So like my current employer (and since my personal cataclysm of a bad bicycle accident two years ago followed ten weeks later by removal of a three-centimeter blood clot from my skull) I am all about my own health maintenance. For me, that maintenance includes eating a plant-based, whole-food, low-fat diet; leading as balanced a life as I possibly can; and maximizing the joy while minimizing the stress in my life.

Where I find a great deal of that joy these days is when (literally and metaphorically) I have my feet under me and I am moving forward, rather than sitting on my ass! Though I have what is conventionally a very sedentary job (spending the bulk of ones day sitting in front of ones computer or in a meeting) I don’t accept that conventional framing. I am up, on my feet and moving about as much as I can wrangle at my job site during my work day.

That day starts with a half-hour walk to the train station for a short train ride to work. Particularly it is cool and crisp and gets my blood flowing and my brain processing better than any cup of coffee.

At my desk I have found I can invert one of those empty 11 by 17 cardboard ten-ream paper boxes in front of my computer monitor, set my keyboard and mouse on it, and do much of the work at my computer standing up rather than sitting down. It helps here that I’m left-handed actually, since to make room for my mouse on the left side of the box I can move the keyboard to the right with the keypad dangling off the right side (since I don’t use the keypad). I know there are expensive desk arrangements that raise and lower, but this works quite well, is simple to do and undo, and costs nothing. I generally can spend several hours a day working in this upright position, even able to move my feet in place while I do so.

Over the past few years I have acquired the ability to facilitate meetings over the phone, particularly those where all the other participants are on the phone as well. Many of the meetings and work sessions I am called on to facilitate are of this sort, involving co-workers calling in from all over California or the entire country. Even when I’m not the facilitator, many of the other meetings I participate in are such conference calls as well.

For all these meetings that I participate in on the phone, I put on my wireless headset, and since it has about a forty foot range, I can walk around the “neighborhood” around my cube while I am engaged in the meeting. I can pace, look out the nearby windows, refill my water glass in the kitchen and generally keep my body in motion. If it is a “web meeting”, where I need to see what’s on my computer screen (or I am typing things on-screen for others to see and comment on) then at worst I can stand in front of my monitor with my mouse and keyboard on box arrangement.

This works so much better for me than sitting in a meeting room, where my brain tends to shut down and I have to fight with dozing off (if I’m not the meeting facilitator). I think up to eighty percent of the meetings I participate in I am able to do over the phone.

Then I build into my day generally three twenty-minute walks around my work campus. This is where I do all my best strategic thinking, how I should proceed on a particular project, what’s on the critical path of my workload, or what I have to be most cognizant of in a work session I’m about to lead. When I am walking briskly I have the maximum blood flow to my brain and therefor my mind is working optimally. When I am outdoors and can “look long” at distant objects that somehow promotes more “longsighted” strategic thinking. I tend to be more “shortsighted” when I am staring at cube walls only a few feet in front of me. Sometimes I will even do part of a meeting, where I am basically just listening in, on my cell phone and headset while I take one of my walks.

I have found that my body is my avatar and my corporeal orientation is the metaphor that drives my metaphysical orientation to the world. So if I am “off my ass”, “on my feet” and even “moving forward” physically, it seems those metaphors play out in the work that I am doing as well. I get a lot of kudos on my meeting facilitation skills and the quality of the documents I create, and I am convinced that leveraging these metaphors helps me do so.

I certainly hope we don’t end up looking back at Google saying to ourselves, “What have we done?”

As one always trying to come up with provocative titles for my pieces to get more people to read them, I have to take my hat off to Gurley for his title. I mean how could I resist reading that piece!

Gizmodo summarizes Gurley’s piece with the following teaser…

Bill Gurley thinks that Android is an unstoppable freight train that will prevail against all its rivals. For Google, Android is not even a product with a business plan. It’s just a weapon at the service of their master domination strategy, a way to destroy any potential threats that may eventually kill their search monster. This is how they are doing it and the potential consequences.

Though it is not made clear in Gurley’s piece, Android is an operating system environment that can be used on a variety of electronic computing devices, particularly the plethora of new hand-held ones. Microsoft remember, has made billions when they once had a near monopoly in selling their Windows OS on umpteen PCs. Rival Apple has also raked in the money selling you their well-crafted proprietary devices with their proprietary operating systems. Google in contrast is giving theirs away for free.

With their Android OS as exhibit A, Gurley goes on to describe how Google has developed a model where they are giving computer products away for free in exchange for your participation in their information network on which they sell advertising in an innovative model they call Adwords. Google’s advertising sales are big-time, bringing in billions of dollars yearly including a handy profit. So far its been mostly free software, but why not move in the direction of free or nearly free hardware and Internet access as well, taking this approach to its logical conclusion.

Funny, but Google’s is the business model that built the commercial radio and over-the-air television businesses during the 20th Century, the latter made obsolete to some degree by the pay-for-subscription cable/satellite TV business model in the last decades of the century, and to a lesser degree the satellite radio model of the early 21st. Now the commercial pendulum seems to be swinging back in that direction… go figure!

So from the point of view of a more egalitarian access to technology, I (who tends to see things in an optimistic light) applaud the Google approach challenging the proprietary you-got-to-pay-to-play approaches of Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, and others. But I’m not naïve enough not to realize the dangers of any monopolistic concentration of economic power, and as Peter Townsend said in his band The Who’s song “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, after the revolution…

Meet the new boss… same as the old boss… Parking on the left is now parking on the right…

“The Man” by any other business model is still “the Man”.

Gurley cites Warren Buffett’s “castle and moat” analogy for what makes for the most successful businesses. The “castle” is the money-making offering (in Google’s case highly targeted advertising) and the “moat” is the defensive aspects that protect it from being challenged (all the free software and other stuff Google is giving away to get you to play in their sandbox and have your “eyeballs” available to their advertisers).

So given all that, what’s this whole “destruction of wealth” thing? Google threatens entire areas of the for-profit software industry…

The combined market capitalizations of companies that build desktop operating systems, handset operating systems, mapping software (they give this away with Android also!), as well as internal software that helps to differentiate mobile devices is well over $100B, and may be several times that. Yet, there is no economic law that necessitates that these industries remain in their current form.

The giver’s away of stuff for both social consciousness (Linux and Wikipedia) and for profit (Google) may triumph in the information marketplace, and in Google’s case in particular, be the “new boss” or the “new man”. But according to Gurley it is not a monopolistic business practice in any traditional sense…

One might yearn to suggest that there is a market unjust here that should be investigated by some government entity, but let us not forget that the consumer is not harmed here – in fact far from it. The consumer is getting great software at the cheapest price possible. Free. The consumer might be harmed if this activity were prevented.

So it’s a brave new world where its hard to tell if Sherwood Forest’s newest high-profile inhabitant could be Robin Hood or could in fact be the new Sherrif.

But for better or for worse, it appears that the communication revolution catalyzed by the Internet will have a profound impact on the world akin to the impact print and movable type technology had on the Medieval world. In the case of the earlier innovation, it spawned an egalitarian revolution that toppled monarchies, brought on an age of citizens rather than serfs, exploration and discovery. Of course on the darker downside, also colonialism, nationalism, totalitarianism and unprecedented concentrations of political and economic power.

In most premodern cultures, there were two recognized ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge. The Greeks called them “mythos” and “logos”… Each had its own sphere of competence, and it was considered unwise to mix the two… Logos (“reason”) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world… But it had its limitations: it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggles. For that people turned to mythos or “myth”.

In her first chapter, “Homo Religosus”, Armstrong puts forward her portrait of the very ancient world (before any of the religions we know of today existed) and the critical role that myth played in people’s lives. Her contention is that people used language and reason (logos) to communicate the everyday information needed for survival – how to hunt, what to gather, how to take care of children, etc.

But as to the “why” and other metaphysical questions of life – why it was okay to kill other creatures for food that were not all that different from humans, why it was important to be kind to others, why bad things happened to good people, why life was such a struggle, how a young person became an adult – logos could not provide useful answers. These questions required myths and legends built on a ritual practice that generally went beyond mere words and knowledge that was attainable through the senses.

The development of religion as an essential part of being human, according to Armstrong, did not involve doctrines or principles composed of mere words. It involved rituals and other practices, that when undertaken in the appropriate context, led to individual discovery and insight on the deeper “why” and other metaphysical questions of life.

By coincidence (if not synchronicity at least for me reading this at a yoga retreat) Armstrong uses the ancient discipline of yoga as an example of ritual practice toward a calm mind that can perceive knowledge beyond the realm of the senses. In the Wikipedia entry on the word “yoga” it says…

The Sanskrit word yoga has many meanings, and is derived from the Sanskrit root “yuj”, meaning “to control”, “to yoke” or “to unite”. Translations include “joining”, “uniting”, “union”, “conjunction”, and “means”. It is also possible that the word yoga derives from “yujir samadhau,” which means “contemplation” or “absorption.” This translation fits better with the dualist Raja Yoga because it is through contemplation that discrimination between prakrti (nature) and purusha (pure consciousness) occurs.

After a ninety-minute yoga session (of gentle stretching and thoughtful breathing) I would be lying on my mat on the floor of the camp lodge in the “corpse pose”, my shoulders, hips and back returned to a proper alignment, my chest open to a full breath (of that much cleaner mountain air). My mind would be blank (for at least a little while) and I would be in a state that I could only begin to describe using the word “bliss”, but something really much more nuanced than that.

And the last evening of the retreat we all gathered in the lodge for a drumming circle and a sort of call and response chanting and singing know as “Kirtan”. Again, in the midst of the rhythms that we were all contributing to (with the array of drums they made available to everybody) or amidst the sound of sixty voices in unison responding to the call of the person leading, I felt a profound sense of some sort of “truth” well beyond what any words could fully describe. A connection between all of us in attendance that felt like it was also between everybody else as well.

So was that perhaps at least a more visceral glimpse at the religious “practice” that Armstrong was talking about in the ancient world? Something she attempts to write about with mere words on a printed page? What the great religious thinkers of the ancient world, like Buddha and Confucius, often described as a profound “nothing” beyond all the muggle somethings of the world.

As Armstrong says…

Religious discourse was not intended to be understood literally because it was only possible to speak about a reality that transcended language in symbolic terms.

That makes sense to me, even though I, like Buddha and Confucius (who are way beyond my league), do not “believe” in deities that “exist” in some form. They intuited a deeper level that did not “exist” in any precise sense of that word, but could be intuited by others by following certain disciplines of thought and action (like going beyond ego or practicing the Golden Rule).

Teasing it in her introduction (and detailed in chapters I have yet to read) Armstrong goes on to posit that starting with the beginnings of the “Modern Era” in the 16th Century, the Western world moved away from myth and ritual religious practice toward a hyper focus on logos (rational thought) as the only legitimate source of truth about the world. Some began to believe that science alone could answer all the most profound questions of the world.

In the process, the metaphorical legends and other stories (never intended to be taken literally according to Armstrong) that could give people a metaphorical context for wrestling with profound dualities and contradictions (not just things that we did not know yet), were discredited. The definition of the word “myth” became simply “something that is believed but is not really true”.

Armstrong believes that most Western religions got caught up in this obsession with logos, and in order to try and stay relevant, reframed their sacred texts, including the Bible and the Koran, as literal truth (logos) rather than metaphorical stories (mythos) meant to suggest insights on the human condition.

Certainly science has advanced to the point of explaining so many things, including where babies come from, that germs are involved in making us ill, what causes earthquakes, and that the processes of natural selection can reasonably explain the development and diversity of life on our planet. And maybe science will eventually explain many of the mechanisms of how “consciousness” inhabits (or seems to inhabit) a human body or how people can perceive things beyond their five senses.

But why bad things happen to good people, can “logos” have an answer beyond the fact that it is completely random. Most people don’t want to go on living unless life has some meaning beyond survival and even beyond simple pleasures of good food, drink, sex and company.

I consider myself a humanist who believes Albert Schweitzer’s famous quote, “There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.” But I believe that more strongly after sitting in the deBenneville Pines lodge two nights ago in as state of great relaxation and inner tranquility hearing the combined voices of sixty human souls (including my own) all unique but choosing for that moment to act as one.

Our country has a great principle of separation of Church and State, which acknowledges a role for both. How about agreeing as well on some sort of principle of the separation of logos and mythos, and acknowledging the value of both as well? If religion stayed in what Armstrong describes as its original realm of a vibrant and non-discredited mythos, would people be expressing so much hate and acting with such violence in the name of religious “truth”.