Spiderwebs & Women's Web of Relationships

A husband and wife are out for a rare, intimate dinner when the wife's cell-phone buzzes (she has been considerate enough to turn the phone to vibrate).  She tries to ignore the phone but grows anxious.  She finally pulls it out of her purse and looks at it and puts it back in her purse.  He seems visibly bothered and stops talking.  Before long, things have deteriorated and they finish their intimate dinner talking about how he is being unreasonable and he complains that she can't even put things aside for one evening to devote herself to him.

I believe men and women often have enormous difficulty understanding some fundamental differences between the sexes.  Women arise in the context of a web of relationships.  Their identity is tightly connected to the relationship environment in which they develop.  For many women, their sensitivity and awareness to the web of relationships is extraordinarily well developed.

It is like a spider on a web.  If something tickles some distant part of the web, even one in the periphery, the spider is immediately aware.  It demands the spider's attention.  That is how women feel ripples in the web of their relationships.  So when the phone rings it doesn't matter that they have a responsible babysitter, she has felt the ripple.  Maybe it is the kids.  If she tries to ignore the buzzing phone, she feels a gripping degree of agitation.  She has to check what is disturbing the web.

Now men do not arise in a matrix of relationships.  Men are encouraged to believe that our identity is crafted from distinguishing ourselves from others and sometimes by outright opposition.  Men are very adept at isolating one relationship from another.  The interconnectedness of their relationships is often not as inherently relevant to a man.  So when he is with his wife for their intimate dinner out, he is not as aware of the vast web of relationships in which his life exists.  His resentment at his wife's need to check her phone fails to appreciate how embedded his wife is in her web of relationships.  His wife is likely to misunderstand that her husband experiences her checking the phone as and either/or phenomenon.  When he has her attention he is reassured that he is of central importance.  When she checks the phone or attends to any other ripple in the web of relationships, he may feel he has been displaced, or cast out to the periphery of her web.  Men have enormous trouble understanding that in a web, every strand is, in a sense, connected to every other strand.

If a man can remain mindful that his wife must attend to the entire web of her relationships.  And a woman may benefit from remaining mindful that her husband wants to be assured that he is at the center of her world, even if just for a moment.  And both men and women will benefit by accepting difference as inherent.  If a couple can do this, they may be able to develop effective ways of honoring their differences and perhaps learn from one another.

Addressing Chronic, Unproductive habits

If you suffer depression or anxiety here's an idea for dealing with chronic, unproductive habits that aggravate psychological symptoms.  Suppose you were intending to write an instruction manual whose purpose it was to assure that your symptom or complaint would either be provoked or aggravated.  What methods do you use to arouse a symptom or perpetuate it.  For example, if you were someone given to anxiety perhaps your list might look something like this:

• Whenever possible, think about things that are far off in the future about which you can do nothing.
• When something good happens begin thinking about how it could turn sour.
• When something frightens you, avoid it, even if it is important.
• Convince yourself that everyone is paying attention to how anxious you appear.
• Consider that at any moment others might discover that you are really a fraud.
• Remind yourself often of occasions when things went badly.
• When things are bad, tell yourself that things could be worse.
• etc

Try to compile your list of phrases in generic terns by looking for the general theme of what you do that makes you more anxious.  This exercise is a gentler way of addressing your chronic complaint.  

Buddhist Geeks

An interesting website http://www.BuddhistGeeks.com/

Sidewalk Art, Out of Body Experiences, and the Nature of Reality

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/01/3d-sidwalk-art-that-will_n_478649.html 


 How do you understand perspective and the tricks our mind plays upon us and our perceptions?  Look at the images of sidewalk art.  The enchantment comes from how easily we shift frames in these amazing 2-Dimensional images that convey such a dramatic 3-D experience.  

Consider the recent evidence that Out of Body Experiences can be induced experimentally with the use of virtual mannequins.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6960612.stm

Let these things percolate for a moment and then consider that we are always seeing a map, a representation of the world that reflects the sum of our pas experience (and the conditioning of our cognitions), our bias arising from limbic centers regulating emotions, and various other contributing factors.

Our understanding of reality should reflect the fact of such oddities in our cognitive function.  It should also give us all pause when we become too self-assured about what we know.