Notes: The Economic Naturalist

by Robert H. Frank.

Intro

• If you can tell such stories and understand why they make sense, you have a far better grasp than simply memorizing. Same with narrative explanations based on principles of economics. 
• the human brain's specialty seems to be absorbing information in narrative form. 
• If your goal is for the core ideas to become part of your working knowledge, the only way that can happen is through engagement and repetition. 

Cost-benefit principle

• Product design features are dictated by it (like rectangular milk cartons). Principle says an action should be taken if, and only if, its benefit is at least as great as its cost.

Supply and demand

• "no cash on the table" principle - holds that freely available money seldom sits unclaimed for long. Only way to make real money will be through some combination of talent, thrift, hard work and luck. 
• It reminds us to be wary of opportunities that seem too good to be true. 
• Competition drives price to a common level. Law of one price - restatement of the no cash on the table principle. 
• General pattern -- as price of a good keeps rising, the quantity demanded keeps falling. 
• Supply side -- as price of good keeps rising, sellers are willing to sell more units. 
• Many important patterns in the marketplace can be understood by focusing on sellers in some cases and on buyers in others. 

Discounted Prices - why some pay more

• Hurdle method of differential pricing -- jump through hoops, then you pay less, ie. find out about sales, wait for sales, etc. 
• Marginal cost - cost of producing one additional unit -- is less than average cost (total cost divided by number of units produced.)

Myth of ownership

• People enjoy property rights in chickens but not in whales explains why the former are secure and the latter are endangered. 
• When all other attempts to explain rationale for a law fail, a good strategy is to ask how it might change income of those affected by it. 

Decoding Marketplace Signals

• "Costly to fake principle" -- costly or difficult to fake. Size (in dogs) is one such signal. 

Personal Relationships

• Familiar conflict between individual and group incentives: Although it would be better for all to wait, the dominant strategy for each individual may be to snap up the first strong opportunity that comes along ... spouses in rural areas, free cherries ... 

Parting Thoughts

• Agreements to limit arms races -- not limited to formal athletic competition. ... mandatory kindergarten start dates, school uniform requirements, etc. 
• theory of compensating wage differentials ... because jobs that entail moral compromise, inflexible work schedules, poor promotion prospects, and low employment security are generally viewed as less attractive, they must pay more to compensate for those attributes. 

Notes: Wherever You Go There You Are

Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, J. Kabat-Zinn.

What is Mindfulness?

• it has everything to with waking up and living in harmony with oneself and with the world. 
• Meditation helps us wake up. 
• Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. Art of conscious living. 
• Simple but not easy: Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use is energies to guide us rather than tyrannize us. 
• Stopping: Meditation is simplicity itself. It is stopping and being present. 
• Meditation not really a "doing" but a "being." "This is it."
• Breath  - helps to have a focus for your attention, an anchor line to tether you to the present moment and to guide you when your mind wanders. The breath serves this purpose. Bare bones awareness of breath moving in and breath moving out. 
• Make a little time in your life for stillness and what we call non-doing, and then tune in to your breathing. 
• You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
• Meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment. It's not about getting somewhere else, but about allowing yourself to be where you already are. 
• Non-doing: formal meditation involves purposefully making a time for stopping all outward activity and cultivating stillness, with no agenda other than being fully present in each moment. 
• Non-doing in action: the action does itself. Effortless activity. Nothing is forced. No small-minded "I," "me" or "mine" to lay claim to the result, yet nothing is left undone. Non-doing is a cornerstone of mastery in any realm of activity. 
• Doing non-doing: Simply means letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way. Effortless effort. Years and years of practice and experience combine, giving rise to a new capacity to let execution unfold beyond technique, beyond exertion, beyond thinking. Action then becomes a pure expression of art, of being, of letting go of all doing -- a merging of mind and body in motion. 
• Meditation is synonymous with the practice with the practice of non-doing. We aren't practicing to make things perfect. We practice to grasp and realize things are already perfect, perfectly what they are. 
• Patience: ethics as "obedience to the unenforceable." Patience as one of the fundamental ethical attitudes. Things unfold in their own time. 
• Feeling under pressure, blocked or stymied ... try not to push the river in the moment but listen carefully to it instead. What does it tell you? What is it telling you to do? If nothing, then just breathe, let things  be as they are, let go into patience, continue listening. If the river tells you something, the do it, do it mindfully. 
• Letting go: an invitation to cease clinging to anything. 
• Non-judging. Meditation means cultivating a non-judging attitude toward what comes up in the mind. Simply witness whatever comes up in the mind and to recognize it without condemning it or pursuing it. Interested in the direct contact with experience itself. 
• Trust. Trusting the present moment. 
• Generosity. A good place to start is with yourself. Give yourself gifts that may be true blessings, such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose. Experiment with giving away this energy -- in little ways at first -- directing it toward yourself and toward others with no thought of gain or return. Give more than you think you can, trusting that you are richer than you think. 
• Mindful cultivation of generosity. Actually an inward giving, a feeling state, a willingness to share your own being with the world. Such is the power of mindful, selfless generosity. Deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient ... only the universe rearranging itself.
• Have to be strong enough to be weak. If you are truly strong, there is little need to emphasize it to yourself or to others. What looks like weakness is actually where your strength lies. And what looks like strength is often weakness, and attempt to cover up fear. 
• Voluntary Simplicity. The impulse frequently arises in me to squeeze another this or another that into this moment. Practice voluntary simplicity - doing only one thing at a time and making sure I am here for it. It means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so that I can have more. Slowing everything down. 
• I practice saying no to keep my life simple, and I find I never do it enough. 
• Concentration - capacity of the mind to sustain an unwavering attention on one object of observation. Cultivated by attending to one thing such as breath, and just limiting one's focus to that. In Sanskrit, it's called samadhi, or "onepointedness." Samadhi is developed and deepened by continually bringing the attention back to the breath every time it wanders. 
• Vision. Asking yourself why you meditate? What is my vision, my map for where I am and where I am going? 
• Bhavana translates as "development through mental training." In Buddhism, the vehicle for this work of inner development is meditation. 
• Practice as path. Tao for "Way" or "Path." In Buddhism, meditation practice is usually spoken of as a path -- the path of mindfulness, the path of right understanding, the path of the wheel of truth (Dharma). 
• Meditation is more rightly thought of as a "Way" than a technique. It is a Way of being, a Way of living, a Way of listening, a Way of walking along a path of life and being in harmony with things as they are. Useful at times to admit to yourself that you don't know the way and to be open to help from unexpected places. 
• Meditation is not Positive Thinking. Does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself. 

Heart of Practice

• Sitting meditation. Think of yourself as a mountain. 
• Sitting posture. Dignity. Posture itself is the meditation. Sitting with dignity -- coming back to our original worthiness. 
• Meditation practice is the slow, disciplined work of digging trenches, of working in the vineyards, of bucketing our a pond. Work of moments and the work of a lifetime, all wrapped into one. 
• What to do with the hands. Hand mudras have different energies. Palms down -- self-containment. Palms up - openness. Rid of anger - palms together over your heart in the prayer position. 
• How long to practice. Value of stopping, of shifting even momentarily from doing to being. 15 minutes a day, if not, then 10 or 5 minutes. 
• Truly no one "right way" to practice. Best to encounter each moment with freshness. Look deeply into it, and then let go into the next moment, not holding to the last one.
• Trust that in this moment, "This is it," whatever and wherever "this" is. Without analyzing, discoursing, judging, condemning, or doubting; simply observing, embracing, opening, letting be, accepting. Right now. Only this step. Only this moment. 
• Contemplating "What is my Way?" We just watch, listen, note, let be and keep generating the question, "What is my Way?", "What is my path?", "Who am I?" The intention here is to remain open to not knowing. 
• Mountain meditation. Invite yourself to become a breathing mountain. Sit with holding this image in our mind. By becoming the mountain in our meditation, we can link up with its strength and stability, and adopt them for our own. 
• Lake meditation. Lake image in your meditation. Allow yourself to become one with the lake as you lie down or sit. 
• Walking meditation. You can couple an awareness of walking with an awareness of breathing. Take each step as it comes and be fully present with it. Feeling the very sensation of walking, moment by moment, step by step. 
• If you find yourself rushing, slow down, remind yourself your are here now, and that when you get there, you will be there. If you miss the here, you will also likely to miss the there. 
• Standing meditation. Best learned from trees. Stand close to one, better still, in a stand of trees. Remembering that trees stand still for years, occasionally lifetimes if they are fortunate. Work at being in touch with the air on your skin, the feel of the feet in contact with the ground, the sounds of the world, the dance of light and color and shadow, the dance of the mind. 
• Lying down meditation. You can reclaim your entire body as the locus of your being and your vitality, and remind yourself that "you," whoever you are, are not just a resident in your head. Body scan - lie here and feel the different regions of your body and then let go of them. Inwardly direct your breath in and out from various regions of the body as if you could breathe right in to your toes or knees. When you are ready, on an outbreath you just let go of that region, allowing/inviting it to dissolve in your mind's eye. 
• As much as possible, breathing to be through your nose. 
• Getting your body down on the floor at least once a day. Just being low down in a room tends to clear the mind. 80,000 basic yoga postures. But I keep coming back to a core routine of 20 or so postures. Yoga folds movement and stillness into one another. 
• Not practicing is practicing. Yoga and life are different ways of saying the same thing. Coming back to mindfulness that seeing lies. 
• Loving kindness meditation. Being whole and simultaneously part of a larger whole, we can change the world simply by changing ourselves. From your heart or belly, invite feelings or images of kindness and love to radiate until they fill your whole beings. Invite feelings of peacefulness and acceptance. Once you've established yourself as a center of love and kindness radiating throughout your being, a cradling of yourself in loving kindness and acceptance, you can dwell here indefinitely.
• Take practice further ... can let the loving kindness radiate outwardly and direct it wherever you like ... to immediate family - hold them in your mind's eye and in your heart, visualizing their essential selves, wishing them well, that they not suffer needlessly.
• If you are capable of it and it feels healthy to you, and liberating, finding a place in your own heart to forgive them for their limitations, for their fears, and for any wrong actions and suffering they have have caused, remembering Yeats's line, "Why, what could she have done, being what she is?"
• Make sure you are not trying to help anybody else or the planet. Rather, you are simply holding them in awareness, honoring them, wishing them well, opening to their pain with kindness and compassion and acceptance. 

Spirit of Mindfulness

• Mindfulness is the very opposite of routine. 
• Direct contact. We don't even bother to look or check how we feel because we think we already know and understand. We forget that direct contact is even possible. Direct experience. 
• Is there anything else you would like to tell me? But what is required most by patients is simply listening, being present, taking the person seriously, not just the disease. 
• Wherever you go, there you are: There is no successful escaping from yourself in the long run, only transformation. You must be willing to left life itself become your teacher. This is the path of working where you find yourself, with what is found here and now. This, then, really is it... this place, this relationship, this dilemma, this job. 
• When you get to your cave or beach, there you would be, with the same mind, the same body, the very same breath that you already have here. So why not let go and admit that you might as well be at home wherever you are?
• The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. 
• Going Upstairs: sometimes slow my ascent, reminding myself that there really is no place I have to go and nothing I have to get that can't wait another moment for the sake of being fully in this one. To use ordinary, repetitive occasions in your own house as invitations to practice mindfulness. 
• What is my Job on this planet?: Ask ourselves over and over again. Otherwise, we may wind up doing somebody else's job and not even know it. That somebody else might be a figment of our own imagination and maybe a prisoner of it as well. 
• At risk of never realizing our uniqueness -- as long aw we remain in shadow cast by our thought habits and conditioning. 
• Buckminster Fuller - discoverer/inventor: to live from then on as if he had died that night. The rest of his life would be a gift. Instead of living for himself, asking, "What is it on this planet that needs doing that I know something about, that probably won't happen unless I take responsibility for? Just ask this question continuously and do what came to him. 
• The asking/the inquiry itself may lead you to a few places that you would not have gone had you merely followed mainstream conventions, or your parents' expectations for you, or even worse, your own unexamined self-limiting beliefs and expectations. Once the universe is your employer, very interesting things start to happen. 
• Mount Analogue: "it's the mountain that will decide who will climb it." There are outer mountains and inner mountains. Perhaps the full teaching of a mountain is that you carry the whole mountain inside yourself, the outer one as well as the inner. 
• The mountain climb is a powerful metaphor for the life quest, the spiritual journey, the path of growth, transformation, and understanding. Ultimately, it is the climb itself which is the adventure, not just standing at the top. 
• Interconnectedness: Everything is related to everything else. Everything is in flux. New way of seeing, a new way of being, a new way of experiencing that permits a new of acting in the world. It's our way of seeing which creates and maintains separation. We become conscious of a connectedness which has been here all the time. 
• We have climbed to a vantagepoint from which we can more readily perceive wholeness, and can cradle the flow of present moments in awareness. All things are one thing and that one thing is all things. 
• Non-harming - Ahimsa: Why not try to live so as to cause as little damage and suffering as possible? You can start practicing ahimsa's gentleness on yourself and in your life with others in any moment. The willingness to harm or hurt comes ultimately out of fear. Non-harming requires that you see your own fears and that you understand them and own them. 
• Karma: Here's how mindfulness changes karma. When you sit, you are not allowing your impulses to translate into action. You are just watching them. Mindlessness that imprisons us. More and more we are stuck in our cultivated-over-a-lifetime habits of not-seeing, but only reacting and blaming. 
• When you stop outward activity for some time and practice being still, right there, in the moment, with that decision to sit, you are already breaking the flow of old karma and creating an entirely new and healthier karma. Herein lies the root of change, the turning point of a life lived. 
• Wholeness and Oneness: When we perceive our intrinsic wholeness, there is truly no place to go and nothing to do. Thus, we are free to choose a path for ourselves. 
• What is This? Inquiry doesn't mean looking for answers. It means asking without expecting answers, just pondering the question, carrying the wondering with you, letting it percolate, bubble, cook. Inquiry and mindfulness are one and the same thing, come to from different directions. Inquiry means asking questions, over and over again. 
• Selfing: "me," "I", and "mine" are products of our thinking. What we call "the self" is really a construct of our own mind, and hardly a permanent one. There is no absolute separate "self" in the first place, just the process of continual self-construction or "selfing." Stop trying so hard to be "somebody" and instead just experience being; we would be happier and more relaxed. Start from where you find yourself and work here. Begin by taking things a little less personally. 
• Anger: watch your reactions in situations that annoy you or make you angry. Experiment with mindfulness as a pot into which you can put all our feelings and just be with them, letting them slowly cook. Knowing as they are more cooked, they will be more easily digested and understood simply by holding them in the pot of mindfulness. 
• Parenting as practice: To do it (parenting) well would demand the greatest clarity of view and the greatest letting go and letting be. Parenting was nothing short of a perfect opportunity to deepen mindfulness, if I could let the children and the family become my teachers, and remember to recognize and listen carefully to the lessons in living. 
• These trials are not impediments to either parenting or mindfulness practice. They are the practice, if you can remember to see it this way. Also, make time for yourself: for stillness, for just being, for just sitting. 
• Try seeing the children as your teachers. Observe them in silence sometimes. Listen more carefully to them. Ask yourself, "How can I help them right now?" Then follow what your heart tells you. Advice is probably the last thing that will be useful in most situations. Just being centered yourself, fully present and open and available, is a great gift for them. 
• Children are and will always be their own beings; but they need great love and guidance to come to full humanness. Best way to impart wisdom, meditation, or anything else to your children is to live it yourself, embody what you most want to impart, and keep your mouth shut. The real teaching is almost entirely non-verbal. 
• Pitfalls along the Path: the ego wants to lay claim and take credit for this special feeling or understanding. As soon as this happens, you are no longer into meditation but into advertising. It's using meditation practice to support the self-inflation habit. 
• In the spirit of inquiry and genuine curiosity, keep asking, "What is this?", "What is this?" It's when you get attached to your experience that the practice arrests, and your development along with it. 
• Whenever you think you are getting somewhere or that you are not getting where you are supposed to be, ask yourself, "Where am I supposed to be?"; "Who is supposed to get somewhere?"; "Am I inviting mindfulness into each moment, or indulging in mindless repetition of the forms of meditation practice, mistaking the form for the essence?"
• Meditation really is the one human activity in which you are not trying to get anywhere else but simply allowing yourself to be where and as you already are. 
• Mindfulness Spiritual? The work of mindfulness is waking up to vitality in every moment that we have. Mindfulness is beyond all thinking, wishful and otherwise, that the here and now is the stage on which this work unfolds continuously. 
• Perhaps ultimately, spiritual simply means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and the totality are interwoven. 

Notes: Accidental Buddhist

by Dinty Moore.

• It is easier, more efficient, to chop onions when you are only chopping onions, not conversing, checking up on the rest of the kitchen, answering the phone, etc.
• Tibetan: the source of our problems is our human weakness, and that weakness is our tendency to become attached. 
• Ok to have xyz (house, car etc) but so long as we don't expect these things to make us happy. Happiness is internal, not external and chasing externals is a waste of time. 
• Buddhist realization of our lack of independence actually calls for greater responsibility. For ourselves and everyone else because we all rise and fall on the same wave. 
• Cars keep us isolated from our environment, whereas "self-propulsion" (biking, walking, canoeing) puts us in touch with the land below us and world around us. 
• We seek enlightenment for the benefit of others.
• We are not separate creatures, separate entities, the Buddha taught, we are all one interconnected reality. 
• Only a trick of the brain that creates this perception of individuality. 
• Turn off the faucet, stop all input. Second, you have to quit grabbing. The water settles, and the still water of the mind then becomes a mirror in which you can find yourself. 
• The more we insist on our preferences, the bigger our ball and chain, and the more it weighs us down. But if we don't prefer things ... we don't have to like a rainy day, we just have to take it, notice it, and pass through it, without dwelling on our preference that it be different. 

For further reading:

• Instructions to the Cook, Glassman
• Mindfulness in Plain English, H. Gunaratana
• Miracle of Mindfulness, T Nhat Hanh.
• Being Peace, T Nhat Hanh
• Dropping Ashes on the Buddha, S. Sahn. 

Notes: Taming the Tiger Within

by Thich Nhat Hanh.

• If your house is on fire, the most urgent thing to do is to go back and try to put out the fire, not to run after the person you believe to be the arsonist. That is not the action of a wise person. You must go back and put out the fire. When you are angry, if you continue to interact with or argue with the other person, if you try to punish him, you are acting exactly like someone who runs after the arsonist while their home goes up in flames. 
• Whatever you do or say in a state of anger will only cause more damage in the relationship. Instead, try not to do anything or say anything when you are angry. 
• If it is your partner who is angry, just listen. Listen and do not react. Do your best to practice compassionate listening. Do not listen for the purpose of judging, criticizing, or analyzing. Listen only to help the other person express himself and find some relief from his suffering.