Beliefs, Values, Morals, Ethics

This is something I picked up at the police academy a decade and a half ago that has been really valuable. I wish I knew who to attribute it to, because it is a good tool.

The concept is: Each individual has a heirarchy of right and wrong. This hierarchy is individual and idiosyncratic and each level depends on the level below it.

BELIEFS are those things you hold to be true.
Given those beliefs your estimation of the relative importance of the "true things" are your VALUES.
MORALS are a generalized feeling, based on your values, of what is 'right' and 'wrong'.
ETHICS arise when you try to codify your morals in concrete terms.

Couple of caveats- these definitions are specific to this system. Ethics and morals are greek and latin translations of each other and are pretty much synonyms in common usage. This also can look kind of fuzzy given the system in four little lines. Bear with me a minute.

So a couple of examples (following does not necessarily reflect the beliefs of the author, me):

"I belief that all life is sacred."
"However, I value human life more than animal."
" It is wrong to take human life and sort of wrong to kill animals."
"Thou shalt not kill people, and you should only butcher animals where I can't see it."

A change at the Value level creates a different person:
"I believe that all life is sacred."
"I value all life equally."
"Taking any life for any reason is wrong."
"Meat is murder!"

The power in this as a tool is to realize in any disagreement where the fundamental difference lies and to understand that you CAN NOT convince anyone who disagrees from a basic level with arguments from a more abstract level. If the issue is a difference of morals (an intuitive judgment of right and wrong), you won't be able to convince them with an ethical (a logical, legalistic, code) argument. If someone doesn't value life at all, it does no good to argue what type of life is most valuable.

If you run into a PETA member who honestly feels that humans and animals are of equal value, you will never convince this person with a moral or ethical argument. You would literally need to shift their values and it will be easiest to do that by clarifying their beliefs:

"If all life is sacred, does that mean that nothing should ever be allowed to die?" or "Is this a personal preferance or a natural law, because it seems to me that in nature, every animal dies..."or "If all life is sacred are the natural acts of life, such as a carnivore killing and eating, also sacred?" Lots of people have never thought through their beliefs at this level and sometimes there's a good amount of self-discovery in talking at this level. Will it change 'em? Not always.

You see this problem in some of the most intractable arguments in modern politics. Abortion, from the pro-choice arguments, is largely a moral issue: It is wrong for any person to tell someone else what they can not or must do to or with their own body. It is based on a deeper value of autonomy, possibly tinged with a sense of injustice that women had almost no reproductive rights for much of recorded history and that is based on a deeper belief that controlling someone else's body IS slavery...

The core belief of the pro-life lobby is that the fetus IS a baby. Not a potential life, not a piece of tissue, but a baby. From that belief the next step (value) is simple, weighing the life of a child over a change in the woman's life-style. Balancing the murder of an innocent baby against the ease and freedom of being childless...

This kind of issue can never be settled at the intuitive moral level or the logical ethical level (which is where all written laws reside). It may not be solvable at all, unless someone can find a a little room to maneuver in subjects as definite as the definition of slavery and the definition of life.

Getting It

If you aren't careful, experience can become your worst enemy.

You may have had a hundred fights, but this particular fight you will only have once. If you play off the old scripts and the situation changes, you will fail.

I'm halfway through a fascinating book called "Deep Survival" by Laurence Gonzalez. At this point, I can't accurately summarize it except to say it's about why some people die. He's covered the neurochemical response to stress and how it can lock you into previous behaviors. How when the stress goes on you can lock your eyes on the goal and kill yourself smashing into it. How a well-worn mental map can become "more true" than the reality it was meant to describe. How people who are used to a safe environment and working to make it safer mentally choke on the idea that there are some things that you can never make safe- that walking in the woods a hundred times is fine until Nature decides "today's the day" and you are faced with how truly miniscule a human brain, body and spirit are in the face of a cold ocean, thirst or an avalanche.

It hit a lot of my buttons about violence, because we can't make this job safe. It can't be done. You can develop incredible tactical skill and superhuman awareness and have every gadget known to man and still go in to break up a fight and be burned to death with some thrown rubbing alcohol and a lighter.

One of the things that keeps coming up echoes one of my admonitions: Gonzalez says that survivors are the ones who never hold their 'reality maps' to be sacred, who keep an eye on what is actually happening and don't have a problem with ditching a plan or just getting the hell out of Dodge when the situation ceases to resemble the plan. I say the people who get fucked up are the ones who think that they have the answer.

It's not about answers- it's about the questions.

Tony sent a note into Cyberspace, someone had told him it was a pleasure talking to him because he 'got it'. It bugged Tony, because he has enough experience with bad people and bad situations to know that there are no answers in real life, and he's a very humble martial artist who sees all that he has yet to learn,

But he does get it, in a way that very few martial artists ever do: There aren't any answers. There's no silver bullet, there's no Holy Grail. There is no training or system or instructor who will make you safe. Everybody dies. Well trained and conditioned martial athletes get their asses kicked or their throats cut or gunned down in the street. Well-trained tactical officers get shot in the back of the head and Delta Operators get overwhelmed and ambushed.

And no one wants to hear that. They don't want a teacher who says, "I don't have any answers for you." People pay for answers. They want solutions to problems.

The best you can give them are percentage points, and remind them to keep their eyes open to what is going on. Tony gets that. Not many people do. Not many want to.

The Problem of Mushin

Mushin is the state of "no mind"where the body does the appropriate thing quickly, completely and without conscious thought.

For beginners, they see the fist coming at them and they think, "I'd better block" and they do, usually too slow. In mushin, you never consciously see the fist or choose the block. The same thing happens in many, many areas of our lives. Most people remember how complicated and difficult driving was the first time and rarely appreciate how automatic it has become. The same with music, but we see a higher level here that applies to martial arts- some can sight read music and play without thinking about it, many can play a favorite song "by heart" without thinking about it, but very, very few can 'jam'- can meld seamlessly with a group of players making beauty out of chaos. That, my friends, is a lot like fighting.

So I usually see two camps, constantly arguing with each other:

Position 1: Train hard and mushin will be there when you need it.
Position 2: How dare you tell someone to rely on a mystical state that you can't even prove exists when their life is at stake!

The biggest danger to students doesn't come from either side, it comes from the arguments themselves.

All of life is incredibly complicated and we do an incredible amount on automatic pilot. Real combat can be one of the most surreal and complicated things- your body may be pushed to it's limits of strength, speed, endurance and durability; your brain will be soaked in a cascade of neurochemicals and you have two or more human animals in that state with different perceptions, plans and inclinations. Then there's the Twilight Zone stuff that sometimes happens.

Your conscious brain can't process it. Both camps know this. But your subconscious, especially if it has been trained well and hard, can deal with it. It doesn't have to deal with it 'right'. I will tell you and any self-defense instructor will tell you that high kicks are generally a bad idea, but in one case a friend flinched and kicked the bad guy in the chin. Game over. On paper an iffy technique, but the subconscious dealt with it.

The traditional camp says Mushin will be there when you need it, and they are often right. People who train hard and give themselves permission to do what they train can accomplish amazing things. A metaphor: Training is a vehicle. An assault is suddenly seeing a piano fall off a truck in front of you when you are doing 90 mph. If you are driving a sports car, you cut the wheel hard, cut back and accelerate. If you are driving a jeep or a pick up, you veer and keep the wheels straight if you go off the road. If you're driving a dump truck, you accelerate and smash through the damn thing. If you are in one of these vehicles and you try to drive it like the others, you die. Cut the wheel on the dumptruck and you flip. Smash through with the sports car and you're smashed. Go off road at speed with either and you're in bad shape.

Trying to decide what to do instead of letting your training do it's job, is like driving the sports car like a dump truck- or worse, not being able to decide how to drive and getting killed with a deer-in-the-headlights look like an idiot.

The other camp, when they aren't just complaining and are actively training, tend towards scenarios. It's easy to go into pure fantasy with scenarios but the idea with good scenarios is to expose the students to situations as realistic as possible and let them work it out. Unlike real life, you can learn from your own death. But the core idea, the real meat, is that if you do scenarios enough and well enough when the real fight happens it won't be unfamiliar territory. If it looks and feels enough like training, you'll have the home court advantage, you'll be able to think instead of simply react.

The flaw, of course, is that often thinking is too slow and you must react. Scenario training still gets there, it's just that the point at which the person is cooly thinking of options while the Sim bullets whiz around his head is NOT the goal, it's actually one of the most dangerous mental way-points. Things happen at such speed that you must get to the conclusion without going through the mental process to get there. Thinking, no matter how cooly, is falling in love with the dead time.

The other camp, 'work hard and you'll get there', is right sometimes... as long as the brain doesn't obsess on the fact that this moment if nothing like training. That's a deadly freeze.

In both cases (though the scenario camp is reluctant to do or admit this) you must give your body and subconscious mind permission to handle it. Without the conscious 'You' interfering. That's a huge leap of faith.

I've done this a lot. Honestly, I usually plan the first second or second-and-a-half of a fight. Everything beyond that is stroking myself. Then I let go. I trust my will to survive, my moral base and my skill even (especially) without conscious control.

I feel the argument between the two camps is dangerous because the first time you let go, it is an act of faith. People telling you that what you have to trust doesn't exist can put a hole in your faith. On the other hand, after the tenth or twentieth time, the people telling you it doesn't exist range from amusing to annoying.

One more note- when dealing with chaos not all people react in the same way. For some, Mushin is automatic under stress, for others it doesn't happen at all... and the only way you can find out is to go into the storm and take the leap of faith.

Making Waves

There's an area where we have always known we have trouble with contraband. The inmates who clean up the roadways and homeless camps find lots of interesting things and, when they can, they smuggle it into our facility. I had the idea a few weeks ago of attacking this problem in the middle instead of at the ends (the ends in this case being the work site and the entrance to the facility). With the help of the friendly neighborhood K9 drug dog, we went through the trucks.

We went through some of the trucks.

Well, only two really.

Because that was all the contraband we could lift. Knives. Smokes. Lighters. Tools. Porn. Complete sets of civilian clothes. CDs and players... The stuff from one truck covered four tables in the conference room. We knew there was a problem, but no one had imagined this. Deputies with twenty years in were saying, "No way! No fucking way!"

There were only three of us involved in the actual search, but it had been planned with work crew, senior administration and enforcement. It wasn't, or shouldn't have been, a surprise to anyone. Yet one deputy says it was grandstanding to take pictures of the contraband. He, and he alone, is more worried about a colleague being embarassed than the same colleague supervising inmates with hidden knives. It's true that the work inmates have chainsaws, but the officer hands them the chainsaw and knows who has it. The one he doesn't trust with the chainsaw may have a knife...

The pictures were really impressive, but I'm just grandstanding...
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Paranoia moment: A friend said, "Hey, I was down at headquarters and I heard some good stuff about you, heard you were doing a good job."

I froze, and stuff started sliding through my head, old conversations from headquarters: "What you need to understand, sergeant, is that there are line monkeys and there are office people, and you're a line monkey..." "Sergeant, you're just a tactical guy. You shouldn't even be speaking on these matters..." "Everyone who works the line is beating people up every night and they're lying about it!"

I honestly thought that there were only two kinds of people at headquarters- people who didn't know I existed and people who couldn't stand me. Looks like I need to get over that.

Motivation and Dedication

In BCT (Basic Combat Training otherwise known as Boot Camp) there were several days devoted to classroom training- intelligence briefings on the Soviet Threat, classes on surviving chemical and biological weapons, Chain-of-Command... that kind of stuff. Questions from the recruits were encouraged.

Several of the other training platoons started prefacing their questions with slogans to show 'spirit': "Drill Sergeant! Private Jones from 3rd Platoon the best platoon! My question is..."

When I had a question, I asked it: "Drill Sergeant! Private Miller, First Platoon. What is..."
The drill stopped me right there. "What's the matter private? Aren't you motivated?"
"Drill sergeant! No Drill Sergeant! I'm dedicated! I'll be there long after these cheerleaders have burned out!" Fortunately, the drill sergeants we had- Smoll, Bowe and I can't remember the third, liked that. Smoll and Bowe had seen a lot of ugliness and valued dedication over motivation.

This is in my head now because of the ugliness mentioned in the last post. There were some bad and, in my opinion, unethical decisions made. I called the boss on the bad decisions and refused to go along with the unethical one... and called that one out into light. THAT's MY JOB. It's not easy and I don't always enjoy telling people I usually respect that they are wrong but that is my job.

And it's just a job.

But all week (and I've already had two days of it and it's making me tired) the individuals involved will be taking me aside and having long, private, heart-felt conversations to make sure that we don't have a problem. It's as if they expect (and I've seen it, so it's not an irrational expectation) that no one would actually speak out unless they were deeply angry.

I spoke, so I must be angry.

I'm dedicated. I'm dedicated to my job so I do the job. I do it as well as I can whether I'm tired or frustrated or injured or having problems outside of work. Not just when I'm motivated or in the mood. That's what I'm paid to do. That's what I swore I would do. Sometimes that involves saying things that people would rather not hear. That's okay. the best lessons are the ones you don't want to hear.

Aftermath

The stuff I should write about leaves me cold right now. I expect criminals to try to ambush me, not colleagues. I expect some of the inmates to try to make my job harder, not senior administration.

Inmates don't bother us because, deep down, what do I care if a swindler who cheats little old ladies or a crack head or a child molester or a murderer thinks of me? We act honorably for ourselves, not because of what the inmates might think. But we do care about what other officers think.

It was a pretty ugly day. We had some information and we did a good hard search of one of the problem dorms with drug dogs and all available man power and we found a lot of contraband. Not all the contraband was important. Drugs, weapons and firestarting stuff are a bigger problem than someone stockpiling food or extra clothes.

It was a good job. The deputies did an outstanding job with excellent control, the sergeant in charge of the area busted his ass both on the search and getting the paperwork done.... and the senior administrator though it was odd that there was so much paperwork and dismissed it all...and tried to blame the people doing the job. Without a word to any of the people involved.

We deal with an ugly environment but morale, particularly with this crew, is usually very, very high. We do a good job. We take care of each other. Then someting like this happens and for MONTHS we'll be looking at anyone with brass on his or her collar as a potential enemy.

That was only one incident from that day, the less serious of the two.

Religion

A deputy tried to convert me to Christianity tonight. It would have been better received if he was one of our more ethical or least self-centered deputies, but, alas. On the other hand, I've never had anyone of really deep ethics who genuinely cared about others attempt to proselytize. Just my experience. Your mileage may vary.

It would seem that if you were going to try to convert someone to your religion, or any religion for that matter, you'd use the sense of any basic predator and look for the weak or the injured. Wouldn't it make sense to concentrate efforts on people in a spiritual crisis or identity turmoil or at least somewhat unhappy? Thinking back, the handful of people I know who were successfully (and fanatically) converted to a religion were caught at exactly these low times. So... hmm... the good converters do follow the predator dynamic. That's interesting.

So why try to convert me? Until a direct question is asked, people usually assume that I am the same religion they are: live a fairly ethical life, do things you're proud of and speak with a little respect and knowledge of whatever religion comes up and it's just assumed that you're a fellow member of whatever flock is on their minds (I once had a girl write a letter suggesting we explore a long term relationship since we were both born again fundamentalist christians in a godless, secular world ?!?)

In this case, I think it was as simple as validation. He'd taken certain clues (I was on graveyard shift for awhile and got very good at crossword puzzles) as signs that I was very intelligent. Unless he could prove to himself that I was firmly in the grip of satan, it was an affront for someone he considered intelligent to disagree.

It was weird. He'd been "studying the bible for 26 years" but he'd never read Josephus or any of the Jewish philosophers or even any contemporary history books to supply any context. When that part of the conversation didn't go as he'd planned (and honestly, I wasn't trying to be an ass) he switched to the supernatural effects he's experienced from being "born again". That was a non-starter, too. I've been involved in and experienced some pretty weird stuff.

"But I wasn't dreaming this," he kept saying. Neither was I.

He asked if I believe in an afterlife. I do, because of some personal evidence, but I told him it didn't matter. Trying to explain, I told him that what made Lucifer into Lucifer was that he wasn't satisfied to be an angel. This is a huge, beautiful world and I will never in my lifetime or many lifetimes exhaust the beauty, mystery and sheer experience of it. How sacriligeous to ask for something more, as if the world was not enough.

The very need to seek an afterlife, to seek something beyond and above the miracle of life and every day is the very attitude that created (according to Milton) the Christian Satan. Maybe, maybe if life were something that I would use up or exhaust it might be right to seek for more. But what kind of petty monster is given inexhaustible riches and lives in the very hand of God and snivels for something more, for heaven. To be in "His presence". If you aren't in his presence now, if you can't see that you live in the very heart of the divine, dying won't help you.

Last night (it's 24 hours later. I got busy) driving away from this encounter, the west was a half circle of brilliant royal blue with a curved line of glowing, layered gold and pink clouds directly overhead and a swirling black mass of clouds to the east flashing with sheets of lightning. A half moon rode the edge of pink and gold. It was beauty and power, light and dark.

Words and Action in Accord

I'm dealing with a prejudice of mine. I like people who have a tight coordination between what they say and what they do. It used to be worse- I used to assume that almost any discrepancy in word and deed -say the schism between a stated religious or ethical belief and an action- was a deliberate deception. A sign of evil and betrayal and blah blah blah...

I've grown up a lot since then. Frankly, for most people, words are just shit that comes out of their mouth to make them feel less lonely. It's white noise. Not for every one and not for anyone all the time. It's just in my nature to think of words as tools and it seems obvious to me that tools should be used precisely. It took a long time to understand that most humans don't see the world in terms of ends and means and don't instinctively value practicality as the highest ideal.

So I watch actions and friends and relationships: not what a person says about waitresses and flight attendants, but how they treat them. Not whether they preach the sanctity of marriage but how they treat their wives and how many wives they've had.

So I've grown a little bit, but it still bugs me.

It especially bugs me when words and words are not in accord. That seems so simple. (Following example heavily edited to take out the jargon)

Deputy: Sarge, I think this person is breaking this rule, but I don't have enough evidence to follow up.
Me: Why do you think he's doing it?
Deputy: I watched him do it.
??????

And this is the deep prejudice, because it's hard not to interpret that as stupidity- but the person isn't stupid. It's just white noise coming out of the mouth.

Surviving an LTR

A new analogy/metaphor/comparison hit me today. Not sure how applicable it is, but it feels right. It's about relationships and the troubles they go through and at a deep level, how I look at them.

Kami and I have been together a long time. It will be twenty years in October. They have been mostly good times and I cherish her. But ther have been horrible moments that still hurt years later and sometimes the hurt or the memory drifts across my mind and everything is gray for a while.

I realized today that Kami isn't my longest-term relationship. It's not my birth family, either, since I moved out when I was sixteen. The longest, stormiest relationship so far is with my own body . It's not the years, as they say, it's the mileage. If you look closely there's a lot of scar tissue. Very few of the joints in my hands look they way they were designed to. There is a screw in one knee and probably should be one in the other and if I remembered all the shoulder dislocation it would be in double digits or close to it. Relationships or body, I've never held back much. Not expecting to last long, I've always been driven to get the life and the love out now, on the table, in the open. I've never, ever had a problem telling someone I loved them because I never believed I had a lot of time to waste.

The first time I dislocated my shoulder was decades ago, showing off that I could do a "human flag" from a stop sign. Don't know why it popped that time and not before. It hurt and I reduced it and for a long while I didn't trust it. I worked it hard, never wanting it to be weak or fail again. I actually felt betrayed by my own shoulder. When I judged it strong enough, I tested it... and it popped again, of course

So I was angry at a part of me.

What am I trying to say here? Not sure. Sometimes, under great (or not so great) pressure, things snap. Sometimes, that thing is a part of you. If it's truly a part of you, you work on it or get it replaced. I replaced my knee. I don't trust it, it always hurts, there are numb spots, the hamnstring they cut the replacement out of is as tight as a guitar string. It may not be as weak, but there are more parts damaged in the replacement process than I understood when I made the decision.

I haven't had surgery on my shoulders and I don't want to. They crunch. They hurt all the time. But I know what they can and can't do and how far I can push them before they pop and how to fix them and what I can get away with in the heat of a fight after fixing them. They're my shoulders, dammit. Even if they aren't the uninjured and untested teenager shoulders they're mine and we go well together.

Besides, they match the scars.

It's a Long Story...

A few days ago (first real chance to write since) an inmate asked how I became a jail guard. "It's a long story," I said. Nothing more. It's personal information and we don't usually share that with inmates.

Kami and I had been thrown together in a conspiracy orchestrated by mutual friends which involved getting me to leave Nevada and then throwing us in the same room for an hour. That was all it took, really.

We knew very quickly that we wanted to spend the rest of out lives together. I don't recall it as any kind of big moment or sudden realization, it was just obvious. This is my wife. This may sound like I'm belittling something glorious, but I find glory in many seemingly small things: Meeting Kami was like putting on my favorite jacket. It fit right, it smelled right and I've never, ever, had a moment agonizing over which jacket is my favorite. It just is.

But we were smart and ambitious and had plans. We would both start careers. When we had a house and an income over 100k (1980's ) or a total of four books in print we would marry and have children.

Then the first Persian Gulf war erupted. I was in a National Guard unit E/1-249th AA. Echo company was a desert trained, air-mobile, anti-armor unit. We were rated one of the best tank killing units in the military and Hussein had a lot of tanks. Not for a minute was there a shred of doubt that we would be one of the first units deployed.

Suddenly, everything changed. If we were sent and if I was killed (medic assigned to a front-line unit without much of a self preservation instinct) all that Kami would have would be memories and my family would be fresh out of sons (Dad had always made a big deal that I was the last of his line).

So we decided to get married and start trying to have a child. The Gods must have smiled (or snickered) because according to the doctor Kami had been pregnant for about a week when we made the decision.

Then... nothing happened. The huge mass of top-of-the-line soviet tanks that Hussein had (and which our intelligence briefs had indicated were as good or better than the US M1 Abrams) fell apart in a matter of days. I wasn't going to war. I was going to live.

Ohmygod I have a wife and baby on the way!

Things moved quick from there. I talked to my advisor and found out that the double major (Biology and Psychology) I'd been working on for ten years would take another year (assuming I could pass biochemistry) or I'd have to take a single humanities class to get the psych degree.

---Couple of asides. 1)It took me ten years to put myself through college on the "work until I had enough to go back then stay as long as I could afford to" plan. 2) Shameless plug: The National Guard, between the student loan repayment program and the GI bill were instrumental in getting me through. Any military training is also a big edge in developing some discipline and turning whiny, selfish little entitled American kids into men and women who have a work ethic and a sense of teamwork.---asides end

And I needed a job. A real job that could support a family (omygodimgonnabeafather!!!). I put out a bunch of applications, mostly in the Law Enforcement area- it seemed like a good fit after some military, bouncing in a casino and talking to some old officers.

The Corrections job came through. It was a good fit.

Long story with a happy ending. Except it's not ended yet. Not by a long shot.

Intersections

Do you ever sit down and think about the absolute random things that came together to create you? Not just the one in a million chance that that particular sperm would fertilize that particular egg in order to make your particular genetic combination. Other stuff.

I'm priveleged to know a few of the people who read this: extraordinary fighters and musicians; insightful, incisive, curious, warm friends. What magical combination does it take to make a Mac, a Kami, a Kevin or a Kai? (that's what you get for signing your comments).

The intersection that is shaping my life right now is twenty-five years of martial training combining with fifteen working the jails. But that's not the whole story. From listening to my seniors in the exciting, fast-paced world of Corrections it seems that a few years before I joined there was a level of unprofessional brutality and corruption that was tolerated and encouraged. I could not have stayed in the field if that was the case. I have no problem with using violence for a clear, justified and legal goal. I DO need a clear difference between the good guys and the bad guys and I need to be one of the good guys.

So I entered the field at the time when we were still expected to have the old skills- to be able to enter and finish a fight quick and hard, to recover from ambushes and prevail, not to back down from weapons or numbers but were discouraged from using them just to bolster our authority. Without moral hesitations, I could get into the physical stuff with an inner purity which made a lot of things possible.

If I had come in ten years later when the attitude had shifted to a very hands-off approach and the introduction of OC (pepper spray) to the facilities had started making people more tool than skill dependent, it would have been a different story. I might have been one of the "Five year rookies" still waiting for that first big fight.

When the corrections tactical team started it was essentially an unarmed SWAT team. Hostage rescue, riot control, cell extractions, barricaded threats... and no firearms. No problem. Strategically and tactically, it was a bad concept. But there was no more perfect way to intersect unarmed martial arts and real life.

This window of time fit perfectly with my training and my temperment. That's a lot of coincidence. Or a lot of luck. Give a thought, today, to the intersections of your life.

The Point

This is where this has all been going, and as I've laid the background it's become obvious that I misunderstood may things. I'd looked at the big mythic journies as qualitatively different than the daily journeys and they aren't. I'd assumed, because sometimes it feels that way, that some deep events isolate you from the world, and that's not quite true.

This is what I'm talking about, the myth that has to be written- what happens to those few men and women who cross a dark threshold to a very deep place and return to find no community of people who have gone before? It has happened with veterans of Viet Nam, some of whom came home to families without parents who had served in Korea and a community who rejected them. It happens to officers who survive shootings and people who go into the desert and starve themselves to a vision.

It is the farthest travelers who learn the greatest secrets, and have the fewest to share it with.

I'm going to couch this in mythic language like the original Hero's Journey because myth is adaptable to many interpretations.

The Hero has completed his Journey. He has been beyond the world and has returned with new powers and new insights.
-The Homecoming: Greeted with joy, the returning hero greets his old friends

-Position in the Tribe: Accomplishments recognized, he is placed in a position of responsibility and respect.

-The dissatisfaction: He no longer fits with his old friends, perhaps due to the difference in growth. Members of the tribe become resentful. What yothe Hero believes is important does not mesh with the ideas of the power structure, tradition or politics of the tribe.

-Seeking Others: The Hero reaches out, looking for Others who have returned. He finds many, but most are burned out, suicidal, addicted or clinging to ancient glories.

-Creating the Kingdom: The hero ceases to search and decides to create a realm that reflects the wisdom he has won

- The leaving. The Kingdom runs well and happily and the Hero realizes that he is unneeded, unfulfilled and bored. With his confidence in his ability to create he goes in search, again, of Others.

-The Hero finds many archetypes in his travels, perhaps he must become each of these to move on. The Derelict: a burned out addict so overwhelmed by his experience that he can no longer function in the civilized world. Perhaps evil, but most likely pathetic, the Derelict searched his life for an enemy who could beat him and when he gave up he defeated himself. The Mystic: Caught up in the unearthliness of his vision, the Mystic has no connection with the day to day world. The King: Responsible and lonely he has accepted the reins of the Kingdom and works conscientiously, out of duty, slowly dying of boredom. The Teacher: Chooses to spread his knowledge either formally or as a guide leaving hints. He tries to help other to the Other Side and to be waiting when they return.

-The Hero begins teaching, but the truths are hard and the path is lonely. Further, the path must be walked alone, at the moments the Hero is teaching, the student cannot be on the path.

-At some point, a student will fail or die or betray.

-Creating a legacy: The Hero chooses to create a love-gift for the world, possibly his students. An expression of self and truth for future travelers. If the students are the legacy, this ties into the teaching step.

-Letting go of the Legacy. Once created, the Hero lets it go, watching only the changes in the world, not meddling.

-The Hero dies. In order to die well the Hero should have seen a student complete the Journey and been, perhaps, a Derelict, King, Mystic and Teacher.

That's my best guess at the mythic end game.

Journey Errata

Read the comments to the last post. The journey is a journey no matter which direction you are going and whether you are progressing or digressing is largely a point of view. Every career criminal that I have really talked to is convinced that he has moved closer to the truth of the world than a productive citizen can ever know.

There are rarified strata of criminals just as there are of good guys. There are cluster communities of bad guys who have done certain things and feel a kinship- bank robbers; sex offenders; murderers; deeper than the connection they feel with the rest of the criminal community.

And there is cross-over. There are certain predatory criminals who have used violence for an end and survived violence who I have more in common with than I do with my kid's school teachers.

This is important, but it is also an aside.

More stuff:
1)Everyone is involved in many of these journeys simultaneously. Fatherhood; career; martial arts; introspection; wilderness survival; emergency medicine; farming; criminals... are all areas where I have had huge growth, huge moments that shifted perspective. I'm not at the same level in all of them and never will be.

2) There is a mutual respect cross-over. I'm not a member of the criminal path, but our worlds touch a lot and that effects our interaction.

3) Some of the mountains have much in common, especially at the top. Most people who have really earned wisdom and insight do have a lot in common, and most can disagree gently.

4) No matter which secret brotherhood you have accessed, you are still a part of the mainstream community. After enlightenment, you still have to make a living. Maybe even suck up to a boss. (Who's hair raised at that sentence?)

5) Democratic and egalitarian societies have a real problem with extreme personal growth. In a Shoshone society, the people who brought themselves to the edge became Shamans and Warchiefs. In modern society they are eccentrics or babykillers.

6) This all seems very important and deep to me now, but in ten years I'm pretty sure I'll be laughing about how shallow and self-important I was.

The Journey: Breakthrough and Community

Working off the description from the last entry, each journey ends not only with a change in the self, but with admission to a new community of peers.

The blue collar kid in the example becomes a college graduate. He enters a new community and will relate with other members of his new community. He may go home, but it will never feel right. Old friends will treat him differently because he has changed, even if he believes his core is the same. He sees different problems and different solutions in their day to day world. Some will resent him (I've been in many places where 'college boy' is as much an insult as any racial epithet), some will try to latch on to his success (another cliche- how many songs and stories have been based on the plea of a young woman to "take me away from this place"?) But it never fits.

It doesn't end, either. Journies never end. With each passage the hero moves into a new community of people who have shared the path and with each passage the group becomes smaller and tighter and deeper... and more distant from the mainstream.

Emergency Medical Technicians. They go through a complete journey in training, building up to the big test, the "Practical Exam". It's not that hard but it is stressful and many students choke and many have to repeat it, but once you have, you are an EMT. You have joined this elite group and you share things with them that an outsider doesn't really get.

And then you get your first call. No matter how well you did in training, the first real call is always different. And you find there is another community, because the professional EMTs don't see the world the way the rookies do, or the wannabes (the ones who got the certification 'just in case' but never went into the field).

Then there is the first big call- blood and guts and brains and highspeed decisions. A level of responsibility that is almost unbelievable. A sense of accomplishment or failure that is soul shaking... and you graduate to a more elite cadre.

(There is growth all this time, of course, and skills increase and routine decisions are made with easy authority... unless you burn out, a sneaky way of giving up and leaving the path while staying in the community.)

Then there is THE CALL. The one that haunts your dreams and brings up things you never thought to deal with: The decapitated infant. The butchered family. The rape victim. There's a story going around that you aren't a real cop until you taste your own tears. That goes for a lot of Emergency Services personnel. This brings on the dark night of the soul worse than ever before. It gets into your dreams, colors the way you look at every detail of life. You will either burn out, quit, kill yourself, or keep going. If you keep going it might be with understanding or joy or determination... but if you decide to keep going, you will find, on the other side, a helping hand and a very small community of very quiet men. It is a small brotherhood who have come to see things few others have; and they share. Not in a sense that is easy to understand- it's not like Tony or Mauricio or Sean see the world I do or drew the same conclusions from similar events. It's simply sharing that someone else has been through it and survived. That the feelings are okay. That you are stronger and better for the experience.

And at this end, there are clusters of small communities: the officers who have survived shootings are rare and find it easier to talk to each other. The officers who have been hostages are another group. The ones who have recovered from alcoholism. The ones who responded to 9-11. Membership in one group does not give you membership in another.

There is an old saying that 'there are many paths up the mountain', but really there are many mountains. The mountain is a symbol for a heightened perspective. The perspective a fireman gets will show him, perhaps, the preciousness of life in a way that someone who has never risked their own life and saved another can really feel... but it will be subtly different than the perspective of someone who risked his life to save another in a hostage situation and very different from someone who went alone into the wilderness for a long time. All will have heightened perspectives, but they will be different. Different mountains. Different communities of 'heroes'.

Background - The Journey

I've been putting off writing this long enough.

The Hero's Journey, as explained by Joseph Campbell, is the basic framework of many myths. It chronicles the stages that a person/character/youngster goes through to become something more. It has been used, quite successfully, as a framework for evaluating and directing lives.

In general, an ordinary person leading an ordinary life gets called to a great adventure and rejects it. The stakes are raised (sometimes many times) until the hero accepts, then he meets a teacher, a mentor, who shows him something about how to survive what he is about to face. The hero then faces the first challenge and commits to taking it on. Maybe wins, maybe not. Maybe the first challenge was an illusion... but the hero is committed and keeps at it until he passes this test, only to find out that this is nothing, a prelude, a taste.

He is changed, though, and begins in ernest to both become what he is destined to be and come to terms with it. He will make friends and enemies, gather allies and wisdom and take and pass many tests. <>.

Then he will face darkness, the true challenge. Everything will be on the line, not just his life, but his identity. He will have to face the hardest temptation of all, the temptation to quit, to take the laurels he has won and go home. This is the 'why' phase, the place and time of insight. It will shatter illusions about what the hero is to himself and to the universe.

Beyond that is the gift, the goal, the chalice. In myth, the grail or the Medusa's head or... many things. In life it is usually an insight and depth of understanding.

There are many many variations, many archetypes one may stumble across. It can be repeated over and over as the Hero tries to settle down and is called for new problems.

Because it is couched in the language of myth, people miss how often they have lived this. Imagine a blue collar high-school kid who, during an assembly hears about college. Nah, he says, I'm not smart enough or rich enough. He hears the girl he has had a crush on for years is going to State. Still, he rejects. (Maybe more piles on, he is told of a career he would love that requires college or an ailing grandparent whispers that she wants one member of the family to attend college before she dies.)

So he decides to apply and contacts the school counselor (who may encourage or discourage, may be the first mentor or the first test). You see the tests and the challenges linig up? Taking grades seriously for the first time. The SATs. Applications and interviews. The mentors, allies and enemies- the roommate who was always going to college and knows what to expect. The RA who recognizes the kid is lost at college, the upperclassman asshole. Each challenge, each test. Each final exam. Each serious date. All the times the poor kid though 'I can't do this, I'm not cut out for this...' and talks himself out of giving up. Each extraordinary teacher or complete ogre until... finals and a thesis. Do we all know someone who worked on his thesis for years? Or someone who never completed it, swallowed by the big challenge?

And the reward, the diploma which does change everything about the former blue-collar highschool kid, who now sees a bigger world and has prospects for a completely different life.

Then the career becomes the next journey...

Do you see this? Like evolution, it is everywhere if you open your eyes. You have lived this a dozen times in big and small ways. Every decision you have made that was truly big enough to change you has followed this pattern. Maybe not all the steps and maybe not in the exact order. Maybe you 'met the temptress' (one of the variations) and maybe you 'met the Goddess'. Maybe you journeyed mostly alone. But this is not new territory for you, just the images have changed.

Illusions of Mastery

I'm re-reading a book, one of the ones that came out in the seventies that makes me want to puke every time I hear the word "warrior", especially applied to a non-violent lifestyle. You know the trope- it's always the first person account of a young, shallow, outwardly successful american college student who meets the quirky old man with seemingly mystic powers in an unlikely place. The quirky old man puts a finger on the vague disquiet that the protagonist feels in his life and challenges him to take a journey or follow a path or (insert cliched metaphor here) to become (insert euphemism for someone really special- warrior, shaman, "man of knowledge", healer, sorcerer, initiate, scout... there are dozens).

The protagonist is always extremely stupid and unobservant. The crazy old man (sometimes a woman) is always deft and subtle and, between the lines, smugly and self-righteously humble. That's humble with a capital H. Like in Horseshit. The protagonist eventually feels 'awakenings' and sees things that he has never seen before and rejects all that he has been taught about the false and plastic and shallow and spiritually dead mainstream culture.

As an aside, if you read these as potential cult initiations, you can get a good feel for the "Jim Jones" moment when the protagonist would have drunk the Grape Kool-aid of Doom as an act of proof of faith.

The whole premise is false and cruel. I'm really sorry that at some point the protagonist stopped smelling grass or tasting food or watching sunlight on water. I'm sorry the protagonist felt empty and unfulfilled. I'm really sorry it took two hundred pages of crappy writing for the author to get it clear to the protagonist that those were all individual choices. Ooooops. I didn't mean author and protagonist. I forgot for a second that these were all GENUINE First Person Accounts! Sorry. I obviously meant it took two hundred pages of crappy writing for the enlightened warrior mentor to bring the protagonist to this gate of understanding. That's what I meant. And they always seem to teach the last lesson on their death beds, which kind of makes it hard to verify anything. That's always convenient.

The need that inspires these books is also false and cruel. They can dress it up any way they want, but seeking mastery, at any level, is about seeking control. The world is a big and scary place. Not everything will go your way. Any way that you can measure happiness can and will be taken away from you- health, friends, posessions, experience will all fall away in age or senility or death. But so many people want to believe that there is this thing, this place, this discipline, this truth that will in some way transcend the inevitability of their own death, their own insignificance in the face of luck. They want an answer. People are lining up to provide answers, for a price.

Here's another persistant and obviously false belief about mastery: that if you truly achieve mastery in one thing, you have achieved it in all things. For the sake of argument, let's say that I have achieved absolute mastery in unarmed combat... you don't want me performing open-heart surgery on your child. Not if you have any brains at all. On the other hand, unless he's really special, you want me coming to save your ass from the bad guys, not your family doctor. The reply, of course, is that a true master has transcended such things as skills... which is a way of dodging and excusing the fact that the world is BIG. You will never know all of it and no matter how good you get at how many things, there will always be hundreds, thousands, millions of things that you don't know and can't fix.

But you can know and fix yourself, the enlightened ones say with smug, yet humble, superiority. To an extent, I agree. You can work on yourself. In any given situation you are the one variable you can control. To that extent, I agree. But if the self was truly mastered, all these final lessons wouldn't be happening on death beds, would they?

You can't beat time and you can't beat death. Get over that. But you can sure live while you're here. That may be the key, the one real chance at immortality lies in the stories you live and leave behind.

Too Busy

I've been really wanting to write- the difference between the small world and the big concepts behind it; how pushing someone into a leadership position is so much like teaching a child to ride a bike; how a sociopath can set the agenda without either him or the others around him realizing what is happening; storm clouds in the gorge...

Too busy. In the last four (or is it five now?) Two swing shifts, two and a half day shifts and two days off; two days of training; one night spent in the ER; a tactical operation; a day and a night visiting and talking with my oldest, closest friend.

Still to do- four reports, two investigations.

The Other Side

This is a prelude to something I've been needing to write for some time, and it touches on one of the major themes of this blog and my life. You've been warned.

There is an "other side" Actually, there are lots of other sides. There are events in life that change the people who experience them on a fundamental level. These events change how that person sees the world, how they interact with the world-- the events change who they are. Mine, usually, have centered around risk or violence or exposure to subcultures that most people prefer to pretend don't exist. There are others, though- years of focused introspection in a monastary; immersion in an alien culture; surviving in the wilds with nothing; being diagnosed with a terminal disease... many others.

FYI- There are others that I consider invalid- the weekend meditation retreat, the 10-minute consultation and enlightenment with the guru, the guided survival camp with the emergency radio, the interview with the serial killer (who lies anyway). The good ways all have certain things in common- real risk and/or real deprivation and/or real fear.

There are people who have been to this other side and returned to the normal, comfortable 9-to-5 world. From that time on, the world never fits quite right. People from this side look at you and sense the difference. Some sense the otherness and respond with fear... nothing overt, usually, just an obvious discomfort. Sometimes they sense the insight gained and they wind up sitting at your feet like cultists (and some of the fakes and wannabes crave that for some unknown reason).

You want, so badly, for people to understand what you have learned on the other side... but. A big 'but'. I want my children to understand me, to really know me, but I will give everything I have so that they never see the whiteness of their own bones on a frosty morning, never see the eruption of meat and blood from someone they have just shot, never hear a man scream from a torn ear and never smell brains.

Until they see those things or something like them, though, they will not understand me. More importantly, they will not know who they are in the harsh times or what they will do. They will not know themselves until they have been to the other side.

Sometimes we are driven to share, some more than others, in the hope that with words we can create a few people who can understand without going through the events. But our words can become the fodder and the scripts for the wannabes and we recoil when we recognize our words coming from the mouth of a slick talking man with soft hands.

Breaking

Muscles grow through exercise, I am told, because the effort causes tiny tears in the fibers. They don't actually grow during exercise but through the healing process during periods of rest. Learning is like that too- under good instruction and through dedicated effort there is a growth process composed of microscopic acts of destruction.

A punch is not perfected by doing something 'more'- it is perfected by removing every motion, every tension anything and everything that is not a punch from the motion. The hallmark of good fighting is simple efficiency- if my line is simpler, my distance shorter, my power generation cleaner, my targeting more efficient... I will win.

Teaching, at least for what I teach, has more in common with a sculptor chipping away at any piece of marble that doesn't match her inner vision than at a mason building a rock wall.

Those are the minor acts of destruction. Teaching, at the edge of life and death, involves major acts of destruction. Since part of the skill of real confrontation involves internalizing risk and fear, the student must be exposed to real risk and real fear. Whether it's at the high end of two man kata training where a slight lapse in concentration shattered a collarbone or boxing and breaking ribs or a drill with safety equipment and rules that still sent a third of the participants to the hospital, it had to be faced.

We make training as safe as we can, but for the few for whom this is not a hobby they eventually need to reach the edge and spend some time there. Still, the destruction that arises here is peripheral, accidental. Injuries happen when you play hard, but the injury isn't the point.

But sometimes the injuryIS the point. Usually it's a psychological break, not a physical one. A good instructor carefully brings a student to the edge of this cliff, gives them all the tools they need to fly, and pushes them off. Some fly. Some don't.

It's important to be clear here, but very difficult. For every physical inefficiency that slows and weakens a strike, there are psychological issues caused by history or inclination or false information that can cripple you before you even move. Illusions that must be faced and shattered. Once he has them to a certain skill level, Mac puts his students through a multi-man drill with the intent of immobilizing them to helplessness and then to continue the beating. For a young, strong, male fighter it is psychologically crushing... but the only thing that is crushed is a stupid illusion of invulnerability. Some learn, dropping one of many illusions. They fly at the edge of the cliff. Others never return to class, imagining what they will and should do to prevent it ever happening again, rescuscitating their illusion.

I remember some of my breaks- when my judo instructor showed me the old follow-throughs, turning a fun sport into a frightening art, I thought about quitting... but chose to accept the responsibility. When my shoulder dislocated in a match, I learned that pain and injury weren't that big a deal. My first Bull-in-the-Ring I learned that my instinct, even when I was too tired to lift my arms, was still to fight. My last Bull, just after knee surgery I learned that I would rather be crippled than let the team down. And I learned that if I was scared enough I would pray.

They were shattering, but shattering an illusion is like shattering a constricting shell. It's not like breaking a bone, something structural. But when you, as an instructor, push it to this level you don't know who will fly and who will fall. Whether what breaks is a shell or a bone isn't up to you. The student decides. That's scary.

Basic Jailin'

Frustrated today, and I'm going to try to turn it into something useful.

Today, off the top of my head, subject to change without notice, Rory's Rules of Jailin':

1) Being a jail guard is a very easy, very safe job for smart people who pay attention and a very difficult, dangerous job for stupid people who don't pay attention.

2) The officer wants the dorm clean, quiet and safe. So do the inmates.
Corollary- if all involved parties basically want the same thing, it shouldn't be a daily battle.

3) Asking an angry or upset crook what his goal is can cut through a lot of bullshit- "What's your goal, son?" "I want out of this fucking cell you piece of shit! Let me out or I'll kill you!" "How does yelling and making threats work for getting you out of your cell?" "Oh."

4) Keep your word.
Corollary- don't give your word if you will have trouble keeping it or it would be wrong to follow through.
Second corollary- ALWAYS follow through.

5) Being a talker (which is 90% being a good listener) is good.

6) Being a fighter is good.

7) Being both and being able to switch between the two without hesitation is essential.

8) Your reputation as a fighter will prevent 50% of the fights.

9) Your reputation for being fair and consistant will prevent 90% of them.

10) Paying attention to the dynamics in the module and acting early will prevent even more.

And a general rule for life: You can take yourself seriously or you can take the world seriously but NEVER both at the same time.