Quantum Crawfish Bisque for the Clueless Soul:

How Choice Works To Create Success or Despair

by
Glenn J. Morris, Ph.D., Sci.D.
Copyright, 2009. Irena M. Morris. All rights reserved. No rights to
reproduction without the
permission of the copyright owner.
Quantum Crawfish Bisque for the Clueless Soul..Morris
Other Books, DVDs, Inventories, and CDs by Dr. Morris
CDs:
Meditation Mastery, a series of 8 CDs with over forty exercises
Bone Breathing Chi Kung and Meditation
Timed Meditations
Kundalini Awakening Process, only available through the KAP
Seminars
Earth through Wind Strategy and Chakra Meditations CDs for
Hoshin members.
Business Books:
Organizational Sync: Making Your Job Work for You
The Flexible Organization
Job Search: The College Graduates Guide to Getting a Job
Martial Arts:
Path Notes of an American Ninja Master
Shadow Strategies of an American Ninja Master
Martial Arts Madness
Videos and DVDs:
Teacher Training Videos for Hoshinjutsu
Cane and Hanbo Techniques
Knife and Pistol Defense
Rope and Chain Techniques
Short Stick and Pen Techniques
Pick Up Weapons
Grandmasters Energy Defense and Attacks
Hoshin Budo Meditation, Basic Massage, and Healing
Secret Smile at the Big House, CCA seminar.
Available at www.hoshin.com

This book is for the enlightened, the protectors, the

wannabe seekers, and the needy to aid all with no
expectation. Enjoy the read. On a more personal level
thankyous are owed to Irena for her patience and
toleration while I worked on this project, Trish Walker,
and Lenora Rougeou for their suggestions and
kindness, Irena for the book cover, my readers in
calling for another book, and the senior ryu members
for reacting to various versions as I wrote.
-Glenn J Morris

Quantum Crawfish Bisque for the Clueless

Soul..Morris
CONTENTS
Proem/Introduction or Aint rhetoric a kinda
question.5
Understanding the importance of rhetoric as universal
strategy, soft science, and practice
is necessary for living well. Skip the intro if you are not
interested in applied scholarship.
The fun starts in Chapter One.
Chapter One: Natural or Not Natural
Selection..18
Establishing the animal model for rhetoric hardly needs
white rats.
Chapter Two: Brains Over
Brawn35
We have four brains and ten chakra that influence sexual
selection, energy, dominance,
and other matters of importance and consequence.
Chapter Three: Religion, Social Control, and
Brainwashing.52
We tend to like what we learn first best. Interesting effects
of how information is
presented from St. Augustine to the web.
Chapter Four: What have Birds and Bees to Do with
Getting Laid?..72
The seven (or eight) kinds of lovers and other odd facts
about sex and gender in people.
Chapter Five: Problem Solving, IQ, and
EQ..93
Who is directing this three dimensional environment
adapting meat machine anyway?
Three tools of analysis that predict success in most
situations.
Chapter Six: Ghosts in the
Machine.107

Flight/Fight Response, Stress Management, and Aging.

Why you should pay attention to
nutrition, exercise, meditation, and stretching.
Chapter Seven: Budo versus
Basketball120
What do we learn from sport that hinders our abilities in
combat and sometimes life.
Chapter Eight: Surviving Comfortably in a Complex
Society 138
What you should understand about what matters that you
cant do much about. Power,
social class, race, sex, and age.
Chapter Nine: Getting a
Life153
What you should understand about what matters that you
can do a lot about. Social
identity, nutrition, gender, sexuality, ability, communication
skills, and technology.
About the
Author168

A graceful taunt is worth a thousand insults. Nizer

He has never been known to use a word thatmight
send a reader to the dictionary.
- Faulkner on Hemingway
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions
come from big words?
- Hemingway on Faulkner

Proem/Introduction or Aint rhetoric a

kinda question?
No, it isnt! Rhetoric is part and parcel to human
development and should be thought of as weaponry like
our brains. Understanding how rhetoric and science are
natural problem solving behavior in all sentient and some
semi-sentient animals helps us to understand that the
choices we all make in even the most mundane
circumstances can have life changing and threatening
impacts. Havent you wondered why some people seem to
always get what they want, and others who seem just as
worthy fail miserably? The difference often relates to the
ancient Greek skills of rhetoric or the more modern terms
social psychology and communication skills. Havent you
ever found yourself suspended over the coals or quagmire
due to some indiscretion, or fault, and searched mightily
through your repertoire of apology for the words that will let
you continue life unscarred and unscathed? Rhetoric is
high powered weaponry for the mouth as well as pen. If
you get it right you should never need that sword or troop
of bodyguards. Both men and baboons derive power
through the command of weaker fodder. The baboons,
however, sometimes, have to bark it up and survive to hold
the title of boss. Havent you ever told a whopper to

impress someone, or embellished a story to make your self

look a little better to the discriminating listener? Thats
rhetoric too, working for the man on the street. Ill warn you
going in, this book is a guide for the soul that is stressed
out in the daily struggles for survival in this concretized
jungle of virtual reality. If you liked my books Path Notes
(guided by Musashi and Sun Tzu) and Shadow Strategies
(Confucius and Chuang-tzu) and they made you think in
new ways, then this book should shake your tree of
creativity enough to make something gibber and fall out.
Lets take a test. Well do this with every chapter. Take a
test. See if you know and then fill in some of the holes.
True or False:
1. Rhetoric isnt taught anymore?
2. Most people arent swayed much by advertising?
3. American politicians are too virtuous to use negative
advertising?
4. Rhetoric and Religion are not related?
5. Rhetoric has nothing to do with natural selection or
evolution?
6. Man is the only animal that uses or has a history of
rhetoric?
7. The classic educational system paid little attention to
rhetoric?
8. Rhetoric and government do not relate?
9. Leadership has more to with real skill than rhetoric?
10. In this modern age knowledge of rhetorical principles
will not help you get ahead?

Rhetoric is often treated as a subcategory of

communication or information exchange dealing with
persuasion. Rhetoricians or rhetors are scholars who study
this subcategory in a disciplined and academic manner.
The surprising thing about rhetoricians is how often they
are killed by their governments or religious leaders. It is
dangerous to examine how we think we think and
persuade others, if history written by the winners can be
regarded as accurately presenting the lives and deaths of
the losers. It has often been pointed out by these hardy
scholars that during times of oppressive or authoritarian
government rhetoric becomes simply the exercise of formal
presentations (like the dumbing down of the Presidential
debates, after taking them from the League of Women
Voters), and during enlightened government is the hotbed
of dialogue and free speech where humans learn to excel
at persuasion (like the symposia, or hot hookup bars on
Friday nights). Like your hook up statements all of the first
test items are false. The psychologists claim that modern
human beings are allured by the hypnotic siren of
television into a state where suasion is too easy and the
bites of info thus delivered deliberately lead to short
attention spans and shallow thinking. Thus government
becomes more authoritative and thought less rigorous as a
product of technology not purpose or neglect so I mustnt
talk down. Lets take a test and see what you know about
this media age in which we are all immersed. Read on at
your peril.
True or false:
1. Psychology was invented by Sigmund Freud.
2. The American Indians have contributed little to our forms
of government.
3. The average attention span continues to rise with our
IQ.

4. Music is its own language and has little or no physical

effects.
5. Word choice is a function of vocabulary and has nothing
to do with financial success, gender identification, social
structure, emotional response, or status.
6. America produces more televisions than any other
manufacturing country.
7. The average male claims to be more sexually active
than the average female.
8. The average person seldom lies so most conversations
are truthful.
9. Religion is the arbiter of morality or definer of the good.
10. Theories like evolution can be considered a form of
science fiction.
How do you think you did? All of the above but number
seven are false and since most people lie more often than
they brush their teeth that one is difficult to verify beyond
the paper and pencil. This book will give you a number of
tools to help you make choices that lead to success as
normally defined and whatever personal twists that give
you pleasure. In Ancient Greece and Rome people who
wanted to be successful studied with rhetors or
rhetoricians as they taught the skills for being both good
and powerful in what we would consider brutal times. The
times can still be brutal, but who teaches power and isnt
goodness debatable? Modern rhetoric can be described as
being more concerned with how and why a message is
constructed as well as its content for achieving an
expected result. Aristotle noted that the way we persuade
ourselves is very like how we persuade others and
defined rhetoric as the art of finding all the means of
persuasion in a given situation.

Most students of persuasion or rhetoric have focused on

the persuasion of others to the detriment of developing
tools for self- persuasion but it is these skills necessary for
making good choices that result in creativity and
leadership. Sartre, a modern rhetorician whose existential
thinking was forged in the disappointments of French
actions during the German invasions of WWII came to the
conclusion that choice is the keystone of character. The
choices we make reveal the men and women that we are
and shoulds have little value when facing the deaths of
ones Jewish or freedom loving friends. This position was
also held by Aristotle (exiled by the Athenians in his old
age), Cicero (murdered by the imperial guard under Marc
Anthonys orders), and Kirkegaard (a contemporary
Christian existentialist who wrote about ambiguity building
faith safely past the reach of the Inquisition).
Unlike poetics, rhetoric concerns a specific communication
for a specific audience in a given situation that allows for
the examination of specific motive and examination of
result that can differ from universal appeals and audiences.
Rhetoric is a pragmatic tool and can be considered
mightier than the sword as it is often used as a form of
weaponry for seeking advantage. Persuasive speaking,
simple conversation, writing, painting, graphics, film, song,
dance, theatre, performance, music, photography, any
representational art can be examined and enhanced
through an understanding of rhetorical principles. Hitler
understood this and attempted to pervert the Olympics
through spectacle following the Roman concepts of visual
rhetoric. Churchill responded with his radio talks, copied by
FDR, and later Jimmy Carter. Churchills speeches during
the Battle of Britain and use of Beethovens Fifth as a V for
victory signature fired the hearts of the allies during the
wars darkest hours. Churchill had a gift for words, his
Iron Curtain speech shaped British and American foreign
policy toward Russia for fifty years. It is the general
usefulness of rhetoric that attracts the critics censure and
the marketers praise. Propaganda is hardly the lowest
form of rhetoric and even today the military tosses out

Trojan horses that they hope the enemy will drag into the
temples of their mind. Aristotles definition of rhetoric as
the art of finding in any given situation the available
means of persuasion was situational and modern enough
to be used and quoted for twenty three centuries. His
concepts concerning credibility are still used by many and
when added to the Roman Hermogeneses stasis
questions we have tools to examine any speaker, and if we
add in Isocrates skills for developing good citizens, to
make one. Turning to the Roman pre-Dewey pragmatist
Cicero, writing for both lawyers and citizens, we can be
schooled in creating arguments and recognizing fallacious
thought. Cicero also forecasts Jamess conversational
quality by warning against over indulgence in stylistic
devices. Quintilian admonishes his students to be careful
to select words that best express thought and posits that
only a good man can give a good speech (He did start
them very young.). Does this spur Longinus to seek the
sublime or echo Protagoras and the sophists to measure
the higher end of all things? The ancients were into this
stuff for good reason. They lived in brutal times where
force of arms, and desire for security by the noble or
wealthy often became the favored law of the land. Mark
Antony had Cicero killed because he made people think
about their lost freedoms when Rome went from
democratic republic to Imperial Rome under Julius Ceasar.
In the Renaissance the humanist rhetors Petrarch and
Erasmus studied Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian.
Considerable attention was paid by Pico to the Hermetic
writings of the Greek and Egyptian mystics as well as the
Hebrew Kaballah (way before Madonna and the Hollywood
crowd). Their and his intention was to shape personal and
civic advancement through occult knowledge and practice.
Were they laying the masonry for a New Age rhetoric,
similar to the Scots and Augustine shaping rhetoric to
evangelize the Christian faith? While the popular thinker
Descartes avoided the Inquisition with a circular defense of
Yahweh and logic, Vico postulated that history and
imagination provided as rigorous a methodology as logic

10

and math to discover truth. His ideas were not embraced

readily as he sought transcendence over measurement
(and transcendence is hard to measure). Rhetoric, and
indeed science, would be very different if Vico had become
the dominant voice of the age. He prized imagination over
reason, and was rejected by the Roman Catholic Church
because of his espousal of mysticism. Whately won over
the Protestants a century or two later, and we still pay for
the sins of Campbell in our pulpits. The philosophers, the
religious, the humanists, the politicians, and the mystics all
recognized the power of rhetoric as a tool for shaping and
criticizing behavior whether through writing or oratory.
Anthropologists and animal behaviorists recognize the
place of rhetoric as being ontological and axiological for
the human primates pursuit of dominance. Given that all
communication is rhetorical in nature, it is only natural
those whose nature seeks mastery would value and
continue the study of rhetoric. As Darwin pointed out the
fittest do survive and Kennedys comparative rhetoric
shows how.
With the internet and worldwide communication systems
like real time satellite television modern people can be
exposed to the brilliance of world class athletes in fabulous
tournaments like the world cup or national playoffs. Is the
effect of this panoply of excellence similar to that claimed
by the ancient Greeks for the Olympics? I remember
asking a son if he wanted to watch a live college football
game with me and he replied, I only like to watch the pros
as the college players make too many mistakes. This was
when he was a high school sophomore. He went on to a
Ph.D. in chemistry, designs rocket fuels for the Air Force
(as a civilian) and already has some interesting patents.
He shamed me once by claiming I taught false enthusiasm
as well as strategy and rhetorical theory. I dont think he
had been exposed to Platos Gorgias at that tender age
but he had already figured out how as well as what to think
about. His football answer blew me away. The recent odd
war in Iraq presented a sanitized version of mayhem to the

11

television audience complete with embedded reporters and

a very premature Mission Accomplished. Shwarzkopf
handled the press better for Bush Sr. The dark headed
general even used them to broadcast false information like
the Marine landings that bunched up the Red Guard close
to shore so the bombers had a field day. The GOP is
spending big bucks on rhetorical scholarship at Texas
A&M, but speech and debate is being dropped from the
university curriculum in the Deep South where no child is
left behind, people fear their neighbors, support NRA, and
keep their guns. In 2004s election with Republican warmongering and threats of terror we can see a building of
the fear factor beyond my memory. Maiers frustration
theory indicates the greater the fear and anxiety the more
likely people will hold the old and reject the new. Four
more years. The internet provides a fertile field for enabling
people to respond politically. We now have bloggers to
contend with in addition to more traditional commentators.
PACs can run out attacks with little money and bandwidth
but great effect, like the Swift Boat Vets attack on Kerrys
war medals. A revenge tale that may have wagged the dog
only in an election.When a modern reader picks up his
favorite author and is momentarily sucked into a fictional
world resting in a wormhole of words without sound or
gravity, what mechanisms are involved? Do the tools of
fiction support discourse? We know that humans lie. Does
it surprise us that most animals do too? Is story telling a
better tool for teaching than relying on facts. Sometimes
Augustine makes me feel I have never broken free of
Santa Claus and other mythic list makers. I think reading
fiction probably relates to creativity and social skills. I write
as an essayist and sometimes poet but read a lot of
fiction. Recently my daughter, Teri Dawn, introduced me to
women writers who started their writing careers as
romance writers and now ply their trade in adventure and
mystery. Their books have characters that pay more
attention to social skills and description of place than most
of their male imagined counterparts.

12

Some modern female rhetors support the idea that rhetoric

is primarily a male preserve and because of the Greek and
Roman influence, overly aggressive. Yet most of us with
an interest in history note that Socrates, the
philosopher/sophist, and Pericles, the rhetor/politician,
were both schooled in rhetorical techne by the courtesan
Aspasia, a woman. Those of us who teach today literally
are supported by the methods of the hoary past masters. If
we recognize this debt are we neo-classicists or protofeminists? Perhaps they are correct in thinking rhetoric
would have a different slant had women more power
at its inception. However the argument that persuasion is a
form of masculine violence reveals an ideal sensitivity
beyond ethereal. Persuasion is not coercion. Are not the
skills of intuition and persuasion normally thought of as
attributes of the feminine in Western society? The
argument seems dramatic but specious to me (A
hypothesis in search of a gullible graduate student?). A
better set of questions might be the perennial, What do
women/men want? which is taken on in Chapter Four to
some extent. I was amazed to read a book by a physical
anthropologist who laid the muscular cultural leaps of
Western civilization, from the third century pre-Christian
era to the nineteenth century, at the nimble feet of the
Greeks, particularly the sophists or rhetoricians. Given that
the homo sapiens sapiens hadnt changed much in brain
power for the last twenty-five thousand years (New digs in
South Africa suggest seventy-five thousand.) there is a
certain appeal to his argument. Up until the sophists we
see little discussion of free choice or abstract thinking or
meta-thought. Information seemed to be passed on
primarily as technical description or entertainment with a
thick coating of dues ex machina to cover the story tellers
lack of invention. Sophists introduced the ideas that
thinking could be improved by learning certain principles,
and that idea leaked on many transactions including story
telling and the mass market of the day. All of a sudden the
heroes and heroines began to think for themselves in just
a few hundred years. Look at the difference between

13

Homer and writers/legend makers a few hundred years

later. Notice how the gods are fading in puppetry over a
very short period of time. From where did this sudden selfblame come? How did the gods lose their abilities to
control? This book will examine rhetoric, particularly the
rhetoric of choice in everyday life and show how the
choices we make are immersed in our cultural soup
reflecting the evolution of human consciousness and
problem solving. Since I now live in Louisiana crawfish
bisque seems appropriate. Rhetoric is not one of those
attributes which can only be attached to humans. In
Psychology, The rat is always right. That means that
animal models are the basis of science and the search for
reality. We think of symbol using as primarily a human
characteristic particularly when we add symbolic behavior
to the description of ontological behavior. We have to
include other animals as ontology is the study of innate
being or defining characteristics of an entity. (See Chapter
One) Because humans are decision-makers, tool-makers,
and think in symbols they use language and rhetoric to
manipulate their environment, and make sense of their
experience. Protagoras is the sophist quoted by the bards
as saying, Man is the measure of all things. In Chapter
One we will use some manly measures to include the birds
of the air and beasts of the field to illustrate the usefulness
of comparative concepts drawn from anthropology,
evolutionary theory, and simple observation. We are
judged by the decisions we make. And our self image is
constructed by how others react to our decision making
skills over time. Aristotle noticed that emotional states
reinforced our probable choices and operated to influence
our deep psyche. Science reveals that our deep psyche is
more complex than John Lockes tabula rasa (See Chapter
Two) and modern rhetoricians are developing their theories
with biological and primatological perspectives. Rhetoric
helps to create and use values and thus is alsoaxiological.
If the above paragraph disturbed you to find man included
with other animals you should immediately recognize there
is some species centrism in your value system.

14

Big words can be fun and rhetoric is also concerned with

epistemology or the study of how we discern truth. Some
say rhetoric not only gives effectiveness to truth but
creates it. Rhetoric on the physical plane is hard to
distinguish from strategy, but strategy also includes action
where rhetoric is commonly thought of as only words. This
is no longer true as we must now consider the media and
the visuals as major parts of the message. Action can and
does speak louder. As the only constant in life is the
instability of truth and the immediacy of change you dont
have to guess where I stand shouldering with the sophist
Gorgias and a poked out tongue and nanny, naaany to
sly Plato whose rhetorical skills dunned the title rhetor far
longer than his loss of argument with Gorgias as to
whether Socrates took too much liberty with his young
male students. Cicero, Korzybski, and George Carlin have
greatly influenced my symbolic interactions so Ill take the
position of lightweight generalist lifted easily to the
shoulders of the ancient behemoths.
This book attempts restoring some valuable aspects of
rhetorical study that have disappeared from the common
experience with the beginning of the information age and
the passing of print-oriented-bastards into the minority
surrounded by McCluhans visually inclined global village
inhabitants flexing their tribal tattoos and pinned body
parts to appear free of post industrial consciousness. The
visually oriented passive mind may be quicker to learn but
the question remains as to the value of what is learned.
Using television as the psychic baby sitter to our children
has introduced a passive acceptance of the presented
status quo that can be attacked from numerous
perspectives. What effect does watching some 20,000
fictional homicides have on the average teenager? Can
that lead to an acceptance of Columbine as normal in the
teenage mind? Does it out weigh being able to see the
world in real time? Does watching the slaughter in
Baghdad effect the presidential election in the USA? Why
is the coverage so sanitized? Does Vietnam still haunt us
even after Desert Storms validation? As a long time

15

teacher of communication skills, change consultant to

business and industry specializing in leadership and stress
management, I have noticed that my students and clients
have often neglected to note the impact of technology on
learning, and how technological culture impacts natural
selection. Some of what I describe will strike the naive as
quite horrific, but the world can be a harsh school for the
slow to adapt. However, if stupidity were painful we would
see a lot less of it. Sex, death, rock and roll have been the
mainstays of my life and the study of rhetoric has made it
much more interesting. The plan of this book is to share
some of my more useful discoveries with my fans and
readers. I truly believe in this time that a person who
doesnt have a clue about rhetoric is like a pawn on a
three-D chess board, or a perennial victim of crassest
materialism, being ground up by society with little chance
of making the bottom line or being queened. If you dont
get it, you might as well bend over and grab your ankles
because you are going to get it again and again. Rhetoric
is the oldest school in what we call social psychology
today. The newest school has joined the 18th Century to
pursue happiness. Under former president Martin
Seligman, my favorite former rat runner and drowner, the
American Psychological Association has finally begun to
address what makes people happy in a scientific manner.
How do we flourish? What enables us to have positive
emotions about ourselves and others? This book will
share some of those findings in chapters eight and nine.
When I quote or paraphrase someones best thoughts Ill
throw in the original work in the bibliography for your full
perusal. The bib has many treasures and you shouldnt just
look up a page or two. Read them all. Become an expert in
what interests you.
Benjamin Franklin was deeply impressed by the governing
skills exercised by the Iroquois and argued for their
inclusion during the first Continental Congress. The
American Indian tradition of opening a public forum is to
say something like, May the Great Spirit open our eyes
and minds so that you will hear my words on this beautiful

16

day made for our learning. Study on this, as the first is

also the last, based on sound rhetorical theories of
presentation.
Bibliography:
The Mind in the Cave. David Lewis-Williams. Thames and
Hudson, Ltd. London. 2002.
Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution
of Culture and Cognition.
Merlin Donald. Harvard University Press, 1991.
Rhetoric & Human Consciousness: A History. Craig R
Smith,Waveland Press, Inc. 2003.
Cicero: The Life and Times of Romes Greatest Politician.
Anthony Everet, Random
House, 2001.
The Wisdom of the Native Americans. Edited by Kent
Nerburn. New World Library,
1999.
Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian
Systems and General Semantics.
Institute of General Semantics, 5th Edition,1995.
Persuasion, Social Influence, and Compliance Gaining.
Robert H. Gass and John S.
Seiter, 2nd Edition. Allyn and Bacon, 2003.

17

Chapter One: Natural and Not Natural

Selection
The rat is the proving ground of real psychology and
science. If you cant get similar behavior in a rat
through experimentation or observation you are
probably pursuing wishful thinking. Maier
I dont believe that nature is God, or that we ought to
be worshipping it as God. But I do believe that
its the way God communicates to us most forcefully.
R. F. Kennedy, Jr.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Shakespeare
He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I
admire. Churchill
Human beings are animals. People who do not recognize
their animal nature are easily manipulated by those who
do. It is important that one understands nature and our
place in it. To quote a long dead white man, The
unexamined life is not worth living. Those benighted
humans that do not think they are animals because
animals dont wash enough, have sex in public places,
smell bad, and are generally lewd, crude, and rude do
not understand the effect of culture.We must pity them
because they miss a lot of fun. Human beings are
primates. Primates can be divided into human and nonhuman primates. Chimpanzees with whom we share
ninety-eight percent of our DNA and many physical and
mental characteristics can be considered a hairy distant
cousin and all creatures that have spinal columns and
brains are somewhat related. Ascent is not a direct
conjecture but gorillas; homo neanderthalensis sapiens,
homo sapiens sapiens (our team), and chimpanzees
shared a common ancestor five to seven million years ago.
The physical evidence indicates that some of Gods
experiments in homo erection did not survive the test of
timely adaptation to a constantly changing ecosystem.
Animal lovers are prone to anthropomorphize the subject
of their attention whether local god or distant animal and

18

unscientifically attribute unlikely qualities that close

observation will not support. Lets see what you know about
the critters that surround us, or used to.
True or False:
1. Birds are really stupid and frail, hence the term birdbrain.
2. Animals do not have self-awareness.
3. Animals do not feel pain with the intensity we do.
4. What makes people superior to other animals is social
structure.
5. What makes animals inferior to people is they always tell
the truth.
6. Animals do not have signaling or language.
7. What makes people superior is they have a sense of
humor.
8. Animals, unlike humans, have little or no sexual
boundaries, particularly cats.
9. Animals have small memories and severely limited
problem solving skills.
10. We are superior to animals because we adapt to
change and they do not.
All of the above statements are false as you may discover
in this chapter. Social animals (us) often share
characteristics that establish basic potentials and functions
that can be observed to form rhetorical communication.
Anyone who has lived with animals and paid attention will
have noticed they use a combination of body language and

19

often a wide range of vocalizations to express their

feelings, manipulate their masters and each other to get
what they want. Non-human animals may not employ
speech as we do, with the exception of some birds and the
chimps who got into Amerslan and passed it on to their off
spring, and neither do we do too well at imitating their calls,
scent, and physical systems of communication.
Observation of animal behavior and consequences,
however, gives us some clues to understanding animal
rhetoric and behavior. We can see the formation of
relationships, bartering for goods, use of deceit, anger,
friendship, command, and control that parallel our own
behavior indicating a deep or shared natural rhetoric.
Observation of animals by the astute quickly informs us of
our own nature. Birds are often regarded contemptuously
in the vernacular as bird-brained or stupid. Some birds like
the African Grays and cockatoos are quite clever and have
been companion critters to human beings as long as
recorded time and probably before. When I was teaching
martial arts seminar in Australia I started feeding a wild
cockatoo and my Aussie friends warned me not to do that,
as the clever birds would strip the rubber from your car and
do other surprising things when bored. Much better to
ignore the white avian raccoons of the air. Birds in the wild
serve as a better example of natural rhetoric. In Louisiana,
where I have spent the last six years of my life, is a bird
preserve along Lake Martin outside of the friendly Cajun
city of Lafayette. In the last twenty years (since this
preserve was established) the Roseate Spoonbill has
grown from seven observed couples to hundreds.
Thousands of egrets of various species swarm the lake
and swamp covering the trees and bushes like a white
carpet inter speckled with night egrets and cormorants like
occasional coal lumps in a snow field. If you are interested
in watching exotic birds its an easy drive from the small city
crowds of partying celebrants of spring in Lafayette to slip
down a dusty country road into the primordial swamp.
Lets look at two birds, cormorants and cattle egrets. City
bird and country bird respectively, and wildly divergent in

20

their particular strategies for getting a life. The cormorant is

one of the oldest species of birds and its reptile forbears
can be easily seen in the lizard shape of the newborn as it
struggles, a tiny snake necked dinosaur in the nest with
only the beak indicating the long bodied bird to come with
feathers. I call the cormorant a city bird as they usually
congregate in groups of thousands on rocky islands
competing with only the sea gulls in an econiche that
includes both water and land hunting tactics. Cormorants
eat fish and other waterborne critters as well as
amphibians and insects. Their only natural enemy is the
sea gull that will eat a cormorant egg or chick if given the
opportunity. When cormorants mate the male will put on a
dare devil display of diving into the water from great
heights and swimming under water. He will bring a twig to
the female to show his interest in building a nest with her
and share his kill. He will dance to demonstrate his
flexibility. The females will watch and preen. Eight or ten
male cormorants will gather on a limb and serenade the
female. She will finally select the male who is last to keep
singing as the others fall out. The cormorant pair then
builds a nest and lay three or four eggs in quick
succession. They stand guard over the eggs. One is
always at the nest and when relieved goes about being a
cormorant without looking back until its turn at watch
comes around. The young cormorants usually develop
quickly unless ambushed by a sea gull. The cattle egret
and country bird is one of the smaller members of the egret
family. They are white, usually about two feet tall and
develop orange trim on their neck and wings when wishing
to breed. Cattle egrets are native to India from where they
crossed with the traders to South Africa. They began being
spotted in the United States sometime in the early fifties,
have been seen as far north as Maine, and are quite
common in the Deep South. They share a non-threatening
econiche with cattle. Typically you will see one cow and
three cattle egrets walking about in a field. Cattle egrets
eat insects and the movement of the cattle causes the
insects to flee and thus become food for the egret.

21

One egret will usually walk near the head of the cow and
the others will flank its sides. Occasionally you will see an
egret riding on a cow. We dont know how the cattle egret
slipped across the ocean but it has done quite well in its
new American habitat. The Lake Martin cattle egrets arrive
with the April showers and begin courting with the May
flowers. The thousands of larger egrets have finished their
courting and mate selecting when their smaller distant
cousins begin to arrive and stake out their territory closer
to the road in the lower bushes in the lakes shallow. The
males will often posture and dance, fluffing their white and
orange feathers. Sometimes a male will posture near an
abandoned nest to suggest his probable nesting skills to a
nave female. They make little dashing flights back and
forth across the water. They, too, will offer a female a twig.
Where cormorants are dark and snake like, egrets are
white long legged water birds looking like miniature storks,
but the cattle egrets have for the most part moved from the
water to the field except for this birthing ritual. Some cattle
egrets do not seem to return to the swamp with the larger
egrets. When the male is ready to mate his orange trim will
be quite visible. He will stake out a small territory he will
defend from all comers male or female. Any bird that
enters his turf will be brutally attacked and beaten with his
long sharp bill. He attacks both male and female intruders.
The females circle and watch this aggressive display,
suddenly one will leap out onto the males back and
attempt to beat him senseless with her bill battering him to
the ground. If he bucks her off he continues to attack all
comers. If she knocks him senseless, when he is
recovering she strokes his neck and head with her bill,
and makes cooing sounds until he recovers [He probably
ends the Junior High antics by giving one final tug on her
pigtails]. Then they go off, mate, and build their nest. Cattle
egrets usually lay three to four eggs. The eggs hatch two
days apart and two days in bird time is a long time. Baby
cattle egrets are mostly mouth which mama and daddy
egret cram with lots of insect protein. The first born with its
two day head start is twice the size of the second born and

22

uses this to its continual advantage. It can leap higher and

thus is always first and most fed when the parents arrive
with food. The second born does ok during a year when
there is plenty of food but the third born is usually pushed
from the nest into the maw of the patient alligator waiting
below for its annual treat of failed egret. Alligators are very
long lived and eventually catch onto the annual
evolutionary drift.
Lenora Rougeou, probably Cajun, told me that her
grandfather left her and her brother to play on a pier while
he went to get a drink. The siblings were trying to catch an
alligator. They had a piece of rope with some chicken meat
on a hook. They had tied the rope to their wrists. An
alligator came along and instead of grabbing the chicken
grabbed the rope and started to pull them along the pier
out into the water. They were excited because they
thought they were catching the gator. She says the
alligator was equally excited as it thought it had captured a
double snack and was busy at pulling them into the water
when Mom showed up and shot the gator. She said shed
never forget the absolute delight in the gators eyes as it
discovered it could pull the two small humans into the
water. Reptile brain?
More of the Australian Island Watchers were killed by sea
crocs than Japanese during World War Two. I wish I knew
more about snakes. Cats are interesting. Even house cats
are never quite tame. If left with a dead master for any
length of time they will quickly regard the body as a new
source of food. Big cats regard small humans as snacks of
opportunity so it is a good idea not to forget to feed your
jaguar ruandi if there are kids in the neighborhood and you
let it stray. When I was on camera safari on Nottens Bush
Camp in South Africa we chased leopards at night and
cruised alongside a pride of lions in the day. A male lion is
a huge killing machine. The females are big enough to
make me feel very like fresh meat riding along in an open
Land Rover, but the male dwarves its female hunters like
an NFL tackle out sizes a normal human being. A pride of
lions functions as a hunting family. The females do most of

23

the hunting and raise and train the kits. The male services
from four to seven females, lolls about in the sun a lot and
occasionally if the girls need a little help will rise up from
the grass and swat whatever they werent able to subdue
into a speedy meal. Like hunting dogs, older males will
teach courage to the cubs by letting them have a go at
something bigger and more skilled. The bigger gentler cat
swats the cubs about with sheathed claws and the little
ones charge in fearlessly, a lion version of Jack the Giant
Killer or Seven At A Blow. Busch Gardens in Florida
maintained a pride of lions for the delectation of tourists.
They had a big old male called Charley after the roi de sol.
Charley was old and beginning to show a little rheumatiz
so the females would walk on either side of him to hold him
up and ease his perambulation about his kingdom. The
managers of the African plains show decided it was time to
end this charade and send in a new young male to make
the ladies happy. The price was paid and a buff young
black-maned stud was brought in from Africa. Now tigers
will often kill all the off-spring of a male before or after
killing the dominant male and taking over his territory.
Lions are usually friendlier and do not live the solitary lives
of tigers though lion males usually regard each other as
competition and an invading male will often kill any cubs
that they find, as a new male wants to preserve and protect
its own genes. The females usually accept the loss of cubs
and before too long replace the missing with new offspring. It was quite a shock to the managers when the
pride of females not only refused to accept managements
expensive offering but quickly hunted down the new lion
and killed him. Not to be discouraged by female
preference, management swallowed the bill and ordered
up another young challenger to the ancient Charles.
Perhaps it was a language problem, or the American
raised lion ladies picked up some local prejudice, but once
again the costly African invader was swiftly and rudely
dispatched. Getting the message, management allowed le
roi Charles to finish out his days supported by his ladies
even when mounting another female. He finally

24

succumbed to Rockefellers Syndrome and died in the

saddle. After his demise the pride accepted a new male
leader.
There was a caged lion at the Erie Zoo that I used to visit
as a teenager. He was a magnificent beast that would roar
and roar until he had a large crowd of homo sapiens in
front of his cage. Then he would stretch up with his front
paws on the bars to show his virility and while his captors
gawked in amazement he would urinate out over the
crowd. I always thought he was making some sort of
statement but not being privy to big cat thinking processes
was never certain. This cat acting out created a daily
scramble for safety and the stench of lion urine is cat
amplified. Eugene Linden has written a truly interesting
book on the many things animals do that prove their wit
and ingenuity. In the Parrots Lament he records birds,
leopards, elephants, dogs, etc. The tales of intrigue and
deception indicate a proclivity for rhetoric is universal
among animals. My mentor in Psychology, Norman RF
Maier swore rats were better at problem-solving than some
humans and proved it. You really should read The Parrots
Lament. It is in the bibliography. Norm is rather dry so I
didnt include him this time. A lot of his pioneering work in
animal and industrial psychology is sadly out of
print.
When I was a graduate student at Penn State one of my
best friends was a primatologist working on a degree in
physical anthropology. Norris Durhams specialty was new
world spider monkeys but like most anthropologists he was
a generalist and we found a lot of common interest in our
studies of human and non-human primate behavior. This is
a Durham story about pig tail monkeys from Yerkes
Primate Center outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Any
inaccuracies are a product of my faulty memory. It was
nearly forty years ago.
Pigtails are free ranging monkeys with a curly tail and
because they are fiber and seed-eaters have pretty big
canines like baboons or gorillas. They are hierarchical in

25

their social nature with an alpha male, who usually resides

with an alpha female and other females which are sexually
accessible to the alpha male. Usually the alpha male is
eventually killed by a challenging male who then takes
over the alpha female and other females until he too is
replaced by a challenging successor. The alpha male and
alpha female get to eat first and are groomed and sucked
up to by the other members of the troop. Alpha males will
sometimes tolerate a beta or buddy male as a friend who
hangs out with the alpha and has the privilege of grooming
him and sucking up to the alpha female who acts as a
senior wife. Ceta or fringe males are allowed to hang with
the troop if related to a troop female, but are usually driven
away particularly if they begin to give the alpha male
competition for the sexual favors of his mostly female
followers. Males are usually larger and more aggressive
than females. Such is life in a pig tale troop. Now this troop
lived in a couple of acres of roofed in compound with a big
stake in the middle, and were constantly observed by
graduate students working on their doctorates or masters
in primatology. What Im about to describe became the
subject of a number of erudite papers, but is best told in
the style of cocktail anthropology and could be the source
of a monkey epic as good as a chapter from Homer. Alfred
the alpha was an aging pack leader with beta male and an
alpha female in close companionship. He usually held
court near the center pole of the monkey compound
allowing his beta male (well call Bubba) to pick off his fleas
and occasionally mounting one of the young females to
show he could still get it on. His alpha female Alice was
pleasingly plump for a pigtail, maybe twenty five pounds
and all had a fairly challenge free life being fed and taken
care of by the non-obtrusive staff of the center. Alfred
tolerated a fringe male well call Charley who was a large
but not aggressive male who knew his place and kept his
distance from the center pole eating last. As the months
went by Charley began to grow and became huge by
pigtail standards, almost twice the size of the alpha. But
Charley maintained his distance and shy ways remaining

26

on the fringe of the troop and sleeping in a corner of the

compound. Charley began to be recognized as something
of a ladies man and more and more of the females of the
troop began to spend more time in Charleys corner than
hanging out near the center pole. This was noticed by the
primatologists and bets began to be placed as to when
Charley would attack Alfred and take over the troop.
Charley was large and Alfred though a clever leader was
no giant. One sad day Alfred awoke to find his only
courtiers were his beta male and alpha female. All the
other monkeys had abandoned his leadership and
protection to move over to Charleys corner of the
compound. No challenge, no battle. Just simple primate
democracy where the players voted with their feet.
What a great paper! Leadership Change in a Pigtail Troop
Without Violence. It could make a career for someone
who wanted to push the concept of the noble peaceful
primate. However, come the next dawn the observers
were greeted with a splattered scene reminiscent of the
Texas chainsaw massacres. Alfred lay disemboweled near
Charleys corner and Alices brains were spattered on the
center pole. Her corpse was thrown against the compound
fence. The beta male, Bubba, was peacefully grooming
Charley and the females of the troop were going about
their business as usual. (The king is dead. Long live the
king. What happened? It all seemed to be going so well
with the setting of the sun and Alfreds reign transitioning
into peaceful retirement.) Fortunately the video cameras
ran all night and they got the following. I can only
describe as pigtail vocalizations are beyond my skill to
reproduce. Charley and the beta Bubba sat arm and arm
at the center pole looking somewhat sheepish but the
alpha female was much more active. She would run over
toward Charleys corner and bark at her former
companions then rush back to Alfred and scream at him
while pointing in the direction of Charley. This charging,
screaming, and pointing seemed to indicate both rage

27

and disappointment. When she grew tired of rushing back

and forth with little result, she settled down in front of Alfred
continuing to scream at him and gesture toward Charley.
This went on for hours. Finally Alfred bared his teeth
spread his neck hair and reluctantly advanced on Charleys
corner. Charley rushed out, seized Alfred, lifted him up and
ripped him open like a ripe melon and tossed him aside
rushing across the compound to grab Alice by her heels
and swiftly beat her brains out on the center pole, swinging
her like a baseball bat. While he was bashing her brains
out, the beta male, Bubba dashed around presenting his
rear end to be mounted so Charley would not mistake him
for an enemy. It is interesting to note that in the passage of
time Charley fell to another younger male, but Bubba the
beta remained the beta for two more alphas finally dying of
old age. Such are the advantages of political action and
choice in the lower primate troops.
Celabese black apes presented another interesting tale.
These are big aggressive monkeys and the primate center
had a large colony of them. These monkeys often attacked
their human handlers and each other exhibiting a high
degree of irritability. The handlers carried broomsticks to
knock them back if they got too close. Monkey bites are
very unpleasant and many of us remember that Green
Monkey Fever from bites was remarkably like AIDS and
invariably fatal. They asked Norris to have a look at this
troop and offer any suggestions as to how they might be
calmed down. After all gorillas will quickly respond to a
human who offers appropriate submission gestures and
end an attack display. They are very polite animals. Norris
watched the black apes for a few days and then asked the
handlers where the females were. They replied they hadnt
captured any due to the tactics of these fierce primates.
When their territory is entered the females and infants
immediately flee while the males begin a series of rapid
assaults on the interlopers giving the females time to
escape. This usually results in a lot of males brought down
with tranquilizer darts netted in heavy rope and trucked
away, but as yet no females had been captured. Those of

28

you who have noticed how irritable young sexually active

humans get when they arent getting it might suspect a
deep connection and realize that this problem will require a
unique solution or remain festering. Heroes all. Sarah
Brosnan and Frans de Waal were studying brown
Capuchin monkeys for the ability to exchange tokens
(cucumbers) for labor. The subjects were happy to do so
until they saw that other monkeys being rewarded with
grapes. Grapes to the Capuchin seem to be like melons to
the Japanese. Once the Capuchin ladies realized they
were only going to get cukes for their labor, the exchange
rate fell dramatically (from 95 percent to 60 percent). When
paired monkeys saw their partners get the coveted grapes
the exchange rate fell another twenty percent. It would
seem a sense of fairness and envy are universal primate
traits and emotions evoke a sense of fair play.
(Somewhere one might try to get into a discussion of
economic decision-making as rational? Or altruism as
genetic long-term thinking?) Both evolution and economics
would predict that social animals would selectively acquire
information to strategize from or guide behavior. I still
remember the first time I ever saw a man break another
bigger mans jaw with one blow! The injured man
staggered across the poorly lit barrooms dance floor and
fell between my feet. He was bleeding from the eye
sockets as well as the usual nose or mouth. I looked up at
the short German male that had slugged him and I
memorized him and can still describe him forty years later.
There are other people who I cant remember around the
block. The potential for getting your ass whipped does tend
to focus the mind. I made a friend. He was a stonemason
by trade, strong like a truck mechanic. I was a medic. We
were both fond of beer and working girls.
Monkeys according to Duke Universitys Medical Center
will give up or accept more fruit juice to see photographs of
familiar monkeys in various activities. Male monkeys would
pay extra to see female hindquarters and higher-ranking
monkey faces, they also had to be paid to view low ranking
monkey faces. This is the first experimental

29

evidence that social animals discriminate between images

of others based on rank or sex or classification of
individuals. They also can count. The anecdotal evidence
though treacherous is enormous. The Japanese seem
almost hardwired for this behavior. Porn as well as politics
basic to primate behavior! Whod a thunk it? (I can tell you
from experience that monkeys tend to love melons, onions,
most citrus, and strangely tobacco. I had a friend catch a
spider monkey and throw it in his truck cab while he
chased another one. The monkey chewed up nearly a
carton of Marlboros and proceeded to fire at both ends.
The rest does not bear retelling.) The larger primates or
apes are also diverse in their organizations. Almost all can
be observed hunting cooperatively, food sharing, and tool
using. Political use of hierarchy and familial relationships
as well as warfare up to genocide is common to bush
chimpanzee groups. In the laboratory apes easily learn
sign language and recognize themselves in mirrors, a sign
of self-awareness missed by monkeys but quickly learned.
Jungle living Bonobo chimps tend to be communal, peaceloving, and generally egalitarian. Most social bonding is
among females and the status of a male depends on the
status of his mother to whom he stays close all of her life.
Bonobos are highly sexed and use sexual play as a stress
reducer in almost any novel or ritualized situation.
Supreme Court Justice Scalias recent crack concerning
sex orgies as stress reducers indicates he is familiar with
the Bonobo literature. The bush dwelling chimpanzee
studied by Jane Goodall are different and bond in hunting
male groups. The females share territory with the males in
overlapping ranges but do not bond strongly to other
females or any one male. Gibbons establish monogamous
egalitarian pairs and hold to exclusive territories. Gorillas
are polygamous and mostly vegetarian eating wild celery
and bamboo. The strongest male maintains a territory for
his family and females. The strongest bonds are between
the adult male and his several females. Orangutans live
solitary lives and seldom bond. In his prime an orangutan
male will establish a large territory, within it may live

30

several females. Each female establishes her own home

range. Franz de Waal, an expert on Bonobo behavior
describes Lorettas rhetorical behavior using sex to obtain
an older males favor when she is too low in the social
hierarchy to dominate him. This happened at the San
Diego zoo which has a large colony of Bonobos. Loretta
was in a sexually attractive state (swollen genitals) she
would not hesitate to approach the adult male, Vernon, if
he had food. Presenting herself to Vernon, she would mate
with him and make high-pitched food calls while taking
over his entire bundle of branches and leaves. When
Loretta had no genital swelling, she would wait until
Vernon was willing to share. Suehisa Kuroda, another
expert reports, A young female approached a male, who
was eating sugarcane. They copulated in short order,
whereupon she took one of the two canes from him and
left. (Need I anthropomorphize? A crack ho in search of
food or shelter, or just a friendly romp with a sugar buzz as
pay off?)
My older brother Paul who was my mentor and master
greatly admired began to hear voices and committed
suicide at thirty-three out of fear of going on greatly
diminished after failing to win tenure at his Junior College.
(His administration decided to give it to him at a surprise
birthday party a week after announcement day. This was a
thigh slapper to someone in power.) He had a wife and
daughters and no dowry. He had rebuilt his reputation after
killing two of his fathers friends in a car accident near his
sixteenth birthday. He lived with the horror of watching
them burn to death, he scarred his hands on the locked
doors and melting windows and never drove a car again.
His marriage was going through one of those rocky periods
that all long-term relations endure. I think he saw loss of
tenure as a disaster rather than a challenge and no longer
had the will to continue. Losing tenure usually means you
have no job next year, so start looking. He was a painter,
a poet, and a regional champion wrestler. Lots of demand

31

there. There were other recent shocks in and to his system

that sorely tried his too noble self image of a man of peace,
a teacher, and artist. The city had murdered his kittens. He
was under a lot of stress. He hung himself with his belt in
John Hopkins Psych ward where he had signed himself in
so they could watch him and keep him from harming
himself as the voices were calling for his death even in the
supermarket next to the vegetables. He could not face
failure again. He committed seppuku to his right or left
brained warrior gods. I am told that chimps will go on
hunger strikes and die when the boredom of captivity
becomes too real. It doesnt take much imagination to put
yourself in the soiled soul of a solo caged beast of natural
intelligence and figure out the choices. Among the great
apes, chimpanzees are obviously closest to humans as
models for proto-behavior but all primate social strategies
can be observed at one time or another in homosap
communities making it difficult to identify particular traits
with homo sapiens sapiens. However, it can be said with
certainty that human society is the most diverse among the
primates exhibiting the most complex communication skills
and greatest complexity of cultural adaptation. Males unite
for cooperative ventures, and so do females. Both males
and females bond with their own and the opposite sex.
Monogamy, polyandry, and polygamy are all in evidence,
all across human history and pre-human history too.
The physical evidence of prognathic brows and jaws and
cervical crests would indicate that there was occasional
cross breeding between Neanderthals and Sapiens. Since
cervical crests are only found with the great apes and
Neanderthals it is difficult with the passage of time and
extinction to designate the degree of venturesomeness
held by our thick-browed cousins in their natural selection.
It is generally posited that Neanderthals probably did not
time bind, living in an eternal now from their cave
paintings, and lacked complex language because of the
shape of their jaws and larynx. With some shaving and
scrubbing or in the darkness of the cave who is to say what
one might do to share a little comfort and warmth on a cold

32

night. Homo indicating a species that, like dogs, shows

great diversity yet no accounting for lust or taste. Great
Danes can breed with Chihuahua but would they? Humans
obviously would to the extent that DNA and blood types
studies around the world indicate there are only pure racial
types in the imagination of some Volks who reside in Idaho
and those Mittel European elite fantasists most of whom
the Western world united to kill off in Europe during World
War Two. These guys would have a lot of trouble getting
their arms around the concept that insulin and diabetes
studies indicate fruit flies and humans had a common
ancestor 550 million years ago give or take a millennium.
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee! Could telepathy be
a chromosome left to the hive-mind honey-bees of wise
and beautiful Athena. Spiders are by far the insect (?)
most adaptive. Arachnids hunt far and wide with an
assortment of home grown weapons ranging from armored
claws and fingers like a crab to subtle anesthetics that
keep the prey alive and full of juices and adrenalin yet
unable to move while they feed. Close observation of some
spiders will reveal more than the oddities of ambush and
web weaving. Strange casting abilities, creativity of a
darker nature, and a more assertive hive minding. We so
appreciate and like the spiders, particularly the giant red
and white ones that live in swarms under the sea that we
gave them a special name.. Alaskan King Crab. That is a
piece of rhetoric for great bleeding spiders that can
breathe underwater. Ate some spider lately? Marketing,
marketing, marketing/rhetoric. As we observe these
various rhetorical as well as breeding strategies to secure
a life unfolding we have to be impressed by the variety of
outcomes. There is more to life than genetic imperatives as
the selfish gene carriers or delivery systems have often
outgrown the original package to develop a mind of their
own moving from mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic modes of
living and thinking. Though our consciousness is changing
the delivery system has not, meaning there are ghosts
hidden in the environmentally adapted three dimensional
meat machine that provides our spirits transportation. I.A.

33

Richards reported that Ideas have consequences, and so

do actions. We feel before we think and our brains may
only be what we think we think with. There is obviously
more going on down below at some deep level than is
culturally acceptable in polite circles. Rhetoric operates by
the manipulation of emotions. Having established rhetoric
as natural animal and human behavior let us look at some
of the biological and cultural shapers of sexual selection in
the next three chapters. The rest of the book will give you
some tools that will allow you to make important choices
with greater freedom for living an interesting life. Each
chapter, though short, will include an inventory or test that
will help you to identify your thinking patterns that can lead
to success or failure in our complex society.
Bibliography
Chimpanzee Cultures. R Wrangham, W C McGrew, F B M
de Waal, and P Heltne.
Harvard University Press, 1994.
Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural
Introduction. George A.
Kennedy, Oxford University Press, 1998.
The Parrots Lament. Eugene Linden. A Plume Book,
Penguin Press. 1999.
Flies R Us: Fruit fly cells mimic the mammalian pancreas.
Science News. pp 180-181. C.
Brownlee, Vol.166, #12. Sept. 18, 2004.

34

Chapter Two: Brains Over Brawn?

The more complex the structure, the more energy it
must dissipate to maintain all that complexity. This
flux of energy makes the system highly unstable,
subjective to internal fluctuations and sudden
changes.
If these fluctuations or perturbations reach a critical
size, they are amplified by the system into a new
state, even more ordered, more coherent, and
connected. The state occurs as a steady state.
Prigogine
We dont stop at our skin. Krieger
All systems are regulated not only by known energy
and material factors but also by invisible
organizing fields. Brennan
We like to think that our brain is what we think with, but the
actual reality is we have four brains and ten chakra that
influence sexual selection, energy, dominance, problem
solving, and other matters of importance and
consequence. Well start with the brains as that is easily
documented in Western medicine and literature. At the top
of our spinal column is the brain we like to think is most
important because it is three brains and in men could even
take a bicameral split into two more but that is just too
complex for this simplistic presentation. Once again to
understand the importance of this information you have to
have a rudimentary grasp of the effect of selection and
choice on the long term development or evolution of
primates particularly our team (the winners, unless the
eco-niche goes major poopy which will open the door for
smart insects like Arachnids). A long, long time ago, many
fingers and toes of moons and suns when we were but a
twinkle in Mother Natures eye and mostly spinal column
and stomach we developed what is now called the
somatic/enteric nervous system which was/is mostly an
info system for digestion and production of various
hormones necessary for feeling good. For instance eightyfive percent of the bodys serotonin is produced by the

35

enteric system. Serotonin is a key element in emotional

well being. The more the merrier. This part of the nervous
system ties into the endocrine system, has proven useful
to basic human survival for hundreds of millions of years,
and is shared to greater or lesser extent by all critters that
have some spine and glands. This system is primarily
electrical and chemical in nature. Western medicine and
psychology has mostly ignored these systems to the
detriment of the general population. Lets take a quick test
to see where you stand on these issues. Do not read
ahead just respond to the items. There are no right or
wrong answers. Rate how much the following statements
are like you.
5 = Thats me, and that is the way it is.
3 = Ive experienced this and will verify it can happen.
2 = Kinda makes sense to me but not for me.
0 = No way, Jose.
1.____ I often feel the urge to take command.
2.____I inspire confidence in others.
3.____Sometimes the job is more important than the
people.
4.____I work well with groups
5.____I like to impress others with my skills.
6.____I trust my own judgment and feelings.
7.____I react strongly to many things in life.
8. ____I am challenged by new ideas and technology
9. ____I am often the life of the party
10.___The joy of accomplishment is its own award.
11.___I have little patience with detail work
12.___People describe me as energetic and enthusiastic.
13.___When you really think about it, no position is entirely
wrong.
14. ___I am considered tolerant and understanding.
15.___I believe the world can be made a better place.
16.___I enjoy helping others to learn for themselves.
17.___I get a charge out of making something new from
the old.

36

18.___If you pay attention you can learn from anyone.

19.___Traditions are often based in biology so you have to
understand nature.
20.___Technology can be a crutch or an enabler.
Each block of four questions tie into one of the four
elements in traditional human alchemy which were used to
try to explain behavior in mysticism. They correspond to
early trait psychology in both East and West. Look to your
scores and add up your numbers for each block of four.
Where you score the highest reflects your dominant
chakra which will be discussed in greater detail farther
along in this chapter.
Items 1 through 4 partially describe the Earth. Items 5
through 8 are associated with Water. Items 9 through 12
are Fire, and 13 through 16 attach to Wind. !7 through 20
are Void items. Write which is your highest scoring trait
and more will be explained in a few more pages.
Make a note as to where you put your fives. At the top of
the spine resides the fish/eel/snake or reptilian brain. This
much maligned superior organ orchestrates breathing,
heartbeat, swallowing, rhythm, visual tracking, the startle
response, and rudimentary emotion. It is the startle
response which creates this brains bad reputation. It is not
always pretty when you startle a large primate. Rapid,
shallow breathing, darting eyes, interrupted digestion, and
increased heart rate are all part of this brains control
system that influence fear and anxiety which can turn the
startle into a full blown flight or fight response which will be
examined in Chapter Six. Now, reptiles are said not to
experience emotions but Ive seen what certainly looks like
anger in alligators and a little close examination of snakes
would probably reveal as much intelligence as some birds.
Be that as it may, these two nerve rich systems of
response are the seat of the emotions and first filter of the
senses that create our reality. In other words the
biochemical and electromagnetic sensors shape what
comes in and goes out of the rest of the brain. We feel
before we think. On top of this cone or knob at the end of

37

the spine is another layer of receptors that appeared

millions of years ago (still really old hardware) known as
the mammalian or limbic brain which many experts
designate as the brain that transforms the messages of
the snake/enteric and/or reptilian brains (snakes on legs)
into useful emotional responses or values. Ummm, I like
that. Do more of that! Ugh. Get back or I bite. The limbic
brain introduces quality of life in that we now can choose
between pleasure or pain as emotional experience is
immediate and primal adding flavor to our problem solving,
but having little to do with abstract thought or reasoning.
For reasoning to happen we have to add a new layer of
sensing and processing nerves that came into being a few
million years ago and through natural selection became
the dominate physiological characteristic of homo sapiens
sapiens resulting in a much higher forehead. The modern
model we think of as us. Real human beings, have a neocortex. Well named this new layer seems to have had most
of its integration and advantageous effect in the last fifty
thousand years. The ones with the bigger brains and
communication skills seem to get most of the goodies,
breed like rabbits, and pollute
worse than rats. The neocortex besides separating us from
the rest of the primates gives us a better memory, the
ability to reason, deal in abstractions, communicate
verbally, time-bind, and set goals. These abilities can also
be used to transcend or ignore the emotional content of
the earlier and older response systems by layering in
cultural expectations to shape learned and emotional
response. A real man doesnt cry. Good girls dont. The
neocortex functions with minimal input from the deeper
emotional patterns so often people have a false
understanding of the impact of emotions and even when
understanding from an intellectual appreciation can do little
to change the way we feel or act. As the twig is bent, so
grows the branch. Past behavior is the best predictor of
present and future behavior.

38

Understanding this imperfect integration of biological

inheritance into four brains allows us to better understand
the common inability to rectify the paradox of reason and
emotion. When we recognize the interaction of nervous
systems of human beings greatly effect our communication
as well as inform, and change each other it becomes clear
how important understanding rhetoric and persuasion is to
maintaining sanity. Our emotional connection to other
limbic/sentient creatures affects our hormone flows thus
moods, digestion, body clock, and even brain structure.
When our biology doesnt catch up with culture we get
ADHD, dyslexia, and other learning problems. This might
be thought of as a biological variation on evidence, or
observation of the revenge effects of unintended
consequences. For millions of years we have had the need
to intuit which other humans and animals are safe and
which dont consider us the top of the food chain. As
successful mammals we have a limbic emotional
connection with each other that does not require thinking
to feel. We do not need to analyze or rationalize to feel.
The skilled meditator can shut down the learned intellect
and without conscious direction experience how our
nervous system is always learning, feeling, adapting to our
interactions with our econiche. The Japanese call this
discipline mushin or no mind which can also be translated
as innocence. The unskilled meditator gets this same
information but usually ignores it as irrational feelings more
appropriate to children. Unless, of course, it is love
at first sight that destroyer of parents dreams that hold us
hostage to our childrens fortunes.This is a very simplified
description of central nervous system and some of its
basic sensing functions from a Western medical and
psychological perspective, but it becomes even more
interesting when you introduce the chakra system that is
mostly electromagnetic tying into the endocrine
biochemical systems. Here we depart from Western brute
force medicine to the subtleties of Chinese and Ayurvedic
medicinal systems that are much older and easily as
effective if you are willing to wait awhile

39

longer for your result. We tend to think of the endocrine

system becoming primarily important during times of
extreme stress or part of stereotyped growth periods.
Asian medicine sees greater psychological implications.
According to yoga and Ayurvedic doctors chakra have
positive or negative impact on thinking processes
according to the dominance of yin (feminine) or yang
(male) energy in a particular persons make up. That
energy has gender or personality is a little odd to our
thinking but has its place in the world view of the medical
systems from which I am drawing. Anyway think of chakra
as energy pools or wheels (field generators) resulting from
or supporting how we use our bodies. Ive had
acupuncturists describe the chakra as biological fuse
boxes for our emotional centers. Once you know what you
are feeling for you can sense them easily if someone
knowledgeable shows you how. (I was taught by Canadian
nurses teaching Therapeutic Touch at an American
Humanistic Psychologist convention twenty five years
ago.) Many alternative medicine systems have used this
information enough that it is now becoming mainstream.
Enough that about 25 percent of the questions on the
national certification test for massage therapists now deal
with Chinese, Ayurvedic, and energy medicine. This is a
huge change in the last twenty years but a good one. If
you had a good Physics teacher in high school or youve
read a little, you probably recognize on an intellectual if not
gut level that everything is energy and the vibration of that
energy gives it the appearance of solidity. Since we are
part of everything, vibrational or energy medicine might be
useful to know a little about. The venous and nervous
systems are connected with a bioelectrical system that
the Hindu say connects some three thousand points (nadi)
on the body that can be connected up to nurture various
organs through what the Chinese call meridians. Think of
it as your house wiring. (Just like you cant see electricity
but when you throw the switch the light comes on.) Take
my word for it. If you injure your lung, kidney, or heart
meridian, it will not be long before your physical skills and

40

perceptual world begin to decline. The Chinese ideal is to

maintain harmony between and with all these complicated
systems through going with the Universe or flow. This
can be difficult when you do not understand your nature.
Depending on your culture the following information may
be common knowledge like the godai (five rings or guiding
principles) of Japanese Mikkyo Buddhism, forbidden by
some schools of yoga, hidden in Western mysticism, or
clueless among the average American sheltered by the
AMA and ethnocentrism. In Chinese medicine the focus on
chakra or energy medicine seems to be more on the
organs and meridians than the chakra. There interest was
mainly in mapping and charting the effects of the electrical
system and treated the human body as an interesting
cross between a garden and a battery where we tended
toward the three dimensional meat machine model. The
Hindu and the Japanese were more intrigued with the
relation of health and personality and pursued immortality
of the soul through meditative techniques, the Chinese
focused on keeping the body alive forever. These different
goals produced subtle differences in what was examined
and taught by the scholars. Shakespeares characters
were often based on archetypes as were the actors in
Greek theatre. Jungian psychology based much of its
theory in archetypal behavior which relates to the chakra in
my opinion. Shakespeares doubling or having characters
argue two sides of an action or question indicates his
understanding of behavior being on a continuum and
consciousness may be divided. In Japanese lore the
chakra are associated with certain personality traits
according to dominance and positive (yo/yang) and
negative (in/yin). Here is what I consider important to know
and if makes you curious get in the bibliography because
sometimes I get it wrong and you should research original
sources. I did a lot of research back in the 70s, 80s and
90s when I had access to fairly large leadership
populations to test and compare. I was interested in getting
my tenure at Hillsdale College and found the chakra
descriptions worked pretty well. In fact very well, probably

41

because some of the descriptions people were rating

themselves on were based in Chinese medicine. (We used
to do that too. What does Grandma mean when she says,
Im feeling liverish today! Or Grandpa says, Im feeling
ballsy. Probably does not mean you should head for the
meat department at your local Whole Foods or Wild Oats
even if they like their chow organic.) Well move away from
the alchemy of Grandmas Almanac of Everyday Life and
move on to a modern description of bioelectromagnetic
personality traits that has been tested on some five
thousand people since I started collecting data in the 70s.
Emotion and feelings like behavior can be looked at as
continuums so each chakra is associated across a range
of behaviors that can be seen as positive or negative
against the reward structure of society. Interesting enough
there are colors associated with mental states or fields that
you can test by closing your eyes, assuming the feelings or
attitudes to see what colors begin to bubble up in the
phosphenes in your eyelids. If you want more info on the
colors read in the bibliography. Ill include the colors in the
following descriptions and you can test yourself while
thinking about how these descriptions fit people you know.
What we are describing has a base in biology and ancient
survival mechanisms thus fitting an archetype, but our
choices greatly individualize what can be construed as
success or failure in a society of constant technological
change.
EARTH CHAKRA (Strength/Stability)
The Earth Chakras primary motivation is for stability, a
desire to maintain things exactly as they are. It reflects a
persons orientation in terms of responsiveness and
personal responsibility. The base chakra is associated with
Earth elementals in human alchemy and links up the feet
and legs into the genitals and spine. The base chakra ties
into the genitals of the male or female and generates
sexual energy. Lust at its most base but all the good stuff
that goes with sex or reproduction too. It is a measure of
confidence in your personal belief system which in turn

42

allows you to more easily lead others. On a continuum

Earthy people move from extremes of conventionality and
concern for status on the negative, to benevolent self
confidence combined with a generalist ability to synthesize
on the positive. Depending on the cultural situation these
attitudes can result in many opportunities for reproduction.
When correlated to other tests and demographics this
personality construct correlated significantly with
humanistic-helpful, self-sufficient, bold, age, salary, and
ability to synthesize. These correlations indicate a strongly
positive person willing to help others as they can see the
big picture. When the earth chakra is dominate in a person
change is always more difficult. They tend to be traditional
and past oriented when they say, I dont like this
modern. They are really saying, I like things
the way they used to be.
Negative Earth (Rule Bound)
(-) Earth is the old maid school principal who knows all,
particularly the importance of discipline and order; and
definitely knows right from wrong. It may also be the
police mentality of I just enforce the laws, I dont make
them unquestioning acceptance of authority. In
psychological jargon Negative Earth can be described as
lack of affect and/or superego driven. The color of negative
earth is dull black or red.
Positive Earth (Centered)
(+) Earth is the command general out on the battlefield
with his troops, impervious to fear or danger, a mountain of
strength, majesty, and inspiration. Also, the earth mother
type solid, steady and loving --- always there for her loved
ones and reliable in crisis, or the executive whose life
serves as a model for his subordinates and his vision the
direction of the organization. Centered self confident and
authoritative would be typically used by others in
describing a Positive Earth type. People tend to pick these
people to be leaders under conditions of danger or
instability. Often they will self-select to lead and if their

43

tendencies are toward the negative there is a very real

danger of failure due to inability to recognize change. The
color of the positive earth is bright flag red.
Negative Extreme Expression / Positive Extreme Expression

Obsessively sexual / Uninhibited

Repressed / Practical
Bullying (explosive temper) / Physical (sensory)
Passive aggressive / Manifesting (teaching)
WATER CHAKRA (Adaptive/ Creative)
Primary motivation at the water chakra level is emotional
reaction. Water is tied into the liver and kidneys and
especially the adrenal glands. People scoring high on the
water chakra choices also correlated with tests of outgoing,
enthusiastic, bold, self-assured, salary, open-to-people,
self-actualizing, lower self-criticism, lower oppositional,
experimenting, and more relaxed. People who are
influenced by Water are open to new ideas, options and
innovation. They respond to outside factors, fads and
fashion. Some take control and create for themselves.
There is a tendency to react on emotional levels to almost
all situations. Water is the level of intuitive, gut level
reaction. Water people tend measure themselves against
extrinsic factors. Watery people may work too hard at
being successful and often will suffer burn out and be
more susceptible to stress. Waters basic color is a bright
pumpkin orange.
Negative Water (Reactive)
(-) Water is the office schemer, out to topple those who
have bettered him, preferably in a manner where they dont
even realize what has happened. (-) Water is characterized
by the famed 47 Ronin who sacrificed all for the moment
of complete revenge. The competitive/ approval syndrome
is common with Watery people meaning the person
feels that as long as I am winning people will like me, if
Im not; they wont. Ego and self esteem are tied to
appearance and social status. Change is embraced as

44

long as it is perceived to be ones advantage. Action tends

to be defensive rather than constructive. Learning new
skills is difficult because new ideas may cause one to
challenge ideas that resulted in previous success. This is a
very common form of neurosis in America. The color
negative is brown.
Positive Water (Innovative)
(+) Water is the James Bond character who always turns
disaster into victory. He or she uses all at hand; enjoys
using mental, physical, and emotional natures to meet
challenges. They appear mysterious, seductive, and
powerful, as opposed to strong. They are good listeners
and responsive to others usually out-going and build up
strong records of accomplishment as they are focused on
getting the job done. They tend to be sensual and artistic.
These people are good leaders in periods of change they
also can work well alone or with others but they do like an
audience. They like people, gossip, and politics. The color
of positive water is orange.
Extreme Negative Expression / Extreme Positive Expression

Superficial / Expansive
Selfishly Proud / Sensual
Manipulative / Optimistic
Mistrustful / Ambitious
FIRE CHAKRA (Intensity/ Esteem)
Fire measures intensity of assertiveness. The fire chakra is
located at the solar plexus and is a nexus of stomach,
spleen, and pancreas. In Western mystical traditions this
chakra is considered the seat of the intellect and the Holy
Cross. Fire dominant people are concerned with the
attainment of excellence. They are warm, dynamic and
expansive, using their reasoning powers to control the
environment. It is not aggressiveness in the hostile sense
of needing to dominate, but more of using ones will power
to succeed and enjoy that success. They are emotionally
stable and relaxed physically, resulting in harmony of mind

45

and body. There is little concern for status or control as

they are trusting of others. They see themselves as truthtellers and tend to be strongly forthright in their speech
which others may perceive as blunt or tactless, particularly
if one receiving end of description. Fire also correlated with
higher levels of salary and lower needs for power and
lowest levels of stress related medical symptoms.
Negative Fire (Dominance)
(-) Fire is the aggressive, intense controlling person who is
always on and eventually burns out way ahead of their
time. Often the (-) fire person is hard to get to know as they
feel distance, whether social, physical or skill level, is
safety. They are driven to win because they fear failure.
The color of negative fire is beige. It corresponds with Type
A behavior.
Positive Fire (Exuberant)
(+) Fire is the charismatic leader who attracts followers
naturally by succeeding at whatever he or she does. (+)
Fire people are the dynamic ones who enjoy the process of
achieving. Their enthusiasm adds to the excitement of all
with whom they interact. Positive Fire is sometimes
referred to as star quality. The color of positive fire is
yellow.
Extreme Negative Expression / Extreme Positive Expression

Egotistical Intense/ Self- aware

Cynicism/ Hostility Eloquent/ Expressive
Paranoia Precise/ Planner
Divisive / Empirical
WIND CHAKRA (Developmental/ Love)
Wind reflects the potential to develop others, wisdom,
humor, and love. Oddly enough this chakras physical
location is the heart and thymus. When our personality is
under the influence of the Wind manifestation, we
experience compassion, acceptance, and conscious
consideration of our interactions with other individuals.

46

Wind can be defined as the orientation toward instruction,

repair, or control of another person without irreparable
damage. Benevolence toward others is primarily
characteristic of the Wind. The Wind is the hardest
personality configuration to learn and usually develops
only with age and experience. It is with the description of
the wind that the Taoist hierarchy discriminates between
love needs as an emotional reaction (Water) shaped by
external factors and love needs which are intrinsically
fashioned by experience and the desire to be generative
as well as grow.
Negative Wind (Idealist)
(-) Wind is the ivory tower dreamer who over
intellectualizes, makes moral mountains out of mole hills,
and always defends others space no matter what the
cost. They tend to be out of touch with street level daily
life--- suckers for every theory or program which promises
to smooth out or perfect the jumbled chaos of life and
society. They tend to believe others need help and cannot
solve their own problems. Although their strategies are
designed to help people their need to feel superior to the
helpee often creates dependence rather than
independence. The color of negative wind is olive drab
which also is associated with lying to protect ones concept
of ideal self.
Positive Wind (Model)
(+) Wind is an Albert Schweitzer or Mother Theresa
type, selflessly giving to bring comfort and assistance to
others. Wind people believe in doing their part to make the
world a better place. Jefferson, Franklin, and Lincoln
exemplify historical figures in the United States of
irreligious Wind types. Medical professionals and those
who elect to go into helping professions such as social
work, clinical and developmental psychology, personnel
and training are representative of this attitude. The color of
positive Wind is light foliage green.

47

Extreme Negative Expression/ Extreme Positive Expression

Fanatic / Ideologue Generous

Depleted / Nurturing
Possessive / Compassionate
Insecure thus authority seeking / Open-hearted
VOID CHAKRA (Self-actualizing)
This measure is derived from the interaction of three
chakra in the head and three outside the body that may not
manifest in most people. The three in the head are the
throat which connects larynx and the reptile brain (There
must be a Garden story in that); the third eye or Ajna which
is in the forehead and forebrain associated with
clairvoyance, and the lotus which is associated with
spiritual development. In Maslows words, What a man
can be, he must be. Void people are more independent,
creative, constructive and unrestrained. They prize free
speech, intellectual freedom, the right to self-defense, and
a desire for justice, honesty and orderliness though
recognizing such states are contrived. They describe their
lives as committed, self-fulfilled and meaningful.
Negative Void (Guru Syndrome)
Smug and self-satisfied, one seeks converts to serve as
buffers to ones ego. Often hedonistic in a non-responsible
manner and spaced-out due to lack of discipline. They
tend to be past or future oriented with problems dealing in
the here and now. Thinks of him or herself as creative but
seldom produce anything but self-serving propaganda. We
have all seen the type, particularly popular as a life style in
the late sixties. Phosphenes and energy tends to gray, but
not the smoky grayish purple seen around Bon Po
practitioners. The Tibetans have techniques I cant
imagine. During a Chod initiation of my friend Christina, her
Lamas aura surrounded him in a sparking yellow cloud
shaped like Ganesha. Study on that.

48

Positive Void (Fully Functioning)

Able to draw upon themselves fully as they understand
both their strengths and weaknesses and have the selfconfidence to strategize using both. The Void can be
described as the motivation to reach the heights of ones
personal abilities and talents. Seen by others as having
good intentions, trustworthy and expert at what they do.
More likely to experience what Abraham Maslow describes
as peak experiences, and exist on a higher intellectual
plane than most people. The color of positive Void is light
blue to purple and with experience washes out into white.
Extreme Negative Expression / Extreme Positive Expression

Dogmatic / Committed
Day dreamy / Creative
Undisciplined Sense of wonder / mystical
Instinctual
The above modernized Mikkyo description of personality
and motivation is an extremely useful and realistic tool for
describing archetypal behavior as discussed by Carl Jung.
It is similar to Maslows hierarchy and also has universal
value. Readers familiar with Taoist, Sufi, yoga, Kaballah,
and the Manichean Heresies will recognize the
crosscultural roots of the description and make the jump to
subtle measures of biological differences induced by subtle
but similar mental states across cultures. These items and
concepts in a longer version have been used in selection
tests and as a descriptive inventory on approximately four
thousand executives in the 80s and hundreds of college
students in the 90s. The norm is a thirty five year old
midlevel manager, college graduate, married with children,
pulling down about seventy thousand a year. In other
words, successful and on their way up the ladder, not the
usual insane people from Minnesota or Sufi dervishes. I
even went out of my way to get some academic high
performers, military heroes, female business owners and
models, as well as track and football stars. I throw this in
as you might want to know to whom you are being

49

compared. Comparing to a higher standard is a standard

rhetorical ploy to move the audience through higher
expectations. A leader has high expectations but not
beyond the nature of the beast. Silk ears and sow
purses.Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Mystics since the
beginning of time as well as clever people have developed
the means to discipline the mind and stimulate states of
well being. These states relate to the release of
endorphins (Serotonin and pain killers) and result in
euphoria. Recent research indicates these internally
produced natural substances are more potent than
synthetic opiates and are by-products of the states when
physical and mental well-being predominate in people who
have a positive regard for themselves and others. In other
words at the most basic and fundamental level of our
existence thinking positively is not only good for us, but
correlates to social success to the extent that the long term
choices of evolutionary and/or biological development can
be shown. We are not blank slates and when we choose to
ignore the marvelous strengths endowed by our biological
nature we literally toss aside the capability for success and
damn our selves to the role of sheepish followers. I expect
the reader to be somewhat familiar with the ideas of
Charles Darwin to realize that natural selection is about
survival of the species and sexual selection is about
reproduction of individuals and that they do not always
coincide. Sexual selection is often shaped by culture and is
seldom driven by biology alone. In fact the ideas that
chemistry, biology, or genes alone drive a complex animal
like a human is rather self- abnegating if not just silly.
Effect yes, trap occasionally, but rule? Only through
ignorance. In Chapter Four well play with some of the
interesting effects of gender, sex, and culture. Genetic
studies and the breakdown of DNA studies are beginning
to indicate that cellular differences can wax quantum large
given enough time to become valuable as social indicators
linked to survival.

50

Bibliography:
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
Steven Pinker. Viking. 2002
The Touch of Healing: Energizing Body, Mind, and Spirit
with the Art of Jin Shin Jyutsu.
Alice Burmeister with Tom Monte. Bantam Books, 1997.
Kukai: Major Works. Trans Yoshito S. Hakeda . Columbia
University Press, NY 1972
The Psychology of the Body. Elliot Greene and Barbara
Goodrich-Dunn. Lippincott,
Williams & Wilkins, 2004
Shadow Strategies of an American Ninja Master. Glenn J.
Morris, Frog, Ltd. 1996
New Chakra Healing: The Revolutionary 32-Center Energy
System. Llewellyn
Publications, 1999.
Molecules of Emotion. Candace Pert. Simon &
Schuster,1999.
The Second Brain. Michael Gershon, Perennial, 1999.
LAPSI and MAPS, self description inventories prop. Glenn
Morris
The School of History: Athens in the Age of Socrates. Mark
Munn. University of
California Press, 2000
Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman
Worlds. Daniel Ogden. Oxford
University Press, 2002.

51

Chapter Three: Cults, Religion, Social

Control, Brainwashing, and
Spirituality
The god of the cannibals is a cannibal. Emerson
Spirituality is intensely personal; religion is
institutional. Hamer
He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker
forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame
them. Reston on Nixon
Religion is an illusion, and it derives its strength from
its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful
impulses. Freud
When you hold your spine erect, meditate, or pray the
bodys electrical system more efficiently sends energy to
the brain. If the neck has been damaged it creates blocks
which become sources of friction for this flow and it feels
warm. Aristotle thought that this hotter air lifted the head
and made us stand erect as warm air rises. He was the
first word on many things but seldom the last. At the base
of the brain we have the hippocampus which processes or
prepares emotions and memories to be stored in the larger
brain above (reptile/fish brain again). We dont know how it
works but if it is injured odd things happen to our memory
and dreaming. People who meditate a lot report visions
and much more vivid dreams. Identical twin studies
indicate strongly that there is a genetic component to
religiosity but the expression such as attending rituals and
service is much more cultural or environmentally
influenced. There is a big difference between being
religious and being spiritual. Lets take a test and see
where your tendencies lie. Below are sixteen statements.
Assign points to the statements in terms of how well they
describe you.
5 = Thats me, and that is the way it is.
3 = Ive experienced this and will verify it can happen.
2 = Kinda makes sense to me but not for me.
0 = No way, Jose.

52

1.____I often feel connected to others, people and

animals, like I really
understand them.
2.____I believe in miracles.
3.____I sometimes get sudden insights just before
sleeping or awakening and
during meditation or prayer.
4.____I pay close attention to Scriptures so not to stray
from Gods HolyWord.
5.____I have had moments of awe when I seemed to
merge with everything and
perceived to be part of a flow of energy.
6.____I believe religion is necessary to superior
intelligence and for better people.
7.____I have come to recognize that my feelings are just
as important a source of
information as reason and logic.
8.____I believe that it is Gods will that everyone accepts
the laws and beliefs that
make for a better and safer society.
9.____My own experience tells me that one can
experience ESP phenomena.
10.___I feel that there is a higher power far above and
beyond us.
11.___It often seems to me Im living in a different world
from other people
because they seem to be asleep or just miss so much.
12.___I believe God has passed on to us laws that we are
to discover, learn, and
practice.
13.___I often feel uncontrollable rushes of orgiastic energy
moving through my
body that appears as light behind my eyes.
14.___I take great pleasure in associating with the other
members of my faith and
feel sorry that there are people who never get to sense this
great fellowship.
15.___I have lost my sense of time when concentrating on
a task or thinking.

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16.___There are many things in life that cannot be

explained by science.
Items 1 through 15, the odd numbers reflect statements
and reports by spiritual people who are not very fond of
religion. Call them independent spiritual people. When you
add up the score from the odd numbers you are measuring
your spiritual tendency from a secular non-religious
viewpoint. A score of 35 to 40 indicates you are a long way
down the road to being a mystic and are highly spiritual, 8
to 16 indicates not much interest or awareness of the
spiritual nature, and 17 to 34 is just like most of us,
somewhere in between. Items 2 through 16, the even
numbers reflect statements and attitudes held by true
believers who are immersed in their religion. Call them true
believers or religious dependent people and the higher
your score when you add up the even numbers indicate
your closeness or agreement with them. A score of 30 to
40 indicates you have deep religious convictions that you
could easily share with others. Scores of eight to sixteen
indicate a wishy washy attitude toward religion with 17 to
30 representing an average vocation attraction. 0 to 7 in
both means you just dont have that religious gene or
interest in traditional religion or individual spirituality.
Most people dont put religion and brainwashing together,
but they should because they do. Just like those three
brains at the top of your spine. If youve studied your
cultural anthropology or sociology you may have noticed
that most religions simply reflect the unspoken social
structures of their founders times. Some people take
religion very seriously and others regard rendering what is
usually a personal experience of rare individuals as a rarie
show or service to the masses as an odd but popular
exercise in futility. Be that as it may, it must be recognized
that true believers regardless of conviction have been and
are responsible for a great deal of divisiveness and sorrow.
Some of the most recent research indicates that the
intuitional survival mechanisms developed to protect
intelligence are being interpreted as acts of God. The

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genetic difference between true believers and the rest of

us at least indicates God has a liking for diversity all the
way down to our chemical makeup. If this is true it is
important to understand that some people do not adapt to
change very well and through un-natural selection (Marry
your own kind.) may have reinforced traits that only
become apparent under stress of forced
cultural/environmental change. Those of us that remember
the French attempts to stamp out the terrorists in Algeria or
are aware of the thumb choppers in South America realize
that often good ideas result in revenge effects or
unintended consequences of social change. Killing all the
known Algerian terrorists resulted in greater polarization of
the population and France had to recognize and release
Algeria. I believe they were also recovering from their ass-whipping in Vietnam and felt the need to wax imperial to
feel proud again. Attempting to kill off the opposition cost
them a whole country, again. I wont draw an analogy with
the recent US adventures in the Middle East. Bankers in
South America thought to discourage thieves by installing
ATMs that required thumbprints. Need I go on? You can
probably think of one or two yourself along the lines of we
are living longer so the diseases of old age are much more
apparent. We have developed better antibiotics so the
surviving biogens are evolving in very unexpected
directions. I wont go into all the differences between cults
and congregations, but aside from aspersions thrown it is
mostly numbers. If the group is small and relies on
charismatic leadership it is definitely a cult. The more
followers the less likely to be called a cult, but even the
largest churches and denominations started as cults.
Christianity is a very successful cult. It started with thirteen
guys in the Middle East who were tired of the formalities of
Judaism, which grew out of one family and its allies in the
same locale. The Roman Catholic Church really became a
power in the eleventh century is very medieval in its
structure and is very close to the Roman Legions.
Methodists following John Wesley out of the gin soaked
London rookeries of the eighteenth century tend to

55

espouse the educational values of the industrial revolution

while Baptists are more agrarian and home schooled.
Christianity didnt start out successful. It went through a
long period of barely tolerated, after a couple hundred
years of frequently persecuted. It would still be a minor
religion if it werent for Cicero, St. Augustine, and the
Roman Emperor Constantine who needed a lot of help to
hold on to the remnants of the empire. It was a long time
ago. Long before Cambridge was a great university town.
Long before the two towers were blown by bin Laden, or
Kennedy was shot, or the closet pansy Hitler shot himself
and poisoned his wife after inciting half the world to destroy
his country. What do you remember about those events?
How do they shape your own mythology? How accurate is
your memory? It is understandable if you are starting to
fade around Hitler and Prince Jack of Camelot, but the
religious connection of Osama to Wahabi Islam, Saudi
Arabia, the Taliban, and Afghanistan should be fresh
enough that you recognize that some people take their
religious affiliations seriously enough to kill other people.
Religion is very serious business to some of us and
laughable mythology to others. Others rewrite the history
into his or her story for reasons hard to dissemble as time
flies by. One of the threads in this exposure that most
people miss is that the key religious players today come
from an Arabic world that also produced wonderful fables
like The 1001 Nights (as well as algebra) and preserved
the Greek rhetorics when Rome fell. They used to tell the
French that pepper grew on trees protected by giant
ferocious rocs and kept the price of pepper about the same
as gold in Medieval times. They knew and know how to tell
a story and preserve a market advantage. St. Augustine of
Hippo was a dark complected speech teacher from North
Africa when it was an outpost of Rome, and the former
Carthage, in what is Nigeria today. He was a great admirer
and scholar of Cicero and a convert to Christianity. He is
usually portrayed as a Roman but in Nigeria his portraits
are rather brown. I dont know if skin color still effects
credibility, but in the past it certainly was a factor in social

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success rather like our long boned, blue-eyed, brown

haired Caucasian Jesus, what we call visual rhetoric in the
TV age. Augustines greatest contribution to Christianity
was some books on how to preach, or sell the greatest
story ever told which were heavily derivative or plagiarized
from Cicero. Back in those days, since everything was
copied, people didnt notice and most people couldnt read
anyway. Only the preachers had a clue and it was to their
advantage to tell the story in the most effective way to win
converts. The Church appreciated Augustines contribution
to conversion rates and made him a saint. We get four
different versions of Yeshwa (Jesus) ben Nazreths life in
the New Testament but the Book of Matthew is often
quoted as being most credible, as each story is wildly
different, but all establish that the man was a living god in
the mythic tale telling traditions of the far and middle East.
Divine birth was quite common as an ancient story telling
device to indicate the importance of the hero to the rapt
audience. Helen of Troy was divine as well as the Roman
Emperors after conquering the infectious Egyptians.
Alexander seemed to think of himself as a living god,
though his Companions werent so sure. Virgin birth
differentiates Jesus from the special births of the Old
Testament. Signs in the sky, royal blood, life threatening
situation, clever escape, angelic heralds, were common to
Roman and Greek godlings, too. Mithras slew the black
bull of ignorance, was killed in the process and three days
later arose from the dead. Two thousand years ago
Mithras was the favorite god of the Roman legions.
Hercules killed his snakes in the cradle. How you tell the
story and prepare for your audience is a very Ciceronian
device/advice from Augustine. I remember my father
tracing Jesuss bloodline back to David not realizing the
ancient Hebrew were nomadic thus matrilineal. Even today
if you want to move to Israel you are considered Jewish if
your mother is Jewish. Remember to marry a nice Jewish
girl if you want the Holy Land mobility for your children.
Nowadays a new version of the Bible comes out in the
vernacular every ten or twenty years but in the old days

57

when it was hard to split the church from the government, it

was a very big deal. The King James Version which is the
standard for many Christian Fundamentalists was the
product of a long series of rewrites and the man most
responsible for its language, the poet and rhetorician
Tindal, was strangled and burnt at the stake for heresy
shortly after its publication. Interestingly enough we now
have a couple of Bibles found by archaeologists back in
the early half of the last century which are very different in
tone than the heavily edited over the centuries modern
versions. In the Nag Hamadi Bible, James, Jesus brother,
refers to Pauline Christians as followers of the big lie.
(What are the implications of that statement?), Mary
Magdalene has her own gospel, and according to the
Gospel of Thomas, or maybe it was Phillip gossiping about
the boss, Peter was jealous of her closer relationship with
Jesus. (I wonder why that Gospel disappeared, after all
Thomas was the doubter so his descriptions would have
been more skeptical or accurate?) Some historians call
these the Dead Sea Scrolls or Gnostic Bibles hoping to
separate them from their source by philosophy as well as
distance. It is hard to remember all these people were
Jews not Christians. As much as Id like it to be true,
Browns The DaVinci Code is worm holed with
inaccuracies but the whole concept of a feminine male or
homoerotic league of protector priests keeping a secret like
Christs progeny together for 2000 years against the
church (while keeping their symbols out front for recruiting)
is a major rewrite of history. Its a great piece of rhetoric in
its own right and a fun read. It will be fu to see what he
does with the Freemasons. History is written by the
winners and sometimes the stories vary widely when told
by the losers. Practically any event that happened longer
than fifty years ago begins to develop spin, and the spin on
a thousand or more years can be of tornado force. This is
further complicated by the age of the listener and who tells
the story. We love best what we hear from Mommy.
We tend to believe what we hear first. Credibility studies
indicate that we also tend to believe people we admire or

58

like, particularly when we are young. Bishop Wickey once

said, Give me a child until he is seven and Ill show you a
Roman Catholic forever. What we learn at our mothers
knee is incredibly hard to dislodge even when there is little
social reinforcement. How many of us can remember our
struggles with giving up Santa Claus, particularly when
those presents were involved. Some educators attribute
the hell and damnation New England preacher Jonathan
Edwards with developing religious conversion techniques
in 1735 at Northampton, Massachusetts. His ability to
frighten people into the church was copied by Charles
Finney of New York and the mass religious conversion
industry was born. Swapping the fear of hell for the joy of
heaven through becoming a member of the body of Christ,
however, was part of the sermonizing techniques
developed by Augustine from Ciceros writings for the early
Christian preachers nearly fifteen hundred years earlier.
What did you learn at your mothers knee before the inner
skeptic developed? The tricks of reasoning and faulty logic
of Augustines emotional appeals falter in todays forays
into media exploitation of the mass audience. Todays cult
leader has a vaster array of tools than the vitriolic tongues
of Edwards and Finney. Pavlov of the dog salivating fame
had his work on behavioral psychology warped into
brainwashing by Lenins interest and desire to apply the
potential of his work to government ends in Mother Russia.
Dick Sutphen, an American musician and hypnotherapist
specializing in subliminal effects in his 1984 speech cited
in the bibliography states, In the entire history of man, no
one has been brainwashed and realized or believed that
he or she had been brainwashed. Those who have been
brainwashed will usually passionately defend their
manipulators claiming they had simply been shown the
light or transformed in miraculous ways. One of the fun
things about taking a behavioral psych course is training a
pigeon to do some task. When the semester is over the
trained pigeons are prepared for the next crop of students
by being dipped into a bucket of ice water for a couple of
seconds which has the effect of wiping out their memory of

59

the training. The dip shocks the pigeons little brain just like
electroshock treatment or an overdose of insulin or LSD
can wash the memory out of ours. Pavlov, the Russian
dog-drool psychologist, developed his animal model into
three stages of what he called transmarginal inhibition
where brain responses and emotions could be converted
through impairing judgment and increasing suggestibility.
What the Greeks and Romans accomplished through
reason and rhetoric could now be accomplished through
physiological and psychological techniques with minimal
cooperation from the subjects. Some of the techniques are
so familiar we just take them for granted already entangled
in the web. Others are more sinister and some appear
sinister, like meditation, but are actually benign when selfcontrolled. The Quakers and Shakers believed in
developing goodness through self-examination. The
Quakers did not allow music or preaching, only witness,
and the less of that the better in their worship because
they found people were influenced by it. Any repetitive
beat ranging from 45 to 80 beats per minute or close to the
human heart is conducive to hypnotism as it can generate
an eye open alpha state of consciousness where one is
much more suggestible. You can probably remember
Bringing In The Sheaves, while marching onward to that
Christian state of amazing grace. And if you cant
remember, thats a characteristic of trance state. It is just
the beat that is important. Raves or trance dance music
have the same effect. Hitlers Juden Volk movement had
the-SS troopers- to-be march and sing together to build a
sense of Aryan community. (Himmler tried to make the
Reich into a religious movement based on Nordic
mythology but the archaeology didnt match up with his
delusions. He had to settle for training blondes to
murder Jews, which wasnt that difficult given the antiSemitism prevalent in Europe at that time.) Preachers and
hypnotists train to speak in what is called a voice roll, using
the same beat but emphasizing key words for greatest
effect. In the military this is called the voice of command.
Today we have the technology to hide the process of

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altering mental states in the sound system and the lighting

to help the congregation into that suggestible state of
alpha that is also associated with feeling good and
creativity. The appropriate beat or sound/vibration and
dimmer lighting are of primary importance in inducing an
altered state where the average human is about twenty
five times more suggestible. A company in Los Angeles
designs sound and lighting technology specifically for
churches. Technicians who install these sound and lighting
systems claim the congregation and monetary income of
the church will double if the minister follows their
suggestions. (Time to pass the plate and thank you,
Brother! Relatively harmless? Just good salesmen setting
up the marks?) Well it does stretch the envelope where
ethical communication resides but this is nothing in
comparison to some human development groups like EST,
or big rich congregation/cults like the almost Christian
Korean Moonies, who have a major toe hold on the
Republican Right. How do they work the Pavlov? It usually
takes about a week to break someone down so you have
to separate them from their usual herd and increase their
tension which alters their body chemistry. Separation is
relatively easy, a meeting hall, farm house, church camp,
any place free from interruption by the outside world. There
is often a talk about finding ones purpose and living up to
ones word. EST trainers were famous for increasing
tension by locking up the bathrooms. The tension can be
raised higher by having people, not smoke, drink, or eat
except at breaks and the breaks are short. They are given
tasks that cause some mental and physical fatigue, but no
time for reflection. Tension is built by bringing participants
to the stage where they are humiliated to increase their
fear as public speaking is the most common fear,
sometimes these humiliates are shills. Vicious language is
used to upset the sensitive. When tension becomes high
enough the convert slips into alpha as the body releases
endorphins to protect it from damage as the bodys
flight/fight mechanisms are in a part of the brain that is as
old as dirt and cant tell the difference between

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physiological and psychological attack without special

training. (Read chapters two and six.) This form of induced
alpha makes the subject from 25 to 200 times more
suggestible which is a lot of suggestion. You know you
have them when their eyes dilate and they get that feel
good sappy smile. (Bully for the limbic/semiotic nervous
system.) New jargon is often introduced here to create a
difference in mental alignment as well as creating a feeling
of special knowledge and community for the new convert.
People make agreements to go find new converts before
leaving. Celebration and then go get your buds. Sell it by
Zealot. Get em while theyre hot. Being aware of how
conversion techniques take advantage of the targets once
again pushes the ethical communication envelope, but to
be quite frank this is usually addressed around politics and
advertising, not religion. We have freedom there in
America or used to, but giving a fool a rope doesnt
necessitate self lynching. Attending a religious or EST
meeting armed with this knowledge of how tension over
twenty minutes or so results in a suggestive state (Time to
run, kiddies.) or what Sutphen calls a brain phase will not
lesson the effect. In fact anger, and you should be,
increases tension and almost assures a conversion state.
You may wake feeling all squeaky clean reborn with an
empty wallet. Special training in detachment helps. Those
of us who enjoyed Basic Training in the military or were
raised in evangelical religious traditions can associate with
the process made more real. Be alert to changes in diet to
reduce alertness. There are many ways to reduce
alertness and a big influx of sugar is one of them. The
brownies dont have to be doped. A glass of Kool Aid has
enough sugar in it to stun a horse. When I took my children
with Linda off sugar they went from very distractible
mediocre students to A students in a month. Spiritual
Diets are a major tip off that you are being groomed for
cannon fodder or at least worker bee status. Without the
grounding of grains, nuts, seeds, dairy products, fish, and
even red meat (buffalo is great) people tend to get
spacey or air headed

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losing attention to detail, particularly when combined with

long hours of intense physical activity. My friend Esly
Caldwell went to the wrong guru in India and his
introduction to their brand of karma yoga almost turned him
into a quasi-Mennonite veggy farmer and cave dweller to
be allowed proximity to the god on earth. He was a
sincere fellow and they set the hook with followers
swooning when the guru approached, and other easily
staged opportunities for the guru to strut his stuff. Rather
like a Christian preacher smacking people on their
forehead to stop brain function in the hope that the somatic
shock will erase psychosomatic symptoms. Nobody had
ever told Esly about the dark side of religious manipulation.
He was and is a nice guy. It took a day or two of playing
with his friends to break the hold. He isnt stupid. Not every
one who owns an ashram or temple has your best interest
in mind. Back to the brain and conversion techniques.
Once you have that monkey mind slowed down, confuse
the suckers with bunches of new information, lectures,
encounter groups, and diary writing. This is called
decognition or programming confusion. If you keep them
busy enough reality and illusion can merge and rather odd
logics become more acceptable which allows you to
introduce Pavlovs phase three where the dewy fresh
converts learn to pray or meditate in ways that allow the
mind to go flat or stop thought so you can put in what the
convert should think about. Thirty years ago I thought the
concepts around Bandlers NLP were pretty simple
minded. Well I was wrong. It is more than a tool to seduce
the stupid stolen from the great hypnotist Milton Erickson.
You can start your very valuable education in his sales
techniques with the Richard Bandler book in the
bibliography. Twenty years ago, 1984, researchers noted
that watching TV put the watcher into a more suggestible
state, doubled right brain activity, and in childrens brains
alpha waves dominated after thirty seconds. Alpha waves
usually dominate when you are asleep or your eyes are
closed. Hmmmm? Alpha waves are associated with both
creativity and suggestibility. Commercials or suggestions

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are more likely to be accepted by the no longer alert.

Studies at Purdue found that 90 percent of the audience
missed over 25 percent of questions about a show within
minutes of having seen it, suggesting they were slipping in
out of a hypnotic state. Its a given that there is a lot of
easily forgettable TV fare and the attention span of the
average TV viewer is twenty seconds now. Forty years
ago, when I was an instructor in the Army, I was told the
average attention span was about fifteen minutes. When
you consider subliminal visuals, subliminal messages in
the music, sustained musical beats at trance inducing
paces, spaced picture flicker rates, television and the
internet become interesting tools for conversion. Faster
beat creates greater excitement. Why do you think so
many products now advertise with a rock musical
background? There are a lot of powerful people out there
who have plans for you and there are no laws against any
of these techniques. Pay attention.When I worked for
General Motors in the 80s and 90s I tried to convince some
executives that their advertising needed better targeting,
particularly the Cadillac Style campaign. I worked for the
Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadillac platforms engine division. The
response to my complaint was the typical buyer was sixty
five and the car was a reward for a life well spent. I thought
they should target people about twenty-five years younger
and sell that reward three or four times. The ads now look
a lot like I wanted then. I guess some folks had to retire.
Anyway, back to conversion. Im not saying that some
people dont go on this conversion trip willingly. Eric Hoffer
who wrote The True Believer research on mass
movements before the global village, indicated about thirty
percent of the population are joiners and followers. They
want to give up their personal power and have someone
else do their thinking for them. Hoffer indicated true
believers are not intent on selfadvancement but crave
renunciation of the self and were eternally incomplete and
insecure. They are groupies. They dont have much of that
American independent thing going. They want a rule book
and someone to tell them how to live. I think the numbers

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these days are closer to fifty percent from simple

observation of the Presidential election. At their worst
these are very dangerous people looking for a holy cause
to die for. Hitlers Brown Shirts were true believers. The
Moral Majority identify as true believers. Wahabi Islams
baby bombers are obviously true believers and caught
young. All cults are composed of true believers that follow
a charismatic leader. True believers can be found in
politics, churches, businesses, and social causes. They
are good haters and keep a sharp eye out for the people
who dont share their passion so they can round you up
and get you headed in the right direction, or a lot worse. At
their best they are just Fred and Mary who live down the
street, keep to themselves, tithe regularly, and hope to get
on the school board so they can put an end to teaching
meditation, Values, or evil-lution. Meditation without
special belly breathing and keeping your tongue up can
result in a permanent state of alpha that is rather nice if
you avoid the suggestible effect. Being mellow is one
thing, being everybodys favorite gull is another. Being in a
permanent state of alpha aint samadhi but it is nice, and
you can only get it if you spend a lot of hours in pretty deep
meditation way beyond what most westerners and people
from Asia are willing to try. It is pretty rare that a guru
actually does the work if we use Osho (or the Rajneesh) as
a typical example. Real enlightenment has more to do with
chi kung than simple sitting, spinal twisting, or dancing.
Andrew Newberg, M.D. is a student/friend of Eugene
DAquili whom I mention in Shadow Strategies with some
regard. Dr. Newberg is studying the effect of prayer and
meditation on brainwaves and blood movement in the
brain. He is well regarded as a neurotheologian and posits
that the human urge toward religion is biological. Thus
Freud was wrong to prophesize that as people become
more educated, and thus more aware, religion would be
replaced by science. Like most prophets outside of
Nostradamus, and the futurists of the Holy Books, Freuds
prophecy would seem to be wide of the mark. People like
to interpret biological states as GOD. The kundalini

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becomes Mosess burning bush and the flaming cross logo

of Methodism. Newbergs description of limitless input of
sensation when you cut out the newer areas in the brain fit
with intuition as a feeling mechanism for water bound
creatures to me. See Chapter two. Religion lodged in the
reptile/snake brain with breathing. Interesting? Real
religious experience, visions of light, flights of ecstasy, etc.
can be experienced by modern people. Prayer is very
similar to meditation. Regardless of the nature of the actual
practice, prayer has long been an unambiguous feature of
every living religion. In Islam, prayer is the foremost act of
adoration and the salat is offered five times a day while
facing Mecca. The Hindus use daily liturgical prayers
spelled out in the Vedas. In Buddhism monastic prayers
are practiced morning, noon, evening, and midnight.
Tantric explorers are producing a literature to rival the
patriarchs of old. Shirley Maclaine, the actress writes of her
journeys into mysticism with a wide eyed freshness that is
compelling. Her pilgrimage at seventy of the Camino Real
is an interesting adventure that many younger people
would falter. Da Free John like the Rajneesh has provided
us all with the spectacle of how delusional the guru can
become when encouraged by the worship of his flock.
Rajneesh who reinvented himself as Osho after his fall into
paranoia was a skilled plagiarist and much of his written
work is useful. Margo Anand, whose stuff I like a lot,
though highly influenced by Osho, is a woman who must
be paid attention to as she is very sharp and richly
confident in her experience. As in ancient times both the
wise and the crazy can be touched by God and it is still
terribly rude and arrogant to impose your truth on someone
else and reject their experience as not good enough.
Golden rule? Love? By now you have probably noticed
that people die. It is a cross-cultural given that everybody
at some point in life will give it up and die. Death of the
body is more common than dirt and used to contribute to
dirt until the Egyptians taught the Jews that the physical
body should be preserved creating one hell of an industry
for priests and undertakers for the spiritually insecure. A lot

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of religious activity centers around death and dying

because most people are afraid to die. Fear of death is a
great way to shape how people live. We fear death once
we notice it, because of a feeling that we are immortal (sly
old reptile spinal brain and lotus chakra). Famous
humanistic psychologists Carl Jung, William James, and
Carl Rogers all had experiences that led them to conclude
that spirit might outlast matter. Rogers noted in
his old age that he was too busy to think much about
death. Jungs concept of individuation or the process of
self-realization allows us to deepen our consciousness to
include aspects of the subconscious that do indeed seem
to be immortal. Even those who see death as the end of
material and psychic existence, see the value of
individuation as a living process worth pursuing.
Individuation as a concept seems to render death as a
doorway into the spirit world, void, egregore, or superconsciousness where the next order of existence is
determined to some extent by the level of development
achieved on this side of life. This concept is not so different
as expressed in the esoteric expression of most of the
great religions and myths of the world. Thus in death the
meaning of life is finally revealed. This is not a long leap of
faith from Masturbate and you will go to hell! or Tell the
truth and you will go to Heaven. People who have these
beliefs do not consider them irrational or neurotic. Freud
disagreed. Just because Freud totally blew it around penis
envy doesnt mean he was wrong about everything he
wrote. He was a pioneer. Pioneers are bound to make
mistakes. William James thought of death mythologies as
a basic right and opined they made life more worth living,
perhaps the only defense against the urge to suicide. My
personal experience described in Shadow Strategies and
Path Notes side with Carl Rogers in deciding to consider it
possible that each of us has a spiritual essence lasting
over time, and occasionally incarnated in a human body.
Hatsumi-san said in the forward to Path Notes that his
interactions with me led him to the same conclusion about

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death. I describe sharing energy with him in Path Notes.

You can conjecture as to whom benefited the most from
the exchange. I suspect our ability to soul merge was as as
big a surprise to him as to me. Budo shaktipat.
Granville Hall was a pioneer in experimental psychology
with a sense of humor similar to Voltaire. He argued that if
people really believed in life after death, clergymen would
lead mass expeditions of pilgrims eager to cross to and
conquer on the other side. We should hasten to go young
and in our prime to make the best of the new opening,
rather like the Aztec basketball players who won to be
sacrificed by the priests. Our reaction to Jonestown
strongly indicates most people share Halls view that a
belief in life beyond the grave is a comfortable convention
to help us deal with our fear of death. Even those surest
of Heaven often cling to miserable existences attached to
life preserving machinery in the back wing of old age
homes and hospitals known as the Veggie Ward. Think
they are safe there? See Kill Bill One or check out nurse
Charles Cullen on the internet. The concept of immortality
can act as a powerful conditioner and great conversion
tool. Fear is the factor and for most, it becomes a free form
anxiety, as it is fear of the unknown. Biological immortality
can refer to the continued existence of ones children and
their offspring; it can be extended to spiritual and social
groupings and the traditions they preserve as in a martial
or religious lineage. Material immortality is an attempt to
increase longevity that invariably fails in some laughable
manner as the flesh does not match the spirit in willing.
Since preservation of the body is the most illogical
choice concerning death, you might want to make the
choice of organ donation then cremation. Have a wake. I
loved attending NRF Maiers wake and will emulate him.
Ive known a lot of very interesting people and it would be
fun to get them all together for a party even if I cant be
there for the fun. Theological immortality is not always
literal but may be representing life changes through the
cathexis or conversion of being born again. One dies to
his or her old ways and becomes a new person with new

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behaviors. In budo one kills the ego to be renewed in

nature. Creative immortality is granted to those whose
works are of such quality that they are remembered with
their art. Healing techniques, writings, sculpture, paintings,
and inventions can lift the creator into the ranks of the
immortals. Natural immortality can be achieved through our
acceptance of our embeddedness in nature and the Great
Spirit. Transcendent immortality can be achieved through
meditation techniques that result in a blissful experience of
timelessness, a feeling of being lifted beyond the
limitations of daily life and death (Might also be a result of
reptile brain dominance!). All of these forms of immortality
are tools to symbolically defeat death and have enjoyed
greater or lesser popularity across cultures and historical
epochs. How death is presented and life after it can be
used as a powerful tool for conversion. Sex, death, and
music are powerful motivators used by many people to
shape the behavior of others for centuries. Given what you
now know about the brain phasing effect of stress
reactions leading to conversion and creation of True
Believers you may have some realizations around the
effects of war, terrorism, anxiety, and jihad. Jesus said,
Let the dead bury the dead. Religions control how most
people think about death, murder, or suicide. Judaism and
Islam regard suicide as murder. Mohammad said, Your
body has a right, thus all forms of suicide are forbidden by
Islam. The taking of life is only allowed by way of justice or
direct provocation. The baby bombers on jihad are being
manipulated. In the Buddhist tradition death is considered
inevitable. Buddhists are expected to live in ways that
ensure their mental and spiritual development so that they
are prepared for death. After all, why should the tree
mourn its leaves. The spirit or soul does not mind the
falling away of the body. Its up to you to save your soul or
spirit. No one else can do it for you and there seems to be
lots of different ways to approach truth and the concept
of salvation. The book Power vs. Force explains how
kinesiology can be used to discover truth and levels of
consciousness. An expert psychiatrist who uses this

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method told me that my martial art books scored in the six

hundreds. (Thats a much higher score than
Billy Graham. He was impressed and came to a bump and
slug seminar. The comparison might even be fair as some
people do consider budo a cult, while others regard the
kwoon or dojo a temple.) The methodology can be pretty
simple. You hold the article you want to test over your
chest and have someone push your arm down. If the arm
goes down easily the object weakens you, if not, it is safe
for you. What blew me away is it works for food, cell
phones, books, movies, and other fun things like herbs and
medicines. You should play with this too. Dont take the
authors rankings for granted, do your own. Truth can be
personal. Pay attention.
Bibliography:
The Holy Longing: The Hidden Power of Spiritual Yearning
.Connie Zweig. J.P. Tarcher,
2003.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Robert D.
Cialdini, Ph.D. Quill, 1984.
Battle for the Mind: The Psychology of Conversion and
Brain-Washing. William Sargant.
Malor Book by ISHK, 1997.
The True Believer. Eric Hoffer. Harper & Row, 1951.
CICERO: The life and times of Romes greatest politician.
Anthony Everitt. Random
House, 2001.
A History of the Arab Peoples. Albert Hourani. Belknap
Harvard, 1991.
The Nag Hammadi Library: The definitive new translation
of the Gnostic scriptures,
complete in one volume. James M. Robinson, editor.
Harper Collins, 1988.
Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human
Behavior. David R. Hawkins,
M.D., Ph.D. Hay House, 2002.
The Battle for Your Mind: Persuasion and Brainwashing
Techniques being used on the

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Public Today. Speech by Dick Sutphen in 1984.

www.dicksutphen.com/html/battlemind
Persuasion Engineering. Richard Bandler and John
LaValle. Meta Publications, 1996.
The Carl Rodgers Reader. Kirshenbaum and Henderson,
editors. Houghton Mifflin, 1989
How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of
Science. Michael Shermer. Freeman,
2000.
The Manipulated Mind: Brainwashing, Conditioning, and
Indoctrination. Malor/ISHK,
2000.
Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospect for Religion in the Age
of Evolution. John F. Haught.
Westview, 2003.
The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes.
Dean Hamer. Doubleday, 2004
On Facing Death: Views of Some Prominent
Psychologists. Dr. Giampaolo Moraglia.
Journal of Humanistic Society. Vol.44,No.3, Summer 2004.
Dzog Chen Meditation by Khamtul Rinpoche. Trans by
Gareth Sparham. Sri Satguru
Publications, 1994.
Zen and the Brain. James H. Austin, M.D. MIT Press,
1998.
Shadow Strategies of an American Ninja Master. Glenn J.
Morris, Frog, Ltd. 1996.
Shamanic Guide to Death and Dying. Kristin Madden.
Lewellyn, 1999
The Camino. ShirleyMaclaine. Pocket Books, 2000
The Magus of Strovolos: The Extraordinary World of a
Spiritual Healer. Kyriacos
Markides. Penguin Arkana, 1990.

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Chapter Four: What have Birds and

Bees to do with Getting Laid?
On an average day, about 3.3 % of the worlds
population have sex. Less than 0.4% of these acts of
copulation result in a birth. (Prospect, Oct. 2004)
He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp
postsfor support rather than illumination. Lang
All is fair in love and war. Anon
Loves first sigh dismisses Wisdoms last word.
French Proverb
In the industrialized world a lot of unhappiness is
generated around the concepts of love,
marriage, sex, and gender because people make bad
choices based on faulty information.
We marry until Death do we part! That is a vow. Vows are
very strong promises that
the parties involved are not supposed to break. Breaking a
vow is very embarrassing for
all concerned. The reality since World War II has been a
growing divorce rate. About
half of marriages end in divorce within four years with no
death, a few sheepish grins,
mutters of bad sex and no money, and if not much property
or chattel are involved no
hard feelings. In modern times where people live long lives
under a lot of pressure and
change, the old agrarian community vows take more grit
than most of us can muster. Still
there are that fifty percent that live up to the ideal. Having
been married three times and
lived with a parade of remarkable women the author does
not give marital advice. There
is, however, a bunch of useful information in this chapter
that the serial monogamist or
lover may find more useful than what my father told me the
night before I went off to the

72

Army (Keep your nose clean. Keep your mouth shut. Dont
go out with girls you havent been introduced to.). Hey! He
didnt abuse me or beat me. He was just really out of step
with the times. He helped raise six college grads into the
middle class. He was a good man and great in some ways.
Surprise Numero Uno. There are at least four biological
sexes genetically separated for homo sapiens sapiens (our
team). And that excludes hermaphrodites who the Sioux,
Hopi, and Greeks used to keep around as medicine men
because they understood both sides of the sex equation at
a gut level. Hermaphrodites or intersexuals are quite rare
in any culture. If you ever meet one cherish the
experience. When it comes to sex genetic expression can
get rather odd. What we try to identify as biological gender
differences are rather arbitrary. Biological or genetic
differences can be even stranger as sex doesnt express in
humans until we are rather old. People with Klinefelters
syndrome for instance, appear to be female with breasts
but have deformed male genitals, a high probability of
being mentally retarded, and are sterile. Turner syndrome
girls do not have internal female organs and without
hormone therapy will not experience puberty. In the
general population homosexual behavior is not rare and
never has been. Estimates range from one in a hundred to
one in ten. I suspect that the numbers go up around gay
friendly locales and occupations and down in those
bastions of masculinity and femininity like
lumberjacking, rodeo, or interior design. Stereotypes are
often based in truth so I can say Ive only met two straight
male hairdressers in my sixty years but then again I rarely
socialize with hairdressers as I shave my head. The two I
did know seemed to be having an awful lot of fun with their
easy access to erotic women. The ancient city of Thebes
had a battle group of male lovers who fought as a unit.
Alexander the Great wasnt so great after his favored
Companion and childhood buddy was killed. Queer Eye for
the Straight Guy reflects a reality that the Moral Majority

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wont get but as population increases so does

homosexuality suggesting strongly that God or
evolution doesnt regard the human vermin expanse with
the benevolence of Go forth and multiply. Study on that.
A Chiropractor friend of mine suggests that the female
hormones in the water table have a lot to do with it too, but
then he correlates carbonated drink consumption with
cancer. My experiences with homosexual men and women
in the Army, work life, theater, and horrors, the martial arts,
have led me to a position of benign support. My brothers
lover seems to be a better man than me and furthermore
as the years have gone by I like him better than my brother
who was pretty special before he fell into a bottle of vodka.
As they say in Texas, Git uzed tewit! Jimmy Swaggert is
probably safe, and given his taste in rough trade prosties
has more to fear from that which he doesnt. When his
remarks about killing gays who found him romantically
attractive were made public on national TV, what amazed
me was (1) he actually had a church congregation who
looked to him for guidance (Somewhere now in the Deep
South is an elementary school or boot camp for rather odd
Christians?) and (2), they didnt mention the last time he
was caught with his tongue out and pants down. Jimmy
has some exotic tastes that even the Roman clerics would
probably avoid. The religious economic strategy of outbreeding the other team is a bad choice both genetically
and environmentally and Gaia is beginning to notice our
cancerous behavior. If you are truly butch you arent
attractive to the queer eye anyway. Forgiveness is a
Christian virtue I struggle with as the fear of Alzheimers
makes me work on keeping my memory strong. Ursula K.
Le Guin wrote an important science fiction novel The Left
Hand of Darkness at the end of the 60s about human
interaction with Gethenians that was truly gender-bending.
Surprise Dos. As if plain old two sexes did not create
enough problems for most people, research in the 80s and
90s, and this century too, reveals there are at least eight

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kinds of lovers or socially preferred strategies for intimacy.

This is important to know
because most people egocentrically believe their type of
loving is the type of loving. When I was the token liberal
professor at conservative Hillsdale College, Types of Love
Research was cutting edge and with a little tweaking of the
original researchers self-test I was able to get some fun
data from my students over the years. The original test had
a bias against ludus that attached it to coercion that I
separated for my data. I also added a new category to the
research since moving to Louisiana and talking with
Lenora Rougeou, a local psychologist/business grad
student. This test is relatively gender free and works
across cultures. In other words, it is reliable and you can
base realistic decisions on your results. It is/was used all
over the world and there are some interesting differences
from country to country. To discover your proclivity and
thus improve your chances of developing a lasting
relationship (as like attracts like and differences create
passion) take the test below. Dont read ahead.
Just take it. Youll be glad you did. Respond to the
following statements by assigning a number representing
the degree to which you think they describe your thinking
or behavior toward those you love or hold intimate (The
higher the number the closer the hit.). You are allowed to
imagine if it has been a while.
0 = Nothing, nada, not me, never.
1 = I can almost think that someone might feel that way.
2 = Sometimes under certain conditions this statement
would be generally
accurate.
3 = This statement is about accurate, I have definitely felt
this way.
4 = Thats me.
5 = I always feel this way and cannot believe others dont
feel this way too.

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1. ___My lover looks good, and there is a chemistry

between us that is erotic.
2. ___I feel that my lover and I were meant for each other.
Its fate or karma.
3. ___My lover and I are really attracted and instantly
understand each other.
4. ___Love is a game where there are no rules but passion
and pleasure.
5. ___My lover knows what is good for the goose is good
for the gander so we are
careful about our other relationships to avoid hurting each
other.
6. ___My lover knows I have other lovers so we enjoy what
we enjoy about each
other while we are together.
7. ___I expect to always be friends with my lover.
8. ___Our love is a deep friendship, not a mysterious,
mystical emotion.
9. ___Our love relationship is satisfying because it
developed from a good
friendship.
10. ___In choosing a lover, I believe that similar
backgrounds are very important.
11. ___An important factor in choosing a lover is testing to
see what kind of a parent
they would be.
12. ___I seriously consider the effect my lover might have
on my career.
13. ___Some times I get so excited thinking about my lover
I cant sleep.
14. ___I cannot relax if I think my lover is with someone
else.
15. ___When my lover is angry or doesnt pay attention to
me, I feel sick all over.
16. ___I would rather suffer myself than let my lover suffer.
17. ___I would endure all things for the sake of my lover.
18. ___When my lover gets angry with me, I still love
him/her fully and
unconditionally.

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19. ___My lover is better off not knowing what Ive done
and do with other people.
20. ___You lose your lovers respect if he/she isnt a little
bit afraid of you.
21. ___If my lover starts talking about commitment, I force
a topic change.
22.___Im really afraid to die alone with no one to care for
me.
23.___I want my lover close and to share every meaningful
experience
24.___I am willing to give up a lot to be close to my lover
Add up each little bloc of three. Each set of three
statements identifies one of the seven (now eight) most
prevalent styles of loving. Your highest scoring set
identifies your dominant style described in a lot more detail
below. Pay attention to your three highest scores as no
one is all or nothing. You may have put a lot of your eggs
in one basket but that four or five in another set may create
an occasional surprise for you.
STYLES OF LOVING
Where your scores are highest identifies your style of
loving. Most people have a mix of two or three. Research
that began in the 80s found that there are six positive
styles of love and the nineties added a more realistic
negative and for the twenty-first century we put in the highangst death lover who fears to be alone. Each is a little
different and based on a different view of what a
relationship should be. Since most people think their kind
is the only kind, understanding the differences can make
your life easier, particularly your love life.
EROS Statements 1-3 are characteristic of the Eros lover.
If you put your highest scores here you focus on beauty,
attractiveness, and sensuality. Often the erotic lover
pursues an ideal that is never fulfilled, however both male
and female followers of Eros report the highest satisfaction
with life and their love life when compared with all other

77

types of lovers. Maybe beauty is more than skin deep. Men

tend to score higher here so if you want to be attractive to
men dont forget the work out and the
beauty parlor, as for sensuality there are a couple of books
in the bibliography that can keep you busy trying new
things for a long time. Men are more likely to respond
to love at first sight as they are more lower brain and
chakra responsive. Weirdly enough men and women
across cultures associate attractiveness with competence,
poise, confidence, strength, happier marriages, and more
prestigious jobs. Hetero and gay men and women reported
physical attractiveness of the partner influencing how
much they enjoyed a date and whether they would repeat
the date. It doesnt make sense but it is true. People
attribute positive characteristics to those they find attractive
and negative attributes are slathered on those they find
unattractive. Given these research findings you should
read Chapter Nine regardless of how you score.
LUDUS Statements 4-6 refer to ludus love. The ludus
lover is not a monogamous lover. He or she regards love
as play, and the more players in the game, the greater
the variety, entertainment, and fun. Ludus lovers like the
shallow end of the gene pool and avoid deep emotional
commitment. Ludus oriented lovers of both sexes report
more relationships, but with less satisfaction. If your ludus
is added to coercive lover, items 19-21, particularly if you
are male, you will experience significantly less happiness,
trust, and much more dissatisfaction with life. In general
men score higher at ludus than women. The ludus lover is
almost a male Dionysian archetype but with the advent of
reliable birth control methods females of the ludus
persuasion have multiplied. The song line, When Im not
with the one I love, I love the one Im with! sums up the
healthy ludus attitude. The ludus lover tends toward
excitement and variety of experience as opposed to depth
of attachment. They like having another notch on the gun
and if it is with a Balinese gymnast at 37,000 feet while
crossing the equator during a solar eclipse, how much

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more romantic? Strangely ludus lovers pay more attention

to the rituals of romance, which may account for their
higher partner rate, as both or all sexes report a desire for
more romance in their love life. The deadly spread of STDs
in the USA because of a just say no educational policy of
the last thirty years has not been evidenced in Holland or
England but choice indicates the careless of this common
type of lover will take a Darwinian hit.
When I lived in Detroit I was impressed by the spread of
genital warts in teen-agers in the inner city, but the
popularity of oral sex has created some venereal disease
combinations that even my ex-Medic mind could not
conceive in steamy Louisiana. Having nurses for girl
friends and wives can be so disturbing of ones wa
(Japanese for harmony). Be careful out there.
STORGE Statements 7-9 score tendencies towards storge
love. The storge lover is peaceful and tranquil. They grow
love out of friendship. Sex tends to come late and is not
that important to storge lovers. They nurture their lover with
caring. The storge lover is a companion not a passion.
They pursue someone they know and enjoy to
share interests and activities. They are slow to come to
bed but as the old Pennsylvania Dutch saying goes
Kuchen (kitchen) lasts Kissin dont. Storge
love is very similar to friendship and sex is a lower priority
than mutual respect, caring, compassion, and concern for
the other person. People from the USA usually score lower
at storge than Mexicans, the French, or Asians. Women
usually score higher than men at storge.
PRAGMA Statements 10-12 refer to pragma love. The
pragma lover is above all pragmatic. They go looking for
love in all the right places with a check list of
characteristics they want in a lover or spouse. If you dont
measure up, the pragma lover will soon show you the door.
Conservatives and, of course, traditional grandmas prize
the pragma lover. Pragmas are practical and prefer the
concept of like attracts, or cattle marries cattle, and vine
marries vine. They are traditional and seek alliance

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and the idea of arranged marriage is not alien to their

thinking. Pragmas have an idea of qualifications that a
lover must live up to, love may not be necessary for a good
relationship but there will be road marks to make the trip
through life easier. Is the family respectable? Can this
person cook? Will they advance my career or have a
good one of his or her own I can share. Less advanced
prefer the little red corvette or good supply of nose candy.
Interestingly enough conservative women score high on
pragma but so do United States women in general.
MANIC Statements 13-15 refer to manic love. The manic
lover loves with no controls. They cant drive 55. Love for
them is a constant hormonal imbalance. They tend to
intense jealousy and fear of losing their lovers to the point
of obsession. They want love to be passionate and intense
and thus easily go to extremes. Manic love is common in
the United States, particularly with younger lovers. If you
are high manic and high coercive relationships will tend to
be difficult and violent. You may want to consider
developing another style. Manic usually does not
discriminate across culture or sex with older subjects but
younger women tend to outscore the younger men.
Teenagers all the way back to Romeo and Juliet fall into
this trap that has fed the imagination of writers and
unrequited lovers for centuries. There is truly something
psychotic about dying for love.
AGAPE Statements 16-18 measure agape love.
Compassionate and selfless the agape lover is the saint
among lovers. Compassionate and egoless where the
lover is concerned she/he creates value and virtue through
loving. The agape lover loves people with whom they have
no close ties. They love in general with no consideration
of reward. Agape is spiritual love offered with no
consideration of reciprocity. For women agape is
significantly correlated with life time satisfaction. The
French and African American women in general score
higher at agape. When you fall in love

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with this selfless lover, keep in mind they love the stranger
in the bar, the children starving in Africa, the spotted owl,
and Redwood too. Agape is spiritual love, offered without
thought of gain, so very different from pragma or storge;
closer to ludus but with higher standards. For women
agape and life satisfaction are positively related.
COERCIVE Statements 19-21 measure coerciveness. The
coercive lover needs to hold power or dominate the
relationship. They tend to be inconsiderate, secretive, and
dangerous. The coercive lover has to be on top. They
control and dominate their partner. When correlated with
ludic they tend to sexually abuse, particularly verbally.
Not a good style, but more common than usually
discussed. Coercive and manic is not a good mix unless
you like an emotional roller coaster and enjoy being a
drama king or queen. Coercive and Eros might make for a
good dominatrix (Were moving out into what used to be a
harmless fringe but with population pressure the wannabes
are part of the mainstream. Well, tie me kangaroo down,
Sport.). The main thing to remember is there is a lot more
diversity in the concept of love than most of us
consider.
DEATH LOVER statements 22-24. The items 22, 23, and
24 are the new Death Lover category which Im fairly
certain relates to Manic and will tend to be more attractive
to women. There is not enough data from this category yet
to make any conclusions but fear of dying alone makes
people do some odd things. Fear of being alone is the key
concept.
Surprise Tres. Americans are consumed by sexuality and
yet in comparison to many older societies seem to have
developed some rather odd choices concerning sex.
University of Chicagos research team using random
samples and face to face interviews (much better than
Kinsey or Playboy) discovered that most of us are as
exciting as Chef Boyardees and a peanut butter and jelly

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sandwich, throw in a cup of cocoa for antioxidants and a

little sugar rush. Among the key results published are:
Americans are largely monogamous with men having
typically six partners and women admitting to two. Adultery
is the exception with approximately eighty percent of
couples keeping the faith. (These figures seem to have
deteriorated considerably in the last ten years.) Married
couples who have the most sex and orgasms are less
likely to stray. Forty percent of married couples had sex at
least twice a week and the second most popular activity
was watching the partner take it off. Three percent of
Americans never have sexual feelings and never have
bothered to try sex out. Give it a twirl so to speak. Now its
a given that people lie about everything. Most people lie
more than they brush their teeth so you cant take anything
anyone says about sex for granted. But this study was well
done and there were some surprises like the above.
People who masturbate the most also have the most sex.
Whites do a lot more with oral sex than blacks. Roman
Catholics (4%) are more likely to hold on to their virginity
(even though the percentage is small). Jews have about
twice the national average in sex partners. Protestant
women have more orgasmic experience, but Catholics
have the quantity factor. Mixed race marriages are less
likely to last, but then given the extra stress is that a
surprise? Seventy percent of women who have an abortion
only have one. Over twenty percent of women say men
have forced them to do things they didnt want to do. Three
percent of men say they have forced themselves on
women. I dont know if begging was considered. Begging
skills are very important as you age, particularly when one
considers the sexual harassment climate. Develop your
sense of humor if you like a little more diversity than what
is described above. To me it seems like Hobbes was right
about short, hard, and brutish. Life is full of choices and
sex is one of the best ways you will ever find to stay in
shape, have fun, meet interesting people, and laugh your
ass off with them even if you dont speak each others
language. However, you arent going to get

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laid in your own culture unless you choose to put in the

time to develop your communication skills and hunt in the
appropriate fields. Hannibal Lecter, the intellectual
cannibal of fictive and movie fame, is attracted to what he
sees. So are you. Simple exposure creates affection if the
interaction is positive or neutral. When the initial interaction
is negative, repeated exposure may decrease attraction.
First impressions are important and most people make
their minds up on someone in under ten seconds. People
who are perceived as attractive are also seen to be more
competent. Proximity and similarity influence attraction. For
most people attraction is a mirror in that they are attracted
to people who are similar in nationality, gender, income
level, aggressiveness, and academic achievement (the
greater the similarity, the deeper the friendship). Perceived
attitudinal similarity is related to marital happiness and
liking in general over time. Rhetoric or style of
communication ties into similarity too. Its just not a matter
of subject choice, the message itself leads to the massage.
Similar speech rate and intensity increase liking and
attraction. The research really supports Grandma and her
Marry your own kind! theories. If you like marriage. The
nice thing about marrying your own kind is it reduces the
surprises and fits nicely with social exchange theory where
people develop relationships that will enable them to
maximize their profits. Its like a business, profits equal
rewards minus the costs even if it may lower the depth in
the gene pool. Pragmas tend to follow this model as well
as storge and agape lovers. If you think beauty is a reward,
rather like a trophy wife or husband, then I suppose Eros
will raise his tricky head and bless the union. Social
exchange theory is pretty clear cut like business is
supposed to be, but there is relationship power theory
which argues that the person who controls the rewards and
punishments controls the relationship. Of course this can
be countered by the guerilla theory that the person who
can effectively ignore the rewards and punishments is the
less interested party, and therefore actually possesses the

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power in the relationship.(Rather Zen, that!) The more a

person needs a relationship the less power
they can draw from it. Manic and coercive lovers get lost in
the power games necessary for control and seldom
experience the fun of equity. Americans tend more toward
equity theory where each partner derives rewards that are
proportional to their costs. When it is perceived that the
share is not proportionate to the expenditures lovers
become dissatisfied and move on. Ludus lovers may not
prize lengthy relations but do enjoy equity. It should not
surprise that relationships where the couple strive for
equity correlate with endurance and satisfaction in America
but in Europe control is more important. Relationships can
be very complex if you dont know this basic stuff, but if
you invest a little of your time in choosing to do a little
rhetorical analysis you might choose to adjust your
presentation to the audience to win greater acceptance by
someone you could love. A real relationship is not about
capture but friendship. Friendship enhances lust into love.
Why not rate your skill level in maintaining and developing
a friendship? This inventory lays out some friendship rules
and follows the same rules as the first one in this chapter.
Rate the statements one to five by how much you agree
with or they describe you:
1.______Stand up for a friend in his or her absence.
2.______Show your intolerance of your friends other
friends so she or he will realize
how special you are.
3.______Share with your friend positive information about
feelings around successes.
4.______Share confidences with your friend with your
other acquaintances so we all
feel equal.
5.______Demonstrate emotional support for your friend.
6.______Be careful to restrain positive regard as such
displays can lead to arrogance
and false self-esteem.
7.______Trust your friend and confide in him or her

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8.______If your friend exhibits negative traits nag him into

paying attention.
9.______Enhance your friends self-esteem and feelings of
self-worth
10._____Express similar attitudes, beliefs, values, and
interests to those of your
friend.
11._____Allow yourself to experience the mysterious and
blissful effect of being in
your friends presence.
12._____Remain loyal and faithful to your friend
regardless of circumstance.
13._____Acknowledge your friends life and identity
outside your relationship.
14._____Make certain your friend feels as rewarded by
your relationship as you do.
15._____Arrange your affairs so you can spend substantial
time with your friend.
16._____Work at being open, authentic, and genuine with
your friend.
Relationships have rules and when you break them the
relationship tends to change for the worse quickly as
people expect their friends to play fair and by the rules.
Here is how you get your score. The odd items, 1 through
7 are considered across cultures to be the mark of a good
friendship. The even numbers, 2 through 8 though
positively stated are significantly associated with abuse or
breakup of friends. Let us hope you put your fives in the
odd places. Items 9 through 16 measure romantic ploys
and where you put the higher numbers indicates the
mundane and expected against the special and
extraordinarily romantic. Odd numbers (9, 11, 13, 15)
reflect the tendency toward exceptional romance. Even
numbers (10, 12, 14, 16) measure the expected actions
beyond flowers and candy in a romantic relationship. None
of these theories take into consideration smell and simple
body chemistry but that is why perfume is a major

85

industry as well as a tool for rhetoric and romance.

Romantic relationships hold great promise for joy or
despair. Few people take the time or trouble to analyze
their relationships or style of romance because the skills of
analysis are difficult to render when swept up by passion.
However the tools given in this chapter may prevent a
disaster by helping to identify areas of conflict and
incompatibility. Discussion and removal of these obstacles
to intimacy result in trust and reduction of fear. It is through
the reduction of fear that the natural spirit of authentic love
or romance can emerge in many different aspects
mentally, spiritually, or physically. With this knowledge the
lover can follow Aristotles cue in the Nicomachean Ethics
that mutual love involves choice and choice springs from a
state of character. Unrealistic expectations often lead to
despair and even existential crises. A couple would do well
to respectfully discuss their scores and explore how they
may effect the relationship so they can move forward in a
healthy manner that satisfies their needs.
Surprise quatro. Fifty-six percent of older men report they
think about sex three or four times a day where only twenty
percent of women report such an active sexual thought
process. This is a huge statistical difference. Women are
more likely to think of coitus in terms of times per month or
even months. The pleasure/pain principle teaches us that
we pursue that we enjoy and flee that which hurts us. What
do the above percentages reflect? How could equity theory
be applied? Does the gander seem as happy as the
goose? (Divorce rate? Infidelities? Hooking up?) Again we
turn to rhetoric or social psychology for solutions.
Communication in close relationships can be improved by
applying basic principles that improve communication in
other contexts. At the simplest level you wont get it
unless you ask for it. How and when you ask are major
weights in balancing your romantic equation. Timing, as
we say in bizzness or combat, is everything.
Understanding the opponent or lover requires empathy
which exists on both a subtle and

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a social level. The subtle requires you being able to read

ones energy and the social to learn to interpret the world
from the other persons point of view, to feel that persons
pain and insecurity, to experience the other persons love
and fear. Empathy is an essential ingredient in your recipe
for friendship, love, or hooking up. Without empathy
your timing always sucks. Self-disclosure in the
development and maintenance of relationship is supported
by a vast amount of research. Most relationships can
benefit from disclosure of present feelings which can add
to empathic understanding. Letting it all hang out,
particularly past sexual experiences and psychological
problems, will often result in it being whacked off. The rules
of rhetoric suggest keeping disclosure positive. Everybody
changes, just like everything changes. It is like sex, death,
and taxes, there is no escape from change. Technology
changes so fast now that everything techie you knew when
you entered school may be obsolete by the time you
graduate. Since people in relationships are interconnected
with each impacting the other, changes in one can often
demand change in the other. Research indicates that the
most frequently requested changes are giving more
attention, complimenting more often, expressing feelings
openly, and being more affectionate in public and private.
It may seem I am flogging a dead horse, but do you want
to get laid more or not? The ludus lover tends to be more
responsive to change as his or her life style tends to be
more adaptable and flexible. Willingness to change is in
fact one of those very important cross-cultural attributes
that contributes significantly to relationship satisfaction and
successful family function. Everybody fights. The problem
is most people fight dirty. Conflict is inevitable. Hell, conflict
is essential. Without conflict we would have no problem
solving, no rhetoric, no difference of opinion, no
democracy. Combat differs from sport primarily because
combatants contest weakness by strength (See Chapter
Seven). Usually we are not combatants in fights with our
lovers. Getting ones way, kicking some ass, being verbally
abusive, and outright aggression have little cachet in a

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loving relationship. Winning and losing are concepts that

will get you sleeping on the couch or camping out alone if
you are one of those people who have to hurt to win. The
loser will find a way to retaliate and eventually no one is
winning in any meaningful sense. Fighting with a friend or
lover requires fighting fair. It is possible to enter a conflict
with the aim of resolving it by finding a better way through
airing of differences, the struggle for mutual understanding
can benefit both parties. Dont be afraid to pick a fight. You
can lay down rules and declare fouls for being nasty. A fair
fight can actually be fun, rather like an informal debate.
The more often you do it, the less often you have to do it.
Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band have put out some
great songs. Being ludus, Night Moves struck a
sympathetic chord and now the internet age has given us
the hookup. Hookups could be considered about the same
as a one night stand with less information exchange.
Hookups may or may not include casual sex but genital
touching is more prevalent than meaningful conversation.
For many college students developing a meaningful
boyfriend/girlfriend relationships are quaint things of the
past when college was an idyll where a spouse could be
hunted. The brutal economic realities of the twentyfirst
century USA indicate for the survival oriented pragma that
building their resumes, getting the grades for grad school,
or laying the groundwork for their career leaves little time
for romance. College is just another benchmark and
people dont want to be tied down. Looking at the stats
from the 80s and 90s tells us that todays college student is
much more sexually active, a real this is now, and that
was then difference. Approximately eighty percent of
students have hooked up. Its the norm not the exception.
Where high school hook ups are best when discrete, the
older collegians talk freely of their experience of beer
goggles (drunkenness leads to disappointing surprise or
coyote ugly partner), or the dangers of catching feelings
(emotional involvement). Some storge report sex is part of
friendship and there is no way Im going to marry
someone I have to teach how to be my lover. The average

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student reports ten or eleven partners over a four year

period and the attractive eros lover may range up into the
forties. I knew a pretty hot girl who did a hundred in a
semester just because she could. It was her idea of fun.
Now if you think of this as indiscriminate, careless
philandering injurious to innocence, rather than harmless
experimentation preparing the burgeoning scholar for the
vicissitudes of adulthood, you might be wrong. It might be
like the research showing that people whove
experimented with marijuana are psychologically healthier
than those who abstained. Some of the Michigan
longitudinal research is pointing in that direction. So if you
are of an age where hooking up is a very real possibility
the data indicates a kiss and dont tell advantage to the
younger players and skill development for the older.
Communication skill is not a high priority when the pool is
shallow and the time is limited. However, the wham, bam,
thank you, mam attitude of the knuckle walker will not
suffice where the metrosexual represents the idealized
concept of hot. If you are going to play in the fast grope
lane you still have to attract partners willing to jump for the
hook. Being aware of what is considered looking good is
still important.(I let my 25 year old wife shop for my casual
clothes and direct tonsorial activities. Since Im over 60 I
handle the fabric and talk to the tailor concerning formal
events.) If you hope for a repeat performance its a good
plan to be a Viagra man. When it comes to performance
the sexual practices described in the readings selected
for this chapters bibliography are not for the faint of heart.
Staying in shape is a good choice. Mere stamina is not
enough to hold a serious partners attention and multiple
orgasms arent just for women anymore. Recent studies in
Germany indicated that eight weeks of exercise using the
tantric Five Tibetans restored sexual performance better
than Viagra. Tantra can provide a path of spiritual
liberation using sexuality for the transmutation and
sublimation of sexual energy to reduce aging and speed
healing. Ive found Shaivanistic energy work which uses
the chakra system to be quite effective. I

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personally find it almost identical to the Kaballah and

Mirkabah systems that have attracted Madonnas attention,
but find they actually work, and a lot faster. Where the
systems touted for the influential Hollywooders are
intellectually stimulating, they dont do much for the inner
snakes and ladders. Study on that. If you need a further
nudge check out my students at www.hoshin.com , or
UMAA Tantra on the internet. After all, Tantra is an ancient
spiritual path of love, expansion, and union with the divine.
It includes a remarkably scientific view of sexuality in a
broad cosmology of energy work and a philosophy of
enjoying life. It isnt a religion, a cult, or limited to skilled
sexual practice. Unfortunately sexual tantra has been
seized upon by a long list of charlatans from ill informed
hippie gurus, new age lotharios, and Alistair Crowley to
exploit the needy. One translation of tantra from the
Sanskrit is simply energy work. Like the martial arts, one
should peel back the layers of local color and examine the
breathing techniques, physical postures, and medical
descriptions to find what is really worth doing. It is your
choice. This is America. Modern men are choosing to
avoid marriage according to a study of a sample of men
from around the USA done by Popenoe and Whitehead of
Rutgers. Number one reason given was sex was available
without the ring, so no need for the legal ball and chain.
The second was financial ruin from divorce, not fear of a
broken heart. Seems men are becoming less romantic and
more pragmatic. The research also revealed that women
met in bars are considered casual sex and not soul mate
material. When a man thinks of a woman as mate material
he tends to wait until the fourth or fifth date before
stampeding the bedroom. There are major differences
between sex, love, and romance in the minds of most men
and women. Men tending to line up behind sex and trophy
hunting, or sport f*cking, and women going for love and
romance across a spectrum ranging from femininny to
feminazi. If the reader is of the female persuasion and is
looking for the

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latter, best not to hunt for love or romance where alcohol is

sold. If you are appealing to the masculine eye it is an
advantage tilted toward the erotic lover, but if you have not
honed your intellectual and intuitive powers, beauty then
becomes a handicap setting one up for a long chain of
experiences where men treat you as a dick wipe. Once
again the choice leads to fun or folly. Rhetoric is the art of
clarifying choices and hopefully leads one to choices right
for him or her. Any intelligent lover will tell you that
behavioral mod works best with the opposite sex and once
used can often be used with success. Nagging seldom
works and mostly irritates the wounds of past and present
compliance failures, creating guilt, shame, and loss of
respect which often leads to the death of love in a pragma
heart. In any contest between behavior mod and nagging,
mod should win but the unschooled will nag on. Most
people respond reasonably when reasonably asked. Most
people are not telepaths, you have to ask for what you
want. How you phrase the demand has a lot to do with the
attention it will get. That is rhetoric, too. The question of
what do men/women want depends on their style but in
general it might boil down to Rodney Dangerfields
Complaint coupled to the Rolling Stones musical comment
on satisfaction.
Bibliography:
Gender: Psychological Perspectives. Linda Brannon. Allyn
& Bacon, 1999.
The Social Organization of Sexuality. Laumann, Michael,
Michael, and Gagnon.
University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Sex in America: A Definitive Survey. Gina Kolata. Little
Brown, 1994.
Your Erroneous Zones. Dr. Wayne Dyer. Avon, 1976.
Human Sexual Aggression: Current Perspectives. Prentky
& Quinsey, eds. Ann N.Y.
Acad. Sci. Vol. 528, 1988
1001 Ways to be Romantic. Gregory J. P. Godek.
Casablanca Press, 1991.

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The Perfumed Garden. Richard Burton, trans. Castle

Books, 1964.
The Complete Kama Sutra: The First Unabridged Modern
Translation of the Classic
Indian Text. Alain Danielou. Park Street Press, 1994.
Sexual Reflexology: Activating the Taoist Points of Love.
Mantak Chia and William
U. Wei. Destiny Books, 2003.
Seduction. Robert Greene. Penguin Books, 2001.
Taoist Bedroom Secrets. Master Chan Zettersan. Lotus
Press, 2002
Sexual Secrets. Douglas & Slinger. Destiny Books, 1979.
Shakti Woman. Vicki Noble, Harper, San Fran, 1991
The Left Hand of Darkness. Ursula K. Le Guin. Ace
Science Fiction, 1969.

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Chapter Five: Problem Solving, IQ,

and EQ.
The lower the IQ, the more structure necessary for
learning. The higher the IQ, the better the odds of
self-learning and multi-functioning. The new
heterogeneousclassroom calls for heroic efforts by
teachers. Gottfredson
He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness
in others. Johnson
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others
whenever they go. Wilde
NRF Maier, my mentor in industrial psychology started off
brown rat running and being interested in problem solving.
He was an amazing old man and taught me a lot. We
designed a safety program for Exxons Baton Rouge plant
back in the 70s (when I worked as psychometrician for
Human Synergistics) that saved a bunch of lives and
reduced their lost time accidents significantly. Two of his
pet peeves were how the medical profession abused
stress theory by treating symptoms instead of causes (See
Chapter Six) and how problem solving and trait psychology
had been mostly ignored by the politicians lodged in
positions of leadership in the APA resulting in a watered
down understanding of intelligence that has only been
corrected recently. Norm had a tremendous impact on my
thinking as did David McClelland who had Timothy Leary
as a colleague at Harvard. Clay Lafferty who trained me in
psychometrics had me research the hell out of Leary who
was in jail due to his LSD give away program. Clay actually
set it up so I could meet people and get into their heads a
bit. McClelland thought Clays methodology was too simple
to work and Norm thought it was too simple too. Leary was
happy to have someone listen to him and sold his circle to
Clay. However, by loading the samples, going to
nonparametric statistical procedures, and other tricks of
the trade one could get very significant differences in
problem solving and well crafted traits. Crafting and finding

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the significant differences was my job. Elegance often

appears simple, i.e., Einsteins E=MC2. Maier had some
great techniques for solution identification, posing
problems, and solution evaluation that are very simple but
most never use them. The Quality/Acceptance continuum
in Shadow Strategies comes from Norm. Over a five year
period we crafted some really good inventories and
problem solving simulations that allowed Human
Synergistics to grow into the international management
development company it is today. (Clay often bragged on
me as his creative genius but that did not keep him from
screwing me out of verbal agreements. Where money is
concerned, always get it in writing. America is a low
context society which means people will bullshit and the
contract is king. Verbal agreements have been a lifelong
failing on my part.) Anyway that is how I learned a lot of my
psychology while working on my Ph.D in rhetoric and
communication. I was lucky to work for Clay as a grad
student because I was introduced to a lot of managers and
executives and was able to work on some really interesting
projects that fed the envy of my professors at Wayne
State. Human Synergistics specialized in teaching group
work through training simulations. This was before the
computer revolution so the simulations were based on
individual cases and then group work at coming to a
consensus. Id done a lot of this type of work with teachers
at Penn State working on my Masters in Rhetoric and
Small Groups at Penn State. Thirty years ago this kind of
training was considered outside the box but now it is
cutting edge-cognitive-acceleration and learning. I built a
couple of long simulations with hundreds of choices that
are still used today. Grindtown and Turnaround were my
PH.D. projects. Human Synergistics used simulations to
reorganize Texas Utilities and later train TUGCO and
Exxon workers in Safety. One of the interesting
things I learned was people make better choices when
theyve made some bad ones. We always built in some
realistic losers in the choices in hope they would be
eliminated

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during discussion. Think about that a moment. After

Hillsdale College when I worked for General Motors a lot of
the leadership training was done through using my tests
and simulations. One of the other things Human
Synergistics did for corporations was develop selection
tests. I wont take you through the arcane methods of that
process but you have to do some real research and
comparisons if you dont want to run up against Uncle Sam
at some point. It takes time but if you create a quick
reliable and valid test for an occupation or trait that
correlates with success in your industry you can save a lot
of money in training. Here is my favorite success story.
Cargill Corporation hired a hundred executives. The
hundred, as part of the hiring
process, took some of our self-description inventories and I
was given their data. My job was to separate them out on
the basis of their scores into superior performers,
acceptable performers, and problem performers. Nobody
but me knew what the separating criteria would be and I
never saw any of the hires. The experiment was supposed
to take a year, however, after six months Cargill and Clay
decided to open the envelopes and see how we did. All the
superior performers and acceptable performers were still
with the company. What was funny was every one of the
twenty people who I had identified as problems were gone.
Two had been arrested for various corporate wrong doing.
Six had been fired for incompetence and twelve had self
elected to go elsewhere. Our paper and pencil test worked
better than the corporate very professional interviewing
and simulation system because people put on their best
behavior for those situations and most know how
to play the game. Hell, most Speech departments give
courses in interviewing for jobs these days. McKenzie
Scott has a brilliant training program for marketing
executives who are transitioning through jobs or career
changes. Intelligence is one of those slippery concepts
kicked around like a soccer ball in the West for a hundred
years. Darwins cousin Francis Galton was fascinated by
both

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evolutionary theory and quantification and attempted to

measure stuff like beauty, boredom, equanimity, the effects
of prayer, and other multi-faceted subjectively difficult
traits like superiority. Galton lived in the nineteenth century
and developed some useful statistical techniques, but
wasnt much of test maker as the above list of topics
should inform you. Alfred Binet picked up on Galtons ideas
and developed tests to predict childrens academic
achievement. Theodore Simon partnered up with Binet and
they theorized that mental aptitude was like physical
aptitude and would show up in various ways. They
developed reasoning and problem-solving questions that
separated awkward learners from the bright. The tests still
work to predict academic success but life success beyond
satisfaction eluded the process. This French research
captured a California scholars attention. Lewis Terman
found the Parisian norms didnt work so well with his
Merikans so he developed the Stanford-Binet and with it a
concept of mental age. IQ equals mental age divided by
chronological age times one hundred. Thus an eight year
old who answers questions like a ten year old would have
an IQ of 125. When I was in the sixth grade I scored like a
high school junior, however my hobbies have
hampered that precociousness into social handicaps most
of my life (That life success versus curiosity problem that
keeps most academics from acquiring much wealth unless
they figure out patents, copyrights, or consulting.). The
term IQ is still in the popular vocabulary for tests of mental
age or academic ability. Intelligence beyond academic
prediction hasnt worked that well as a concept because
intelligence is socially constructed. What is smart in one
situation may get you killed in another. Modern
researchers view intelligence as a capacity for adaptive
behavior used in reaching goals, arguments still abide
around brain speed, culture bound or free, or multiplicity of
skills versus single trait. I tend to side here with Plato who
wrote in The Republic that no two persons are born
exactly alike, but each differs from the other in natural
endowments, the one being suited for one occupation and

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the other for another. It is in the differences not the

similarities that tests can be used for selection purposes.
Real intelligence may not be culturally defined but problem
solving skill can be measured. This is part of a little test I
developed to select pipe fitters and investment brokers.
Both jobs require that one be very intelligent but the
cultures are very different. Blue collar and macho versus
white collar and detail oriented. Since variations of this test
are still used by some companies Ill only use twenty
random items. The hardest items are toward the end of the
test and if you want to be tough on yourself the test can be
timed. You have twenty minutes. Please answer the
following twenty questions by circling the correct answer.
1. A farmer has seventeen sheep. All but nine break
through a hole in the fence and
wander away. How many are left?
a) eight b) seven c) ten d) nine
2. If x + y= x + 5 then y=______?
a) -5 b) 1/5 c) x-5 d) 5
3. Choose the word that is most nearly opposite in the
meaning to the word in
capsWILT
a) prevent b)drain c)expose d) revive e)stick
4. Row boat is to ocean liner as glider is to
a) kite b) airplane c) balloon d) rocket
5. Concrete is usually made strongest by mixing
a) only sand and water b) only cement and water c) lye,
cement, and water
d) rock, sand, cement and water
6. You have white socks and black socks in a drawer that
are mixed into a ratio of 4 to 5.
What is the least number of socks you will have to take out
to be sure of having a pair of

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the same color?

a) 2 b) 3 c) 4 d) 5
7.What number comes next in the following series? 20 20
21 21 22 22 23?
a) 23 23 b) 23 24 c) 19 19 d) 22 23 e) 24 24
8. Using measuring cans without intermediate markings
two gallons of oil can be
accurately measured from a barrel and put into a bearing
using
a) an eight gallon and a four gallon can
b) two four gallon cans
c) a six gallon and a four gallon can
d) a 1 and a gallon and a 6 gallon can
9. Ceylon is to Sri Lanka as Constantinople is to
a) Mardi Gras b)Moscow c) Paris d) Indianapolis e)
Istanbul
10. Black Beauty is to horse as Lassie is to
a) Scottish ballads b) dog c) drugs d) porno e) whale
11. Dandelions double in area every twenty four hours. At
the beginning of summer there
is one dandelion in a field. It takes 60 days for the field to
become covered by the
dandelions. On what day is the field half covered with the
dandelions?
a) 30 b) 46 c) 29 d) 59
12.What letter would come next in the following series a e
c g e I g k l m k ?
a) I b) o c) m d) p e) n
13. Loops is to spool as straw is to
a) pinking b) hats c) boss d) warts e) dogs
14. Halley is to comet as Broca is to

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a) print b) tire c) bovine d) brain e) fruit

15. If it were two hours later, it would be half as long until
midnight as it would be if it
were an hour later.What time is it now?
a) 6AM b) 11PM c) 9PM d) 10PM e) 4AM
16. Uncle Harry bought a radio for $60.00 and resold it for
seventy dollars. He thought
about the deal, and bought the radio back for eighty and
then sold it for $90.00 a week
later. Did Harry:
a) make money + $10.00 b) make money + $20.00
c) lose money -$10.00 d) lose money -$20.00
e) break even didnt make money but didnt loose any
17. Below is a related pair of words in capital letters. Select
from the following lettered
choices the pair that best expresses a relationship similar
to the capitalized words.
SCOFF/ DERISION:
a) soothe/mollification b) slander/repression c)
swear/precision
d) stimulate/appearance e) startle/speediness
18.Washington is to one as Lincoln is to
a) five b) twelve c) twenty d) fifty
19. Onions are to leeks as crocuses are to
a) bananas b) saffron c) tulips d) orchids e) apples
20. Here are three words: paint, doll, and cat. Pick a fourth
word that changes the
meaning of all three.
a) hair b) brush c) house d) ball e) ladder
Well, how do you think you did? If you got eight of the first
ten (1 through 10) and six out of the second (11 through
20) and we liked the cut of your jib we might invite you

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back for that second interview. Here is why. The items in

this test are age and skill related to the abilities or
aptitudes to solve certain kinds of problems. There are
several levels of ability and mental age being tested. The
breakdown of the groupings is explained below:
Correct answers for 1 through 5. (1=d, 2=d, 3=d, 4=b, 5=d)
average, non-discriminating The first five items can be
answered by a sharp ninth grader in the public schools or
an adult of average intelligence having general knowledge
with an IQ of one hundred. Items one through three
measure reading ability, simple math, and vocabulary
respectively, four is a simple analogy, and five combines
general knowledge with simple logic. If you missed any of
these then maybe that was the day you were smoking in
the parking lot or trying to impress the opposite sex by
doing something cool. You should correct this
deficit if you think you are above average for a ninth
grader. Correct answers for 6 through 10. (6=b, 7=b, 8=c,
9=e, 10=b) fairly smart, practical The items in this part are
weighted toward intelligence and insight and can be
answered quickly by a knowledgeable high school
graduate or an adult with an above average IQ of one
hundred ten and above. Items six and seven measure
reasoning and serial reasoning ability. Item eight nails
down mechanical aptitude with special relations, and items
nine and ten fall into general knowledge of
geography/history/literature. High school wasnt that tough.
I mean practically everyone but Hispanic girls gets a pass
and their dropout rate isnt about smarts. That culture
thang can be a killer of achievement. Correct answers for
11 through 15. (11=d, 12=b, 13=d, 14=d, 15=e) above
average This group of five can be easily answered by most
college graduates or an adult with an
IQ around 120 or above. Item 11 is a killer that tests
reading ability along with problem solving, intelligence, and
synergy. Item 12 checks progression reasoning and 13
and 15 get at pattern recognition. Item 14 tips toward
anthropology/curiosity and scientific recall. These were the

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easier items in this set. I picked them randomly and

sometimes random is just lucky for you.
Correct answers for 16 through 20. (16=b, 17=a, 18=a,
19=b, 20=c) near genius This last group can usually only
be answered quickly by very smart people with IQs above
130 which is considered near genius. The items are drawn
from MITs graduate school for engineering exam and one
that Dr. Maier devised to smoke out the dummies. Item 16
measures problem-solving and math skill. Item 17 links
verbal ability and reading comprehension. Eighteen is an
insight and synergy item connecting presidents and
money. Item 19 identifies unique knowledge and
environmental curiosity, and 20 correlates with creativity
and measures remote association. Problem solving by
itself does not correlate with academic intelligence so a life
skill test has to get at some other characteristics. Now if
you got these and missed a lot of the basic questions we
would grant you are probably smart as can be but not
worth hiring because your basics are shaky and we would
have to spend too much time to train you. In the last thirty
years a lot of work has been done in creating personality
typologies. The most popular being the Meyer-Briggs
based on the work of C.J. Jung and used to identify types
in terms of extrovert, introvert, intuitional and so forth. They
do give you some tools to describe people but they dont
predict performance. Most personality tests are like that.
The MMPI is now rejected by the government as a
selection device although it does sort out psychopaths
pretty well which is what it was developed to do. The
Enneagram is very popular but Ive never seen any hard
science or stats that support its use beyond description. It
comes out of Gurdjieff and the Sufi mystical traditions
which arent wildly different from the chakra descriptions I
used in Chapter Two but I question the negative structure
validity and placement of types. David C. McClelland put
together some rather complex protocols for identifying
themes in childrens literature that predicted the rise and
all of economic empires. He

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studied the clans of Scotland and was able to predict

social standing and political success from tartan colors. He
figured out three major motivating factors that heavily
affected why and how most people and social groups fared
economically. He went to India with a grant and a bunch of
grad students and taught the success principles in a region
that had little change in hundreds of years. Within five
years it was a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity and still is.
Lafferty took the ideas of McClelland, Harry Harrison, and
Carl Rogers and other psychologists like Karen Horney
and refined them into short self descriptive inventories that
when taken together made a very easily understood
personality profile. He got that idea from Leary who still
designed kick ass personality profiles until his death. I was
fortunate enough to have the job of researching those
profiles to prove their reliability and validity and then went
on to craft even better ones with Barb Forisha-Kovach and
these days write my own or customize to industry. Anyway,
there is a high probability that some HRD person will give
you a short test and based on the results you may or may
not be hired by a particular company for a specific type of
work. (Most of those tests are not reliable or valid, but that
is just my opinion as a test maker.) Daniel Goleman who
did interesting work with meditation in the 80s has coined
the term Emotional Intelligence or EQ and like the profiles
developed by myself and Lafferty has had considerable
success predicting behavior. Emotional response can be
trained and problem-solving can be directed, whereas
personality is quite stable and difficult to change. If you are
geeked on personality type systems check out Who Am I?
Personality types for self-discovery by Robert Frager. He
covers many of the clinical ones and even gets into Native
American Spirituality, the Tarot, and astrology. Knowing
a bit about personality can help you understand your own
humanity and others. Practically every culture develops a
typology and when you can identify cross cultural aspects
you are beginning to tap into biology and archetypes so
your ability to predict goes up. Think of this test as an EQ
or motivational self-description. Rate each statement by

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how much you agree with it or it describes you. Respond to

the items off the top of your head and quickly. If you have
to think about it, its probably a two.
4 = I almost always agree with this statement
3 = I often agree with this statement
2 = I occasionally agree with this statement
1 = I rarely or never agree with this statement
1.______ I ask for help when I have a problem.
2.______ I have to look for why things happen.
3.______ I have a hard time taking myself seriously.
4.______ I persist in the face of difficulty.
5.______ I know what I dont want out of life.
6.______ I seldom have colds or upper respiratory
infections
7.______ I do not believe in fate, luck, chance, or things
just happening.
8.______ I believe freedom is always important.
9.______ I often solve problems by breaking them down
into smaller parts.
10._____ I am generally effective at what I attempt.
11._____ I find it easy to share feelings
12._____ I meet and talk with different kinds of interesting
people.
13._____ I suspect most folks have similar thoughts and
feelings.
14._____ I can learn from and relate to almost anyone.
15._____ I tend to resist conformity.
16._____ I enjoy physical contact and being touched by
others.
17._____ I seldom, if ever, have gastro intestinal problems.
18._____ I have to get away to recharge my energies.
19._____ I am open to warm friendly relationships.
20._____ People say Im hard to predict.
Here is how you score. This inventory measures two
characteristics of highly successful people. Items 1 through
10 measure task and achievement orientation and items

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11-20 can be considered people and responsiveness

orientation. Add your scores from 1 through 10 to give
yourself a total. Do the same for 11 through 20. You
should now have two totals under forty. This test compares
your score to a total average of 2000 highly successful
managers and executives. The higher the score the
stronger it correlates with the below scores and
descriptions.
Task and Achievement: (Items 1 through 10) Measures a
concern for completing the job, working positively with
others, pursuing excellence for its own sake with little
regard or anxiety as to how others view them. They tend to
be cause and effect thinkers who recognize barriers to
accomplishment and get around them. They are more
linear thinkers and see achievement as a step rather than
an end. If your score was between 22 and 27 you are
scoring in the lowest percentile which indicate that in
comparing yourself to high achievers you are taking a
great risk of having your self esteem damaged because
you have a lot of work to do. Are you waiting for someone
to tell you what to do? You should feel sheepish because
you score like a follower. Still looking for a Daaaaaaady?
Scores from 28 to 31 are on the below but acceptable
average and indicate little goal seeking interest. Just an
average Joe. 32 to 37 indicates you have considerable fire
in the belly and succeed at most of what you take on, and
38 to 40 means you are crazed with achievement and
probably over-exaggerate to the point of annoyance. The
personality factors TA significantly correlates with are more
outgoing, dominant, forthright, self assured, and relaxed.
Self Concept measures are pro-active social behavior,
positive self identity, and higher performance. Life style
correlations are affiliation, lower avoidance, and self
actualizing. Demographic relations are higher salary and
lower stress related medical symptoms. Now that is a lot of
work out of ten items.

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People and Responsiveness: (Items 11 through 20)

Measures people skills like responsiveness and open
acceptance of others. This type of person is warm, open,
and friendly. They are willing to share their thoughts and
selves with others without seeking dominance. They enjoy
team work and working with others to achieve their goals.
It could be called task-oriented affiliation. If your scores
were lower than 25 and someone has called you unfriendly
or a cold fish, believe them as that is a low percentile score
indicating some real problems in warming up the madding
crowd. Scores of 26 to 31 are acceptably low and would
eliminate you from most sales or teaching type jobs but
you would feel comfortable with engineers or automobile
manufacturers. Tech work beckons. 32 to 37 indicates a
strong preference for working with and developing others
as in charismatic leader. 38 to 40 makes me want to roll up
my cuffs as nobody is that nice. Excuse me, while I button
my hip pocket. The personality factors PR significantly
correlates with are greater emotional stability, and
conscientiousness. Self Concept ties into openness to
people and affiliation. In demographics, surprisingly PR
correlates with both job level and salary in political
organizations but not with medical symptoms either way.
David McClellands work on needs Achievement and
Affiliation show that along with Power these motivational
trends or patterns are important. (I dont talk about the
Power needs because they almost always result in
disaster. No sense studying what doesnt work when you
are in a hurry, and arent you in a hurry?) EQ is more
important than IQ and Achievement and problem-solving
are more important than EQ. Affiliation when directed
beyond the family can help one rise in a complex world as
it helps to have friends. In other words being smart helps in
a complex society and if you are alive right now, this is
pretty complex. Being well educated is a choice most
smart people would not reject given the correlation with
salary or life-time earnings. Being a skilled problem solver
correlates with a bunch of positives and being friendly
usually doesnt hurt. These are three choices you can

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control. You want more testing get in touch with me. I am

easy to find.
Bibliography:
Organizational Sync: Making Your Job Work for You.
Forisha-Kovach, Kovach &
Morris. Prentice-Hall, 1983.
Measuring Emotional Intelligence. Simmons & Simmons.
Summit Publishing, 1997
Measures for Clinical Practice. Vol. II Adults, 2 ed. Fischer
and Corcoran.. Free Press,
1994.
Who Am I? Personality Type for Self-Discovery. Robert
Frager. Tarcher-Putnam, 1994.
Schools and the g Factor. Linda Gottfredson. Wilson
Quarterly. Summer 2004
Reworking Intuition: Business simulations spark rapid
workplace renovations. Bruce
Bower. Science News, p.263 Oct. 23, 2004, Vol. 166

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Chapter Six: Ghosts in the Machine

Let us put our minds together and see what kind of
lives we can make for our children. Sitting Bull
You are what you eat! Tiny Tim
He loves nature in spite of what it did to him. Tucker
In the United States medical experts estimate we spend
over 400 billion dollars annually for stress related
symptoms and disease. Ninety percent of all hospital beds
are filled with people having psychosomatic illness.
Probably half of this expense could be eradicated by
simple adherence to some simple practices concerning
nutrition, exercise, and posturing ourselves mentally for
wellness. Some cancers, most ulcers, heart disease, high
blood pressure, and other serious ailments are psycho
(mind) somatic (body) which means a major component of
the disease comes from lifestyle choices and mental
processes. Dr. Hans Selye, a Belgian who went to med
school in England hatched the concept of stress for human
beings. He called it GAS or General Adaptation Syndrome
and popularized the concept through his writings as stress.
What he identified through observing the population in the
London Underground was an endemic look of malaise.
Was everyone sick? They appeared so to the trained
medical eye. If what he observed was true, then doctors
were definitely going to reap the rewards of being in the
health care industry. What did he see? He saw the effect of
modern society. He saw a population suffering from
generalized psychosomatic symptoms or what he came to
call stress. Stress is nothing more than the cumulative
effect of change on any organism or for that matter,
structure. Just as wings fall off airplanes, biological
systems (us) also deteriorate over time. Although
breakdown and exhaustion resulting in physical death is
inevitable we have a great deal of control over our minds,
emotions, and bodies which allow us to manage or
reduce the effect. Health or wellness is a function of our
ability to recover from or avoid the cumulative effect of
stress or change. Disease or psychosomatic

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medical symptoms are our bodies way of telling us we

have made some bad choices concerning how to maintain
or enhance our immune systems. Even if you were skilled
at picking your parents so you inherited no genetic time
bombs, there still is no escape from the simple wear and
tear of having a life called the aging process. Just as
manufacturing systems achieve quality through continual
improvement, human beings (us/we) achieve wellness
through continually improving ourselves and controlling our
stress. As Plato pointed out, everybody is different. That
difference creates the diversity of symptoms that we see
as people come under stress. Some are more affected by
mental frustration (This is where my friend Norm Maier
focused back in the 30s) and others are ground down by
physical abuse, and still others get thrashed by societal
changes. Where ones sight may weaken, another gets
ulcers, and yet the source of the stress is the same. We
forget that we are primates with a long history of adapting
to change. Some of the biological systems evolved to save
our lives in the pressure of fleeing and fighting are of
dubious value when dealing with the insults of modern life.
The body (somatic/intuitive systems discussed in Chapter
Two) regards threats whether psychological or physical as
attacks, and lives in a continual state of positive now or
immediacy. When the body feels threatened the endocrine
system dumps adrenaline and cortisone-like chemicals into
the blood stream resulting in arousal. How long the state of
hyper arousal lasts is a strong indicator of how much
damage your organs are taking from the chemicals of rage.
There are only so many beats in a heart. The stomach and
intestine do strange things. Youve heard the expression,
scared shitless or pissless. Thats so you can flee without
excess baggage. Try explaining to your boss you just
soiled yourself because you were so excited when asking
for a raise. Universally the eyes dilate to take in more light
when aroused, indicating that those who did not wake up
quickly (with some night vision) were killed in their sleep
(Natural selection at work a long time ago when the
population was very small.).

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That same eye dilation also is part of the flush of orgasm

that darkens the eyelids and lips which the Egyptians
imitated to start the make-up industry. No eye dilation
when sharing loving glances with the beloved? Oh my! The
thrill is gone. High chest breathing fools the body into
anxiety attacks. Blow in the bag and well fool the old
crocodile brain in the other direction. Where is your
weakness? Stress will find it and make it real for you.
Continual states of arousal are not good for you and wear
out your organs. The blood vessels stiffen into
arteriosclerosis. The stomach ulcerates from excessive
acid. Tendons grow brittle and break. Chronic emotional
stress has been proven to age cells prematurely and
damage DNA. The prospect of an anti-aging medicine to
protect cells will be a long time coming. You get the
picture? Old survival oriented hardware running or
attacking inappropriately. Time to learn how to enter new
programming and upgrade the software. It is not like our
government is making us feel safe and secure, that your
future will be better than the past, or that nobody is really
out to get you. Perhaps there is a reason for all that
tension in the air. But first lets run some more diagnostics.
People are strange. Medical doctors treat stress as some
amorphous boogie but it can be broken down into
somewhat controllable categories. Holmes and Rahe made
up lists of life events that correlated with psychosomatic
symptoms. The more life events the greater the chance of
illness. One of the interesting pro bono studies I did for
Human Synergistics was researching police officers in
Detroit. We found that there were personality factors that
buffered the effect of life events. Police officers who scored
higher at TA and PR (Chapter Five) had significantly less
medical symptoms. Life events for some police officers,
particularly those in drug enforcement are ridiculously high,
yet we were able to identify factors that kept them sane
and symptom free, and it wasnt jogging. Ever notice how
many of those MDs who recommended running or jogging
as the way to save your heart seem to have cardiacs on

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the track? This is called being a victim of your own wishful

thinking. Dont worry we wont get you training like a Greek
messenger. Seems to me the guy who made the dash
from Marathon died of a broken heart too, but I might be
wrong about that. Anyway here is the Morris version of the
Holmes-Rahe.
The following is a list of events from work, home, and
school. Mark only the items that apply to you in the last
year.
1.____ Sudden significant increases in the activity level
and pace of work
2.____ Requirement to work more hours per week than
normal
3.____ Restriction of social life, such as moving to new
location
4.____ Marriage or Divorce
5.____ Too much work; too little time.
6.____ Feedback is only given when performance is
unsatisfactory
7.____ Major changes in assignments, procedures, or
policies
8.____ Major reorganization at your place of work
9.____ Death of a family member or close friend
10.____Conflict with people you have to interact with often
11.____Having unclear standards and responsibilities
12.____Trouble with boss or someone who holds the
power of reward over you.
13.____Serious Illness
14.____Serious legal difficulties
15.____Change to a new job
16.____Assume heavy financial burden
This second group of life events is more environmental.
Check off any that apply to you
in the last year.
17.____Pollution of your environment
18.____Excessive noise
19.____Concern over the economy

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20.____Fear of terrorism or other victimization (Declining

neighborhood)
Third group is what we call type five stressors that vary
according to personality. You get to assign a value
according to how much the event effected or affects your
life. You can assign anywhere from 10 to 200. Only assign
a value to an item that actually happened to you.
21._________ Raised by alcoholic and/or abusive parents
22._________Early sexual experiences include rape
23._________Sexually harassed
24._________Burglarized/robbed/or prized possessions
ruined
25._________Expected insurance did not cover
26._________Stock drop effects personal investments
27._________Intense interpersonal dispute or fight with a
stranger
28._________Spouse or child becomes seriously self
destructive
29._________Physical injuries or disease create obstacles
to ones goals
30._________Education did not pay off as expected
OK. Add up the score from the first section. Every one you
picked is worth 50 points. These are items which strongly
correlate with stress related medical symptoms. If you
checked off more than 600 points you should be nice to
yourself as that is a lot of stress particularly if you are over
thirty. Items from the second group are not as disturbing to
the average person as those from the first so give yourself
25 points for each one. Add this total to the first and then
add in the third to give you your life events score. The
higher the score; the greater the potential for stress related
medical diseases the older you are. An average score for a
college graduate in a mid management position thirty five
years of age is 400. Ive seen college students with scores
over 1600 and executives and police officers over 2000. If
your TA and PR scores are in the 30s you can usually deal

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with a lot of stress. However, it is stress that in the end

gets to close the coffin for most of us. Learn to deal with it.
Here are 20 statements concerning how highly stressed
people describe themselves. Assign each statement a
number according to how often you feel it applies to you:
1 = rarely or never
2 = occasionally (some of the time)
3 = quite often (most of the time)
4 = that is the way I am (all the time)
1._____ It doesnt take much to make me angry.
2._____ I get irritated when I have to wait.
3._____ I find it hard to adjust to change.
4._____ I can easily say I dont like what I do for a living
even though I do it
well.
5._____ I set impossible goals for myself.
6._____ My personal goals do not fit what I am doing.
7._____ Im so uptight, I have trouble falling asleep.
8._____ Its difficult for me to relax, take it easy or goof off.
9._____ I seem to run everything into a contest.
10._____ I really get upset when I lose.
11._____ I am basically honest with myself.
12._____ I can talk with and get along with a wide variety
of people.
13._____ I am confident and relaxed in dealing with
people.
14._____ I derive personal satisfaction from the work I do.
15._____ I set realistic goals and accomplish them.
16._____ I have goals to which I am committed.
17._____ I think mistakes are a natural part of learning.
18._____ I know that Im in a good shape and take care of
myself.
19._____ I enjoy cooperating with others to achieve
common goals.
20._____ I am able to tell the difference between trivial
and significant problems.

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Add all your points from the first ten statements and then
subtract that total from the sum of the points from the 11 to
20 statements. Call the first ten total Type A2 as those
statements correlate with higher stress related medical
symptoms and cardiac arrest. Call eleven through twenty
Type B as those descriptions are coping strategies.
Subtract the A2 total from the B total to get a score called
Coping Strength. You could have a minus score but that is
not something you want to have as it indicates ridiculously
cardiac prone behavior patterns. 0 to +5 = low coping and
high probability of stress related symptoms. 6 to +15 =
about normal stress handling but has to work at it. 16 to
+25 = stress buffering personality, handles stress well. 26
to +30 = walking on water, bullet proof, probably not true.
Do it again. Cognitive realignment is how psychologists
say changing your mind. You can do that. I can do that.
Weve all done that. With practice one can become less
Type A2 and more Type B, but given the pleasure pain
principle What is the reward? The rewards are primarily
intrinsic or internal and are as follows:
Rewards for Remaining Type A2
Have or develop significantly more stress-related
symptoms regardless of life events. Have three times
higher rate of cardiac arrest then Type B. If you are
suspicious, cynical, and Type A2 cardiac arrests are five
times higher. Type A2 are four times more likely to die by
accident Type A2 do not admit to anger, do not handle
change well, or wait in lines well. Type A2 tend to be
competitive, approval seeking, secretive, and
perfectionists. TypeA2 tend to plateau at the supervisory
level because they reject learning the new. Type A2 work
better in structured jobs with lots of rules, particularly if
they enforce the rules. Misery loves company.
Rewards for Remaining Type B
Have no or develop little stress related symptoms even
under high life events stress. Have lower blood pressure,
and slow steady heart rate (resting 40 to 60).

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Type B are fluent of speech, sleep easily, eat with gusto,

and have pleasant dreams. Type B have little or no arthritic
pain, live fuller, and acquire new skills with age. Type B
have fewer psychosomatic symptoms than the general
population and live longer. Type B accomplish more and
report happier lives. Putting the choices to the
pleasure/pain test seems to support the Type B as the way
to go but there are many Type A2s running about and
seemingly happy. Frustration theory suggests that people
will continue to do something that is obviously not working
just to be doing something. We call it being decisive when
it works and fire fighting when it does not. As you can see
from the above self descriptions and how they correlate
with symptoms there is a lot to be said for examining ones
life and self to discover what makes life worth living. Pets
are good stress reducers. Dogs will forgive almost any
injustice and cats are so wonderfully flexible, curious, and
clever. We had a deaf white with blue eyes cat named
Meetzek that was a source of endless fun. From the blood
splat on the road whoever ran over him had to cut almost
to the curb. My wife, her cat, is transfixed with grief. She
cant talk. That cat had a wonderful sweetness about him. I
havent wept for a while. It is difficult to forgive some
miserable shit who would go out of his or her way to run
over a handicapped cat. I wonder if he or she was
surprised when the cat didnt try to dodge. Probably not
sharp enough to notice. Johnny Carson of the Late Show
before Jay Leno liked a rather odd person who entertained
under the name of Tiny Tim. Tiny played the ukulele, sang
Tip Toe Through The Tulips in a falsetto and offered odd
social commentary like, You are what you eat! Wisdom
from the strangest places. Time for your nutrition test.
Circle the ones below that apply to you.
In the last 24 hours:
1. Did you eat chicken, fish, veal or pasta as a main meal?
2. Did you abstain from meat at one main meal?
3. Did you have at least two servings of low fat or non fat
dairy products (cheese, milk, yogurt etc.)?

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4. Did you take at least 20 minutes to eat each meal?

5. Did you eat a healthy breakfast?
6. Did you eat at least two meals?
7. Did you eat breakfast?
8. Did you have less than two salted/sugar snacks?
9. Did you have two or less servings of caffeinated
beverages?
10. Did you have at least one serving of high fiber bread,
cereal or pasta?
11. Did you have at least six servings of fruits and
vegetables?
12. Did you take a multivitamin supplement?
13. Did you drink at least eight glasses (two quarts) of plain
or bottled water?
Did you have two or less alcoholic drinks?
14. Did you consume a well balanced diet?
15. Are you within five pounds of your most comfortable
weight?
16. Did you consume less than ten grams of salt? Did you
use canola oil or flax
oil for cooking instead of corn oil, vegetable oil, animal fats
etc.?
17. Did you consume less than 40 grams of fat?
18. Did you consume less than 2,000 calories (if female) or
2,500 calories (if
male)?
19. Did you consume more potassium than salt?
20. Did you use herbs and spices rather than salt?
Each item is worth five points. Lets hope you hit a hundred
and keep the Tiny Tim Memorial diet rolling down the tulip
petal strewn path of health. If your score is below 80.
You want a C in what you put in your body? Thats like
putting sand or sugar in your cars fuel. Let us see what
choice clues and cues we can pull out of the above list.
Nutrition is important. A lot of socially acceptable foods
arent very good for us. Salt and sugar are so prevalent in
most of our store bought food that using either is
dangerous. Supplements may be a very good idea

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particularly when government studies indicate major soil

depletion, and so is drinking lots of water and little alcohol.
Life events plus age minus nutrition minus EQ factors like
coping strength, TA and PR give us an equation that has a
high probability of predicting how well well be able to
handle stress. Must be a predictive profile someplace in
there? Ill bet you personality traits are a better predictor of
cardiac than conditioning for most folks over thirty. Losing
weight, moderate exercise, not training for marathons,
quitting smoking, eating healthy food, cutting out the salt
and sugar, eating more oily fish like salmon and trout and
meditating before starting out your day are all indicated for
dropping blood pressure. All, not one or two. Do them all
and stress will bounce off you like cold water off the
proverbial penguin. This advice is the same advice the
research indicated twenty years ago. Nothing has changed
but the stress levels of everyday life. Fear factor and
anxiety are easiest and cheapest to control through just
learning to slow down your breath. Learn to belly breathe
(The blow in the bag thang) and fool your body into feeling
everything is all right. One of the major reasons I was able
to work for GM so long was that I told a vice president at a
training event that he had a classical heart attack profile
and ought to take a vacation. He barked back that he
hadnt taken a vacation in twenty-five years and wasnt
about to now. Three months later he died with his boots on
at his desk of a massive coronary and I had a change
agent and coaching job to die for. Do you know how much
it costs a major corporation when a successful and popular
manufacturing exec has to be replaced? More than time or
a cog, for sure. Five years later we had reorganized the
platforms and created the Engine Division. The executives
and over two thousand supervisors Id coached had made
a lot of changes and I had a lot of enemies because we
often had to buck the system and stop feeding some
sacred cows. In 1994 I took my money and bought a
biotech company in Houston. Big mistake. Major stressor.
Probably took twenty years off me. I lost 2.8 million on
paper, five years, some people I really thought were

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friends, and at least a bushel of self-respect. It was a

humbling experience and if it werent for my then girl friend
Ari Marquis I would have had the opportunity to experience
being a bag person in Houston elbowing a couple of
schizophrenic fellow Vietnam Era vets out of the warm
place under the I-10 overpass. Nothing like having your
ass handed to you over a long slow period to humble you.
Takes a lot of work on the positive thinking to keep from
leaping off a tall building or developing a taste for nine
millimeter barrels. When I was living the GM corporate life I
spent my magnanimous salary putting my children through
college and traveling to Japan and China to train in my
favorite dojo or kwoon. Since my Japanese really sucks I
would often take a young martial artist with me who spoke
Japanese and could be my mouth and ears. I was
approaching fifty years of age and was finally getting to do
some of the things I had always wanted to do. There
was a much greater emphasis on using soft weapons and
stretching before and after training to reduce the chance of
injury. Techniques were taught from the basis of how
they felt rather than looked. Many of my American ninjutsu
instructors had used hard training weapons and my karate
instructors never stretched. There was less emphasis on
meditation as it was considered to be a personal tool for
self-development. I was able to train in some of the
legendary dojo as the Chinese and Japanese
respect education more than Americans, and I was treated
kindly wherever I went as the good doctor who writes
about us. I was usually able to learn a bunch of new
sword and stick techniques to take happily back to
Michigan where my colleagues thought I was crazy to
spend my time doing such dangerous stuff at my age. It
may have been crazy but it was exciting, fun for me, kept
me in good shape, and returned a bit of limberness to my
aging tendons. (Interestingly enough Cheerleading is the
most dangerous sport in America, when you look at
injuries. Martial arts arent even on the first page.)
Sometimes I must have looked like Bilbo Baggins setting
off with the elves at the end of Tolkeins

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trilogy. Stretching is probably far more important than brute

strength. Yoga can more than save your life, it can make it
fun again. If you have never tried out yoga it is never too
late. Yoga and massage will smooth out the bumpiest body
and keep you out of the way of the sword. Shiatsu and
Thai massage can reinvigorate tight muscles to help you
fight the aging process in a pleasant manner. The ancient
Taoists named the way of death as stiff and brittle and life
as soft and bending. Ive found the yoga exercise called
Greetings to the Sun very beneficial and have lately been
experimenting with the Five Tibetans as well as playing
with the Russians by integrating the very flexible and smart
art of Systema into my hoshin at the black belt level. Ive
been training with Igor in Scotland and sending my
younger spies to play with Vladimir in Toronto. When we
cant figure out a Russian technique we get Scott Sonnon
to explain in detail. Rob Williams has systemized the
healing side of hoshin into a distance learning system with
a certification program in budo massage. Mark and Tina
Lawrence who head up my Canadian dojo have helped me
put together a brilliant chi kung course also set up for
distance learning. Santiago Dobles and Tao Semko of
Umaa Tantra have been my friends and guinea pigs for
integrating chi kung and yoga into an even faster path to
enlightenment that I was teaching in the Kundalini
Awakening program. Cardiologist Mike Fenster is working
with me to develop a recovery program for those who need
heart surgery called HeartSmart. I also was privileged to
work with Rev. Trish Walker of the VOA to help street
people in Lafayette, Louisiana who were schizophrenics. I
went with her to a prison in the CCA system in Arizona and
taught my Secret Smile meditation techniques to thirtyeight men serving from 75 to 420 years for homicide. Im
not normally that charitable but it seemed a great
opportunity to test my Meditation Mastery CDs on a
captured audience, plus get a look at what a maximum
security prison was like from the inside and make a video.
Pretty scary.

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In 2002 I had broken my leg and in 2003 caught a lingering

dry cough from the wrong blood pressure medicine (six
months) after getting a flu shot and a rotator cup injury; I let
up on my moderate exercise (bad mistake). Now Im forty
pounds heavier than I would like to be and used to
coddling myself. The physical road is always rougher as
you age. As I approach 2006 and sixty plus I am going to
have to slowly build up a regimen of exercise to both
reduce the Dunlop disease and increase stamina and
stretch. Study on that.
Bibliography:
The Human Element: A Course in Resourceful Thinking.
Thomas Cleary. Shambhala
Press, 1995.
Positive Living and Health: The Complete Guide to
Brain/Body Healing and Mental
Empowerment. The Editors. Rodale Press, 1990.
Your Maximum Mind. Dr. Herbert Benson.William Morrow
and Co. 1987
Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges
Politically Correct Nutrition and
the Diet Dictocrats. Sally Fallon. New Trends Publishing,
2001.
INPALIS, LEAPS, and LAPSI Personality Inventories.
Glenn Morris. GJM, Inc. 1985.

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Chapter Seven: Budo versus

Basketball
I dont know the key to success, but the key to failure
is trying to please everyone.
Cosby
War is cruelty and you cannot refine it. Sherman
There never was a good war or a bad peace. Franklin
The first thing we must realize in life is natural selection is
similar to war and sport is not. Now that may seem harsh
but sport attempts to level the playing field so that
strengths may be contested and winners receive their just
accolades. Life, love, and war on the other hand bring out
the worst in our self and others and the survivors get to
write the history. Savateurs have the concept of malicio
which can be translated as an ability to take joy in the
confusion and defeat of ones enemy. Maliciousness gives
the skilled fighter an edge beyond technical competency
and often results in a flair for destruction. While the pen is
mightier than the sword, the sword does have the upper
hand at any given moment. Survivor is a key term. One
can survive in comfortable or brutal circumstances and I
have noticed that people living in what we in the sheltered
West might consider abominable conditions often appear
quite happy and in reality are. What amazed me as a 3rd
Infantry veteran (Vietnam Era) was how clever people
tended to get when they were determined not to let you kill
them. In Baghdad the kill rate is low on Americans in
comparison but take a look at how our VA hospitals are
filling up with the disabled and wounded from booby traps
and explosives. It does remind me of the bad old
days when belonging to the Vietnam Vets Against the War
was honorable rather than a sign of errant liberalism. Here
is a principled strategy test for martial artists. True or false:
1. _____ Speed defeats strength.
2. _____ Distance and timing defeat speed and strength.
3. _____ Simplicity tends to destroy complexity.

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4. _____ Surprise defeats distance and timing

5. _____ Soft defeats hard as water smoothes rock.
6. _____ One must study hard to learn the soft.
7. _____ One should rush to embrace the sword. is a Zen
maxim.
8. _____ Earth is destroyed by water; Water is destroyed
by fire; Fire is
destroyed by Air; Air is destroyed by Void and the false by
truth.
The sixth statement is purposively ambiguous as a form of
koan or pun. Studying hard karate to learn soft karate is a
waste of time but the study of the soft can be difficult
to the point of ineffable. All the rest are considered to be
true. Baltasar Gracian was introduced to me by Jack Cain,
Gracian was a Jesuit priest assigned to a wealthy family in
Spain in the 1600s. He wrote a number of books
commenting on how to develop greatness that are still
translated and commented on by people who are
interested in strategy and hard hitting satire. He was
somewhat mordant which worried his Church fathers
enough that they threatened him with exile if his pen
became too pointed. (Spain was home to the Inquisition
and Church and State were not too well separated in those
days though each institution had its own prisons and
courts.) Gracian reminds me of Ambrose Bierce who wrote
some chilling commentary on the American War Between
The States and may have planned the slaughter at
Chickamauga. Baltasar Gracian was a favorite of
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well as Voltaire. In his
lifetime his works were translated, plagiarized and
distributed in other lands. Just like mine. When he spoke in
public thousands showed up making him a rock star of his
day, unlike me. Two things Fr. Gracian was very clear
about. Greatness in any field took years of study or
preparation, so take your time and hide your depth while
developing your skills. The second was to be generous to
your friends, and not to waste yourself and others
frivolously. Like the ninja Gracian commented on inner and

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outer realities and that one should learn to manage

appearances as well as actions. Inner qualities like wit,
wisdom, or courage can and should be combined with
outer qualities like manners, quickness, charm, variety,
grace, and careful spontaneity. Even these guiding
principles were cautiously modified to recognize our animal
nature, Speak to the many, feel with the few. As a
chaplain in Spains royal army he exhorted and went with
the troops into battle against the invading French at Lerida,
he tended the wounded and administered extreme unction
to both Spanish and French dying. After the battle he was
called by the survivors the Father of Victory. Gracian
thought our greatest battles were with our selves and
argued that great men and women, noble warriors, able
politicians, wise magistrates, and complete scholars were
heroes, and offered up two cookbooks to speed the
ascension to power. They are much better reads for self
development than Dress for Success. Check the
bibliography. Sport fosters reliance on tactics and
techniques as the rules of sport restrain behavior. We tend
to admire athletes that compete in sports as role models
for our children and exemplars of our way of life under the
law. Chesty Puller, our pugnacious Marine General and
Lord Wellington, hero of the Napoleonic Wars, thought that
sport helped develop fighting spirit and maybe it does.
Masaaki Hatsumi, 34th soke or grandmaster of the
togakureryu ninjutsu and founder of the bujinkan
researched 280 famous and representative battles from
Ancient Greece onward and found 274 were won by
ambush or other forms of unconventional warfare. Only six
were cases where conventional strength opposing strength
warfare won the day. The warning is very clear. When I
mustered out of the army in 1966 we werent allowed to
wear camouflage Stateside. Eventually somebody woke up
and decided we should be harder to kill and quit
pretending American soldiers never hid in battle. Our
fearless leaders seemed to have forgotten the lessons of
Rogers Rangers, riflemen, and the Revolutionary War. I
suggest reading H. John Poole, USMC retired as a

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cautionary voice of military wisdom. I notice that the Iraq

warriors have not been taught to darken their patches and
brass in some battalions. Seems a small thing but the
yellow chevrons, bars, and the shoulder flags red, white,
and blue make fine targets for the sniper eye whether the
uniform is sand and rock or forest dapple. You take out the
communication and the leaders first. My father was a
wrestler, football lineman, shortstop, and boxer; a life-long
fan of the sweet science and often went out of his way to
point out what I liked was dirty fighting. It did me no good
to argue that anyone who attacked me would probably not
be wearing gloves and probably would be armed. My being
a skinny, bookish, wuss seemed to escape his notice too.
Jujutsu, to me, was a godsend. Dad almost had a seizure
watching the first moonwalk because he had won a debate
in college on the premise that Man shall never reach the
moon. He even had a sermon or two in his filing cabinets
around the idea that Space was Gods and Man Belongs
on Earth! I dont think he had an original thought after the
40s and his ideas of good nutrition probably added to his
Alzheimers. His rules concerning fairness did not help him
outside the ring. He was a good man, served the Methodist
church his whole life, put his kids through college, coached
and refereed wrestling for thousands of athletes, but he
wont be remembered on a national and international scale
of immortality like Gracian. He was more of a tactician than
a strategist and even though he knew his Augustine he did
not understand rhetoric beyond the pulpit. His warriors
walk was limited to the arena of his church, family, and
neighborhood. His strength was not much dimmed by the
predations of Alzheimers on his mind. In his 80s he still
played par golf though he no longer knew where or who
had put him on the course with balls and sticks. Research
indicates moderate amounts of regular walking boosts
brain function in sedentary people. Alzheimers damages
the body mind and spirit over the diminishing years. It often
begins with depression, then anxiety, and irritability.
Psychoses erupt accompanied with paranoid delusions
and hallucinations. Speech is often impaired as eating and

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sleep disorders emerge. The body stoops, feet shuffle, and

struggle to hold the bladder and remember to dress
properly is forgotten along with the names and progression
of dates fading into the eternal now of the animal brain.
Debilitated most victims of Alzheimers fall to pneumonia or
some other deadly infection. More than four million
Americans suffer this long and gruesome death and those
numbers are expected to treble during this century as
another revenge factor in living longer. The latest research
shows that people with mentally taxing jobs are statistically
less likely to develop Alzheimers but the dietary escape
window may close years before cognitive decline is
noticed. Although federal agencies warn consumers to
avoid consumption of fish due to mercury contamination, a
diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids seems to prevent memory
loss. The battle to wrest a good life is not limited to human
opposition and one may be a victor or loser in lifes
continuing war with death regardless of ones compassion
or ethical stances. Hard choices not taken can also be
deadly in small things chosen. Life is not sport though
sometimes a game playing attitude makes it more fun or
gives you an edge. When I was in college I discovered the
works of Stephen Potter. He was a subtle satirist that wrote
a series of books on how to cleverly put your opponents off
balance in most skill situations, in other words how to win
without actually cheating by rattling them in such a fashion
their expertise is thwarted. His books on manship taught
the art of the ploy and the escape, and gave handy
examples to try. In college I worked them on a chess
champion from the Netherlands and even though I lost the
match he was so enraged he spat at me and then took a
swing. His team mates wrestled him to the door and
dragged him screaming invectives down the hall. I always
regarded the loss as a moral victory. I knew I could beat
him if I were a better player. He was tipped over because
he thought I had given him the game out of boredom.
Years later, after I went back to school on the GI Bill, I saw
him at a lecture at the Penn State Chess Club. He was

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lecturing on the Russians. When he saw me in the back of

the room he grabbed the podium and couldnt continue. I
left the club and never went back as I knew I wouldnt be
welcome. Potter gave me the insight on how to rub him
raw even though he was a far superior player and I didnt
even resort to trash talk. The set of books were out of
print in the 50s and Holt Rinehart & Winston made them
available again in the 70s as The Complete Upmanship. It
is out of print again but well worth finding on ebay (The
chapters on wooing and politics are priceless.). Bobby
Fischer the greatest American chess master was so good
at stressing out his opponents that many were hospitalized
after a tournament. His books on chess will levitate a good
beginner into an expert faster than any other writer on the
game. It is a shame he is so singular and poor at people
skills, but he is an awesome player and a really good
teacher. Chess can be a lot of fun as long as you dont get
too ego involved with the win. My father quit playing me
when I was eleven and I always thought it was because he
found me childishly unchallenging until years later I
realized he hadnt beaten me for a couple of months. I kept
playing my kids after they read their Fischer even though I
seldom got another checkmate. There are many lessons in
chess beyond winning and losing. I find the average player
has to play me about fifty times before he or she can beat
me. Most good players can get me after a game or two. I
had Garth Clarke, a very good tournament player for a
roomie at Penn State. We played about five hundred
games over the years. I won eight. The last time we played
I won two in a row. Four hundred and ninety three games
to go before I can ask for a handicap. Watching Kobe and
Shaq do their thang has provided some interesting drama
in a game more and more dominated by giants. Maybe the
NBA should go to a bigger court and higher baskets. Ive
actually watched the women pros more often than the men
the last couple of years which probably makes my sister
happy. I took my daughter to a couple of Comets games
because I wanted her to see that the game could be
played by smaller people. It was probably wasted effort as

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the women are obviously pumping iron and getting bigger.

Anyway the title of this chapter was more for alliteration
than subject matter. You may have noticed that the
discussion is more to exploiting weakness whether
biological, psychological, or skills. Enough of basket ball
and back to budo. Japanese martial arts with a do or po at
the end serve the dual purpose of combining physical and
spiritual development. Both can be translated as way or
tao meaning their practice can be used as a means to
achieve enlightenment in this lifetime. No pie in the sky bye
and bye. The idea that spiritual development can
transcend the horrors of war is alien to Western thinking
but is a major theme in the esoteric practices of Asia,
hence budo, the war way. By embracing and facing the
sword one learns to calm ones mind and face their fears
and death. Combat arts are concerned with living and
dying more than winning and losing. Survival is the primary
concern and that makes them extremely interesting and
very different from sport. The internal martial arts like chi
kung are even concerned with longevity and spiritual
development. My old friend Dr. Cheng-De Wu has written a
foreword to the best book on Chi Kung I have ever seen,
Qigong Empowerment. It covers medical, meditative,
religious, military, and general energy cultivation with good
explanations and plenty of pictures. It is in the
bibliography. (If you need hands on guidance go to my
Canadian hoshintao chi kung instructors Mark and Tina
Lawrence.) Hatsumi-soke has often said the primary skill
study of the eighteen warrior skills of the ninja is spiritual
development and that the end goal of bujinkan budo
taijutsu is to create better people. Morihei Ueshiba, the
creator of aikido said the same thing of his art, aikido.
Since most of the people who come to the martial arts are
looking to kick some ass, the self-selection factor for budo
leads to some gnarly associations on the path.
Occasionally Ive been asked to give my seminar to
aikidoists on samurai and ninja combat sword techniques
and it has been great fun.

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Robert Cowham, in London, returned giri by showing me

some aikido grappling that had very nasty potential
problems for the attacker if he or she did not submit to a
more peaceful solution. Most of the aikido I had seen up to
that point was overly dependent on the cooperative skill of
the uke. When you are in a strange dojo dont be afraid to
talk to people and get out and drink and eat with them. Do
they seem to find harmony in their lives or do they tend to
paranoia? How do they treat each other, their children,
their money, dissidents? What do their faces tell you. Are
they happy? Healthy? What is their energy like? Some
dojo seem to instill fear and misery, others want approval,
some too aggressive, and some too humble because they
really should advertise. Budo can be just like picking a job,
school, or church. You have to have some standard above
omniscient. We all know that doesnt work. Dim Mak or
death touch is a major skill base in real combat arts. It is
very important for a practitioner of the softer arts to learn
this arcane set of skills at the least for self protection as
many of the strikes have consequences that are not readily
apparent. There are three types of death touch: (1) bone
and muscle, where one breaks bone and destroys tendons
and muscles by where and how hard one strikes to drive
bone shards into organs; (2) vascular and organ strikes,
which are somewhat effected by the time of day, where
blows are directed to create ruptured blood vessels,
hematomas that can starve limbs and organs into delayed
problems, and organ disruption; (3) nerve and meridian,
subtle damage to the nerves can have psychological as
well as physiological results and at the highest level disturb
the flow of life force inside and outside the body. Usually
the third type is only taught to healers. Fear of this type of
interference is one of the reasons that many Chinese
practitioners avoid being touched. Our hoshin body magic
skills teach thirty eight points drawn from both Chinese and
Japanese systems and include the rarely taught mu and
shu points that counteract damage. Counteract points are
really handy when you goof doing tai chi, jujutsu, karate, or
ninjutsu, and go too hard.

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If your martial art doesnt teach pressure points, well too

bad. Its hard to be a hero when your heart has stopped,
you cant make your lungs work, or your bladder just
released. Definitely helps eliminate the size and strength
factor when you arent wearing body armor. I occasionally
get professional football players and wrestlers to train with
me. These guys are huge. One night one of the guards
asked me if I could take him. I replied, I think I can, but
you will be so pissed off and embarrassed by what Ill do
that you probably wont want to train with me anymore if
you survive. You are just too big, quick, and strong for me
to show any mercy. He dropped that line of inquiry. Hed
seen enough to make him ask. Notice how I used my Sun
Tzu in this conversation. In ninjutsu, avoiding the fight can
be as important as winning. If there can be no gratification
in the win, then there is little reason for the fight. If you
present yourself as a hopeless loser with physiological
problems like drool and displaced hip youll seldom be
attacked by a warrior, though you might attract a predator.
When I worked as a bodyguard and a bouncer sometimes I
would escalate the consequences in conversation that
discouraged a potential fighter by appearing to be more
than a little blood lusty. Now nobody attacks another
human being unless they think they can win or beat
them into submission or death. In a real attack your
assailant is going to keep after you until you go down and
then he or she will stomp you, or kick you, or finish you off
with a weapon. If your avoidance skills dont include
sensing an attack and getting out of the way then youd
better work on some simple, split second responses to
getting hit. Getting hit is never fun because real serious
people hit you with weapons. They usually invite their
friends too, so you had better play with the idea of multiple
attackers. After Id trained savateur Dr. Kevin Menard, he
became the oldest man to win silver gloves ever and with
bad knees. You have to fight fifteen rounds of kick boxing,
some with multiple opponents. His opponents complained
after the match that they were not able to hit him with any
power as he was always slipping away. Avoidance skills

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again. Avoidance should include escapes. No matter what

other people may say fighting against weapons with your
bare hands almost always results in you being injured so
you need to run, or attack in a manner that leaves your
opponent confused, severely injured, unconscious, or
dying. Which takes me to another point about combat arts.
Most of them teach you how to use ancient weapons you
cant carry around with you. In fact the police will probably
object strongly to you walking about with your sword,
nunchaku, or pistol. Learn to look handicapped/challenged
and you can carry/limp around with your walking cane. A
scarf or t-shirt can become as deadly a strangling tool as a
chain weapon if you know how to make the crooked
straight. You really should know how to shoot, and pay for
the concealed carry course and license. Better to have and
not need, than to need and not have. Real combat arts get
you out of the dojo and into various types of terrain which
means you have to be stretched, balance aware, and able
to deal with different types of clothing. Your footwork
should keep you standing or allow you to move on varied
surfaces. High kicks dont work on wet grass or gravel,
stuff like that can save you a lot of pain and
embarrassment. Martial arts like hoshin, systema, tai chi,
or ninjutsu that are
principle based allow you to figure out what you can do
with your body rather than force your body to adapt to a
technique (as in sport) depending on the control needs of
the teacher. Little things make a big difference. Do you
lead with your right, rather than square off, to protect the
heart from the blade? Do you know how to protect and
attack the genitals because you wont have a cup? Can
you turn anything that you pick up into a useful weapon?
Do you have choices built into the techniques so you can
negotiate with the police if necessary, though we all know
you will be farther ahead to just fade away. Ive said most
of this before in my martial arts books but this is a different
audience that may not know about such life rewarding
strategies. There is a concept cherished by most traditional
teachers called Oral Tradition

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Only that restrains some knowledge from being written

down so that personal teachings and relationships
between expert practitioners can develop. This is a little
different from the use of esoteric sound in language like
Sanskrit. Ive studied ninjutsu for twenty-three years with
Masaaki Hatsumi, grandmaster of bujinkan budo taijutsu. I
have taken lessons from his shihan, Seino, Shiraishi, and
Nagato. I was with Stephen Hayes for six years and four
years with Daron Navon. Twenty years with Kevin Millis
and four years with Dave Bolin and Richard Cearly. Dick
Severance, Greg Kowalski, Greg Cooper, and Cheng De
Wu have been martial friends since back in the eighties
and I did a few Yang Jwing-Ming chin-na seminars at Dr.
Wus in the nineties. Ive done seminars with skilled
professors in savate, isshinryu, gung fu, silat, systema, etc.
Dr. Joe Adriance has six Mexican ninjutsu dojo and is
opening others farther south. He is fluent in Spanish and
Japanese and his Ph. D is in cultural anthropology. He has
discovered more about the inner secrets of ninjutsu than
my stroll into ethnography. Ill travel a couple of hours to
study with him. I like studying with people who are intense
and knowledgeable. This is my hobby and I dont have
much time so I want to share time with the best. You may
have never heard of these guys or schools but they are all
legendary in our little world of expertise. Giri demands I
thank them for offering me their life preserving techniques
both ura and omote. It is like taking a lesson from a
bowling or tennis instructor. Private lessons with the
professional will speed up your learning. The subject
matter is what you are paying for. You want some secret
techniques? You buy some private lessons and go to the
pros seminars not the local storefront. You may still not
get the best stuff because you dont know how to ask. Oral
Tradition demands that the student has to invite the
vampire to cross the threshold.
Hoshin teaches self-protection principles drawn from
espionage schools around the world. Its techniques are
quiet, simple, and very effective because at heart were
spies and arent supposed to be there. I was taught

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defendu and some jujutsu by my uncle after the Korean

War (Yes, I am older than dirt.) and got a refresher in
ONeill Quick Kill during my Vietnam Era enlistment.
ONeill was the British and Canadian selfdefense system
developed for special operations/commando units by the
old China hands for WWII. ONeill is the base art of hoshin
with bits and pieces of all the other schools we have
slipped into providing collections of techniques and
occasional improvements. If you want a taste of the Anglo
WW II espionage schools fighting skills, they are
described in the recently reprinted Canadian WWII spy
schools training manual How to be a Spy. The European
spy network was run by the perfidious military intelligence
of Albions nobility. Very Old School in European terms,
still pissed off from the Huns predations in WWI and who
knows whatever insults back and forth over the centuries.
No quarter given or asked. Even Rome trembled when the
Anglo women painted themselves blue and drove the
chariots into battle. (The place we ran away from because
these bastards had it locked up for their own, but the
Germans were truly into madness this time. What the
Germans did not know was the Brits had stolen one of their
Enigma machines at the beginning of the war in Poland.
We had their codes.) Real family values. I thought it was
so cool. Elite troops secrets. ONeill gave me the skills to
win most of the time until I met up with the ninja. Back to
school. I bet Im the only spy who spies on the spies for a
hobby for fun. Everybody pulls out their best stuff when it is
time for war and they are actually deep into it. Col. Greg
Radabaugh, (retired like a SEAL) a former top spook
against the Russians for the Air Force often lectures on
some aspect of interrogation or propaganda techniques at
our Kaizen (annual gathering of enthusiasts). One year we
had an astral travel expert he used give a lecture on far
seeing, once we passed the Geller spoon bending who
cares silliness some of us were peeking into each others
houses drawing pictures of things accurately enough to
surprise each other! A statistically significant number of
hits in a truly blind study but enhanced by skilled teachers

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and perhaps too much feedback to be considered

academically certified science. Lenora described this
California aikido and yoga teachers study down to where
the cockatoo had his perch. We hadnt a clue about him,
he just showed up after being on the hoshinchat for a
couple of years and joined the ryu. The Eskimo shaman
had similar techniques for moving in the void as do the
ninja. Im not so sure of them as some of my yoga friends
but Hatsumi is a master and I sure hope he can find a
worthy apprentice for serious dream magic. He even
signs his sendings with an animated chop. Way over my
head. Higher chakra and tantra combined with an artists
ability to visualize. The military stuff isnt as frilly with local
color but the Colonel still likes it. You can make up your
own mind once you get dipped in it. (Experiential learning
was my thang at the Uni. Doctorate even.) Budo, as you
can see, has some esoteric aspects beyond punching,
throwing and kicking. Even the infantry has to gather
intelligence. Dim Mak is just acupressures dark side and
great preventative medicine. You may be on the battle field
or fleeing for your life. I have lectured and demonstrated
energy healing to medical colleges in Florida and Sydney,
Australia. The look on some MDs faces when something
works without physical contact is worth the fee. Budos
meditative practices have to work in the shortest time
with greatest effect. The kundalini is one hell of a flight/fight
response. Healing of subtle injuries was probably one of
the early forms of mental therapy and works pretty well for
more mundane injuries as Rob Williams who is nationally
certified in massage therapy and heads up our budo
massage therapy can verify. Budo as a spiritual path
includes conflict reduction, problem-solving, and meditation
as a physical reality. Turning away the sword and creating
friendship through recognizing respectable behavior is not
quite religious but similar enough to be called philosophy.
The remarkable and mystic states reported occasionally by
sportsmen at the heights of their game, i.e., illumination,
ecstasy, out of body experiences, altered perceptions of
time and space, and exceptional feats of strength and

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courage are sought, analyzed and replicated in the higher

schools of budo. The better schools have their benchmarks
similar to the religious heritages, but budo is purposively,
measurably, providing a means of experiencing spiritual
development through physical and meditational activity.
What happens in sport by serendipity is purposeful in budo
and a high priority among the people who tend to be
secretive as a traditional understanding of how things work
best. No real malice intended, the old once burned, twice
shy kind of respect for human nature. If you think such stuff
does not exist in sport but only in a temple you should read
some humanistic psychologists like Michael Murphy, one
of the founders of Esalen. He really gets into the physical
work to get spiritual. The Tibetan Buddhists have become
a great resource for those trying to understand the
traditional Buddhist ways. Locked above the clouds for
centuries with minimal exposure to the rest of the world
they have had a lot of time on their hands to develop idle
ways. The harshness of their environment has made death
a constant guest at all their studies. The lamas are parting
with huge amounts of amazing techniques for both medical
and physical development. Santiago Dobles and Tao
Sempko my yoga and silat instructors both study with
different lama from different sect. Ive had three initiations
into the bon (shamanistic) techniques that lama claim go
back 18,000 years. They very closely reflect American
Indian shamanistic techniques for subduing the ego while
also placating the demons and abandoned ghosts and
spirits. I can verify their power and efficacy, as for the
age. That is a long time and impossible to prove. Lama
Surya Das is an American (originally just plain Miller)
lineage holder in Dzogchen was introduced to me by Eric
Lee this year. This guy lived in Tibet and India for thirty
years and does some organizational work for the Dalai
Lama. Im not much for organized religion beyond the role
of keeper of traditional wisdom (Chicken soup for the soul
may soothe but what are the long-term side effects?). I
have authority problems when dealing with the omniscient
ignorant. The Reverend Das has written a very lucid

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text for awakening the natural self through following eight

steps to enlightenment. His book is a light-hearted offering
of basic techniques and fundamentals of Tibetan
Buddhism to the darker magics of shamanistic bon. He
writes a great manual and clarifies the meanings of
practice like only an experienced practitioner can. I find
myself shaking my head repeatedly as I read his
interpretation of various ritual. He goes in the bibliography
for those who wonder why so many martial artists seek
refuge in Tibetan Buddhism.
Robert Anton Wilson claims the martial arts will make or
keep you sane. Like Crowley his advice almost gets you
there but relies on anodynes, over-intellectualizes, and
does not embody the offered wisdom. The Russian
researchers report normal distribution in the human
population for self-transformative capacity. Published
research from their sport and medical communities indicate
they have developed techniques for selective control of
various psychological and physiological processes, even
for the growth of muscle fiber and affecting cellular and
interestingly from a quantum aspect, subcellular
processes. At the very least martial arts force you to be in
the moment, or present. The Russians claim development
of a system for Psychic self-regulation (PSR) combining
yoga, hypnosis, autogenic training, and the martial arts.
Everybody, has it to some degree, according to them, but
are unaware of it. Some use it subconsciously, often
contributing to the development of disease like chronic
fatigue when they burn their kidneys and adrenals, or chi
sickness when they develop more energy than their bodies
can sustain. But in budo we have ways of healing those
little problems if caught soon enough. In fact we have ways
of teaching that I suspect are very similar. Now, I ask you.
Isnt all this more fun than basketball? And you can play at
a pretty high level for a lot longer than name a giant. Here
is what our annual training weekend is like.

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KaiZen 2005 Lafayette, Louisiana

August 26, 27, and 28 (Hoshin Penache, BodyMagick,
Healing, and
EnergyWork)
Lafayette American Legion, Surrey St. Friday thru Sunday
$100.00 for Hoshinroshiryu and WWN members and early
sign-ups; $150 for non-ryu
members or at door. $50.00 dollars a day. ($25.00 for
WWN members for Friday alone.)
Friday
(10 to 5)Meditation for the Reduction of Psychological and
Physical Trauma:
Secret Smile, Five Point Breathing, Meditation Dos and
Donts. Open to
Wholistic Wellness Network members. Experiential and
Class Lectures
Friday Evening
(7 to 9) Get Together at the Legion. Receive tourist
packets, t-shirts, pocket rope.
Play some games and get some safety techniques. KaiZen
Begins. BYO
Saturday
(9 to 10) Hoshin Stretching. (New stretching curriculum
developed by Steve
Sonnier and Nate Bryant of the Lake Charles Hoshin
Hombu.
(10 to 11) Hoshin Dim Mak with Dr. Death (Stealing your
opponents strength
through Pain and Knowledge)
(11-12) Short Stick, Knife Handle, Fountain Pen,
Magazine, Book Weaponry and
other techniques for rendering the pen mightier than the
sword in restricted areas.
Lunch (prepared by our own chefMudge)
(13 to 15) Hoshin Pocket Rope as taught by TobyMallet of
the Swamp Devil
Dojo of Lafayette. Scarves, siens, marbles, and t-shirts
thrown in so you can go

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armed but look so harmless.

(15 to 16)Hoshin Fundamentals of Cane /Walking stick
East and West. The
challenge of looking challenged. Set ups that give you the
edge. Learn a weapon
superior to the sword that police are restricted by law from
taking away from you.
(16 to 17) Hoshin Tanto/folder/straight razor. Blade
surprises you can create.
(17 to 20) Dinner. Scatter out with Cajun guides and forage
in some of the fine
area restaurants.
(20 to 21) Firewalk. Toast your tootsies and try a gomo
wish ceremony.
Sunday
(9 to 10) Chakra opening, sensing, and basic
healing/energy work. Description of
the new distance learning programs necessary for third
dan and above. from
Kawartha and Rob Williams.
(10 to 12) Massages for upper body with Rob Williams.
Lunch (ChefMudge)
(13 to 16) Specific Healing Techniques. Chakra
Diagnostics, Personality and
Health, Meridian Repair, Headache Removal, Energy
Rebalancing, etc.
Awarding of Ranks and Closing

Bibliography:
A Pocket Mirror for Heroes. Baltasar Gracian, trans. By
Christopher Maurer. Currency
Doubleday, 1996.
The Way of the Ninja: Secret Techniques. Masaaki
Hatsumi, Ph.D. trans. by Ben Jones.
Kodansha, 2004.
How To Be A Spy: The World War II SOE Training Manual.
Denis Rigden. Secret

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History Files, Dundurn, 2004

The Complete Upmanship. Stephen Potter. Holt, Rinehart
& Winston, 1971.
Sports Psychology: Mental Skills for Physical People.
Harris & Harris. Leisure Press,
1984.
In The Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports. Murphy
& White. Penguin Arkana,
1995.
Bobby Fischer Goes To War: How the Soviets Lost the
Most Extraordinary Chess Match
of All Time. Edmonds &Eidinow. Harper Collins, 2004.
Qigong Empowerment. Master Shou-Yu Liang & WenChing Wu. The Way of the
Dragon, Publishing, 1997
Civil War Stories. Ambrose Bierce. Dover Thrift Editions,
1994.
Hoshinroshiryu Dim Mak. Glenn Morris. Hoshinroshiryu
Publications, 2001
Awakening The Buddha Within: Tibetan Wisdom for the
Western World. Lama Surya
Das. Broadway Books, 1997.
Yoga: 101 Essential Tips. Sivenanda Yoga Vedanta
Centre. Dobling Kindersley, 1995.
Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia. Thomas A.
Greene, Ed. ABC-CLIO, 2001.
Phantom Soldier: The Enemys Answer to US Firepower.
H. John Poole. Posterity Press,
2001.
The Tigers Way. H. John Poole. Posterity Press, 2003.
The Hiram Key. Christopher Knight & Robert Lomas. Fair
Winds, 2005.
The Great Tao. Stephen Chang. Tao Publishing, 1987.

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Chapter Eight: Surviving Comfortably

in a Complex Global Society
He has sat on the fence for so long the iron has
entered his soul. Lloyd George
There is nothing wrong with you that reincarnation
wont cure. Leonard
He has the attention span of a lightening bolt.
Redford
It is not enough to do your best; you must know what
to do, and THEN do your best. Deming
We live in global times as well as a turbulent global
economy. Lets see what you know about how the USA
stands in comparison to other countries. True or False:
1._______The USA is the worlds largest democracy.
2._______The USA has the highest infant survival rate of
any industrial country.
3._______A large percentage of American voters regularly
turn out for elections.
4._______American high school students lead the world in
math, science, and
biology.
5._______The American dollar is the strongest currency in
the world.
6._______America has the largest bank in the world.
7._______America has the largest standing army in the
world.
8._______America is the only country still in space and
planetary exploration.
9._______The United States is recognized around the
world as the leader in
entertainment, music, and movies.
10.______The United States is famous world-wide for its
open borders and free
immigration policies.

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11.______The USA is the worlds largest manufacturer of

televisions.
12.______The USA has never fought an offensive war as
it favors peacekeeping.
All of the above, but number nine, are false. All are
markers of great countries and growing economies except
number seven. Seven aint lucky in this case. It used to be
Russia, might be China, but North Korea has a huge army.
North Korea is governed by a dictator the world generally
regards as crazier than Hitler and definitely as odd. But he
does have that humungous hungry horde of military which
means he doesnt have to play nice so everyone is careful
around him. He has found a way to employ the
unemployable young males (unlike the Arabs), eventually
the coup will unseat him if he doesnt do the war thing to
distract the populace. He claims seven nuclear weapons
and occasionally rattles them at his opponents like the
proverbial saber or Saddam with his hunting rifle. He also
likes golf, has one of the worlds largest collections of
cartoons, and loves Daffy Duck so he cant be all bad. He
has a well-rounded personality by his standards. As a
seminar leader I get around the world quite a bit. The last
decade has been allowing me to visit Europe more often
and get to know my English and Dutch friends better. In
the early 60s as a young soldier I made it my fun to hitchhike from Greece to Spain and out to Wales from London.
Europe then was still struggling to repair the damages of
World War II, we were fighting the Cold War, and Vietnam
was a fast approaching shadow cloud on the horizon. It
wasnt until about five years ago I began to realize that my
European friends had a better life style than my own. My
black belt Vincent Biemans made fun of the customs
inspector who accused him of trying to sneak into the
United States by laying out the advantages he had as a
Dutch citizen versus us. The inspector was floored, he
really thought we were the shining beacon held high for the
rest of the world. Vincent didnt even get into how many of
the victimless crimes that

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fill our prisons in the USA are simply legal and taxed in
Holland. He mostly pointed out advantages in medicine,
education, and tax laws. The choices we have been
making lately have led many young Europeans to believe
the old continent now has the vision of the future with
strength based on education and business cooperation
rather than military might. This new United States of
Europe could well replace us as the world focus for
wealth, well-being, and security. The new Europe has
expanded on the American Dream and in the process was
becoming a viable alternative economic democracy. In the
early 90s I thought the European Union had little chance of
success given the ancient rivalries concerned, but it is now
the first transnational political entity with twenty-five
members and a thriving economy even if it cant yet come
to a constitutional agreement. The Euro now competes
with the dollar and is used by 455 million people. What is
the big deal? While we have been letting our infrastructure
rust, wasting our wealth on foreign wars, and supervising
the decline of our public schools through conservative
divine neglect, the EU is fast eclipsing us in education,
science, banking, engineering, and construction. In the
Global Fortune 500 Europeans have 61 companies while
the USA has 50. Rather than ignore social problems for
political gain, the European model has emphasized
community and cooperation resulting in significant gains in
quality of life advantages such as lower crime rates, lower
poverty, and cleaner environment. People arent afraid to
stroll around in their neighborhoods. While we have been
devoting our lives to the relentless pursuit of happiness
through personal wealth, the Europeans have opted for
more balance, spending far more time with family and
friends, longer vacations, better food, socialized education
and medicine. They claim they work to live well. Goods
and services cost more, and the taxes are higher but
people are getting what they pay for. Schools are not war
zones, medical rates are not prohibitive, and there is a
remarkable lack of national jingoism. Some the police
forces in Europe dont even carry

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firearms but they do have their SWAT equivalents hidden

away for serious business. As the dollar weakens against
the Euro it cheapens US goods and services making us a
more viable tourist attraction as well as helps revive the
manufacturing. Europeans get hit hardest when the dollar
is weak because their exports become more expensive.
The Japanese and Chinese have little choice but to hold
on to their American real estate investments because large
scale dumping will ruin their investment. Both Asian
countries hold a large dollar horde close to a thousand
billion which they have been building for years. The larger
our deficit the weaker the dollar and the more important
become our creditors. When Korea sold off its dollar horde
recently, it was very bad news to people who market
money and the American economy. One of the major
reasons the United States has been able to dominate the
global economy has been its awesome lead in science and
technology, a side effect of the post WW II GI Bill.
However, a quick peek at the Physical Review, a top
science journal, reveals that the number of breakthrough
papers published by Americans has fallen from 61 percent
in the early 80s to 29 percent last year. This is a side effect
of conservative politics interfering in scientific education.
China is now the heavy hitter submitting on the average a
thousand papers a year. We have long taken Asia for
granted but India is producing more than Bollywood, and
now is becoming the dominant leader in computer
geekdom and medicine. China and India are proud ancient
civilizations with large internal economies no longer
dependent on exports to the West/us. That means the
competition for world markets and prestige is up for grabs
and we arent doing so well as a leader or holding the high
ground in quality. If we continue to choose guns over
butter we may remain the best armed country in the world
but our trade and economic deficits will not just impoverish
us but our future generations. We are beginning to
resemble England in the last days of the Raj when she
fought wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Sudan, while we

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waxed strong building our technological and cultural might

through the public school system, and then after WW II,
with the GI Bill. If we are not careful, the rise of the USA,
(replacing the entrepreneurs of Western Europe of the
17th century to lead the world,) may not be followed, by the
expected Pax Americana, but the Asian economic
revolution of the 21st century. While we waste our finest
resources and limited substance creating wars (instead of
commando raids based on good intelligence) and insulting
our natural allies by leading our own Holy War against
Arab Islamic fascists, China and India are playing strong
cards at the table for players in the New World Order. Of
course this whole scenario is just based on emerging
economic factors and since the Bush regime has shown no
respect for our usual rules of engagement, let alone the
Geneva Conventions, perhaps well try to solve those
problems militarily too. After all, he who got the gold rules.
Right! Right? One of the great contributions of India to the
world is the Bhagavad Gita. It is normally thought of as a
holy scripture, like the Christian Bible. It begins on a
battlefield and teaches, among other things, how to do
ones duty and still maintain mental equilibrium. The Gita
tells us not to become attached to the fruits of our labors
because comparison will bring inevitable disappointment
as the ego is fed by greed and envy. The answer to how to
be a good leader is to manage yourself and choices. The
book also advises one to perform with loving attention to
the divine creating suitable conditions for skill development
and excellence. Like the Bible for the Christian, the Gita is
the cornerstone of religious guidance and success in life
for the Hindu. Some of its prescriptions for success
include:
(1) Develop and cultivate a strong philosophy of how to live
(2) Identify with an inner core of self and be self-sufficient
(3) Striving for excellence in any endeavor is worship
(4) Do not think in terms of judgments, like good and evil
(5) Strengthen yourself so you can enjoy life
(6) Work for the good of all beings

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(7) Remain steadfast when facing contrary impulses and

emotions
The battlefield of Kurukshetra and discussions of strategy
by Lord Krishna to Arjuna may seem alien to our way of
interacting with the Deities but it should be remembered
that the Shakyamuni Buddha was first a Hindu warrior
prince, and it was that training that gave him the discipline
to pursue, develop, and preserve enlightenment as a
structured developmental path. Anyway, the above ideas
for maintaining under pressure were good advice a couple
of thousand years ago, and indicate that the competition
from India will not only seek the high ground but will be
staunch. The Chinese have practiced the craft of
intelligence gathering and developed and tested theories
concerning the ruthless deployment of all kinds of agents
with dramatic success beyond any Western nation. They
have produced more tomes concerning spy craft than the
much studied Art of War by Sun Tzu. They have produced
works concerning the deployment, insertion, recruitment,
and control of agents; covert practices such as
entrapment, assassination, subversion, and sexual
exploitation; which have modern applications. There are
manuals exploring counter intelligence and military
intelligence to include objectives, analysis, and
interpretation. As a little known example of their
cleverness, chemical analysis of pottery fragments by
archeologists reveal the Chinese were making rice and
grape wine over two thousand years before beer was
brewed in the Middle East some five thousand years ago.
The past decade has seen a resurgence of Chinese
interest in ancient writings from Confucius to Hein Fei-tsi
who resembles Machiavelli. Sun Tzu has had our attention
for about fifty years and has become everyones war
manual whether terrorist, guerrilla, insurgent,
businessman, or traditional military strategist. The Chinese
take a long view of history where we tend to forgive and
forget. This means some cold dishes of vengeance may be
served up for our

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edification over the next few years. We live in interesting

times. The Japanese are expert at industrial intelligence
but the entry of the Chinese into more and more Western
markets will probably raise the bar above what I taught GM
supervisors to watch for back in the 80s when negotiating
with the Japanese. The reorganization of the CIA and
other intelligence agencies seemed too politicized to
escape collective groupthink. Reminds me of Nixon and
Salinger back when. Kennedys advisers didnt think the
Cuban invasion force needed air cover in the 60s because
of groupthink, and weve had to put up with the
embarrassing presence of Fidel ever since Groupthink
occurs most often in organizations that seek those of
similar beliefs. Terrorists are one thing, our commerce,
trade, and livelihood are another that may fail to be
protected by a government too concerned with marketing a
war and the next election. Remember how five years ago
we were hammering the Chinese for trying to steal
computer secrets for their missile programs? Big Blue has
sold its PC manufacturing business to Lenovo, a Chinese
firm. Lenovo has captured thirty percent of the Chinese
market using Chinese characters on its keyboards. Lenovo
hopes to move from regional heavyweight to global giant.
IBM has also sold 10,000 employees to Lenovo avoiding
layoffs and changes in pay. Lenovo will be able to exploit
some advantages that western
firms dont enjoy. The Chinese government is a significant
shareholder as the Communist party no longer seeks a
Marxist economy. As more deals like this go down the
Made in China is going to reflect, like India, that the
product was financed, researched, and designed there too.
China, like Japan, has a long history of seeing business as
war. Westerners will have to deal with care, and may have
already made choices that will doom our ability to compete
in another ten years, as new technologies proliferate and
replace the need for extant skilled workers with newer
markets and workers who are more sophisticated. Matthew
Slaughter, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, points

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out that the labor force in the USA is diminishing, yet our
immigration policy since 9/11 is more restrictive. Also
innovation tends to come from educated, experienced,
motivated workers not the classic white coats in the labs.
IBM just sold a lot of computer innovation to China. We
have to learn to think locally as well as globally. We have
lost over 1.5 million jobs to China since 1989. I am not
advocating a yellow peril position, just common sense. We
are not the only players in the Pacific pond. When USA
jobs move off shore they take a lot of wages with them.
Catherine Mann of the Institute for International
Economics, suggests we can no longer ignore the
costs of globalization. It is obvious to her that unless the
average worker gets some help in skill development well
soon be competing for the bottom jobs on the lower rungs
of the technology ladder. I think she is right about the
problem not being outsourcing but the long term
competitiveness of our workers. We are focusing too much
on corporate advantage for the short term and losing our
best people resources for the long term. Back in the 60s
when I was at Penn State the weather wizards noticed
holes in the atmosphere caused by fluorocarbons being
released. The Republican Party under Nixon took the
position that this warming trend was debatable and trying
to fix it has become one of those proverbial political hot
potatoes. It is forty years later now and the world has
become more interesting. Weather has definitely been
changing in the last forty years. The incident of skin cancer
has tripled since I was a kid and is now epidemic in
Australia. Droughts are common and most Western
farmers have adjusted to drier weather. Global warming?
Seven of the last ten summers have been in the top ten for
hot in recorded history. Recorded history goes back four
thousand years. The Greenland ice sheet is melting and
slipping into the sea at a much faster rate than normally
observed. The polar caps are shrinking and with the
Greenland meltdown ocean levels could raise twenty feet
in the next twenty years. If you live on a coastal plain

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this is worrisome. At the end of 2004 tidal waves or

tsunami in Asia and Africa corresponding with an
Indonesia earthquake killed about 300,000 people with
about the same missing. These were short term events
and the governments claimed they couldnt get the warning
out fast enough. Imagine downtown Miami or New Orleans
under twenty feet of water. (Hurricanes Katrina and Rita
have made the unthinkable a reality in Louisiana again.
Holly Beach, a little resort town is gone without national
notice, but we all saw the mess from New Orleans to
Mobile. I rode Rita out in Lake Charles and watched FEMA
and the Guard timely arrival with public relations and
media support locked and loaded, from the wreckage of a
town shredded by high winds. Whole neighborhoods
flattened by fallen water oaks. No electricity, water, or food
for the unprepared but most of the unprepared bailed
rather than experience Katrina II. FEMA was on the ball
this time.) Most of Florida is about fifteen feet above sea
level. I wouldnt be buying any real estate on the coast for
the long term. The weather is changing and the spate of
hurricanes ripping up our coast is probably not an
aberration but a taste of the warmer weather to come. The
movie The Day After Tomorrow portents another ice age
as that is a lot scarier than things warming up. But warming
up has some very scary consequences beyond creating
new wetlands, particularly around disease control and
weather. A recent Science article, submitted by the Fitters,
father and son naturalists from Cambridge, England
records that the flowering and blooming of some flowers
and plants has advanced some fifty-five days indicating a
climactic warming trend. They are also sprouting farther
north and at higher altitudes. A major study by the National
Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis found the
increase of disease incidence to be astounding. Even
slight increases in temperature allow viruses, bacteria, and
fungi to develop more rapidly. For example nasty things
that only hung out in the tropics are being transported
toward the poles as milder winters and less freezing allow
them to live

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and prosper where winter used to stop them cold. People

complain about unkillable molds. Epidemiologists predict a
warmer but sicker world when combining this trend with the
emergence of the new super bacteria developing as a
revenge factor of our success with antibiotics. Michael
Crichton posited in the introduction to Prey, a scary
nanotech novel If we were to grasp the true nature of
nature__if we could comprehend the real meaning of
evolution__then we would envision a world in which every
living plant, insect, and animal species is changing at every
instant in response to every other living plant, and animal.
Whole populations of organisms are rising and falling,
shifting and changing. This restless and perpetual change,
as inexorable and unstoppable as the waves and tides,
implies a world in which all human actions have uncertain
effects. The total system we call the biosphere is so
complicated that we cannot know in advance the
consequences of anything that we do. Time to bolster the
immune system with Astragalus and Echinacea and keep
to that moderate exercise regimen. Interesting times
require careful observation of our leaders because
competency is necessary for survival in hard times. In the
Old Deep South where the livin is easy, smoke and
mirrors can suffice as good government, because when
things get too bad you can always go fishing.
Manufacturing may be moving to Mexico and high tech
went to Texas and Florida where there is still some
possibility of hiring well educated workers. Now it is a given
that Louisiana has squandered the possibility of a middle
class life for most of its children, but are we seeing the
same sort of bread and circuses developing at a national
level. I think so. At the least there is a meritocracy that is
looking more like a technocracy with every passing year.
Well nobody really knows what happens to their tax
dollars anyway. Eighty percent of the wealth in the USA
belongs to less than twenty percent of the population. We
have our old money families who own property and our
new money families who make things and sell services. It
takes money to make money

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and having been both rich and poor (Rich mostly on paper
and promises. Want to buy a promissory note for a couple
hundred thousand?), rich is more fun. On the
manufacturing front, Demings ideas have become
pandemic through the world under a number of names
raising the standard of quality beyond even the pickiest
customers dreams. The companies who caught on have
gone the six sigma route and the ones who did not are
fading from the scene. If you like the manufacturing game
apply yourself to understanding statistical process control.
The wave of the future will belong to those who can crunch
their numbers in real time and pull and add factors to
predict cost and profit. The math exists now as does the
hard and software but only a few really get it. The
corporations who take the time to implement their data into
real time modeling will very quickly crush their competition.
Wal-Mart is as close to real time marketing as retail can
get at whiz-bang communication speed. Go take a look,
then do some comparative shopping.
One of the problems General Motors had to conquer early
in the 90s was no central accounting, or central
communication system, no shared business plan, or
rationalized vendors. Once those systems were put in
place, life became much easier for the decision-makers as
they had prices and quality parts in a timely manner.
Imagine running budgets for ninety different plants each
having its own system of reporting, or not knowing if you
had a profit until well into the next fiscal year. Deming style
SPC eliminated a lot of the manufacturing line problems.
EDS untied the communication knots. Now they have to
deal with lack of vision caused by faith in bigness. Once
real-time-SPC gets noticed you will see another
manufacturing revolution evolving out of being able to
better predict the market and build to response. Serious
elimination of waste. I believe the formula is 3% eliminated
waste equals 20% more profit. Thats in the future. Right
now we face a dodgy market and very slow growth in jobs
with a huge back log of lost jobs. Losing a job has about
the same psychological

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impact as losing a wife. Major stressor and contributor to

low self-esteem and depression. Invest in anti-psychotics
and anti-depressives. Marketing will become more difficult
in an information-based society. Already the craft
consumer shops the net to look for best prices and higher
quality. Computers and cellular technology enable us to be
more productive in shorter bursts of time. I used
to tell my students to learn everything about computers,
now I know that a good percentage of them know much
more than I do. However, for those who are disciplined,
this new era will open many opportunities to work in worldwide groups of people with similar interests, as well as
develop autonomous life styles based on worldly exposure.
Those who pursue excellence will thrive. Defining
excellence will continue to be a problem for the masses.
Peer pressure will continue to shape the culture at the
lower end. Peer pressure is not always a bad thing. Not
fitting in is the most common reason for teenage angst and
suicide. Take some time in selecting your peers. There are
lots of interesting people in the world and some make
better friends than others. The net can make them easier
to find. Handhelds will soon be as ubiquitous as cell
phones are now. People from some cultures avoid
uncertainty and have little tolerance for ambiguity, whereas
people from other cultures are more at ease with change
and the unknown. Cultures that have trouble with change,
particularly social change might be Japan, Greece,
Portugal, Chile, Peru, and Spain, and they value
conformity more than cultures which tolerate greater
ambiguity like India, Australia, the United States,
England, Canada, and Sweden. Cultures that value
personal goals and self-autonomy should be less
conforming than more collectivist cultures. Social proof is
the five million Frenchmen cant be wrong concept of
rightness. People are more likely to try something when
they know others have. It works best under circumstances
of ambiguity or when people see others similar to
themselves using a product. Buzz marketing or virus
marketing where corporations give away or hire influential

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or visible people to act as consumers is a form of applied

social proof. De-individuation or hiding in the crowd often
allows people to exercise their darker sides, the bigger
the crowd the greater the tendency to violence, people
tend to not work as hard as when they are alone, and will
slack off to match the level of work done by others when
standards are ambiguous (Remember our primates and
the grapes versus cukes in Chapter One? Animal models
do predict.). These norms will also develop in virtual
groups. Thus if the groups norms are positive, individuals
are more likely to act in prosocial ways. If negative, you will
see a greater tendency to flaming. Organizations tend to
be the same way. Study the culture. See who has the
power and why. Decide how long you want to work there. It
takes about a year to learn a job, another year to get really
good at it. Another to train your replacement while you job
hunt and plan your next move. People move around a lot
these days and the company man is a fading way of life.
Still losing a job you like is a heart breaker and rates high
as a major stressor. Power rests in the ability to reward.
Whatever you reward you will see more of. Ingratiation or
kissing up is not as effective as simple praise. Brown
nosing detracts from organizational effectiveness. A
genuine compliment, however, demonstrates respect for
both the individuals concerned as well as recognizing
higher standards. People run companies and the people
who run companies have power. Research by French and
Raven back in the 60s lined out five types of power that
people draw on to influence others. The dominate power
base tends to define the corporate culture: (1) Reward
power has control over valued resources such as
promotions and raises; (2) Coercive power has the ability
to punish; (3) Expert power is based on knowledge; (4)
Legitimate power comes with formal rank or position in the
organization, and (5) Referent power based on skill and
liking. People with more power are perceived to be more
persuasive than those without. Politeness is important in
gaining compliance and threats and hints do not work as
well as direct requests. It is the hoshin way to seek and

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use power to the benefit of all. Be nice, be generous, be

grateful, and be wise. Being autonomous or a knowledge
worker is rather like the samurai ronin who left their clans
to work for the Westerners in the nineteenth century.
Although they were regarded with contempt by the feudal
clannish samurai, they became a force for change and
many founded their own businesses. They had to learn to
live in two worlds and to manage their own existence. Like
the ronin of Japan it is important to figure out what you
like to do for fun and relaxation. What brings you pleasure
and what harms through over indulgence. One has to be
able to motivate oneself, as sometimes the jobs are
unstructured and unrewarding, by creating goals and
rewards for oneself. You have to be able to self start and
set your own goals which tend to make you different from
the average man or woman who chooses to depend on
others to start them, set their goals, and dole out the
rewards. Musashi, one of my favorite ronin set down nine
guiding rules in the Earth book of his The Book of Five
Rings for those who wanted to live the adventurous life of
a strategist.
(1) Be positive and avoid sinister designs.
(2) Recognize that budo (the warrior way) is a never
ending pursuit
(3) Cultivate a wide range of interests and skills in the arts.
(4) Be knowledgeable in a variety of occupations.
(5) Learn discretion in your commercial ventures.
(6) Look for the truth in all matters.
(7) Perceive that which cannot be seen with just the eye.
(8) Know what is important, even in trivial matters.
(9) Avoid useless activity.
Musashi killed over sixty men in recorded duels. He was
the Billy The Kid of Japanese sword lore. He wrote a book
on strategy that moved him from being remembered as a
talented thug, to a master swordsman and artist. Musashi
led a somewhat tragic life as an itinerant artist continually
attacked by swordsman wishing to establish their
reputations by killing him. He retired when he was fifty-five
from accepting duels and shortly thereafter wrote his book.

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It is still used by strategists today as a guide for the

individual facing the challenges offered by venturing your
life. He knew that the adventure is in traveling up the path
not in the destination. The modern day ronin can not
predict a comfortable job or the compromises expected of
those following a linear corporate career path. As you face
the challenges of a turbulent global economy you may find
advancement is replaced by self-discovery, lateral moves
in new directions result in new knowledge to be used in
other work places. Most of the research around happiness
indicates higher salaries, good friendships, and family
relationships are critical to sustained happiness so work on
your social skills and network. Look up as you move out.
Ronin are often contract workers who develop by working
through the corporation not for it. It is a path comparable to
the ancient warriors. As the American Indians would say,
Choose a path with heart! Go where you can have a
joyful journey!
Bibliography:
The Tao of Spycraft: The Intelligence Theory and Practice
in Traditional China. Ralph
D. Sawyer.Westview, 1998.
The Art of War. Sun Tzu, trans. by Lionel Giles, and edited
by Dallas Galvin. Barnes and
Noble Classics, 2003.
The Book of Strategems: Tactics for Triumph and Survival.
Harro Von Senger. Viking,
1991.
Roman Warfare. Adrian Goldsworthy. Cassell & Company,
2000
The Way of the Ronin. Beverly Potter. AMACOM, 1984.

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Chapter Nine: Getting a Life

The harder I work, the luckier I get! Krulak
The scariest thing aboutmiddle age is knowing you
are going to grow out of it. Day
I feel so miserable without you, it is almost like
having you here. Bishop
You should understand about what matters that you can
do a lot about. Social identity, gender, immune system,
living well, sexuality, ability, communication skills, and
technology. Since the world is obviously changing there
are some things you should do for yourself if you wish to
survive in comfort. First is to put together a longevity plan
to stave off the diseases of life style such as heart disease,
diabetes, some cancers, and stroke through healthy eating
habits, and moderate exercise. Avoiding and reducing
stress through meditation, chi kung, and taking food
supplements as well as soil analysis shows the vitamin and
mineral content of the soil has been vastly depleted by non
organic farming methods which will effect what you eat.
Sleep is probably more important to brain health and
feeling well in general than most people recognize. People
who get about seven hours sleep a night memories
function about twenty percent faster with about thirty
percent improvement in accuracy over those who sleep
less. Most of the recent research indicates the brain works
better given about eight hours of sleep to restore itself. If
you want to sleep better you should cut the caffeine out in
the PM. That means no coffee, tea, chocolate, and
probably no spicy foods either for at least three hours
before hitting the bed. Hot milk is a fine sleep aid, but
alcohol is not. Since the changes wont slow down for you,
you have to slow down for them to become more effective
and efficient. You can go for long periods without sleep
when you are young, and little sleep over long periods, but
how much bar time do we really need? We live in a time of
great change, what the Chinese would call interesting in
their famous curse for the unwary. Interesting times call for

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a plan or strategy if you wish to live well. Call it a to do list,

or a battle plan, or just setting some priorities, but it is
important to do as the demands of modern society not only
keep us busy, but distracted from what may be important.
Most of us are trying to do more things in less time, and
sooner or later find we cant do everything we should.
When I was training supervisors and foreman at Texas
Utilities I used to recommend that the leaders make priority
lists. Write down four or five things you would like to
accomplish by the end of the day. Decide which are most
important. Mark the most important A, then B, or C. Go
after the As first. If you get the As done, you will have
accomplished more than most people do in a typical day.
The Bs and Cs will go away or move up. Before you go
home put one A in the center of your desk to start on the
next day. Do not take work home if you can help it. It is a
strong indicator that you are in over your head, not what a
hard worker you are. Besides sleep, meditation is another
no cost but time, no bad side effects, and good for you
means to improve brain and immune function. A slew or
research shows that many of the effects of stress,
including heart disease, high blood pressure, anxiety,
depression, insomnia, and infertility are reduced by
meditation. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention
reports about ten percent of the population are now
serious meditators, an additional twelve percent use
breathing exercises or chi kung, and five percent espouse
yoga. That is close to becoming mainstream. I was fired by
George Roche at Hillsdale for teaching meditation
eighteen years ago. General Motors hired me within three
days and tripled my salary so I could hardly sue for
damages. I was tenured though, and it really pissed me off.
(Meditation was the reason given to keep the Baptists
happy, Ive always suspected George had more
Machiavellian reasons like providing his daughter-in-law
with a higher profile job at the Dow Center for Leadership.
True believers are easy to maneuver. Thats another story,
but google up George Roche and Hillsdale College for a
tale of conservative hubris gone wrong on a Greek tragedy

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scale when you are bored sometime. Talk about

comeuppance.) Given that the Pentacostals still go after
meditators in the Deep South, depending on your practice
you might take care how and to whom you describe your
life benefiting deep breathing exercises, particularly if you
see them as the biological process that leads to spiritual
development. Here are some tips. The effect of meditation
is compounding and continual which means you have to
do at least twenty minutes a day for best results. You
should feel rested at first and the benefits will accumulate
to recognizable shifts in health and calm by twenty days.
After twenty days you will probably feel good enough that
you will just make it part of your daily routine. To increase
the benefits be sure to keep your tongue tipped up on your
palate and your breathing through the nose at a very slow
rate, pushing your stomach out as you inhale and pulling it
in as you exhale. It also works better if you are sitting up
rather than lying down. If you want some real expert
instruction get my Meditation Mastery CDs. Twenty years
ago this was cutting edge and controversial, now its close
to being mainstream. If you use the Secret Smile
techniques taught in Path Notes youll get all the benefits
of stronger immune and endocrine system, plus greater
happiness. Reducing stress and sleeping better doesnt
mean quit using the gray matter. About twenty years ago
we began to realize that brain cells can rejuvenate and that
the slow decay of decision-making powers, memory, and
multi-tasking were the outcomes of lifestyle choices and
disease more than the aging process. This regrowth of
cells may help individuals avoid the declines of perception,
cognition, and motor skills once thought to be part of old
age. Best of all the regrowth is stimulated by some of lifes
simplest pleasures that present mental challenges.
Crossword puzzles, chess, moderate physical activity like
walking or golf, video games, group salon discussions,
reading, and motor skill challenges like dancing or yoga
have all been proven by research experiments to be
beneficial to the brain. Probably as good as eating fish.

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Need I say that many of these criteria are part and parcel
to the higher martial arts like tai chi, ninjutsu, or hoshin.
Simple walking has remarkable rejuvenating powers for the
sedentary. Some people derive benefit from gardening and
taking care of pets, but for a real challenge take on some
volunteer work with children like Big Brother and Sister. I
had an eighty year old shaktipat client who had married a
pretty Hispanic girl who was pregnant. I dont know how
happy she is but he is having a great time taking care of
her kid. When I asked him about it. He said, All my friends
are dying. They all talk about their operations, doctors, and
medicine. Give me a break. The boy and I are having a
great time, and I think she really has come to care about
me. When I was fifty, I took on a baby girl and the loss of
sleep nearly killed me in the first two years, but the rest
was great fun. A lot more challenging than a dog and
greater consequences if your parenting skills arent much.
The new happiness literature supports that relationships
with your children are a great source of happiness. I like all
my wives kids. As part of this brain rejuvenation process
surround yourself with music. Remember one of the main
jobs of the snake brain is sensing the pulse of the
universe. Feeling the beat. Dancing and music is part of
our most basic nature. I suspect the ability to embrace a
wide variety of music relates to higher intelligence. Dance
is second only to sex as the best form of exercise.
Musicians often make better group leaders than athletes
and are often more concerned with quality performance.
Research seems to indicate that about 95% of us fall away
from popular music around thirty five indicating we lose our
taste for novelty and begin to embrace repetition. If you are
spending more time listening to the Golden Oldies than
what is new you have fallen into the long grave of being in
a rut. New to you is the key. Comprehensive music sites
like www.allmusic.com on the web are fun to explore.
Www.globalmusicproject.org can take your ears around
the world. And if you just want to expand your musical
consciousness or see what youve been missing
www.music-map.com uses algorithms to predict that fans

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that like one band will favor similar musicians in other

groups. Plug in your favorites and check out what pops
up. Music is a great way to keep the brain nimble. Too bad
most school boards will cut the orchestra before the
football team. Making music is even more beneficial than
listening to it. Reading, and I take it you are a reader since
you have this work in hand, is much better for your brain
than more passive forms of learning like television.
Reading also puts you in charge of the process. Reading
fiction increases imagination skills and enhances intuition.
Being able to visualize what you read is a skill that
transfers into many areas like engineering and decisionmaking. I taught my son Richard who was severely
dyslectic how to read using comic books and Louis
LAmour, now Id use J.K. Rowlings and Harry Potter. He
went from being put back two years to graduating National
Honor Society. Success of ones children is another source
of happiness. If you want successful kids you will have to
work with them. Kids like limits so give them some around
TV time. Dont make childhood too easy. Get them to set
goals and problemsolve. Musical instruments are great
ways to keep them positively busy. Dave Cowan once told
me, When I was fourteen I got a guitar and. Then I was
nineteen and going to college. Try to make sure they have
some experiences that stretch them and encourage them
to make friends with kids who are smart. Make their
allowance tie into their grades and encourage part time
jobs to save for college. If the grades are good youll
help with that bike or car. I always told mine if you go to
college on a good scholarship Ill help. If not there is
always the Army or McDonalds but you are out of here
and on your own. It worked. Im very proud of my children
and grandchildren but Im not much on grandparenting. Im
too busy trying to survive. Ive spent what I have earned
traveling and what not with my friends. People who dont
visualize what they read (Read words rather than see
pictures created by words.) usually dont like to read. Using
comics or page-turners can heal that pitiful state. Reading
fact increases ones ability to problem-solve and adds to

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ones knowledge base. Reading good or classic literature

increases ones ability to understand motivation and use
language as an expressive tool. Magazines keep one up to
date. The most useful magazines I have found are Science
News, which publishes news concerning the findings of
scientists each week written for a sharp tenth grader; The
Week which gives a wide spread of news and opinion
concerning politics, the arts, and happenings around the
globe; the Utne Reader which is dedicated to alternative
life styles, and Ode, which strikes me as an oddly edited
ecological critique. I try to read one factual and one
fictional book a week now. Hopefully somewhere in your
undergrad exposure to education you took some
philosophy and literature courses. Philosophy is dedicated
to examining how to live well through understanding our
values. Reading philosophy can help one develop some
distance and perspective but most philosophers do
not write very well and over explain. My home library has
close to a thousand books, most of which I have dipped
into and decided to keep for reference or pleasure and
there arent many philosophers preserved there. I belong
to the History Club and often buy selections from their
editors. Biographies are a great way to walk in someone
elses moccasins. Keeping up in your own profession is
easier if you belong to the appropriate reader service. I
think the old maxim, Readers are leaders! still applies to
most ambitious people. If you havent been in a classroom
for a while here are some rhetorical tips that get you the
good grades:
(1). Remember it is not a democracy. Authority, no matter
how uncool, resides in the teacher. Be quiet and polite. Act
like a scholar. Its a school and you are paying for it.
Everything changes.
(2). Sit up front. Try to get in the first three rows. Those are
the A seats. Teachers think students who sit in the back
are hamburger with learning problems.
(3). Ask questions. Teachers think smart people ask
questions.

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(4). Make eye contact with the teacher. Shows you are
honest as well as paying attention.
(5.) Laugh at the jokes when a teacher tells one. What
kinds of jokes can teachers tell? Give him or her credit for
trying to lighten your load.
(6.) Ask an occasional question after class. Makes the
teach think you are a scholar so dont ask stupid
questions. If you cant come up with a thought
provoker ask about last weeks lesson.
(7.) Check out the other students who are up front, make
friends, study together. That way youll get good notes and
may make some good contacts.
All right, that should keep the gray matter perky. What else
makes life worth living? Everything I see indicates we will
soon be in world wide competition for goods and services,
and that bit of social Darwinism has been missed by our
government global planners. If you want to be top dog, it
takes more than military dominance. Education and
economics are pretty important. That is how we wore down
Russia and Russia was a great enemy but never real
competition, rather like Germany way too stretched out and
not enough structure behind the faade. China, India, and
the lands of the Euro have shoals where our war craft may
founder if we continue to act like the War On Terrorism is
actually our war and not a necessary global police action.
Look what happened in Ireland when they made the
schools free and quit killing each other. Given this
economic competition, we have to look at our school
systems as they are our future, not the industrial/military
complex. If we really want a war then lets put in a base or
two north of Baghdad and see if the big PX can hold its
own against the camel spiders. Since the economics look
rocky for the reasons I stated in the last couple of chapters
it might be a good idea to strategize around your finances
better than I did. Learn about compound interest and
retirement funds (Einstein loved compound interest.). If you
were to save $80 a month for thirty years earning a
conservative 5% each year, you would have saved about
$75,000. My friend Dr. Porter suggests putting $500 in a

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compound interest fund and waiting 65 years to collect

your several million dollars. Now that is a retirement fund
you can set up for a child (I wish my parents had done that
for me!). Well, if you are like most of us waiting for our
social security to come up, it is also hoped you had the
sense to put some fiscal discipline on autopilot by putting
away the max percentage allowed into an employer
sponsored 401(k). This type of deduction is not taxed and
can accumulate rapidly in an asset allocation plan. TIAACREF a fund for teachers and scientists has worked very
well for me. I accumulated a little under 65,000 in five
years by going mostly into high risk technology. If I hadnt
invested all of my retirement from Hillsdale and General
Motors into my bio-tech debacle, Id have a cool million or
more waiting for me. It is a good choice. Start early. When
you leave a company or school, transfer your 401(k) into
an IRA. Economic theory and the simple reality of profit
motives suggest you put it in a mid-cap mutual fund which
often pays as well as 90% in five years.The interest on
your credit cards is a sure loser. Pay them off as quickly as
possible. Pay all your bills on time and dont seek more
credit than you need. When it comes to money, it is good
to be pessimistic concerning financial disaster. Keep a
running fund of three to six months expenses in a money
market account. It is better to have and not need than to
need and not have. Take a look at your FICO. Thats your
credit score with 350 being lousy no way to 850 making
how can we serve you when you apply for loans. 700 is
considered a score that will win you the lowest rates. For a
fee the three credit agencies, Experian, Equifax, and
TransUnion will let you know when info has been added to
your report. Its a good idea to check that report from time
to time as they occasionally get it wrong. Its your job to
make sure they get it right. Studies indicate they screw it
up about thirty percent of the time. Get a paper shredder if
you want to avoid identity theft. Of course all this supposes
you have enough education to start your own business, or
get a job that pays well. Lets look at lifestyle too.

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Clear out the clutter. Im constantly amazed at the stuff that

accumulates in ones house or garage. If you havent worn
it in two years make the fashion police and Volunteers of
America happy by making a donation. Real art and
treasures you may put in storage or hang on the wall. Get
rid of extra electronics, old phones, and computers by
donating them to charities too. Organize what you have left
by seasons. Summer clothes go with the beach and diving
gear, winter with skis and heavy coats. Get rid of your old
shoes and if you are over forty check your shoe size and
get some inserts. Your feet will tell you why. Shelving and
hanging bags in closets can be used to keep cleaning
supplies and bath stuff out of sight but handy. You might
want to look into Feng Shui. Cant hurt, might help.
Study your computer. Google can sort through jillions of
web pages for us but most of us have trouble sorting out
our own PC or Mac. Mastering your own data is a great
way to start getting organized. Set aside time to learn your
search programs. I like Yahoo, but Google has some
interesting features like a Desktop Search and Microsoft is
getting into the game. Ask Jeeves works pretty well and
the name cracked me up. Get into your documents and
name your pictures and file them away. Get your resume
up to date and post it on Monster. Organize your papers
and letters. I mostly word process but am constantly
amazed at all the clever things that a computer literate
person can really do. Hell, I still need to work on my typing
skills because I hunt and peck. At least Im up to two hands
and four fingers. You might want to take a course or two.
One of the easiest ways to get some great educational
experience that wasnt available until 1990 is The
Teaching Company (www.TEACH12.com). What they do is
get the best professors onto DVD, CD and video for home
study at a reasonable price. You get the adventure of
learning from some of the top dogs at top schools without
the classroom prison like atmosphere and pressure of
homework and exams. Just kick back and listen in the
kitchen or car. I just knocked off a lecture on quantum
physics and time travel and followed that by one on the

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Gnostic Bible and Nag Hamadi which corrected some of

my thinking. All that while playing with the cat and eating
breakfast. Now that is putting the pleasure back in learning
something new. Its probably a good idea to get as much
education as you can in and out of your professional
interests. Im often surprised by some of the questions
students ask me about the thoughts that run through their
heads and then realize the benefit of a liberal arts
education. Most of my students are geeks of one sort or
another and well-rounded is a concept that whizzed by
their keen but pointed perception. They hit on the library
with glee when something strikes their fancy. Paranoia is a
fond motivator for some when selfrealization comes late.
They learn more from movies and TV too. My wife quotes
Dangerous Liaisons and M.A.S.H.. When I was in
Melbourne this year David Cowan
introduced me to the DVD movie Blueberry about a Cajun
who is friendly with a Navaho shaman. The visuals when
he does the shamans drugs show the evolutionary
movement of spirit and body familiar since the kundalini.
The story is a bit predictable but it is very well done.Weak
script, interesting cast, great graphics, no buzz in the
States. If you have been smart enough to buy rather
than rent and you have some equity in your house think
about where you really want to live and how. Are you living
where you want to work? Are you doing work you like? If
not start making your escape plan. Hate the city? Small
town life goes at a slower pace. Bored in the country? City
life has a wealth of experiences to offer and masses to
exploit. Country life is supposed to be healthier but these
days you may want to check the water table or find out
what industries are upstream. Too many people are finding
it too easy to separate the general public from being your
neighbor, and thus you find a business person willing to
dump pollutants into a fishing stream or despoil the
econiche for simple profit. If you have children the offerings
of the local schools become important, and how taxes are
raised will point to how good the schools are. Ive been
amazed at just how nice Australia and Costa Rica are.

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Travel. Look around. The net can make you free. How did
you do on that nutrition test in Chapter Six? There are
some tricks to eating better. First of all read the labels.
There is a lot of marketing on a container that has little to
do with the contents. Veggies with darker colors indicate
more nutrients, phytochemicals, or goodies. Spinach is
better than iceberg lettuce and so is Romaine. Dark
chocolate has more antioxidants than practically anything.
Cocoa is actually good for you. Coffee is harder on your
kidneys than tea, particularly black coffee. White foods
like bread, rice, cakes, cookies are not only nutrient lite,
but contribute to carbohydrates, usually have too much salt
and sugar so increase the risk of diabetes and heart
disease. Avoid the colas as they are heavy on sugar and
may contribute to cancer. Drink water or tea instead. Your
skin will thank you, so will your PMS. Avoid canned and
frozen food and canned soups (mega salt). Try to eat
fresh. Fresh foods make a real difference your body will
quickly recognize. If you must eat fast food, try out
Subways or other fresh food franchises. Cantaloupes
have more vitamin C than apples and oranges, as well as
great fiber. Blue berries are good for your night vision. Do I
need to hit the evils of cola and sugar for someone who is
already running on empty? Do a little research and get
yourself on the right vitamin supplements for your age and
sex. A very scary study by the British Agriculture Ministry
and the Royal Society of Chemistry comparing nutrients in
vegetables across time showed about a sixty percent drop
since the forties. Even organic production of food is no
guarantee of nutrient richness. It does not take an Einstein
to question the consequences of constantly electing to
choose junk food. Some studies in Europe are finding links
between bad diet and violent behavior but I suspect there
is a solid economic factor that confounds the way to peace
being through the stomach. Consistently, across history,
the culture with the most useful technology wins.
Technology is not always kind to the environment or the
people using it. Chariots versus travois. As we grow older
there is a strong tendency not to embrace the new stuff. I

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resisted getting a cell phone for years. The James Bondish

camera and web connect won me over. If you intend to
stay ahead and afloat in the modern economic stream you
will have to learn and buy the new toys just to keep up with
the kids. Resistance is futile. Go with the flow. Who moved
your cheese? Change is the only constant. You just have
to learn where to get the most bang for your buck. Just ask
the nearest wired up kid listening to his earphones while
talking to the air to his invisible friend who might be on the
next continent. It is in our hands today! The civilian toys
really have to compete with the shrunk down and focused
military, so different from the draft old days. Bows and
arrows versus repeater rifles, smoke signals taking on the
digicamphone on international TV or just back to MI at HQ.
Studies by McClelland showed clearly that wearing darker
clothes besides providing a camouflage advantage was
associated with business success. Dress for success is still
a good idea. HRD specialists take about seven seconds to
make up their minds about an interviewee. You dont get to
make a second impression in a competitive market. Your
resume and education may get you to the interview but
your communication skills and ability to make others
comfortable will keep you from being shown the door.
Learn what the expectations are for the position you are
seeking and adapt to your audience. It is your job to make
them comfortable with you, not the other way around.
Fashion is for media and art industries folk. Business
people get to play with a limited range of accessories and
like the yakuza usually hide the tattoos. Be proactive.
If you intend to lead others take every opportunity to
practice your positive thinking, intention, and public
speaking. Half of management is telling others how and
what to do. And remembering the difference between
nagging and behavior modification. Think clearly and
kindly, be specific, and speak gently. Which thoughts do
you really want to express? Choices, so many choices.
When I was a management counselor at the Dow Center
for Leadership I used the following mantra a lot, How can I
say this, so this person will learn from it, and not be

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injured. The Buddhist concept of right speech includes

more than just telling the truth. Study on that. Chapter Four
may have given you some clues about diversity in sex and
gender. It is important to know what you like if you are
going to get more of it. One of the sad realities of modern
living is that married people are generally healthier
physically and psychologically than their single
counterparts. Happiness, however, is not guaranteed, the
American divorce rate continues to climb, and longitudinal
studies in Europe found that there was only a short bump
in life satisfaction for the married. Often on reflection
couples reported being more content before marriage. A
study in 2003 showed that middle aged women involved in
satisfying marriages were less likely to show symptoms
of emotional distress and were less likely to have heart
disease than their unhappily married counterparts or single
women. Similar benefits for men have been known for
years. Married men outlive single or widowed by about five
years. A study of identical twins revealed that the married
brothers made 27% more than their single siblings
indicating a societal bias in favor of married men. A happy
marriage results in a better sex life or at least an easier
hunt. Unhappy marriages undo all the above, so plan on
working at keeping your spouse happy. If you are not
happy with yourself, marriage like wealth will not make you
happy. Some of the latest research from twin studies by
Lykken indicates happiness is about fifty percent genetic.
Contentment may be the highest form of wealth. Having
been in good marriages and bad marriages I still like being
married better than being single. If you want to go the
marriage route have a heart to heart about your
expectations with your amorata before you get into it and
save yourself the expense of an expensive divorce down
the line. Tons of research indicates walking, swimming,
bicycling, yoga, tai chi, and other soft martial arts are
enormously beneficial to the older practitioner. Moderate
exercise accumulating to at least a half an hour a day
seems to do the most good. In 1988 Hatsumi-soke gave
me a bujinkan award for studying the mental

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characteristics of his school members. Interestingly

enough, the people in my sample were significantly more
self-actualizing, achievement oriented, and scored higher
at affiliation than the general population. Rather different
from the image of grim assassins put out by the media and
competing martial arts. The ability to relax under pressure,
common to the bujinden and Russian Systema, is
priceless. Most people never realize how much tension
they carry around (My trapezius muscles get like cable.),
nor recognize how creative, effective, and faster they can
be when relaxed. Removing excess physical, emotional,
and spiritual tension in a stressful situation is probably the
most transferable skill in budo, and the most useful after
the spiritual development component in the higher order
martial arts. Having fun and playing are a great starting
point for slowing down to learn muscle memory. Try out a
non competitive martial art which usually means combative
because no one wants to get into an arm breaking contest.
What you learn may save your life and it is more
interesting than pumping iron. Musha shugyo is the budo
term for spiritual journeying or knight errantry. Try it out. It
doesnt seem like a hard choice to me. Spiritual journeying
is an internal adventure. It means going within and the
easiest way to do that is through meditation. Being your
natural self or fully human, means you have to pay
attention and wake up from the confusions and delusions
that most people share to their constant suffering. Change
is possible. We are all to a greater or lesser extent the
creator of our own destinies. Our thoughts, our words, our
choices, and our deeds interconnect with the world to form
our experiences that shape our reality. If you are not
having a good time, look at your choices. Martin Seligman,
Sonya Lyubomirsky, and Robert Emersons research
indicate that gratitude exercises like keeping a journal
where you write down three to five things for which you are
currently thankful, or looking up an old teacher or mentor
and thanking them for their guidance has both
psychological and physiological benefits. Seligman actually
recommends writing testimonials and the effect lasts about

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three months. The positive psychologists, like Hatsumi-san

back in the 90s, also recommend random, and specific,
acts of kindness, as they maintain ones connectedness,
generosity, and feelings of competence and control.
Rhetoric is the science of making good choices, first for
yourself, and then for others. Making choices for others
has a long history of not working out very well, so
approach that aspect of leadership with humility. As for
yourself there is nothing described here that the author has
not applied or tried in his own life to advantage, and
where he failed to pay attention and reaped the bitter fruit
of despair, there is no recommendation. It is hoped you
may avoid my mistakes and arrange for yourself the
best application of my meanderings. I like this ebook
means of publication to reach my rather limited audience
and hope you have fun and gain some insight by this
offering. If you want to implement what you have read turn
to the experts listed in each chapters bibliography.
Bibliography:
The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle. Baltasar
Gracian, trans. By Christopher
Maurer. Currency Doubleday, 1992.
Extreme Weather: A Guide and Record Book. Christopher
C. Burt. Norton, 2004.
Crimes Against Knowledge: Exposing the Bogus
Arguments of Polititians, Priests,
Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders. Jamie Whyte.
McGraw Hill, 2005.
The H.I.S.S. of the A.S.P : Understanding the Anomalously
Sensitive Person. David
Ritchey. Headline Books, 2003
Old Masters. Great Artists in Old Age. Thomas Dormandy.
Hambledon & London, 2000

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About the Author:

Dr. Glenn Morris lived with his painter artist wife Irena
Morris and strange spotted cat (named Cat) in Lake
Charles, Louisiana. For twenty some years he was a
psychological consultant on leadership and organizational
change. He worked with Mid West Industries like General
Motors, Meijer Thrifty Acres, and Cargill to develop
strategies for excelling at their business while defeating
their competition. He also helped develop safety
programs for Exxon and Texas Utilities while working for
Human Synergistics that significantly reduced lost time
accidents. He has written internationally selling texts for
management, psychological inventories for stress
reduction, ethnographies of Japanese martial lineages for
the public, articles for encyclopedias, and taught
psychology and communication courses at both American
and Canadian universities and colleges. Glenn partly
owned and helped take a bio-tech company public and
later into bankruptcy. He is considered knowledgeable in
Asian and Middle Eastern cultures and religions but not
bio-tech. He has taught stress reduction and leadership
seminars in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
Glenn is also recognized around the world as an expert in
kundalini meditation, chi kung techniques, and budo/bugei.
He conducted Kundalini Awakening workshops around the
world with various experts. He has been nominated for the
prestigious Templeton Prize for Science and Religion.
Dr. Glenn Morris unexpectedly passed away in his home
on April 1st 2006. He is forever to be missed by many.

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