciliation with reality and true self acceptance.

I felt the film was so misleading that I became suspicious of Gamble’s motives, suspecting that he was trying to mobilize the masses to turn us all into a bunch of corporate serving slaves (as if we’re not already). I felt instantly set against anything Gamble supported. One of his first targets seemed to be the Federal Reserve. I didn’t know much about the Federal Reserve, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and found it was formed after a series of financial panics in the early part of the last century. Their mission is to maximize employment, stabilize prices and regulate long-term interest rates. That all sounds good to me, so I figured Gamble must be trying to bring down our “central bank” much like George Soros brought down the Central Bank of England in the 90’s with his dire predictions. Now there’s a name for the Illuminati list. Some would have you think Soros is the devil incarnate, though whenever I’ve researched him, I’ve found an intelligent survivor who has manipulated and taken advantage to fill his own coffers. He’s an investor. That’s what investors do.

I figured it would be a disaster if Gamble was successful in taking down our Federal Reserve, and suspected that somehow, like Soros, he’d make boat loads of money while the rest of us writhed. I suggested to a well-connected friend that P&G was out to ruin our lives for their profits by taking down the Federal Reserve. He wrote back that the Federal Reserve was actually dragging us down. He referred me to this six minute video featuring Peter Schiff. After listening to this video, I have a better understanding of what the Federal Reserve is, why it was formed, and it’s short-comings, which primarily is that it inadvertently supports inflation. As Schiff points out, we now have the technology to apply more efficient solutions to the problems our Federal Reserve has tried and failed to address. We just need to be careful about how we proceed in implementing that technology so that no one gets an unfair advantage. 

Maybe Foster Grant is right about the Federal Reserve. Even a blind squirrel finds a few nuts. Really, it’s all about control. Thrive wants to mobilize the masses, and is attempting to do so with its critical mass actions, some of which are not all that bad. I signed up for the one about keeping the Internet free, which is the most popular. I signed up just to see what kind of battiness I’d get in my email box, but I haven’t been overwhelmed with manipulation, so far. Their movie does contain some good ideas – namely taking responsibility for your own environment and acting locally to improve your community. He’s off base in some ways. Gamble says put your money in local banks. Why? So they can invest it in China? I say put your money directly into your local community if you want to get the biggest bang for your buck. Don’t expect your local bank to do it for you. They’re out to make a profit for themselves. If you want to see a garden on that street corner, you buy the property and you plant it. Taking personal responsibility for our immediate surroundings is the first step to making the difference between thriving and writhing.

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Reach for the Golden Apple, but Not at the Expense of Passing the Torch

I found Eric Dubay’s work on Atlantis inspiring. When we look into ancient history, which, going back far enough, includes legends in the form of writings from Greek philosophers to religious texts, we find some common threads.

Throughout history there have been stories told involving reaching for the golden apple. Perhaps the first was the myth of the Greek heroine Atlanta. She was a fierce warrior and fast runner who refused to concede marriage with any man unless he could beat her at a race. No man was faster than Atlanta, but one man prayed to Aphrodite and was advised to carry three golden apples from a sacred tree. As he raced with Atlanta, he threw the golden apples at her feet, one at a time. She could not resist stopping to pick them up, and thus lost the race.

Another well-known story also involves a woman who reached for a golden apple from a sacred tree. Beckoned by the serpent, or as Theosophists would say, the fallen “solar angel”, Eve took of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, thus imparting “principle of mind” upon the whole human race, giving us self-awareness, alerting us to our nakedness. God didn’t want us to eat from the Tree of Life and live forever in our awakened state. To do so would be to become like God, so we were cast out of the garden. We had to work the land for our food. We had to battle the elements, and each other, for survival. We would fight to live, and then we’d die.

In both these stories, reaching for that golden apple winds up to be a stumbling block that catapults us to an egregious loss. Some say the stories represent the confounding result of acting out of greed. Some would parallel the fate of Atlanta with the fate of the whole society of Atlantis in that it sunk under the weight of its corrupt desires.

In the story of Eden we were only forbidden to eat from one tree in the whole garden – the Tree of Knowledge, right smack in the middle. That is the tree the fruit of which Eve finally sank into with her glistening white teeth.

There was another special tree in Eden called the Tree of Life. We were kicked out lest we eat from that tree, too, and live forever; however, that tree hadn’t been off limits implying that before we became self-aware by eating from the Tree of Knowledge, we could’ve lived forever. Now we can’t live forever because we are aware of ourselves, and like the tree from which we ate, we are the center of our own attention.

We perceive ourselves as individuals, but together, we make up humanity. As a group, we live much longer than any one individual. In thinking of ourselves as one of a team of people all running a race, passing the torch, it suddenly becomes clear how detrimental it is to stop for apples. If we get so caught up in stopping for apples to focus exclusively on our own pleasure, we could literally lose the race. By that I mean the whole human race – not just the heat. We could wreck the planet to the point where every trace of our existence is gone. No one is left to tell our stories, or those of the Greeks from so long ago.

If we were, instead of people, individual cells in a body, we would expect to do our job for awhile, eventually die, and be swept off, sloughed away, but how would we feel about our one little cellular self being blown away upon the wind? If we could see the big picture, we would know that by ourselves, we were not capable of existing, but we contributed to something beautiful that could do back flips across a room – something that could calm a weeping child, or rouse an audience to their feet in a round of applause. If we knew that as an individual cell, we’d realize how important it was to do our job to the best of our ability, and not worry too much about picking up those apples for our own little self.

Just like the cells in our body, we need to to keep functioning efficiently. We need to clean up the planet. We need to keep finding answers. We will eventually need to find a way to traverse the space-time continuum and find ourselves another home as this one will be gobbled up by our expanding sun. Not in our lifetime, true. It will take many lifetimes of many people to develop the technology we need to keep our torch lit, but we can do it if we keep in mind that this is a group effort – not just of everybody on the planet, but of all the inventors who have gone before us and contributed to the knowledge with which we work. They have passed us the torch, and we must honor them, and ourselves by carrying it forward as we can, then passing it along when our time here is through. We mustn’t be so distracted with the golden apples of fame and fortune to be amassed here for ourselves during this brief existence that we fail to pass that torch, and keep the race alive.