I was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room flipping through some curled-up waiting room magazines the other day. One snappy, well-written article after another (ain’t it nice to read a good piece of writing?) tells me all the things I’m supposed to know and do:  how to feel, how to act, how to cook, how to dress; what to buy, what to sell, who to trust and who to suspect; when to spend, when to save, where to eat, where to shop, where to play; when to pray, when to love, when to hate and when to relax, and why all this is important. Truth, it seems, is all around us. Are we lucky or what?

OK, this is how I really feel: everybody’s selling too damn hard, and it makes me suspicious. More than suspicious, it makes me doubt the whole enchilada; nobody has an exclusive on truth. Now I’m not sayin’ I’m a cynic, I’m an optimist, really; I’m sayin’ that there’s so much crappola flying around it wears me out just listening to it. Opinions, arguments, opposing points of view, expert analysis, special offers, low interest, three easy payments…yada, yada, yada. It all leaves me cold. More often than not, if the TV’s on, the screen says “MUTE” in the corner.

Truth requires no sales pitch, no one-time offers, no special pricing and no zero interest. I believe truth is complete, truth is honest and pure. At heart, you see, I’m a purist. Take the sun, for example, it rises every day; no hype, no analysis, nobody has to sell me anything about sunrise. Or breathing, the air I just inhaled and exhaled; I’ll do that eight to 10 times a minute, 24/7, day after day. That’s truth, complete and simple; no credit needed. Or love; love is truth. And for that matter, so are anger, sadness, and another 84,000 emotions. Truth is basic and available, yet everybody’s working overtime selling their version of truth. It appears there are two possibilities: (1) We are so lacking in confidence and so shell-shocked by life we can’t decide what’s good for us and incessantly need to be told how to think and what to do, or (2) All these people who are selling truth are wasting billions of dollars on paying for good writing. Possibly, (1) and (2) are both correct.

So, here I am, yet another writer “telling it like it is” to yet another reader. If you follow my logic, you should never have even started this column. But, here you are nonetheless; I’ve remarkably, miraculously, unbelievably held your attention and I have absolutely nothing to sell. This makes me either (a) an honest man or (b) a damned fool or (c) possibly both. I leave that judgment to you.

As for truth, I suggest the following zero interest contemplation: “This statement is false.”

Words, in fact, can and do hurt; words are nearly magical incantations that immediately stimulate limbic system responses, powerful emotions and physiological effects. Used maliciously they can damage others and oneself. Rush Limbaugh for example, callously called a young woman who testified about insurance payments for contraception a “slut” and found himself at the center of an organized effort to punish his radio program advertisers. Thus it is that vicious words are a double-edged weapon that cuts in two directions.

Words, of course, come easy to people. Within a few years of birth, we adopt a complex and symbolic word-based reality that nominally and metaphysically represents the world in nearly infinite glory. We move through this metaphysical realm with ease and natural comfort as long as others share our particular language. Word magic is dependent upon a collective symbolic framework; plopped down in a foreign land one immediately discovers how easily the magic disappears.

There was a time when all words were considered sacred, and their power was respected. Vowels, for example, were not included in early Hebrew writing to prevent those who had not received an authorized oral transmission from knowing how particular words were pronounced; lacking such knowledge, word magic could not be used improperly. In paleolithic and early neolithic society, speech itself was considered a sacred aspect of the wind element and therefore nothing to trifle with. Anthropologists speculate that early humans combined gestures with various sounds imitating animals and nature.

Today, of course, we toss words around without much regard for their magic. Sure, we continue to recognize words well-spoken or set down, but even this is considered by many an old-fashioned affectation or simply irrelevant. Because people are passionate, words of passion dominate TV and movies – often hateful, sarcastic, cruel, painful or mean. Words once considered obscene, such as George Carlin’s famous seven dirty words, are now in such common everyday use on cable TV that they are steadily losing a particular type of power. Sometimes I wonder what will replace them.

In our individualistic society, freedom of speech has come to mean “anything goes.” Hidden behind platitudes about honesty or having every “right” to say what we want, we often ignore the injuries we inflict on others and ourselves.

Kind and loving words have power and magic, too, lest we forget, and despite Hollywood’s depictions, most people speak kindly to one another. The rarely invoked “golden rule” is true wisdom, a valuable legacy of earlier generations that understood how a good and just society forms and functions. In today’s super-speedy culture we move faster but ironically have less time; “right speech” requires a thoughtfulness and attention that seems too slow for us. Yet, our natural inclination to promote harmony and pacify conflict underlies linguistic forms of politeness and decorum. Right speech is peaceful speech.

Personally, I find myself spending more time being quiet. Even one day of silence reveals volumes. So here’s my modest proposal: say nothing next Tuesday, just listen, and then let me know what it’s like.

For many in the scientific community, the answer is emergence, which is to say the phenomenon of consciousness spontaneously arises as the result of the coming together of the various component physical structures of the brain. Emergence implies that consciousness is an outgrowth of complexity, an effect dependent upon specific brain architecture and processing capabilities.

However, an alternative though scientifically less popular view of consciousness is that it is not emergent, but rather an underlying and inherent force that primordially exists within the matrix of existence. This scenario implies an ever-present, all-pervading source of information and organization upon which all biological entities are built; consciousness itself merely the ultimate expression of this source.

Consciousness ranges from the simple act of having awareness of the surrounding environment and responding to it – behavior found in earthworms – to self-consciousness, a recursive form of abstract conceptualization that results in the experience of “I am.” It is this latter form of higher consciousness that is the subject of so much scientific interest.

Clearly, if an emergent explanation for organic consciousness of this latter type is forthcoming, science will look for ways to apply that knowledge to non-organic systems, hoping to replicate higher consciousness within non-living machines. Human brain structures are very small indeed, and the interconnections nearly uncountable. At the same time, quantum computing is already being tested, and due to the nearly infinitely small scale of quantum mechanics, approaching the processing and interconnectedness scale of the human brain may in fact be possible. Like the sentient HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, emergent consciousness could manifest.

This issue raises moral and ethical problems. None of us want to face a “Terminator” scenario wherein machines decide to send humans on our merry way. At the same time, if a machine achieves higher consciousness, are we then morally bound to respect it? Is conscious “hardware” any less “alive” than conscious “wet ware?”

In five years I will have to have my implanted cardio-defibrillator replaced; its battery will run out. The computerized unit I currently have in my chest not only establishes and regulates my heart rhythm but simultaneously monitors my heart and intervenes with various therapies if it detects a potentially problematic arrhythmia. It will even deliver a life-saving shock if preliminary therapies fail to stop a problem. In other words, this is a “smart” little piece of hardware that mimics intelligence, but it is not conscious. Five years from now such ICD devices will be far more sophisticated and “intelligent,” and possibly (dare I say it?) conscious.

Personally, I do not agree with the theory of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. I believe that a universal force of consciousness precedes, pervades and generates the existence of all living things. If we do succeed in generating consciousness at a quantum level we will not have proven emergent theory correct, but will have merely penetrated the very force that naturally exists and envelops us all.

My life on retreat was simple, although often my mind was not. I spent many hours each day meditating, and the rest of my time was occupied with cooking, eating, washing dishes, reading, hiking, sleeping and periodically sitting on a bucket with an attached toilet seat. It reminded me of a version of the Zen commentary, “Chop wood, haul water.” Like I said, life was simple.

Going cold-turkey from my usual habits and routines was challenging at first. My normal daily life includes sitting at my computer for many hours at a time, and I actually found myself suffering from media withdrawal. I’d feel the urge to check my email and finding that impossible, I’d have a stab of anxiety. This passed within a day or two, and I never got the shakes or sweats, but it was a true addiction being broken in that little cabin in the woods.

A mind alone finds its own rhythm and space, and so it was with mine. Because meditation includes watching the mind, for a while boredom itself became the object of my meditation. Lacking all forms of familiar distraction and entertainment, the boredom that developed eventually transformed into serenity all by itself. It was transformational experience from human doing to the more fundamental nature of human being.

Modern life is filled with doing, and my life is no exception. The doing is so continuous and all-consuming that the being underlying it can all but disappear. Even regular meditation practice can become another act of doing, despite intentions otherwise.

Isolated, left alone to establish itself in space, my mind of being expanded. I went for long silent walks, traversing the ridgeline perimeter of the 9,000 foot-high valley in which my cabin was located. Protected from the cold winds by a down jacket, I’d sit for hours gazing at panoramic views of the lower Rockies and stands of Ponderosa Pine. I’d go to sleep when the sun set, and awaken before dawn. In silence, with no appointments or obligations, I lost track of time and would simply sleep when tired, day or night. The same went for eating; I lost interest in breakfast, lunch or dinner “time.” Did I miss my wife, kids, grand-kids and friends? I did, but I couldn’t call them. Like people in all but the past hundred or so years, I accepted uncertainty, leaned on faith that all were well and wished them health and well-being from a distance. Like boredom, home-sickness also became the object of my meditation, and it changed too, to gratitude.

Solitude and silence are rare these days; to find it required making advance arrangements, flying to Denver, traveling for a few hours into the mountains, and more. It’s ironic that being demanded so much doing; ultimately, though, it was well worth it.

A mind alone is a terrible thing to waste.

You may think I’m kidding, but if the scientific marketplace has its way good ole’ Fido may well lose his place as boy’s best friend. And while we’re talking canines, take a look at what we’ve done to that particular creature. You want a short-haired, long-eared, stub-tailed, bug-eyed, hang-tongued canine companion? No problem, we can breed it for you. Just imagine what will be possible when consumer-oriented commercial genetic engineering gets its hot little hands on Poochy.

Yet Poochy is the least of it; let me remind you of one basic scientific truth: ontology recapitulates phylogeny! For those of you who don’t recall the wisdom of ninth-grade biology, let me refresh your memory. As we watch the gestation of an animal from fertilized egg onwards as an embryo develops, we observe various stages of evolution played out before our eyes. In the case of humans, an early embryo looks very much like that of a chicken, briefly displays amphibian gill-like structures and for a while even has the cutest little tail. Everything we’ve ever been is deeply encoded in our DNA, right there for the picking, and the same is true for all animals.

Moreover, science now has the ability to extract genetic information from the “soft” tissues of frozen remains, like those of the Wooly Mammoth. In no time at all, our combined know-how will result in the magic of designer animals; then free market forces will take over.

The market for exotic pets is already huge. People keep big cats, anacondas, various apes, monkeys, tarantulas, iguanas and so forth around the house or in the yard. Many of these animals are dangerous, obviously a big part of their appeal. It’s been popular for a long time. In the 1950’s my grandfather rented a winter-time house in Florida, bought a cute little baby crocodile and kept it in a bathtub. After several months of a diet of hot pastrami and chicken liver it grew to two feet long, and being every inch a crocodile gave my grandfather a nasty bite on the end of his index finger, effectively severing their bond of loyalty. My grandfather bundled the little croc in a towel and released him into a small pond on the nine-hole golf course across the street. Similarly abandoned exotic pets like Burmese Pythons have thus transformed the Everglades.

So, I do foresee some problems. Cleaning up after your dog is one thing, cleaning up after your mini-mammoth is another. A six-foot flightless Terror Bird, once the supreme carnivorous predator of South America, could be real handful, combining the curiosity and intelligence of Polly-the-Parrot with a razor-sharp beak and enough jaw-strength to snap a human thigh bone like a toothpick. And of course, there is the ultimate predator, T-Rex; every boy wants to have one of those. I can see it now, a miniature T-Rex three feet tall striding down the sidewalk, muzzled of course, and on a leash.

Is there danger in all this? Of course there is, just as certain breeds of dogs are dangerous. But…hey, let the free market decide, after all, it’s the job creator!

Losing an object we love can be upsetting; a favorite cup, a photograph, an old sweater. Losing someone we love is downright heartbreaking; a mother, a father, a child, a friend. In the film The Maltese Falcon, Sydney Greenstreet plays with our sympathies at the prospect of turning-in his gun-toting assistant Wilmar to the police; “I’ve loved him like a son,” he says, mournfully “but then one can always get another son. There’s only one falcon.” The “Fat Man’s” heart’s revealed to be as black as the bird he seeks. Such melodrama works well in cinema, but only dangerous psychopaths feel this way in real life.

When my father’s wife died suddenly, he was crushed; nearly twenty years his junior her death was unexpected. He lived one year longer, but it was a long year of endless grief. Nothing could repair his broken heart; not me, my family, his grandchildren, music, movies or any object. I would try to comfort him by saying things like, “give it time, Dad, it will get easier,” or “focus on gratitude for what you’ve had and have,” but these attempts, though well-intended, were simply words and ultimately misguided. These past few years I’ve learned that a lost loved one leaves a hole that can never be filled. Time makes some difference, but I miss my departed friends and family as much today as ever, and now realize that’s how it will be until I too cross the finish line. Surprise, surprise; I’ve been awakened by my broken heart.

The first teaching of the Buddha was the truth of suffering, and a broken heart qualifies. Life feels tragic because it is. We try, me included, to cordon off our hearts for protection – using humor, logic, sentimentality, sarcasm or anger – but this just results in the suffering of suffering, suffering squared. At long last, I’ve gratefully learned that my broken-open heart keeps suffering direct and simple, places me face-to-face with my deep attachments and the feelings alongside them. The sadness and loneliness I sometimes feel leaves me more vulnerable and exposed, and that in turn makes me more open to the vulnerability and suffering of others.

The Buddha knew that realizing the truth of suffering is the first step on the path to liberation. His teaching was not that we should avoid suffering, but to see it, sit with it, feel our broken hearts and let them open to the broken hearts of others. This is no simple “how-to” self-improvement teaching; it is a life-long journey that is often painful, relentless, moment-to-moment, and yet also mixed with love’s great joy and peace.

Beyond words, fine platitudes and sincere advice, discovering that life is heartbreaking is simply the price we pay for love.

But what of freedom; is it something granted or a birthright? Political thinkers in Europe’s Age of Enlightenment, from whom America’s founding fathers borrowed phrases and richly endowed our Declaration of Independence without attribution, considered freedom a birthright of Natural Law. Thus the phrase “all men are created equal” (appropriated from British philosopher Thomas Locke’s Second Treatise of Government written in 1690), applies precepts of Natural Law to birth. It’s worth noting Locke and our founding fathers also considered Natural Law justification for slavery and the second-class status of women, viewed as the “lesser sex.”

Today’s Libertarians and conservatives gravitate to Natural Law precepts, and their acceptance of legitimate government goes only so far as the idea that government’s paramount role is to protect private property. That this opinion is vintage 17th Century philosophy about civic society makes it all the more sacrosanct; the Tea Party name is entirely apropos. Ironically, the freedom to own begets the freedom to shop, which gives rise to the freedom to sell. Thus we find ourselves stuck in the mire of a relentless modern day materialist free-for-all. But wait…there’s more!

In commercial terms, free means getting “sumpin’ for nuttin’,” an infallibly faithful sales technique despite common knowledge that no “free lunch” is “free.” We also employ phrases such as fragrance-free, carbon-free, aerosol-free and the like, all of which use free as an indication of absence. In the meantime, freedom from want, freedom of expression, freedom of religion and a variety of other freedoms are now part of our everyday national narrative. In short, we are so free in the use of the word free it’s no longer terribly meaningful.

Whether all of us are naturally “born free” remains an interesting area of inquiry. Despite the conventionally popular view, we do not emerge from the womb as independent full-fledged citizens; to the contrary, we are born totally helpless, completely dependent, and then spend many years in childhood accommodating ourselves to a well-established system created well before our arrival. This system is a collectively held set of cultural norms, symbolic meanings, proscribed behaviors, established views and popular attitudes; none of us are free from all that, ever. Thus freedom, even the freedom of Natural Law, is never absolute. We cannot as individuals be separated from society; we explore freedom in relative terms only, political opinions notwithstanding.

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, never one to be afraid of controversy, opined that the freest among us are psychotics. Unbridled from the common cultural norms or other customary restraints of society, psychotics explore spaces most of us cannot or choose not to access. That such psychosis can fuel the creativity of an artist, such as Vincent Van Gogh, is without dispute. Of course, his creativity also came at the price of cutting off his own ear, which he was free to do, as are we all. Perhaps ear piercing is a symbolic nod to the freedom of our own latent psychosis.

Ultimately, freedom is just another word. What it means is up to each of us.

You may think you are a loser: full of self-criticism, disliking your looks and your body, eating badly, drinking and smoking, not sleeping enough, ignoring your kids, slacking off at work, treating friends like enemies, mouthing off at your wife, wearing dirty clothes, wasting money on lottery tickets, picking your nose in public, flipping-off other drivers, leaving no tips, speeding on side streets, tossing litter, and so on and so forth. All this miserable behavior is appropriate to losers, but the basic fact remains: you are a winner.

We’re all winners; everyone alive has come out on top, beaten odds so enormous they are beyond calculation. For billions of years one life after another led up to you – amoebas, microscopic worms, trilobites, dinosaurs, buzzing insects, crawling slugs, marsupials, rodents, primates, proto-hominids and homo sapiens. All these past lives, and many more forever uncountable and unknown, form an unbroken chain with you at the end. At any point, at any time in any place, this continuity could have been broken, and if broken, you would not exist. If that does not qualify you as a winner, dear one, what possibly could?

Alright, you say, that’s true, but so what? Why should it matter if each of us who are alive represent the ultimate culmination of billions of years of life? We did not ask to be here, so what’s the big deal, and besides, if we want to think that life is crap, it’s our choice, right? Well, this is true; think what you like. But thinking does not change the facts, dear one, and the fact is that being alive is a near miracle.

How we think of ourselves is our choice (and that ability an evolutionary joke, perhaps?), and carefully examining the fabric of the lives we’ve woven can be sobering indeed. We all make mistakes, poor choices, and bad decisions; this is how we learn. If we don’t learn from our mistakes, then we are doomed to repeat them, right? And if we do learn, the fabric changes along with our behavior.

Some believe evolutionary change is fueled by nothing more than a continuum of non-lethal mistakes. Our ancestors, including those microscopic round worms in our family lineage, took right turns instead of left and survived long enough to pass on genetic and epigenetic information about survival. Others may say we’re here by divine grace, that this worm or that was blessed for survival over others. Still more might say survival of those that came before us was predetermined, by fate or karma. Ah well, such arguments are not winnable; we are here now and it’s what we do with this time that matters.

Of all creatures, only people feel like losers. No bird feels like a loser, nor a salamander or for that matter even a worm. Like all living things, birds, salamanders and worms are natural born winners. People are natural born winners too, but we’ve been told we’re losers for so often that many actually believe it. Sure, life is short and can be tough, but hey, congratulations, you should be celebrating! You made the cut and beat the odds, and every day’s another chance to start fresh again.

And this, dear one, is why birds sing at dawn.

I watched both my parents get old, then very old. They seemed shocked by very old age, and what they lost by degree day by day. Eyes, heart, lungs, legs; one way or another their bodies began to fail them. In my father’s case, it made him angry. He’d stop while walking, poor circulation causing leg pain. “Goddamnit,” he’d curse, “hold on, my leg hurts.” By 91, he’d largely lost his vision to macular degeneration; “I just want to read the paper!” he’d complain. One day I asked him what he’d imagined very old age would be like. “Never thought about it,” he grunted.

My mother would sit on her wicker sofa and scrutinize her changed body. “Look how ugly I’ve become,” she’d mourn, “can you believe it?” Running her fingers across her slackened thinning skin, she’d shake her head in dismay. “How long does this go on?” she’d ask repeatedly; I never was certain what “this” meant. “Well,” I’d say, “Nobody knows, mom. One thing’s for sure, nobody gets out alive.” She always laughed; her memory failing at 89, she’d laugh every time.

Though in denial, in some sense both my parents knew death was calling. Long divorced, they each lived in their own apartment, but near the end they both repeatedly asked to go home. My mother would pack her bags, and my father kept telling me to call the doorman because a car was waiting. Finally bed-ridden, needing constant care, reduced to helplessness, their last few days were spent simply breathing.

Tibetan Buddhists perform ritual practices called visualization. In these, one generates a detailed mental image of a practice deity, learns to switch places with it to perform various rituals, then merges with it, and completes the practice by dissolving the visualization into the emptiness from which it arose. It’s said such rituals help lessen dependence on one’s physical self, preparation for that moment when consciousness leaves the body. Outwardly seeming esoteric and exotic, having watched my parents dissolve, I now realize such rituals are rooted in our ordinary human experience.

To watch yourself dissolve, to leave everyone and everything you love, even your own body, is life’s biggest test. We don’t ask to be born, but having been, we don’t like leaving. It’s an inevitable event, but not one we enjoy thinking about or for which we are very well prepared. When asked to describe his daily practice, the Dalai Lama responded it’s preparation for death. I have no idea how well I’ll be prepared, but I don’t think I’ll be shocked.

“It’s not fair, Larry,” my mother observed three days before she died, referring to the indignities of very old age. Then smiling, still with a sense of humor, she leaned close to me, winked and added, “Get out while you can.”

Such conclusions are by no means consistent or logical. Different cultures have arrived at their conclusions about people alongside creation tales, religious beliefs, social conventions and the dictates of environment. Accordingly, when we review what’s generally concluded about people, we see great variation, running the gamut from terribly negative to extremely positive.

Those among us who behave badly, who hurt others and impose an aggressive personal agenda on all around them, provide a ready justification for feeling negative about people and society. That such bad behavior has often been committed in the name of goodness simply serves to make such matters rather confusing. Badness committed in pursuit of goodness creates a terrible moral paradox, which is why Mahatma Gandhi abandoned any use of violence whatsoever in his pursuit of India’s independence from England. But I digress; the point of this column is to try to answer a question: Are people inherently good but sometimes bad, or are people inherently bad but sometimes good?

The conclusion that people are inherently bad is a popular one, with its roots set in Biblical tales of original sin. According to this conclusion, everyone is born bad, but has the potential for goodness,  accessible to us only through the grace of the divine. In this case, such divine grace requires submission by faith, and there are those who say without it, we are sinners doomed to darkness. A yet bleaker, non-religious conclusion is that people are basically bad and beyond all redemption. Accordingly, this logic dictates that the instrumentality of state power must be exercised to control people, the preferred approach of tyrants and despots.

Others prefer the conclusion that people are basically good. From this perspective, the inherent goodness in people is merely obscured by ignorance, confusion and mistaken thinking, resulting in bad behavior; goodness itself remains unblemished. Thus, it is said, those seeking goodness in others can always find it, despite the outwardly unpleasant actions and activities of people. It was such confidence in basic goodness that made Gandhi all victorious. No matter how terribly people behaved, he never lost confidence in basic goodness, an unyielding force that ultimately cracks open and breaks the shell of self-serving behavior and attitudes.

As in most matters philosophical, I look to our granddaughter Isabelle for guidance; at nearly four she is articulate, thoughtful and not yet filled with too much claptrap. My wife emailed me a discussion she had with Isabelle that’s to the point:

“We were talking about little baby Warren and how tiny he was (when he was born) and she said that she’s bigger than he is so she has to be careful with him. Then she said, “Because he’s little and he’s breakable.” I said, yes that’s true. Then she said, “I’m bigger but I’m still breakable.” I said yes. And then she said, “You are too.” I said yes I was breakable, too, wondering where she was taking this. Then she said, “Everyone’s breakable. Even the bad guys.” I said, yes, just sometimes the bad guys said they didn’t care or they wouldn’t admit they were breakable. She nodded her head. I had tears in my eyes. It’s true, we’re all breakable, even the bad guys.