The Journalist and the Buddha

Right Speech With Sharon Salzberg

BARRE, MASSACHUSETTS -- Here are some notes on a one-day session on Right Speech -- i.e., the Buddhist guidelines on how to speak in a way that helps and doesn't harm -- yesterday at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies here. Sharon Salzberg, one of the three founders of the Insight Meditation Society, just up the road from the BCBS in Barre, led the session.

A small flyer for the session drew a crowd of 90 from all throughout the northeast and, in my case, Minnesota. The morning was spent almost entirely in meditation, and the afternoon about half, leaving only about one-quarter of the time for discussion about Right Speech. But interestingly enough, that seemed like just the right amount. To have spent more time talking a would have seemed like chatter. That fact in itself, I thought, said a lot about Right Speech.

Simply knowing that the session was about Right Speech also made Sharon's meditation instructions resonate in a pointed way towards lessons about ethical speech, and how one might achieve it. There were even points of contact with specific journalism words and ideas. For example:

1. Pay attention to your breath, like a friend in a crowd.
2. Meditation is healing because it is centering of a scattered and distracted mind, and integrating
3. Mindfulness is awareness of the present moment without the intrusion of bias
4. Concentration is a platform for mindfulness
5. Meditation is about relationship, first of all our relationship with what arises within ourselves
6. The key to distinguishing positive from negative speech or action is intention, and we need mindfulness to know our intention

Then there was this four-point series of comments from Sharon to start the afternoon:

1. We cannot control what arises in our minds. But if we are mindful it's not after we send the email.
2. Being aware of what we are feeling is really important.
3. We blame ourselves for what arises in our minds, as though we can control it.
4. Relating skillfully to what arises in our minds is the whole project.

Sharon offered this interesting definition of mindfulness to set the stage for her analysis of Right Speech:

"We generally react in one of two ways to strong negative feelings that arise in us. One is to get lost in it, fixated with it. We can do 100 good things in a day, but that one bad thing that we did, we spend all evening or all week remembering it, dwelling on it, worrying about it, blaming ourselves for it. We can get fixated and obsessed with feeling. The other way to react to strong feelings is to have aversion which can take two forms -- anger, which is the outgoing, expressive form of aversion, and fear, which is the ingoing, frozen form of aversion. We can try to block out negative feelings, crazily trying everything we can think of to avoid it, block it out, not feel it. But there is a third way, which neither gets lost in negative feeling, nor becomes fearful and angry. That third way relates to negative feeling neutrally, neither pushing it away or getting lost inside it. That middle ground is mindfulness."

The key to Right Speech, Salzberg said, is "to know our intentions before we speak, and to know our intentions we need mindfulness. This middle ground I've described is very subtle, but it's a ground we cultivate in meditation." As an example, she asked people to imagine a time when they may have felt the urge to gossip. "You can feel it rising up inside you, right?" she said. The key then is just to notice that feeling but, at least at first, to neither act on it nor to piously push it away. Rather, just to be with the feeling for a while, noticing how it feels and what happens to the feeling over time. And as you wait, start a new line of thought along the lines of "will saying what I have the urge to say right now, really serve my goals in relationship with this person and in my life?" If the answer is "yes," go ahead, but if the answer is "no," you haven't said anything to that point so there's a gain to staying quiet.

That boils down to a two-step strategy to attempting Right Speech:

1. Pay attention to intention
2. Ask 'What do I want?'

Starting both the morning and afternoon sessions, Sharon made this point: "These questions are not easy. The moral dimensions are subtle and complex. It's not easy, and that's okay. One hallmark of the enlightened life is real engagement with things that are not easy. Remember, also, it can feel creative. If we can feel that we are using our lives as a creative medium, rather than 'I gossiped, I'm so bad,' that's a positive path, rather than a sense of right and wrong that is punishing.

"Speech is so powerful yet so ephemeral compared to action. A word said 20 years ago can still resound. These questions are a kind of training which implies imperfection."

She elaborated a bit on the notion of intention: "The reason it is so powerful is that its where the energy of a communication really lies. Intention contains the karmic seed of communication."

She said that the Buddha had summarized his instructions on Right Speech to a simple dictum: "Say what is true and useful."

I found her elaboration on the notion of "usefulness" especially interesting. Mindfulness usually implies a pause before speech in which to ask not only "What do I want?" but "What would be useful to say in this situation?" And this has two elements to it -- first, what is useful to you, and second, what is useful to the person you are addressing. Therefore Sharon said: "There is mutual inner and outer awareness at the same time in order to determine the best action or speech."

She acknowledged the difficulties: "Can you be mindful of every word? No. But we can be aware of the waves of emotion and feeling that relates to intention."

Then she said something really interesting: "There are three aspects to every action or speech. There is the intention behind it, there is the skillfullness of the action, and there is the immediate response to the action. We tend to ground our identities only in the third aspect, and to ignore the first two. Yet the first two are by far the most important. Plus there is also a longterm response to a communication that we also usually fail to take into account." Right Speech, she suggested, takes all these aspects fully into account -- at least as best one can under the circumstances -- ahead of each action.

She told a funny story about a group of friends who are working their way through reading foundational Buddhist texts, and recently had gotten to the section on Right Speech. It seems this material has had a kind of silencing impact on them, that it's made them scrutinize what they say so minutely, that they find they have less and less to say. "They are a bit worried," Sharon said, "that finally all they will be saying to each other is 'it's a lovely day, isn't it?'" I know what those folks are going through, or growing through. This Spring, at a retreat, I heard my teacher repeat a famous Right Speech direction: "Don't speak unless you can improve on silence." That's a damn hard standard to reach!

Sharon made an interesting comment about listening, which started with the standard thing people say but then became richer: "Listening is the key to good communication. When you listen well you are listening to yourself as well as them, especially to your reactions, thoughts, patterns and so on." To which I would only add, it's perhaps not listening so much, which suggests an auditory thing, as being aware, which opens consciousness towards all senses and in all directions.

I found almost the most fascinating part of the day was listening to the questions and comments that people made. They showed me conclusively that the grappling I'm doing with this topic in my professional life -- trying to figure out what in a journalist's life qualifies as Right Speech -- is equally shared by many people in all areas of life. Several people spoke about their constant urge to gossip, not knowing what to do with it. One woman says she often finds herself with her husband, wanting to share something gossipy with him. "Then I ask myself, do I tell him because I want my significant other to know what's going on with me, or do I want to tell him just because it's a juicy disaster? Or maybe I should just shut up about the whole thing?"

Another woman talked about wanting to gossip as being "an unconscious attempt to bond" with others and said if she stopped gossiping, she'd have nothing to talk about with her friends. Sharon then drew a distinction between gossip that was harmful, such as spreading rumors about other people, and idle talk, such as what was going to happen on a favorite TV show that night. And she acknowledged that sometimes, gossiping "is how our communities are formed." That last bit really intrigued me and I want to think about it further. On the one hand, I really understand it, and newspapers and journalism of many forms has long used gossipy items that become "water cooler" talk, social currency. But it's worth asking, what kind of a community is formed, when it's formed on the basis of malicious gossip or related forms of talk? Surely, not a healthy and positive community. This is one area for thinking more in a journalistic vein, combining ethical speculation for example with James Carey's discussion of journalism as the conversation of a democracy and, further, a kind of community-forming ritualistic speech.

Another woman presented this dilemma: "At home I live with people who talk constantly about the Bush administration in the harshest and most negative terms. Not that I disagree with that, but their talk is so nonstop, bitter, and toxic. I just want to scream. It wouldn't be so bad if once in a while they got up and did something, but they never do, they just bitch and gripe and moan."

And several people mentioned a kind of Catch 22 they had gotten into, vis a vis speech, as children, that decades later they are still trying to escape from as adults. One woman said she was the self-appointed truth-teller in her family, always taking pains to declare the elephant in the room that no one was speaking about. But she paid the price in terms of being ostracized, she felt, from her parents' affection and from the social life of the family, that left her out of talk and activities as a result. In discussion with Sharon, it came out that she felt anger at her parents for keeping important topics taboo -- things that were hurting the family every day -- and that this anger fueled not only her truth-telling as a child but also her attitudes and habits on communication to this day. "Anger is often a useful fuel for speech, such as truth telling, but there is some danger in being so close to that anger all the time."

At one point in the afternoon, I had what seemed to me a kind of epiphany that might help me escape the journalistic bind that I am now in, in which sometimes I don't even want to publish my best stuff, writing that I think -- that I know -- is really good, because I just don't want to add to the amount of verbiage in the world. Not to mention my concern whether my speech is ethical or not.

The epiphany was that I realized that in the story of the Buddha's life, in the days after he was enlightened, he seriously considered not saying anything about what he'd learned, to anyone. He knew that he was going to be misunderstood, or not understood, by most people, and he figured maybe it was just best to live out his days in enlightened, silent, peace. But he changed his mind when some higher spirit approached him and convinced him that some people -- a minority, but some -- would understand his message, so on that basis he should go ahead and speak. And so he spoke.

Not that I'm enlightened, that's for sure, but the Buddha's model for at least having pondered staying silent, but then deciding just to go forth and do his best -- knowing ahead of time it wouldn't always be enough and indeed sometimes would be direly misunderstood -- seems to me a great model to follow.

Especially considering the alternative, i.e. the biggest case of writer's block of all time.

   

 

BARRE, MASSACHUSETTS -- Here are some notes on a one-day session on Right Speech -- i.e., the Buddhist guidelines on how to speak in a way that helps and doesn't harm -- yesterday at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies here. Sharon Salzberg, one of the three founders of the Insight Meditation Society, just up the road from the BCBS in Barre, led the session.

A small flyer for the session drew a crowd of 90 from all throughout the northeast and, in my case, Minnesota. The morning was spent almost entirely in meditation, and the afternoon about half, leaving only about one-quarter of the time for discussion about Right Speech. But interestingly enough, that seemed like just the right amount. To have spent more time talking a would have seemed like chatter. That fact in itself, I thought, said a lot about Right Speech.

Simply knowing that the session was about Right Speech also made Sharon's meditation instructions resonate in a pointed way towards lessons about ethical speech, and how one might achieve it. There were even points of contact with specific journalism words and ideas. For example:

1. Pay attention to your breath, like a friend in a crowd.
2. Meditation is healing because it is centering of a scattered and distracted mind, and integrating
3. Mindfulness is awareness of the present moment without the intrusion of bias
4. Concentration is a platform for mindfulness
5. Meditation is about relationship, first of all our relationship with what arises within ourselves
6. The key to distinguishing positive from negative speech or action is intention, and we need mindfulness to know our intention

Then there was this four-point series of comments from Sharon to start the afternoon:

1. We cannot control what arises in our minds. But if we are mindful it's not after we send the email.
2. Being aware of what we are feeling is really important.
3. We blame ourselves for what arises in our minds, as though we can control it.
4. Relating skillfully to what arises in our minds is the whole project.

Sharon offered this interesting definition of mindfulness to set the stage for her analysis of Right Speech:

"We generally react in one of two ways to strong negative feelings that arise in us. One is to get lost in it, fixated with it. We can do 100 good things in a day, but that one bad thing that we did, we spend all evening or all week remembering it, dwelling on it, worrying about it, blaming ourselves for it. We can get fixated and obsessed with feeling. The other way to react to strong feelings is to have aversion which can take two forms -- anger, which is the outgoing, expressive form of aversion, and fear, which is the ingoing, frozen form of aversion. We can try to block out negative feelings, crazily trying everything we can think of to avoid it, block it out, not feel it. But there is a third way, which neither gets lost in negative feeling, nor becomes fearful and angry. That third way relates to negative feeling neutrally, neither pushing it away or getting lost inside it. That middle ground is mindfulness."

The key to Right Speech, Salzberg said, is "to know our intentions before we speak, and to know our intentions we need mindfulness. This middle ground I've described is very subtle, but it's a ground we cultivate in meditation." As an example, she asked people to imagine a time when they may have felt the urge to gossip. "You can feel it rising up inside you, right?" she said. The key then is just to notice that feeling but, at least at first, to neither act on it nor to piously push it away. Rather, just to be with the feeling for a while, noticing how it feels and what happens to the feeling over time. And as you wait, start a new line of thought along the lines of "will saying what I have the urge to say right now, really serve my goals in relationship with this person and in my life?" If the answer is "yes," go ahead, but if the answer is "no," you haven't said anything to that point so there's a gain to staying quiet.

That boils down to a two-step strategy to attempting Right Speech:

1. Pay attention to intention
2. Ask 'What do I want?'

Starting both the morning and afternoon sessions, Sharon made this point: "These questions are not easy. The moral dimensions are subtle and complex. It's not easy, and that's okay. One hallmark of the enlightened life is real engagement with things that are not easy. Remember, also, it can feel creative. If we can feel that we are using our lives as a creative medium, rather than 'I gossiped, I'm so bad,' that's a positive path, rather than a sense of right and wrong that is punishing.

"Speech is so powerful yet so ephemeral compared to action. A word said 20 years ago can still resound. These questions are a kind of training which implies imperfection."

She elaborated a bit on the notion of intention: "The reason it is so powerful is that its where the energy of a communication really lies. Intention contains the karmic seed of communication."

She said that the Buddha had summarized his instructions on Right Speech to a simple dictum: "Say what is true and useful."

I found her elaboration on the notion of "usefulness" especially interesting. Mindfulness usually implies a pause before speech in which to ask not only "What do I want?" but "What would be useful to say in this situation?" And this has two elements to it -- first, what is useful to you, and second, what is useful to the person you are addressing. Therefore Sharon said: "There is mutual inner and outer awareness at the same time in order to determine the best action or speech."

She acknowledged the difficulties: "Can you be mindful of every word? No. But we can be aware of the waves of emotion and feeling that relates to intention."

Then she said something really interesting: "There are three aspects to every action or speech. There is the intention behind it, there is the skillfullness of the action, and there is the immediate response to the action. We tend to ground our identities only in the third aspect, and to ignore the first two. Yet the first two are by far the most important. Plus there is also a longterm response to a communication that we also usually fail to take into account." Right Speech, she suggested, takes all these aspects fully into account -- at least as best one can under the circumstances -- ahead of each action.

She told a funny story about a group of friends who are working their way through reading foundational Buddhist texts, and recently had gotten to the section on Right Speech. It seems this material has had a kind of silencing impact on them, that it's made them scrutinize what they say so minutely, that they find they have less and less to say. "They are a bit worried," Sharon said, "that finally all they will be saying to each other is 'it's a lovely day, isn't it?'" I know what those folks are going through, or growing through. This Spring, at a retreat, I heard my teacher repeat a famous Right Speech direction: "Don't speak unless you can improve on silence." That's a damn hard standard to reach!

Sharon made an interesting comment about listening, which started with the standard thing people say but then became richer: "Listening is the key to good communication. When you listen well you are listening to yourself as well as them, especially to your reactions, thoughts, patterns and so on." To which I would only add, it's perhaps not listening so much, which suggests an auditory thing, as being aware, which opens consciousness towards all senses and in all directions.

I found almost the most fascinating part of the day was listening to the questions and comments that people made. They showed me conclusively that the grappling I'm doing with this topic in my professional life -- trying to figure out what in a journalist's life qualifies as Right Speech -- is equally shared by many people in all areas of life. Several people spoke about their constant urge to gossip, not knowing what to do with it. One woman says she often finds herself with her husband, wanting to share something gossipy with him. "Then I ask myself, do I tell him because I want my significant other to know what's going on with me, or do I want to tell him just because it's a juicy disaster? Or maybe I should just shut up about the whole thing?"

Another woman talked about wanting to gossip as being "an unconscious attempt to bond" with others and said if she stopped gossiping, she'd have nothing to talk about with her friends. Sharon then drew a distinction between gossip that was harmful, such as spreading rumors about other people, and idle talk, such as what was going to happen on a favorite TV show that night. And she acknowledged that sometimes, gossiping "is how our communities are formed." That last bit really intrigued me and I want to think about it further. On the one hand, I really understand it, and newspapers and journalism of many forms has long used gossipy items that become "water cooler" talk, social currency. But it's worth asking, what kind of a community is formed, when it's formed on the basis of malicious gossip or related forms of talk? Surely, not a healthy and positive community. This is one area for thinking more in a journalistic vein, combining ethical speculation for example with James Carey's discussion of journalism as the conversation of a democracy and, further, a kind of community-forming ritualistic speech.

Another woman presented this dilemma: "At home I live with people who talk constantly about the Bush administration in the harshest and most negative terms. Not that I disagree with that, but their talk is so nonstop, bitter, and toxic. I just want to scream. It wouldn't be so bad if once in a while they got up and did something, but they never do, they just bitch and gripe and moan."

And several people mentioned a kind of Catch 22 they had gotten into, vis a vis speech, as children, that decades later they are still trying to escape from as adults. One woman said she was the self-appointed truth-teller in her family, always taking pains to declare the elephant in the room that no one was speaking about. But she paid the price in terms of being ostracized, she felt, from her parents' affection and from the social life of the family, that left her out of talk and activities as a result. In discussion with Sharon, it came out that she felt anger at her parents for keeping important topics taboo -- things that were hurting the family every day -- and that this anger fueled not only her truth-telling as a child but also her attitudes and habits on communication to this day. "Anger is often a useful fuel for speech, such as truth telling, but there is some danger in being so close to that anger all the time."

At one point in the afternoon, I had what seemed to me a kind of epiphany that might help me escape the journalistic bind that I am now in, in which sometimes I don't even want to publish my best stuff, writing that I think -- that I know -- is really good, because I just don't want to add to the amount of verbiage in the world. Not to mention my concern whether my speech is ethical or not.

The epiphany was that I realized that in the story of the Buddha's life, in the days after he was enlightened, he seriously considered not saying anything about what he'd learned, to anyone. He knew that he was going to be misunderstood, or not understood, by most people, and he figured maybe it was just best to live out his days in enlightened, silent, peace. But he changed his mind when some higher spirit approached him and convinced him that some people -- a minority, but some -- would understand his message, so on that basis he should go ahead and speak. And so he spoke.

Not that I'm enlightened, that's for sure, but the Buddha's model for at least having pondered staying silent, but then deciding just to go forth and do his best -- knowing ahead of time it wouldn't always be enough and indeed sometimes would be direly misunderstood -- seems to me a great model to follow.

Especially considering the alternative, i.e. the biggest case of writer's block of all time.

BARRE, MASSACHUSETTS -- Here are some notes on a one-day session on Right Speech -- i.e., the Buddhist guidelines on how to speak in a way that helps and doesn't harm -- yesterday at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies here. Sharon Salzberg, one of the three founders of the Insight Meditation Society, just up the road from the BCBS in Barre, led the session.

A small flyer for the session drew a crowd of 90 from all throughout the northeast and, in my case, Minnesota. The morning was spent almost entirely in meditation, and the afternoon about half, leaving only about one-quarter of the time for discussion about Right Speech. But interestingly enough, that seemed like just the right amount. To have spent more time talking a would have seemed like chatter. That fact in itself, I thought, said a lot about Right Speech.

Simply knowing that the session was about Right Speech also made Sharon's meditation instructions resonate in a pointed way towards lessons about ethical speech, and how one might achieve it. There were even points of contact with specific journalism words and ideas. For example:

1. Pay attention to your breath, like a friend in a crowd.
2. Meditation is healing because it is centering of a scattered and distracted mind, and integrating
3. Mindfulness is awareness of the present moment without the intrusion of bias
4. Concentration is a platform for mindfulness
5. Meditation is about relationship, first of all our relationship with what arises within ourselves
6. The key to distinguishing positive from negative speech or action is intention, and we need mindfulness to know our intention

Then there was this four-point series of comments from Sharon to start the afternoon:

1. We cannot control what arises in our minds. But if we are mindful it's not after we send the email.
2. Being aware of what we are feeling is really important.
3. We blame ourselves for what arises in our minds, as though we can control it.
4. Relating skillfully to what arises in our minds is the whole project.

Sharon offered this interesting definition of mindfulness to set the stage for her analysis of Right Speech:

"We generally react in one of two ways to strong negative feelings that arise in us. One is to get lost in it, fixated with it. We can do 100 good things in a day, but that one bad thing that we did, we spend all evening or all week remembering it, dwelling on it, worrying about it, blaming ourselves for it. We can get fixated and obsessed with feeling. The other way to react to strong feelings is to have aversion which can take two forms -- anger, which is the outgoing, expressive form of aversion, and fear, which is the ingoing, frozen form of aversion. We can try to block out negative feelings, crazily trying everything we can think of to avoid it, block it out, not feel it. But there is a third way, which neither gets lost in negative feeling, nor becomes fearful and angry. That third way relates to negative feeling neutrally, neither pushing it away or getting lost inside it. That middle ground is mindfulness."

The key to Right Speech, Salzberg said, is "to know our intentions before we speak, and to know our intentions we need mindfulness. This middle ground I've described is very subtle, but it's a ground we cultivate in meditation." As an example, she asked people to imagine a time when they may have felt the urge to gossip. "You can feel it rising up inside you, right?" she said. The key then is just to notice that feeling but, at least at first, to neither act on it nor to piously push it away. Rather, just to be with the feeling for a while, noticing how it feels and what happens to the feeling over time. And as you wait, start a new line of thought along the lines of "will saying what I have the urge to say right now, really serve my goals in relationship with this person and in my life?" If the answer is "yes," go ahead, but if the answer is "no," you haven't said anything to that point so there's a gain to staying quiet.

That boils down to a two-step strategy to attempting Right Speech:

1. Pay attention to intention
2. Ask 'What do I want?'

Starting both the morning and afternoon sessions, Sharon made this point: "These questions are not easy. The moral dimensions are subtle and complex. It's not easy, and that's okay. One hallmark of the enlightened life is real engagement with things that are not easy. Remember, also, it can feel creative. If we can feel that we are using our lives as a creative medium, rather than 'I gossiped, I'm so bad,' that's a positive path, rather than a sense of right and wrong that is punishing.

"Speech is so powerful yet so ephemeral compared to action. A word said 20 years ago can still resound. These questions are a kind of training which implies imperfection."

She elaborated a bit on the notion of intention: "The reason it is so powerful is that its where the energy of a communication really lies. Intention contains the karmic seed of communication."

She said that the Buddha had summarized his instructions on Right Speech to a simple dictum: "Say what is true and useful."

I found her elaboration on the notion of "usefulness" especially interesting. Mindfulness usually implies a pause before speech in which to ask not only "What do I want?" but "What would be useful to say in this situation?" And this has two elements to it -- first, what is useful to you, and second, what is useful to the person you are addressing. Therefore Sharon said: "There is mutual inner and outer awareness at the same time in order to determine the best action or speech."

She acknowledged the difficulties: "Can you be mindful of every word? No. But we can be aware of the waves of emotion and feeling that relates to intention."

Then she said something really interesting: "There are three aspects to every action or speech. There is the intention behind it, there is the skillfullness of the action, and there is the immediate response to the action. We tend to ground our identities only in the third aspect, and to ignore the first two. Yet the first two are by far the most important. Plus there is also a longterm response to a communication that we also usually fail to take into account." Right Speech, she suggested, takes all these aspects fully into account -- at least as best one can under the circumstances -- ahead of each action.

She told a funny story about a group of friends who are working their way through reading foundational Buddhist texts, and recently had gotten to the section on Right Speech. It seems this material has had a kind of silencing impact on them, that it's made them scrutinize what they say so minutely, that they find they have less and less to say. "They are a bit worried," Sharon said, "that finally all they will be saying to each other is 'it's a lovely day, isn't it?'" I know what those folks are going through, or growing through. This Spring, at a retreat, I heard my teacher repeat a famous Right Speech direction: "Don't speak unless you can improve on silence." That's a damn hard standard to reach!

Sharon made an interesting comment about listening, which started with the standard thing people say but then became richer: "Listening is the key to good communication. When you listen well you are listening to yourself as well as them, especially to your reactions, thoughts, patterns and so on." To which I would only add, it's perhaps not listening so much, which suggests an auditory thing, as being aware, which opens consciousness towards all senses and in all directions.

I found almost the most fascinating part of the day was listening to the questions and comments that people made. They showed me conclusively that the grappling I'm doing with this topic in my professional life -- trying to figure out what in a journalist's life qualifies as Right Speech -- is equally shared by many people in all areas of life. Several people spoke about their constant urge to gossip, not knowing what to do with it. One woman says she often finds herself with her husband, wanting to share something gossipy with him. "Then I ask myself, do I tell him because I want my significant other to know what's going on with me, or do I want to tell him just because it's a juicy disaster? Or maybe I should just shut up about the whole thing?"

Another woman talked about wanting to gossip as being "an unconscious attempt to bond" with others and said if she stopped gossiping, she'd have nothing to talk about with her friends. Sharon then drew a distinction between gossip that was harmful, such as spreading rumors about other people, and idle talk, such as what was going to happen on a favorite TV show that night. And she acknowledged that sometimes, gossiping "is how our communities are formed." That last bit really intrigued me and I want to think about it further. On the one hand, I really understand it, and newspapers and journalism of many forms has long used gossipy items that become "water cooler" talk, social currency. But it's worth asking, what kind of a community is formed, when it's formed on the basis of malicious gossip or related forms of talk? Surely, not a healthy and positive community. This is one area for thinking more in a journalistic vein, combining ethical speculation for example with James Carey's discussion of journalism as the conversation of a democracy and, further, a kind of community-forming ritualistic speech.

Another woman presented this dilemma: "At home I live with people who talk constantly about the Bush administration in the harshest and most negative terms. Not that I disagree with that, but their talk is so nonstop, bitter, and toxic. I just want to scream. It wouldn't be so bad if once in a while they got up and did something, but they never do, they just bitch and gripe and moan."

And several people mentioned a kind of Catch 22 they had gotten into, vis a vis speech, as children, that decades later they are still trying to escape from as adults. One woman said she was the self-appointed truth-teller in her family, always taking pains to declare the elephant in the room that no one was speaking about. But she paid the price in terms of being ostracized, she felt, from her parents' affection and from the social life of the family, that left her out of talk and activities as a result. In discussion with Sharon, it came out that she felt anger at her parents for keeping important topics taboo -- things that were hurting the family every day -- and that this anger fueled not only her truth-telling as a child but also her attitudes and habits on communication to this day. "Anger is often a useful fuel for speech, such as truth telling, but there is some danger in being so close to that anger all the time."

At one point in the afternoon, I had what seemed to me a kind of epiphany that might help me escape the journalistic bind that I am now in, in which sometimes I don't even want to publish my best stuff, writing that I think -- that I know -- is really good, because I just don't want to add to the amount of verbiage in the world. Not to mention my concern whether my speech is ethical or not.

The epiphany was that I realized that in the story of the Buddha's life, in the days after he was enlightened, he seriously considered not saying anything about what he'd learned, to anyone. He knew that he was going to be misunderstood, or not understood, by most people, and he figured maybe it was just best to live out his days in enlightened, silent, peace. But he changed his mind when some higher spirit approached him and convinced him that some people -- a minority, but some -- would understand his message, so on that basis he should go ahead and speak. And so he spoke.

Not that I'm enlightened, that's for sure, but the Buddha's model for at least having pondered staying silent, but then deciding just to go forth and do his best -- knowing ahead of time it wouldn't always be enough and indeed sometimes would be direly misunderstood -- seems to me a great model to follow.

Especially considering the alternative, i.e. the biggest case of writer's block of all time.

Why Journalists Should Meditate

Among many moral traditions concerning ethical speech, one that commends itself especially to a practical application to modern journalistic practice, is the Buddhist doctrine of Right Speech. There are several reasons for this.

First, the doctrine of Right Speech is embedded in a universal moral system that is grounded, vis a vis the individual practitioner, in rigorous empirical observation and not in blind faith. This is true notwithstanding the mistaken popular view that the Buddha came to Earth as a divine figure or prophet similar to Jesus or Mohammed. To the contrary, the Buddha insisted throughout his life that he was a mere mortal, just a man, albeit one who'd spent significant time observing, very much as a scientist would, the essential nature of his body and mind.

That many modern scientists have declared Buddhism to be the one world religion most compatible with the scientific outlook and method, is natural considering the Buddha's frequent and explicit instructions that none of his followers should accept the assertions made by authority figures, including him, until they had witnessed or experienced something personally themselves. It's an injunction that echoes roundly in ageless journalistic adages such as the one that journalists should ''love their mothers but check her quotes.'' Doubt and skepticism are the foundation of both journalistic and Buddhist investigation.

Second, the Buddhist method of inquiry takes no strong interest in either the past or the future, instructing adepts instead to focus completely on experiencing the present moment. Similarly, journalism, among all literary genres, focuses most strongly on the present. That part of journalism called ''the news,'' especially, is focused on the present, that is giving readers accurate and useful reports on the present conditions of public life. History takes on the past, and science fiction and novels can explore future scenarios, but journalism alone stakes the present as its ground for investigation. And investigation is the word.

Journalism like Buddhism is really a method for exploring the depths of the present, and both disciplines describe, in their user manuals, various methods for ensuring that an individual investigator stays focused on that precise task. These methods, again both in journalism and Buddhism, attempt to heighten and individual's sensitivity to signals from the here and now, while dampening receptivity to such distracting and distorting influences as outdated societal narratives, group anxieties and fears, or political and commercial propaganda. To use the popular Buddhist formulation, both a Buddhist meditator and a journalist conduct rigorous objective investigations into ''the way things are now.''

Third, both Buddhism and journalism, properly understood, are methods of investigation aimed at producing transformative insight. It is not to achieve any special state of relaxation or bliss that Buddhist meditation ultimately is practiced. Rather, it is to create conditions in which a meditator can achieve insights into reality that are strong enough to change him. Even that change itself, freedom from ignorance allowing individuals to fully flower, is naturally mappable from a Buddhist to a liberal democratic civil setting.

It is a powerful if subtle point: the goal of Buddhist meditation and journalism is to produce transformative insight. The assumption in both cases is that only insight into the real, inherently transform. It can not help but transform, because reality seen truly is reality that at last is susceptible to easeful human life. The humans who finally see the path of the real -- which is the only path not littered with obstructive imaginary monsters -- will have no interest in continuing any other way.

At their best, journalists carry out their work based on a similar theory, namely that by illuminating the way things are now in society, they help to create conditions in which wise, fair, and grounded decisions for democracy can be made by the public. Only in one way do the two theories of insight, the Buddhist and the journalistic, significantly diverge. That is, because Buddhism addresses the absolute world of the present, insight into that world is sufficient by itself, to create liberating freedom.

But journalism, an investigation into the present relative as opposed to absolute world, creates insight that is necessary but not by itself sufficient to engender transformative change. Too many other factors are at work to assure such transformation in the relative world.

A Buddhist meditator is an individual working for insights or light that, once gained, illuminates the chambers of the self that made the investigation. And from there, the self is perforce transformed.

But in the relative world, the light gained by investigative journalism encounters many obstacles to its full spreading, not only that obstruct passage of experience from the mind of one writer to one reader in all the usual ways, but also from the mind of one writers to possibly millions of readers, all of whom are simultaneously being bombarded by competing notions and theories of insight, some of which of course are no more than political or commercial propaganda, or worse. Still, the point is, both the meditator and the journalist work to gain insight that they hope will transform human beings, themselves and others.

So the overall world view of the journalist and the Buddhist, both being aimed at gaining transformative insight through skeptical investigation into the present, are inherently compatible. Yet between the two, Buddhist ethics are both more profoundly rooted in human experience and extensive into the world. Two and a half millenia of development on the part of Buddhism, versus a couple of centuries for journalism, is one reason for this; so is the fact that the Buddha taught for the explicit purpose of reducing human suffering, which historically has been only one among many ultimate purposes of journalism over the years, and frequently among the lesser ones.

This is not to try to develop an argument that journalism is in any way flawed because it doesn't try to change men's souls. It's not about that; it's by definition more limited than that; and it's proper that it should be. Rather, it's important to describe the compatibility of Buddhism and journalism, and then to point out Buddhism's greater moral depth, because Buddhism by its nature offers a universal framework for moral decision-making that offers a great many answers, or at least a great many clear paths to answers, to difficulties that increasingly bedevil journalism and the news media today.

What is the basic role of a journalist in society? Is it to entertain, to inform, or to persuade? If some of all the above, what are the right proportions, and under what conditions might those proportions ethically change? An offhand remark from a mother to a daughter can wound both parties for a lifetime; in the same way, a single line of reportage can ruin a reputation not just of an individual but an entire community over a similar time span. Widespread caricatures in the global media can condemn an entire country to scorn and oblivion for decades.

How are individual journalists to work under such circumstances? How are readers or consumers of the news media to understand what they read or see; how much weight are they to give it; and what checks should there be, not only at a policy or social practice level, but at the individual level, to ensure that journalistic speech is healthfully and responsibly imbibed? Journalism's professional ethical code is silent on such questions, and only reference to a deeper moral system in which journalistic ethics are embedded, can begin to offer a useful way to answer them.

Among many moral traditions concerning ethical speech, one that commends itself especially to a practical application to modern journalistic practice, is the Buddhist doctrine of Right Speech. There are several reasons for this.

First, the doctrine of Right Speech is embedded in a universal moral system that is grounded, vis a vis the individual practitioner, in rigorous empirical observation and not in blind faith. This is true notwithstanding the mistaken popular view that the Buddha came to Earth as a divine figure or prophet similar to Jesus or Mohammed. To the contrary, the Buddha insisted throughout his life that he was a mere mortal, just a man, albeit one who'd spent significant time observing, very much as a scientist would, the essential nature of his body and mind.

That many modern scientists have declared Buddhism to be the one world religion most compatible with the scientific outlook and method, is natural considering the Buddha's frequent and explicit instructions that none of his followers should accept the assertions made by authority figures, including him, until they had witnessed or experienced something personally themselves. It's an injunction that echoes roundly in ageless journalistic adages such as the one that journalists should ''love their mothers but check her quotes.'' Doubt and skepticism are the foundation of both journalistic and Buddhist investigation.

Second, the Buddhist method of inquiry takes no strong interest in either the past or the future, instructing adepts instead to focus completely on experiencing the present moment. Similarly, journalism, among all literary genres, focuses most strongly on the present. That part of journalism called ''the news,'' especially, is focused on the present, that is giving readers accurate and useful reports on the present conditions of public life. History takes on the past, and science fiction and novels can explore future scenarios, but journalism alone stakes the present as its ground for investigation. And investigation is the word.

Journalism like Buddhism is really a method for exploring the depths of the present, and both disciplines describe, in their user manuals, various methods for ensuring that an individual investigator stays focused on that precise task. These methods, again both in journalism and Buddhism, attempt to heighten and individual's sensitivity to signals from the here and now, while dampening receptivity to such distracting and distorting influences as outdated societal narratives, group anxieties and fears, or political and commercial propaganda. To use the popular Buddhist formulation, both a Buddhist meditator and a journalist conduct rigorous objective investigations into ''the way things are now.''

Third, both Buddhism and journalism, properly understood, are methods of investigation aimed at producing transformative insight. It is not to achieve any special state of relaxation or bliss that Buddhist meditation ultimately is practiced. Rather, it is to create conditions in which a meditator can achieve insights into reality that are strong enough to change him. Even that change itself, freedom from ignorance allowing individuals to fully flower, is naturally mappable from a Buddhist to a liberal democratic civil setting.

It is a powerful if subtle point: the goal of Buddhist meditation and journalism is to produce transformative insight. The assumption in both cases is that only insight into the real, inherently transform. It can not help but transform, because reality seen truly is reality that at last is susceptible to easeful human life. The humans who finally see the path of the real -- which is the only path not littered with obstructive imaginary monsters -- will have no interest in continuing any other way.

At their best, journalists carry out their work based on a similar theory, namely that by illuminating the way things are now in society, they help to create conditions in which wise, fair, and grounded decisions for democracy can be made by the public. Only in one way do the two theories of insight, the Buddhist and the journalistic, significantly diverge. That is, because Buddhism addresses the absolute world of the present, insight into that world is sufficient by itself, to create liberating freedom.

But journalism, an investigation into the present relative as opposed to absolute world, creates insight that is necessary but not by itself sufficient to engender transformative change. Too many other factors are at work to assure such transformation in the relative world.

A Buddhist meditator is an individual working for insights or light that, once gained, illuminates the chambers of the self that made the investigation. And from there, the self is perforce transformed.

But in the relative world, the light gained by investigative journalism encounters many obstacles to its full spreading, not only that obstruct passage of experience from the mind of one writer to one reader in all the usual ways, but also from the mind of one writers to possibly millions of readers, all of whom are simultaneously being bombarded by competing notions and theories of insight, some of which of course are no more than political or commercial propaganda, or worse. Still, the point is, both the meditator and the journalist work to gain insight that they hope will transform human beings, themselves and others.

So the overall world view of the journalist and the Buddhist, both being aimed at gaining transformative insight through skeptical investigation into the present, are inherently compatible. Yet between the two, Buddhist ethics are both more profoundly rooted in human experience and extensive into the world. Two and a half millenia of development on the part of Buddhism, versus a couple of centuries for journalism, is one reason for this; so is the fact that the Buddha taught for the explicit purpose of reducing human suffering, which historically has been only one among many ultimate purposes of journalism over the years, and frequently among the lesser ones.

This is not to try to develop an argument that journalism is in any way flawed because it doesn't try to change men's souls. It's not about that; it's by definition more limited than that; and it's proper that it should be. Rather, it's important to describe the compatibility of Buddhism and journalism, and then to point out Buddhism's greater moral depth, because Buddhism by its nature offers a universal framework for moral decision-making that offers a great many answers, or at least a great many clear paths to answers, to difficulties that increasingly bedevil journalism and the news media today.

What is the basic role of a journalist in society? Is it to entertain, to inform, or to persuade? If some of all the above, what are the right proportions, and under what conditions might those proportions ethically change? An offhand remark from a mother to a daughter can wound both parties for a lifetime; in the same way, a single line of reportage can ruin a reputation not just of an individual but an entire community over a similar time span. Widespread caricatures in the global media can condemn an entire country to scorn and oblivion for decades.

How are individual journalists to work under such circumstances? How are readers or consumers of the news media to understand what they read or see; how much weight are they to give it; and what checks should there be, not only at a policy or social practice level, but at the individual level, to ensure that journalistic speech is healthfully and responsibly imbibed? Journalism's professional ethical code is silent on such questions, and only reference to a deeper moral system in which journalistic ethics are embedded, can begin to offer a useful way to answer them.

Thinking About Language as Spiritual Food

I  often encourage journalists to think more directly, deeply, systematically, and from various angles about the many modes of action and effects of their chosen medium of expression -- language.

Journalists use many of these modes, but very often without a conscious understanding that they are doing so. As a result, they often aren't aware of the full range of impact their language is actually having on the people who read, watch, and listen to their stories.

Every piece of journalism, for example, attempts to persuade readers of beliefs and premises at deeper level than the explicit content of the article. Even writers who take pains to keep personal opinions and bias out of their articles still must persuade readers of the accuracy, authenticity, and authority of their reporting. And, they have to persuade readers that their writing springs from a moral standpoint and a world view that is basically compatible with theirs.

This invites a study of reportorial journalism, not only opinion journalism, as rhetoric. The use of poetic techniques and tropes in journalistic writing, even sometimes in straight news reporting, similarly invites a deeper study of journalism as poetry; and journalistic narrative techniques invites a study of journalism as non-fiction literature; and so on.

My brief here is to suggest that journalists and scholars of journalism urgently need to open themselves to a branch of language ethics that to the best of my knowledge remains virgin territory as regards its application to journalism and the media.

That is the study of language as an ethical force in itself, as a bearer of a positive or negative moral charge that transcends any specific language message, and which plays a key role in the development of individual human personality, character, destiny, or even, one might say, of soul.

Plato essentially began this line of inquiry in the Western tradition, and many religious, spiritual and moral figures ranging from Jesus, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, St. Augustine, Kabir, Hafiz, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Jaspers have carried it through to the present day.

What is odd is that over the past 200 years the mass media has exploded, vastly deepening the amount and types of impact that it has on individuals and societies. As almost never before in history, a thorough accounting of languages as a means of moral action is needed. Who is doing it?

No longer does language approach us primarily through the spoken language of those people we directly know, plus books and newspapers and television and radio. Now language comes at us in a raging cataract through the Internet, emails, advertising, podcasts, PDAs, wide TV screens hanging in elevators and waiting rooms and restaurants, and seemingly infinite other ways. Increasingly -- because it could be no other way -- the thoughts and ideas and feelings conveyed through all these omnipresent electronic means become our own personal thoughts and ideas and feelings.

But what is the overall effect of this upon our selves? Our communities? This is very much an extension of the original Socratic, Christian, and Buddhist questions about the moral impact of spoken and written language upon the individual soul and upon society. Again, where is the debate?

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates questions the widespread development of writing, because writing, he argued, would surely weaken the human faculty of memory and therefore harm individual moral character and weaken social bonds. Buddha's doctrine of Right Speech posits that using language in a moral manner is the first and most important link between the wholesome moral intentions that arise in spiritual meditation, and the positive actions that can lessen suffering in the world.

Conditions in the early 21st century cry out for the application and updating of these moral theories to mass communication practices, chief among them journalism, the one branch of the mass media dedicated to civic aims.

A journalist might object that journalism after all is only a slice, and a tiny slice at that, of the overall mass media that is generating such torrents of language upon individuals and the public, to such as-yet-unknown effects. That is certainly true. Newspapers, radio and television news programs, and news magazines today are increasingly mere dits and dots in the organization charts of giant multinational conglomerates that generate profits mainly from movies, pop music, advertising, merchandising, and the cross-marketing of their entertainment and communication services. 

And yet the small size of journalistic organizations within these behemoths is itself an argument for its moral and symbolic importance, as a civic practice serving, at least theoretically, public as opposed to private commercial aims. This charter should theoretically allow journalists, above all workers in today's media communication fields, to do the deep kind of thinking about language that I am here proposing. And then, experimentally at first perhaps, to begin to apply the conclusions reached from such considerations, to the actual practice of gathering, writing, and publishing the news.

From at least one other angle, besides the unquestioned impact of mass communication on government and civic society and individuals today, it's truly a mystery why language's moral essence has never been systematically studied in application to journalism. Because there is such abundant evidence in our daily individual lives of a yawning gap between what we claim we believe are the importance and effects of language upon us, versus the objectively observable effects.

Possibly because language is an ephemeral medium as compared with, say, a hunk of metal or a clump of clay, we tend to discount the impact of language on self and community. ''Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,'' we intone as we launch into yet another vicious public debate that leaves all parties more hurt and angry than ever before. We say that such an outcome, and the acute discomfort of such exchanges, is the price we pay for democracy.

It is high time to make a clear-eyed accounting of what exactly we are accepting as the price of our democracy, when we make such a claim. And we need to examine the logic of our defense of free speech of this type, too. Can we really achieve a more perfect union, through the use of language that bitterly and permanently divides? Where does our journalism and our mass media, in terms of tone as well as message, fit into this calculation? Are our means and ends well in accord here?

The daily language that we commonly use to describe the mass media and our use of it, shows that at some level we understand the basic moral relationship of self and society to language, and the very high stakes involved. Generally this language revolves around the metaphor of food.

We speak about ourselves as media ''consumers'' who ''ingest'' a ''daily diet'' of news and entertainment. We face a ''menu'' of media choices, ranging perhaps from ''dry'' or ''lean'' or ''unpalatable'' programs at one end, to ''meaty'' or ''yummy'' or ''rich'' programs at the other. Reading gossip magazines is a ''guilty pleasure'' like eating ice cream, while watching public affairs programs like The Lehrer News Hour or the BBC news is a matter of civic duty, like ''eating one’s spinach.''

A small amount of reflection on the media-as-food metaphor leads to a terrifically deep mystery, one that is really central to this issue yet one that humanity's greatest thinkers have yet to plumb.

One could pose the question his way: If a steak and potatoes dinner nourishes the physical body, what kind of ''body invisible'' does language feed and enrich, or poison and deplete?

The number of human beings who have ever lived who could credibly claim to answer this question probably is in the few dozens, or even less. One can, of course, look to the explanations of these few, such as the recorded words of Jesus or Buddha. But the problem arises that such explanations of the body invisible always include the caveat that describing the body invisible transcends language itself.

The body invisible, say the great sages, can be known only through direct and personal experience.

''Lift a rock and I am there, split a piece of wood and I am there,'' says Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas. This is one way that he describes not only his, but the common human body invisible. This is our inner body that for all its complexity is proportioned roughly the same for us all, just as each of us as individuals has a head, a torso, four limbs and interior organs that we call our  ''physical'' selves.

But we can never map the body invisible with the same amount of detail as we can the human physical body. Because the body invisible, by definition, cannot be seen. Not only when we look outside at the world do we see as through a glass darkly, but even more so, when we look within.

Charts showing ''chakras'' and ''meridians'' and ''auras,'' the best ones anyway, are perhaps are not as bogus as their detractors say. But even these maps of the body invisible, according to the sages, don't divulge the deepest understanding. Because the body invisible is essentially one of infinite change, like a confluence of rivers of feeling, thinking, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching that are endlessly surging and mixing and then emptying finally into a infinite ocean.

At the most ultimate level, the sages say, beyond even these rivers of thought and feeling and perception and sensation that we mistakenly take to be ''us,'' lies a formless unconditioned void that contains all energy and all forms. Any chart or map is a mere cartoon compared to this.

''Within the fathom-long body, the entire universe may be known,'' the Buddha said. We need to begin to understand this statement, and similar ones made by the sages of other traditions, before we can begin to understand the the practical and moral impacts of language on the human soul.

We live usually in a practical, not metaphysical, realm. How does one create a social program that offers guidelines for using language in the media in a way that enriches the body invisible?

To do so successfully is probably not as impossible as it sounds. After all, humanity has advanced a lot in understanding how the physical human body is either nourished or poisoned, and by what types of foods or toxins, and how those foods or toxins pass through various physical and energy states inside the physical human body. All of these are all quite precisely known and even visualized.

We need to begin to understand the body invisible, as much as we have the physical body.

Practical aid can be devised and implemented, even as the ultimate realities remain well beyond our grasp (for most of us, anyway). Understanding the role of language, especially the use and broadcasting of language to masses of people -- thereby either nourishing or poisoning the body invisible of those individuals and their masses as may be -- is an especially urgent task.

We need to get started.

   

Posted at 05:20 PM | Permalink

I  often encourage journalists to think more directly, deeply, systematically, and from various angles about the many modes of action and effects of their chosen medium of expression -- language.

Journalists use many of these modes, but very often without a conscious understanding that they are doing so. As a result, they often aren't aware of the full range of impact their language is actually having on the people who read, watch, and listen to their stories.

Every piece of journalism, for example, attempts to persuade readers of beliefs and premises at deeper level than the explicit content of the article. Even writers who take pains to keep personal opinions and bias out of their articles still must persuade readers of the accuracy, authenticity, and authority of their reporting. And, they have to persuade readers that their writing springs from a moral standpoint and a world view that is basically compatible with theirs.

This invites a study of reportorial journalism, not only opinion journalism, as rhetoric. The use of poetic techniques and tropes in journalistic writing, even sometimes in straight news reporting, similarly invites a deeper study of journalism as poetry; and journalistic narrative techniques invites a study of journalism as non-fiction literature; and so on.

My brief here is to suggest that journalists and scholars of journalism urgently need to open themselves to a branch of language ethics that to the best of my knowledge remains virgin territory as regards its application to journalism and the media.

That is the study of language as an ethical force in itself, as a bearer of a positive or negative moral charge that transcends any specific language message, and which plays a key role in the development of individual human personality, character, destiny, or even, one might say, of soul.

Plato essentially began this line of inquiry in the Western tradition, and many religious, spiritual and moral figures ranging from Jesus, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, St. Augustine, Kabir, Hafiz, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Jaspers have carried it through to the present day.

What is odd is that over the past 200 years the mass media has exploded, vastly deepening the amount and types of impact that it has on individuals and societies. As almost never before in history, a thorough accounting of languages as a means of moral action is needed. Who is doing it?

No longer does language approach us primarily through the spoken language of those people we directly know, plus books and newspapers and television and radio. Now language comes at us in a raging cataract through the Internet, emails, advertising, podcasts, PDAs, wide TV screens hanging in elevators and waiting rooms and restaurants, and seemingly infinite other ways. Increasingly -- because it could be no other way -- the thoughts and ideas and feelings conveyed through all these omnipresent electronic means become our own personal thoughts and ideas and feelings.

But what is the overall effect of this upon our selves? Our communities? This is very much an extension of the original Socratic, Christian, and Buddhist questions about the moral impact of spoken and written language upon the individual soul and upon society. Again, where is the debate?

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates questions the widespread development of writing, because writing, he argued, would surely weaken the human faculty of memory and therefore harm individual moral character and weaken social bonds. Buddha's doctrine of Right Speech posits that using language in a moral manner is the first and most important link between the wholesome moral intentions that arise in spiritual meditation, and the positive actions that can lessen suffering in the world.

Conditions in the early 21st century cry out for the application and updating of these moral theories to mass communication practices, chief among them journalism, the one branch of the mass media dedicated to civic aims.

A journalist might object that journalism after all is only a slice, and a tiny slice at that, of the overall mass media that is generating such torrents of language upon individuals and the public, to such as-yet-unknown effects. That is certainly true. Newspapers, radio and television news programs, and news magazines today are increasingly mere dits and dots in the organization charts of giant multinational conglomerates that generate profits mainly from movies, pop music, advertising, merchandising, and the cross-marketing of their entertainment and communication services. 

And yet the small size of journalistic organizations within these behemoths is itself an argument for its moral and symbolic importance, as a civic practice serving, at least theoretically, public as opposed to private commercial aims. This charter should theoretically allow journalists, above all workers in today's media communication fields, to do the deep kind of thinking about language that I am here proposing. And then, experimentally at first perhaps, to begin to apply the conclusions reached from such considerations, to the actual practice of gathering, writing, and publishing the news.

From at least one other angle, besides the unquestioned impact of mass communication on government and civic society and individuals today, it's truly a mystery why language's moral essence has never been systematically studied in application to journalism. Because there is such abundant evidence in our daily individual lives of a yawning gap between what we claim we believe are the importance and effects of language upon us, versus the objectively observable effects.

Possibly because language is an ephemeral medium as compared with, say, a hunk of metal or a clump of clay, we tend to discount the impact of language on self and community. ''Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,'' we intone as we launch into yet another vicious public debate that leaves all parties more hurt and angry than ever before. We say that such an outcome, and the acute discomfort of such exchanges, is the price we pay for democracy.

It is high time to make a clear-eyed accounting of what exactly we are accepting as the price of our democracy, when we make such a claim. And we need to examine the logic of our defense of free speech of this type, too. Can we really achieve a more perfect union, through the use of language that bitterly and permanently divides? Where does our journalism and our mass media, in terms of tone as well as message, fit into this calculation? Are our means and ends well in accord here?

The daily language that we commonly use to describe the mass media and our use of it, shows that at some level we understand the basic moral relationship of self and society to language, and the very high stakes involved. Generally this language revolves around the metaphor of food.

We speak about ourselves as media ''consumers'' who ''ingest'' a ''daily diet'' of news and entertainment. We face a ''menu'' of media choices, ranging perhaps from ''dry'' or ''lean'' or ''unpalatable'' programs at one end, to ''meaty'' or ''yummy'' or ''rich'' programs at the other. Reading gossip magazines is a ''guilty pleasure'' like eating ice cream, while watching public affairs programs like The Lehrer News Hour or the BBC news is a matter of civic duty, like ''eating one’s spinach.''

A small amount of reflection on the media-as-food metaphor leads to a terrifically deep mystery, one that is really central to this issue yet one that humanity's greatest thinkers have yet to plumb.

One could pose the question his way: If a steak and potatoes dinner nourishes the physical body, what kind of ''body invisible'' does language feed and enrich, or poison and deplete?

The number of human beings who have ever lived who could credibly claim to answer this question probably is in the few dozens, or even less. One can, of course, look to the explanations of these few, such as the recorded words of Jesus or Buddha. But the problem arises that such explanations of the body invisible always include the caveat that describing the body invisible transcends language itself.

The body invisible, say the great sages, can be known only through direct and personal experience.

''Lift a rock and I am there, split a piece of wood and I am there,'' says Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas. This is one way that he describes not only his, but the common human body invisible. This is our inner body that for all its complexity is proportioned roughly the same for us all, just as each of us as individuals has a head, a torso, four limbs and interior organs that we call our  ''physical'' selves.

But we can never map the body invisible with the same amount of detail as we can the human physical body. Because the body invisible, by definition, cannot be seen. Not only when we look outside at the world do we see as through a glass darkly, but even more so, when we look within.

Charts showing ''chakras'' and ''meridians'' and ''auras,'' the best ones anyway, are perhaps are not as bogus as their detractors say. But even these maps of the body invisible, according to the sages, don't divulge the deepest understanding. Because the body invisible is essentially one of infinite change, like a confluence of rivers of feeling, thinking, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching that are endlessly surging and mixing and then emptying finally into a infinite ocean.

At the most ultimate level, the sages say, beyond even these rivers of thought and feeling and perception and sensation that we mistakenly take to be ''us,'' lies a formless unconditioned void that contains all energy and all forms. Any chart or map is a mere cartoon compared to this.

''Within the fathom-long body, the entire universe may be known,'' the Buddha said. We need to begin to understand this statement, and similar ones made by the sages of other traditions, before we can begin to understand the the practical and moral impacts of language on the human soul.

We live usually in a practical, not metaphysical, realm. How does one create a social program that offers guidelines for using language in the media in a way that enriches the body invisible?

To do so successfully is probably not as impossible as it sounds. After all, humanity has advanced a lot in understanding how the physical human body is either nourished or poisoned, and by what types of foods or toxins, and how those foods or toxins pass through various physical and energy states inside the physical human body. All of these are all quite precisely known and even visualized.

We need to begin to understand the body invisible, as much as we have the physical body.

Practical aid can be devised and implemented, even as the ultimate realities remain well beyond our grasp (for most of us, anyway). Understanding the role of language, especially the use and broadcasting of language to masses of people -- thereby either nourishing or poisoning the body invisible of those individuals and their masses as may be -- is an especially urgent task.

We need to get started.

I  often encourage journalists to think more directly, deeply, systematically, and from various angles about the many modes of action and effects of their chosen medium of expression -- language.

Journalists use many of these modes, but very often without a conscious understanding that they are doing so. As a result, they often aren't aware of the full range of impact their language is actually having on the people who read, watch, and listen to their stories.

Every piece of journalism, for example, attempts to persuade readers of beliefs and premises at deeper level than the explicit content of the article. Even writers who take pains to keep personal opinions and bias out of their articles still must persuade readers of the accuracy, authenticity, and authority of their reporting. And, they have to persuade readers that their writing springs from a moral standpoint and a world view that is basically compatible with theirs.

This invites a study of reportorial journalism, not only opinion journalism, as rhetoric. The use of poetic techniques and tropes in journalistic writing, even sometimes in straight news reporting, similarly invites a deeper study of journalism as poetry; and journalistic narrative techniques invites a study of journalism as non-fiction literature; and so on.

My brief here is to suggest that journalists and scholars of journalism urgently need to open themselves to a branch of language ethics that to the best of my knowledge remains virgin territory as regards its application to journalism and the media.

That is the study of language as an ethical force in itself, as a bearer of a positive or negative moral charge that transcends any specific language message, and which plays a key role in the development of individual human personality, character, destiny, or even, one might say, of soul.

Plato essentially began this line of inquiry in the Western tradition, and many religious, spiritual and moral figures ranging from Jesus, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, St. Augustine, Kabir, Hafiz, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Jaspers have carried it through to the present day.

What is odd is that over the past 200 years the mass media has exploded, vastly deepening the amount and types of impact that it has on individuals and societies. As almost never before in history, a thorough accounting of languages as a means of moral action is needed. Who is doing it?

No longer does language approach us primarily through the spoken language of those people we directly know, plus books and newspapers and television and radio. Now language comes at us in a raging cataract through the Internet, emails, advertising, podcasts, PDAs, wide TV screens hanging in elevators and waiting rooms and restaurants, and seemingly infinite other ways. Increasingly -- because it could be no other way -- the thoughts and ideas and feelings conveyed through all these omnipresent electronic means become our own personal thoughts and ideas and feelings.

But what is the overall effect of this upon our selves? Our communities? This is very much an extension of the original Socratic, Christian, and Buddhist questions about the moral impact of spoken and written language upon the individual soul and upon society. Again, where is the debate?

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates questions the widespread development of writing, because writing, he argued, would surely weaken the human faculty of memory and therefore harm individual moral character and weaken social bonds. Buddha's doctrine of Right Speech posits that using language in a moral manner is the first and most important link between the wholesome moral intentions that arise in spiritual meditation, and the positive actions that can lessen suffering in the world.

Conditions in the early 21st century cry out for the application and updating of these moral theories to mass communication practices, chief among them journalism, the one branch of the mass media dedicated to civic aims.

A journalist might object that journalism after all is only a slice, and a tiny slice at that, of the overall mass media that is generating such torrents of language upon individuals and the public, to such as-yet-unknown effects. That is certainly true. Newspapers, radio and television news programs, and news magazines today are increasingly mere dits and dots in the organization charts of giant multinational conglomerates that generate profits mainly from movies, pop music, advertising, merchandising, and the cross-marketing of their entertainment and communication services. 

And yet the small size of journalistic organizations within these behemoths is itself an argument for its moral and symbolic importance, as a civic practice serving, at least theoretically, public as opposed to private commercial aims. This charter should theoretically allow journalists, above all workers in today's media communication fields, to do the deep kind of thinking about language that I am here proposing. And then, experimentally at first perhaps, to begin to apply the conclusions reached from such considerations, to the actual practice of gathering, writing, and publishing the news.

From at least one other angle, besides the unquestioned impact of mass communication on government and civic society and individuals today, it's truly a mystery why language's moral essence has never been systematically studied in application to journalism. Because there is such abundant evidence in our daily individual lives of a yawning gap between what we claim we believe are the importance and effects of language upon us, versus the objectively observable effects.

Possibly because language is an ephemeral medium as compared with, say, a hunk of metal or a clump of clay, we tend to discount the impact of language on self and community. ''Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,'' we intone as we launch into yet another vicious public debate that leaves all parties more hurt and angry than ever before. We say that such an outcome, and the acute discomfort of such exchanges, is the price we pay for democracy.

It is high time to make a clear-eyed accounting of what exactly we are accepting as the price of our democracy, when we make such a claim. And we need to examine the logic of our defense of free speech of this type, too. Can we really achieve a more perfect union, through the use of language that bitterly and permanently divides? Where does our journalism and our mass media, in terms of tone as well as message, fit into this calculation? Are our means and ends well in accord here?

The daily language that we commonly use to describe the mass media and our use of it, shows that at some level we understand the basic moral relationship of self and society to language, and the very high stakes involved. Generally this language revolves around the metaphor of food.

We speak about ourselves as media ''consumers'' who ''ingest'' a ''daily diet'' of news and entertainment. We face a ''menu'' of media choices, ranging perhaps from ''dry'' or ''lean'' or ''unpalatable'' programs at one end, to ''meaty'' or ''yummy'' or ''rich'' programs at the other. Reading gossip magazines is a ''guilty pleasure'' like eating ice cream, while watching public affairs programs like The Lehrer News Hour or the BBC news is a matter of civic duty, like ''eating one’s spinach.''

A small amount of reflection on the media-as-food metaphor leads to a terrifically deep mystery, one that is really central to this issue yet one that humanity's greatest thinkers have yet to plumb.

One could pose the question his way: If a steak and potatoes dinner nourishes the physical body, what kind of ''body invisible'' does language feed and enrich, or poison and deplete?

The number of human beings who have ever lived who could credibly claim to answer this question probably is in the few dozens, or even less. One can, of course, look to the explanations of these few, such as the recorded words of Jesus or Buddha. But the problem arises that such explanations of the body invisible always include the caveat that describing the body invisible transcends language itself.

The body invisible, say the great sages, can be known only through direct and personal experience.

''Lift a rock and I am there, split a piece of wood and I am there,'' says Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas. This is one way that he describes not only his, but the common human body invisible. This is our inner body that for all its complexity is proportioned roughly the same for us all, just as each of us as individuals has a head, a torso, four limbs and interior organs that we call our  ''physical'' selves.

But we can never map the body invisible with the same amount of detail as we can the human physical body. Because the body invisible, by definition, cannot be seen. Not only when we look outside at the world do we see as through a glass darkly, but even more so, when we look within.

Charts showing ''chakras'' and ''meridians'' and ''auras,'' the best ones anyway, are perhaps are not as bogus as their detractors say. But even these maps of the body invisible, according to the sages, don't divulge the deepest understanding. Because the body invisible is essentially one of infinite change, like a confluence of rivers of feeling, thinking, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching that are endlessly surging and mixing and then emptying finally into a infinite ocean.

At the most ultimate level, the sages say, beyond even these rivers of thought and feeling and perception and sensation that we mistakenly take to be ''us,'' lies a formless unconditioned void that contains all energy and all forms. Any chart or map is a mere cartoon compared to this.

''Within the fathom-long body, the entire universe may be known,'' the Buddha said. We need to begin to understand this statement, and similar ones made by the sages of other traditions, before we can begin to understand the the practical and moral impacts of language on the human soul.

We live usually in a practical, not metaphysical, realm. How does one create a social program that offers guidelines for using language in the media in a way that enriches the body invisible?

To do so successfully is probably not as impossible as it sounds. After all, humanity has advanced a lot in understanding how the physical human body is either nourished or poisoned, and by what types of foods or toxins, and how those foods or toxins pass through various physical and energy states inside the physical human body. All of these are all quite precisely known and even visualized.

We need to begin to understand the body invisible, as much as we have the physical body.

Practical aid can be devised and implemented, even as the ultimate realities remain well beyond our grasp (for most of us, anyway). Understanding the role of language, especially the use and broadcasting of language to masses of people -- thereby either nourishing or poisoning the body invisible of those individuals and their masses as may be -- is an especially urgent task.

We need to get started.

The Monks of Burma

I went to the Common Ground Meditation Center tonight in Minneapolis, where the guiding teacher, Mark Nunberg, gave a talk on the Seven Factors of Awakening. I've  been reading recently about the monks of Burma who are protesting the repressive government of Myanmar (Burma) by marching by the thousands in the streets, and refusing to take alms from government officials. I went to Mark's dharma talk listening for points of  connection to what's happening on the Burmese streets.

The Burmese monks' protest seems like an ideal case study in engaged Buddhism. After all, Buddhism in Burma is one of the  original sources of the Theravada/Vipassana style Buddhism that is growing fast in the United States; that is taught at the Common Ground Center; that I personally study and follow; and that is focused on  a simple practice of finding peace in one's heart and mind. What would cause monks who live out this practice on a daily basis to rise up in such an overt political action?

Mark's talk offered several points of illumination, which made clear why, if a political protest is carried out skilfully with wholesome intentions, it is no different from doing anything else in life. For example, Mark talked about how important it is to be aware of attachments that arise in meditation. This can be subtle and a difficult skill to master. For example, it's relatively easy to see how attached we become to  positive phenomena -- good food, money, the praise of peers, etc.  But we can also equally become attached to subtle spiritual longings as well -- happiness, joy, peace, calm.

When Mark said "attachment to calmness is craving," I saw one connection to the Burmese monks. By taking to the streets, those monks have abandoned that attachment, big time. They were giving themselves up to their experience completely, come what may, positive or negative. Presumably, they had also checked their intentions before they walked, to be sure they were acting from compassion towards the military government and not from hatred; and also had resolved, to the degree humanly possible, not to act on any violent urges that might arise during their marches.

Mark then dived into a really deep teaching that is hard for people to believe, if they haven't experienced it personally. And it opened another channel for me to the Burmese monks.

Mark was talking about mindfulness and pain. The two simply cannot coexist, he said, because the one cancels the other. For example, if you are experiencing pain and you bring mindfulness to the pain, the degree of mindfulness you muster, is the degree of pain reduced. The mindfulness chips away at the pain in degrees. For example, at first, you simply notice that with  physical pain comes a raft of mental activity that is  counter-productive, such as worry the pain will continue forever, that you did something wrong to cause the pain, that your life will be ruined thanks to the pain, etc.

The moment you realize this, the opportunity arises to let go of all that useless thought, simply because you see it's useless and there's no need to keep grasping to it. Then other, deeper layers of pain may be reduced by mindfulness. Just watching the actual physical pain for a while, paying close attention to it without exerting the slightest effort to relieve the pain or fight it, itself creates a healing effect. In  my experience, what happens is the pain tends to atomize, to break into small bits, so that the overall pain becomes much less monolithic, and much more a phenomenon of twinkling bits of sensation through which awareness can flow like water through a gorge.

In the Common Ground mediation room, reflecting in this way, I remembered a time in my life when I was bedridden for several months, dealing with severe pain during all of my waking hours. I remember how hard it was to deal with the pain. I was able to do it, but only by basically meditating all day long. Every time my mindfulness slipped, the pain returned, and I was reminded to get back in the moment, back to seeing things the way they were right now. I had mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, I was intrigued by the experience and the wisdom I seemed to be gaining. On the other, since my life at the time, including the people around me, weren't set up to support a person basically meditating all day, I felt like a fish out of water. I could put my ambivalent feelings into the same meditative hopper -- "this is the way it is right now" -- but I never felt fully reconciled.

In any case, as the hour of meditation progressed this evening, I felt more and more open, rawer and rawer as time went on. All of this remembering of pain, and of the mindfulness I mustered to counter the pain, was making me feel painful and open. This deepened my feeling for the monks. To a new depth, I felt I could understand how those monks are feeling in their heart of hearts, and it can't be easy for them. They are surely feeling big pain. They are surely trying to muster big mindfulness to counter that pain, but they must be feeling ambivalent too, and struggling with that.

Tomorrow, I'll sign and send onwards an Internet petition that's going around, and I'll send a fax of protest to the Burmese embassy. When my own sitting group meets tomorrow night, I'll suggest that we reflect on the monks of Burma, as a possible prelude to further action. But whatever I do, I know I'll act with greater compassion than before, because this is what arose when I brought mindfulness to the pain within myself. The gap that opened between myself and pain, was suddenly filled with compassion. For myself, yes, but for others too.

Figuring out how to skilfully recognize, accept and direct that compassion, seems to me my next task. We'll see what happens.

Buddha #1: Josh Swiller

A famous Tibetan Buddhist training is to regard everyone you meet in the world as the Buddha.  That is, everyone you meet has something profound to teach. Figuring out what the teaching is, is your job.

I don't know if it's just me, but I've been finding Buddhas all over the place recently. The Tibetan training encourages you to find the Buddha even in horrible, vile people who act precisely opposite to the way you would expect the Buddha to act. That's not the kind of person I'm finding.

The kind of person I'm finding talks like the Buddha talks. They seem like actual living Buddhas, people who at least in one sphere of their lives have gained real wisdom, and have the ability to share their wisdom in a compelling way. 

My favorite person of this type is the Dog Whisperer, Cesar Milan. Time after time in his National Geographic TV program, Cesar walks into a home riven with human anxieties that the house pet has picked up and is acting out. With his patented "calm assertive energy" Cesar proceeds each time to cooly diagnose the problem and settle things down, usually dispensing gems of Buddhistic wisdom in the process. I'll write about Cesar and his wisdom gems of peace and tranquility soon.

And, I'll start adding a feature to The Journalist and the Buddha, of quick snapshots of all the Buddhas I meet and learn from along my own life's path.

Let's start with Buddha #1, a young man named Josh Swiller, interviewed the other day on NPR (thanks to my friend Alexa Olesen in Beijing for the link). Josh was profoundly deaf for most of his life until three  years ago, when he received a cochlear implant. Now he hears almost 100 percent.

Here is an exchange between NPR's Scott Simon and Swiller:

Simon:  Are there times, now that you are hearing the whole cacophony of sounds that is our world, that you sometimes miss the quiet?

Swiller:  Oh, sure. One of the most amazing things about deafness and the signing deaf community is that when you are deaf without hearing aids or implants you are alone with your thoughts a lot. And I think being alone with your thoughts, it promotes empathy for other people. Because you get to see that having a mind with all its complaints and thoughts and worries is not an easy  thing for anyone. If you ever spend time in the deaf community, it’s one of the most wonderful, compassionate communities. I think maybe with all of the noise we have in our modern world that gets lost a little bit.

The Buddha couldn't have said it better himself. It sounds to me as if profound deafness naturally nurtures the insights one seeks through vipassana or "insight" meditation. One such insight being what a huge  pain in the ass it is to have a human mind, endlessly storming off in all directions.

The theory of Buddhist insight meditation is that such insights tend to cause compassion to arise. And here we have Josh Swiller, saying this often happens for people who are stone deaf.

For the full interview click here.

Amazing.

Talking With Strangers, Talking With Buddha

ROCHESTER, MN -- Journalists talk to strangers. It’s what we do.

There is the biblical story of Abraham who,  while in the midst of an ecstatic conversation with God, is interrupted by three strangers who appear at his tent. Abraham immediately drops his prayer to take care of the strangers -- to wash their feet, to give them food, and to chat a while.

The spiritual benefits of Abraham's hospitality become known soon enough -- his visitors later turned out to be manifestations of God. So it turns out there's no difference between talking to God and talking to strangers, except that it takes time and effort to understand strangers as divine.

But talking with strangers in the ancient Middle East had distinctly practical benefits as well. They brought news of neighboring tribes, shared ideas about farming and herding, told of daughters and sons in nearby villages who'd reached marriageable age, and opened new channels for trade.

Anyone can talk with strangers, but it's journalism's central professional duty to do so. Across all barriers of race, age, nationality, color, rank or class, it's the journalist's job to ask questions of people who live across those barriers, to discover their news, their beliefs and conditions of life.

Journalism serves democracy by talking to strangers and by sharing their wisdom and life experiences with others. This brings strangers into society’s fold; and it brings us into their fold; which makes us not strangers but familiars.

The practice of talking with strangers strengthens society and democracy in innumerable ways. It evaporates dark secrets that could fester and explode. It alerts society to potential dangers, and it helps focus scattered resources on trouble spots when emergencies arise.

At the same time, talking with strangers extracts the most useful life wisdom from all of society’s members and shares that wisdom with all.

Over the past six years, I’ve talked to many strangers who are our fellow American citizens, mostly immigrants from foreign lands – Somalis, Cambodians, Mexicans, Chinese, Croatians, Indians, Sudanese, Ethiopians, Uighurs, Anuak, Iranians, Sri Lankans, Laotians, and others.

The  stranger who has made the deepest impact on me as a journalist and as a person – from whom I’ve learned the most – is both among the most exotic people I've ever met, and the most dead.

He is Siddhartha Guatama, a prince-turned-monk who lived in northern India in the 6th century B.C. He is known to history as the Buddha, the formal name he took after experiencing a tranquility of the soul so deep he felt compelled to spend his life teaching it to others.

This particular stranger has struck me as so wise -- his life experiences  and his teaching so profound and so relevant to our times -- that I’ve decided to spend a little more time as a journalist with him. I want to learn more, and to share more of what I am learning from this stranger.

Starting today, alternating with my regular Global Minnesota columns, I’ll begin publishing a series of reports of my encounters with the Buddha at The Journalist and the Buddha.

Keeping things simple, the topics I hope to cover include:

• What might this wise stranger have to say about such modern-day challenges as terrorism, multiculturalism, immigration, identity-politics, corrupt leadership, and religious extremism?
• Does world peace start with individual morality, and if so how can the two be realistically and practically combined?
• Western Buddhism is usually about learning how to meditate as a stress-reliever, without discussion of the Buddha’s ethical teachings. Does that make sense? How can we become moral, without moralizing?

The Buddha was far from apolitical.  He led a large community of sometimes quarrelsome monks; he administered discipline to them as needed; he ordained women as nuns against prevailing social norms; and he gave advice to local kings and generals during times of famine, ethnic violence, epidemics and war. In so doing, the Buddha taught lessons of powerful contemporary relevance.

Avoiding moralizing and religious cant, the Buddha also defined simple steps that ordinary people  can take to address, to ease, and to solve personal problems and global problems.

We can learn from such a stranger.

At least, for a little, he deserves a listen. What have we got to lose?