Something basic is missing in our upbringing and in our education. We do not understand a basic truth: we do not have to treat seriously every thought that arises. The teenage soccer player had an angry outburst, probably not his first outburst, but no one ever taught him that he could choose to ignore his own angry thinking.

Family members of the dead referee “called on athletes around the world … to hold their tempers in check so another family doesn’t have to suffer.” Anyone who has ever driven in rush hour traffic, watched a sporting event, or had an argument knows that tempers are often not held in check. Tempers flare, and to us it seems that external circumstances are the cause of the outbursts.

Who among us has not experienced anger? Most of us stop short of violence, but we can’t say we are always proud of the ways we react. Holding our tempers in check isn’t a leveraged way to deal with angry thoughts—soon or later the pot boils over. Suppose there is a way to turn off the flame on the stove.

Holding tempers in check is a strategy that is based upon the belief that angry reactions are normal in human beings. While they may be common, they are not normal. Human beings fly into an angry state when they misunderstand the nature of where their feelings comes from.

Allow me to share a recent personal example.

I average about 60 flights a year; and because I fly frequently, I choose to “opt-out” at the airport TSA security lines. That means instead of passing through scanners of dubious safety, I experience a thorough pat-down. Sometimes a thorough pat-down becomes an aggressive pat-down. Last week I had an aggressive pat-down. First the TSA agent asked me to bend my head (no, I was not taller than he was). Next he asked me to spread my legs farther apart as he crudely “patted” me. At several points, it appeared to me that the TSA agent escalated his aggression against me. I felt anger welling up.

If the only tool at my disposal was to hold my temper in check, I might’ve lost it. I might’ve refused to cooperate any further and asked to speak to his supervisor. Most people would understand if I told them I became angrier each time the agent became more aggressive. But I did not become angrier, and not because I’m saintly (far from it). I wish I could tell you that I was thinking compassionate thoughts about the TSA agent, but I wasn’t.

Instead, what happened was something like this. Each time an angry thought arose, I understood that the anger was rising inside me—due to my thinking. My angry feelings were not being caused by the TSA agent. Because I understood this, each time an angry thought arose it vanished almost as quickly as it appeared. I didn’t follow each angry thought with a string of angry justifications. The whole process required no effort on my part. It was as though understanding made the choice for me.

In other words, there is a difference between thinking “I am angry” and thinking “I am angry because I am being treated badly by a thuggish man.” Unencumbered by a story, the former thought passes quickly; the latter thought with its story escalates quickly.

I want you to follow along with this a little bit more because I’m making an important distinction. I was not happy about the aggressive pat-down, but I didn’t grit my teeth and control my anger either. Again, had I tried to keep my anger in check, I may have lost the battle. Instead of controlling my anger, I understood that my anger was being brought to me via my thinking; my anger was not being caused by the TSA agent. This understanding made all the difference.

In my experience, controlling emotions doesn’t work. Our thinking is always causing our emotions; understanding this truth provides the freedom to make better choices.

If I am making it sound easy, well, it is easy—until we are in the grip of our thinking. In the grip of our thinking we are certain that our emotions are generated by the circumstances we are in. That’s when we behave in ways that range from embarrassing to dangerous.

Michael Neill asks and then answers a metaphorical question: “Do you need to practice not stepping on the accelerator of your car if you’d like to slow down? Not really—because as soon as you notice that you’re the one stepping on the accelerator, you can stop any time you like.”

When we choose to allow anger to flare up, we are simply and stubbornly claiming that our thinking is being hijacked by external circumstances. It’s like claiming our foot is not on the accelerator.

The antidote for letting our anger getting the best of us is not holding our temper in check—efforts to control our anger will fail us at critical times. Instead, with surprisingly little effort, freedom of choice comes from understanding that we are never upset for the reason we think.

Many will draw the wrong conclusions from those facts. Those harboring animosity towards immigrants believe that the United States allowed dangerous people into the country and supported them too. These citizens are upset that our government supported terrorists. But, can it be that we helped to create a terrorist? Could we correctly conclude that our welfare state creates dangerous people?

America, above all other countries in the world, has embraced immigrants and prospered as a result. In most countries in the world the children and grandchildren of immigrants are still considered foreigners. In America, the children of immigrants are Americans. In the history of the United States, hard work and sacrifice by immigrants made that integration possible. Integration was not an ideal to strive for; it was reality.

But the welfare state discourages that beautiful reality. Could it be that Tamerlan Tsarnaev is not inherently evil? Could it be that he is no different than you or me?  “People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings,” wrote Anne Frank, “but all of us are born with a basic goodness.”

Basic goodness thrives in a system that rewards us for creating value for others. What happens to that basic goodness when we subsidize individuals so they need not have a purpose that is tied to creating value for others?

We all share a right mind and a wrong mind and the power to choose between. I know my wrong mind sometimes feeds me thoughts that were I to act on them would be inimical to my well-being and the well-being of others. If I wake up tomorrow morning thinking “I’m tired; I want to stay in bed all day and watch movies,” I wouldn’t entertain the thought for long.

Why not? A lifetime of honoring my professional obligations has turned my mind permanently in other directions. Why do I, like you, have a lifetime of honoring my professional obligations? Perhaps simple economic incentives are at work. If I didn’t work I would destroy my professional career and suffer economically.

To be sure, economic considerations are not the only important factor influencing our decisions. Perhaps an imbued value of working towards a meaningful life is a major force in our decisions? In reality, there is a complex mixture of interactive forces driving our decision-making.

Tsarnaev is fully responsible for turning to and then honoring the dark side of his mind. But he and his parents were able-bodied and capable of a purposeful life. Our insane policies that provides welfare for able-bodied men and women, allows them time to spend more time considering darker thoughts—thoughts of blame and hate.

Tsarnaev’s uncle, Ruslan Tsarni described his nephews as not “able to settle themselves and … hating everyone who did.” They were “losers”, he said. Could it be that welfare allowed them the luxury of not settling themselves? Did welfare provide them the time to stew in their hateful thinking?

A purposeful life is built on interactions with others. When we interact with others, we often learn that we are not much different from those we think we hate. Fed by welfare, Tsarnaev had a purposeless life; and the hate in his heart grew unabated by the normal interactions of everyday work life.

Collectively, we seem to be squandering our own rich cultural inheritance of common values such as working hard, keeping your word, and exercising personal liberty to find where our talents and personal genius are best utilized.

About American values, a recent commenter on an article in the Wall Street Journal wrote this:

I was a Public Health Nurse in Baltimore’s inner city when the money from Johnson’s “Great Society” was being put into circulation. As an advocate for children, I could see then how “paying” mothers to get rid of fathers was a very destructive idea. (They called their welfare – Aid to Dependent Children – check a “paycheck.”)

I did not believe that it would be allowed to continue and increase. Surely rational civic leaders would see the destructive nature of the Welfare System!

I was wrong!

Now what was done to the inner city’s poor, is being done to the “middle class.”

Despondently, I do not see any force for change strong enough to overcome the dynamic now in place, where such a large percentage of America’s residents are accustomed to getting stuff from other Americans, and think it is “fair” and “just.”

I have wondered, while his wife was working long hours, how many times did Tamerlan Tsarnaev wash the dishes? I have never once had a thought “Oh, good, I get to wash the dishes today.” Yet, I often find doing the dishes to be a pleasant, transformative experience. I find doing the dishes helps to still a busy mind. Perhaps, if Tamerlan did more dishes his deadly attack may not have happened.

My twins are seniors in high school and members of the National Honor Society (NHS). There is a strong service component to maintain NHS membership in good standing. The first year my daughter was a member, she fulfilled her service obligations because she had to. Now she volunteers for extra service opportunities because she loves to.

Being a member of the National Honor Society is a privilege and with those privileges there are obligations. Being a parent or a spouse has obligations. Being a citizen of a free society has obligations, too. Obligations can be transformative.

To subsidize people to escape from the obligations that everyday life asks of all of us is to help create destructive individuals. No, most who escape from their obligations will not grow up to be terrorists, but many of them will grow up to lead lives that are shallow and callous towards others.

Is Tamerlan Tsarnaev no different from you and me? Considering that idea may be upsetting; but considering that idea may help to reduce the criminal population among us. Ideal hands enable dangerous minds.

Some flights out of New York and Washington were delayed by more than two hours as the Federal Aviation Administration kept planes on the ground. The federal agency has said furloughs of air traffic controllers could lead to delays if there weren’t enough people to monitor busy air corridors.

For instance, the 8 a.m. US Airways shuttle pushed back from the gate at Reagan National Airport six minutes early but didn’t take off until 9:58 a.m. The plane landed at 10:48 a.m. — more than two and a half hours later than its scheduled time.

A total 85.4 billion has been cut out of a Federal budget of 3.8 trillion; that amounts to about a 2% reduction in spending. How could such a small cut in federal spending have such a large impact? Did the FAA have no other option than to cut essential front-line personnel? Or, is cutting essential services a political strategy designed to scare the public into supporting more spending and more taxes?

A few weeks ago, in my MBA principles of economics class, I was explaining how per capita expenditures (adjusted for inflation) for public school students have skyrocketed over the past decades and how most of the spending has gone to grow the public school administration rather than to fund smaller classes or new technology.

Sitting in on the class was the fifth-grade daughter of one of my students. My student offered this example of spending on school administration: Her daughter’s middle school has a principal and it has principals for each of the grades five through eight. Count them up: five principals for one middle school!

I asked my student if she knew how much the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade principals were paid. She actually had the budget information on her computer. Together, the four grade principals were making $468,000. This sum does not include the salary of the overall school principal.

I speculated that if teachers were asked, they would report that these grade principals did nothing but get in the way of their teaching mission. At that point the fifth-grader whispered in her mother’s ear. Her fifth-grade principal walks the halls most of the day and barges into the classroom unannounced. In front of the class, the principal scolds the teacher any time the teacher deviates from the prescribed lesson plans.

What do you think would happen if the public school budget was cut in this city? Would the superintendent fire all the grade principals? After all, in the not too distant past, middle schools ran without individual grade principals. A fifth-grade principal makes about as much sense as a manager in charge of blue shirts at Macy’s.

Sadly, it is far more likely that every administrator, including the grade principals, would be deemed essential employees. The superintendent would instead cut front-line teachers, hoping that the uproar from parents would restore his budget.

That is exactly what the federal government is doing. It would not take too many days for an independent team of professionals to identify hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps billions of dollars, of bloat in the budget of the FAA. Yet the FAA tells us they must furlough air-traffic controllers.

What does the furloughing of air traffic controllers have in common with the hiring of fifth-grade principals? Both are manifestations of decisions made by bureaucrats and politicians whose funding is not determined by how well they serve the consuming public. On the contrary, the poorer their performance, the more they argue for increased funding.

Inconvenience the public until they cry uncle! Is that the strategy of these cynical and cruel bureaucrats and politicians?

She saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, a thirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.

And this is how the book closes:

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Love is the default setting in human beings—Love wants to extend itself and flow through us. This means if we are not feeling loving it is because we have actively overridden Love through our egoic thinking: “I hate the traffic.” “My spouse doesn’t do enough for me.” “Joe is a pain in the neck.”

Like many of you I just completed my taxes last week. I had one occasion to override my tax software’s entry. The tax software sternly warned me that I should be very careful since overriding the entry could cause problems.

Our ego’s thinking comes with a warning system too. That warning system are the bad feelings that our ego’s thinking generates. Yet, we choose to ignore the warnings that we are overriding Love.

Thornton Wilder had it right—Love is the only meaning. We can choose to not block Love today.

Jean-René is in therapy for his emotional difficulties; at the advice of his psychiatrist he asks Angélique out to dinner. The two are immediately attracted to each other, but Jean-René is crippled by his fears. While at dinner Jean-René keeps getting up every few minutes to change his shirt in the bathroom, thinking that would quell his fears. Finally, unable to cope with his busy mind, he climbs out the bathroom window of the restaurant and leaves Angélique stranded.

Jean-René and Angélique

Jean-René doesn’t realize it, but is he is suffering from nothing more than a busy mind. He believes he is incompetent in romantic relationships because for years he has simply treated every frightening thought about women as a valid interpretation of reality. His mind is so busy with distorted thinking that there is no room for any other thoughts. He can’t seem to turn away from his anxious thoughts because ignoring them seems impossible and too risky. After all, like so many of us, Jean-René believes his thoughts and feelings are generated by the circumstances he is in. What if he is wrong?

Despite his inability to turn away from his frightening thoughts, the romance continues to blossom. When they finally have intimate relations, Jean-René again panics and leaves Angélique. When he finally comes to his senses, it is too late; Angélique has left.

With his psychiatrist, Jean-René tries to rationalize his loss. “Phew,” he exclaims. “Why do you say that?” asks the psychiatrist. “You don’t love her?” “No,” replies Jean-René, “I love her madly. I never felt this way before.” “Then why do you say phew?” asks the psychiatrist. Jean-René responds, “Fear of love and its problems; relationship anxiety.”

Love seems to be lost, but the small staff at his chocolate company intervenes. They insist that they will take Jean-René to Angélique and that he will make the situation right. They get into the car and drive to Angélique’s apartment, but Jean-René will not get out of the car. His staff asks him what he is afraid of? He replies, “I’m afraid of pretty much everything.”

Jean-René is paralyzed because his frightening thoughts look to him like more than thinking, they look like an objective external reality that would be foolish to ignore. Thinking generates feelings, and feeling can be felt in the body. For Jean-René, the strength of his fearful feelings reinforced the idea that he is suffering from his circumstances. Yet, it is not his circumstances but his busy mind that processes the same thoughts over and over again.

Jean-René is everyman, and Angélique is everywoman. We all have personal thought patterns that we have honored for many years. These patterns generate anxiety, worry, and fear in all of us. When we honor the thought pattern and repeatedly process our thinking, we turn what would be just a passing thought into something more—into something that seems very real. We have the first fearful thought, we engage that thought, and we add on more thoughts: “What does this thought mean about me” “How can I fix these circumstances and relieve myself of these feelings?” The busier our minds, the more we think about the issue, and the more “the issue” seems real.

Jean-René runs away, or he changes his shirt. We may do the same; or we may play videogames, shop, drink, or eat excessively. In the movie, Jean-René’s behavior is farcical, but so is ours. He can’t see it, but neither can we. In truth, there is nothing wrong with any of us other than a head full of thoughts that we take seriously.

Finally, Jean-René realizes it is white-knuckle time. He has to face his thinking. He follows Angélique to a meeting of emotions anonymous and admits, “I would do anything to face my emotions.”

In truth, there is nothing for Jean-Rene to do other than to not take his thinking as a true representation of reality. The noise in his head, telling him otherwise, may continue for some time; but even while the noise is in his head, he can refuse to turn in its direction. In the interim, Jean-René makes the choice to pay no mind to his dysfunctional thinking. Jean-René is ready to let his thinking be and to get on with his life. Jean-René confesses his love to Angélique.

Angélique:  “My stomach is growling.”

Jean-René:  “I like the sound.”

Angélique: “I have clammy hands.”

Jean-René: “I don’t mind.”

The antidote for his misery is to not mind the crazy thoughts in his head. Initially, Angélique and Jean-René may not be able to change their thinking, but all is well. Jean-René (we all) can’t fight the thinking in his (our) head with better thoughts. The antidote for a busy mind is not trying to drown it out; the antidote is simply to remember that we are being frightened only by our thinking.

To find peace and joy, Jean-René had to look away from what he thought he knew; he had to trust what would arise if he got his thinking out of the way. We can all learn his lesson.

Missed in the ensuing coverage was a challenge to the assumption that players will only be motivated by harsh methods. Rice was an unsuccessful coach at Rutgers; and yet, his boorish antics, although extreme, are all too commonplace in sports. Was this simply a case where Coach Rice went too far? Perhaps a more important principle was demonstrated here: boorish behavior demotivates rather than motivates. It is time to question whether colleges are spending millions of dollars a year on coaches that demotivate.

To be sure, athletes at any age might need discipline; but discipline can be accomplished, without histrionics, by simple rules that are evenly and fairly applied. A few examples of simple rules: “Show up for practice on time.” “Learn the team’s playbook.” “Stay physically conditioned.”

In his book Stillpower: The Inner Source of Athletic Excellence, Garrett Kramer observes that even the common-place motivational pep talks are counter-productive: “Revving up a player serves to bind performance rather than enhance it. It always leads to errant decisions and, thus, results in missed opportunities and poor performances.”

Why would this be the case? The answer: You can’t think your way into the zone or a state of flow that athletic excellence requires. Think of the last time you had clarity of mind in any endeavor. Your clear mind is not busy. A larger intelligence is working through you when you get your thinking out of the way. As anyone who has ever played a sport knows, the second you even have a thought “Wow, I’m really in the zone today” is the moment you lose your edge.

The sad truth is that an athlete who plays well for a ranting and raving coach is doing so in spite of the coach, not because of the coach. Some colleges are indeed wasting millions of dollars a year. We would be wise to learn from the Mike Rice example at Rutgers.

In my book The Inner-Work of Leadership I explain how John Wooden, perhaps the greatest coach of all time, relied on teaching instead of “coaching.”

John Wooden was the coach of the legendary UCLA basketball teams that won seven consecutive national championships. Many consider Wooden the greatest coach of any sport in history. High praise indeed! But if you examine his record, his coaching philosophy, and how he conducts himself, it would be hard to argue with this assessment. By his own example and his coaching philosophy, Wooden taught somebodies to be nobodies. A poem about teaching, written by an anonymous author, is a favorite of his:

No written word
No spoken plea
Can teach our youth
What they should be
Nor all the books
On all the shelves
It’s what the teachers
Are themselves

Over the years, Wooden noticed a decrease in team play even while individual talent increased. Unhappily, he observed that a growing number of coaches had forgotten that first and foremost their job, simply and purely, is to be a teacher. In a tribute to Wooden in the New York Times, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote, “He was more a teacher than a coach. He broke basketball down to its basic elements. He always told us basketball was a simple game, but his ability to make the game simple was part of his genius.”

Former UCLA player Andrew Hill also observed that Wooden was “more likely to talk about ‘teaching’ a team rather than ‘coaching’ them.” Hill goes on to say that Wooden’s greatest gift was “not what he taught us, but the fact that he really taught us how to learn.” And in teaching others how to learn, Coach Wooden placed high value on being a learner himself. “If I am through learning, I am through,” he is reported to have said. Teaching and learning—and leading and following—begin with our own example.

Wooden “did very little coaching once the game started; the players knew exactly what was expected of them and how they needed to perform,” recalls Hill. Once the game started, Wooden believed his job was essentially done; he encouraged his players not to look to the sidelines for guidance. During the game, he sat attentively observing the play. Contrast that with the histrionics we see with so many contemporary coaches who over-control the flow of the game by making themselves the center of attention. Wooden’s gentle demeanor on the bench was not weakness.

Coach Wooden’s gentleness came from being firm in his own purpose and principles and yet understanding that, whatever the outcome, it was not about him. The outcome Wooden sought was not to make himself or his players into bigger somebodies. For example, one of the talented players Wooden worked with was Sidney Wicks.  When Wicks first came to UCLA he was not a good team player. In his book Be Quick—But Don’t Hurry, co-written with Coach Wooden, Andrew Hill relates the story of when Wooden banned Wicks from the starting lineup in favor of Lynn Shackleford. Wicks asked Coach Wooden, “Aren’t I a better player than Lynn Shackleford?” Wooden responded, “Why yes, you are, Sydney, and when you learn to play with the team, you will start, but not before then.” It took Wicks a full season to go from being a special  somebody to becoming a great team player. In college, he was named national player of the year; and in the NBA, he was rookie of the year.

By emphasizing teamwork rather than specialness, Wooden allowed the great individual talents of UCLA to be developed and expressed. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recalls, “His drills emphasized fundamentals, unselfishness, and the mental aspects of the game.” Jabbar admits that he could have been a “one-man show” in college, “but what I learned about the game in college and how to mesh with my teammates made it possible to achieve the success I had as a professional.” In other words, if Wooden had encouraged the development of the ego of each player, Abdul-Jabbar may have been an even bigger somebody at UCLA at the expense of his future pro career.

The winning records of Coach Wooden’s great UCLA teams will probably never be equaled. Wooden taught excellence through hard work and sportsmanship; paradoxically, his purpose was not winning. Winning was a by-product of the principles by which Coach Wooden led his players. By his example and by his teaching he provided the circumstances for others to make their own choices, not from their ego but from their True Self. There is a profound gentleness in facilitating others to bring out the best in them, not by building up their specialness but by showing them they are part of a whole.

There was a problem. The battery charger was not in the box. I was puzzled, because I always keep the charger in the box; and I always keep the box in my study. I surmised that I must’ve removed the charger from the box and that the charger was sitting on the shelf in my study. I looked and looked, but the charger was not on the shelf in my study.

Hours later when I was getting resigned to having to order a new charger, I looked again at the camera box in the credenza. I instantly realized something that I didn’t realize for the first five or so times I looked. Although this was a Panasonic camera box, it was considerably smaller than the larger Panasonic camera box for my camera.

I got up from the living room chair and went back to my study. The camera box I was looking for was right there. I had literally looked several times in the place the box sat, but I had not seen the box.

I looked right at this box, but I didn’t see it.

Am I just particularly unobservant? Research suggests otherwise. In their now famous “Invisible Gorilla” experiment Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons demonstrated that most people will literally not see a guerrilla that comes across their field of vision when they are instructed to look for something else.

Consider this recent variation on Charbris and Simons study where radiologists were asked to spot nodules in a CT scan. A gorilla 48 times the size of the nodule was also placed in the scan.

The authors of the study, which will be published in a future issue of Psychological Science, tested 24 credentialed radiologists—including nine from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and 15 expert examiners from the American Board of Radiology. Radiologists were asked to look at five lung CT scans, each which contained about 10 nodules or abnormalities. They were asked to click on anything strange on the scans. On the final scan, a gorilla about 48 times the size of an average nodule was placed in the upper right hand quadrant.

The researchers report, “83 percent of radiologists failed to spot the animal, even though they went past it four times on average.” This is about the number of times I looked at the exact spot where the camera box sat; I failed to spot it—because I didn’t believe it was there. What happened to the radiologists and to me is called “inattentional blindness.”

It didn’t matter how many times I looked on my shelf for the battery charger—because I believed the camera box was not on my shelf, I could not see the box. It didn’t matter how many times the radiologist looked at the scan; they were not going to see the gorilla because they were looking for nodules and not gorillas.

Gorillas. Camera boxes. What else is hidden in plain sight? Here are just a few very important things.

Wisdom, creativity, and emotional well-being sit waiting behind our often very busy minds. When our minds become stiller and we give up believing we know the answer, an insight often appears. Only once I gave up believing I understood the camera charger issue, did the obvious—that I was looking in the wrong box—become apparent.

Most of us spend most of our life look in the wrong place for our emotional well-being. We believe our emotional well-being is a function of arranging circumstances that we believe will enhance our emotional well-being. Our emotional well-being, though, is a function of the quality of our thinking and not of achieving circumstances that are so ephemeral.

In the realm of economics we block order and prosperity. Some believe that order and thus prosperity are only obtained when somebody in-charge controls the choices of others.

To have such a belief is to ignore the evidence that is all around us. Order wants to happen. Human beings want to cooperate.

Consider just one simple case—the miracle of the modern supermarket. A modern supermarket is fully stocked all the time with a cornucopia of foods from all over the world. Even the greatest king a few centuries ago could not have imagined such bounty. No one orders the farmers to grow the food. No one orders the trucker to be in the business of shipping the food. No one orders a supermarket to stock certain products.

I could go on, but you get the point. In the former Soviet Union, even in Moscow in the height of the summer, fresh produce was in short supply. Because people waited for the government to direct their energy, tons of produce literally rotted in the fields in the summer for the lack of coordination that a free market provides for free. The Soviets had to wait for the central planner, who with limited knowledge, had to order people to pick produce and truckers to ship the produce into the cities. How well do you think that such a system worked? The central planners of socialism and communism were suppressing order, not promoting order.

Each of us has our own “central planner” in our own mind which chews over and analyzes our problems, heckling us with constant should haves, would haves, and could haves. Our “planner” works about as well as did central planners in the Soviet Union.

Our own emotional well-being and the economic well-being of society are literally hidden in plain sight. If only we would get out of the way. The price of admission is simple humility. When we stop being so impressed with the power of our own mind, the miracles of a larger order are given to us for free. We fail to see the obvious because we think we know.

The numbers may come as a surprise, but most Americans support at least some of the procedures of the TSA. A 2012 Gallup poll showed that “54% of Americans think the TSA is doing either an excellent or a good job of handling security screening at airports.” A 2010 CBS News poll showed that over 80% support the full body scanners. Why such support? The public must believe that TSA procedures enhance security and increase their safety. And behind the belief that the TSA is useful is the belief that government is here to serve the people. But is that really so? Does protecting you really guide every decision that the TSA makes?

What if instead government agencies served their own interests? Although those in the position of leadership may often be motivated by things other than public service, we do not have to assume bad intentions to explain bad decisions on the part of government employees. We can grant all the good intentions we want to government employees, but good intentions are not enough.

People respond to incentives. Government workers make bad decisions because the incentives that guide their behavior are simply not the same as the incentives that guide the behavior of people who compete to win the loyalty of the consumer.

Recently, I was in line at airport security after 9 pm. Like other travelers, I was there to catch the last flight of the night. The line was moving slowly, and clearly there was concern on the faces of some travelers: “Will I miss the last flight of the night?” A TSA employee was going up and down the lines to make sure that passengers had every last lotion and cream out for inspection. “We are not like some other airports,” he shouted. “We are going to get you for going for going 1 mile over the speed limit.”

One traveler shook the TSA’s agent hand.  I couldn’t hear the words, but judging by the TSA’s agent face, it seemed the traveler was thanking him for a job well done. And the TSA agent was indeed doing his defined job well and with sincere effort; whether he was protecting passengers was another question.

The former TSA head, Kip Hawley said he supports a new TSA policy allowing small knives on planes. In fact, he believes the new policy does not go far enough; it should, he said, allow travelers to bring instruments such as “battle axes (and) machetes” onto planes. When I first read this, I reflexively checked to see that I had not accidentally landed at the satirical Onion website.

Hawley said, “You cannot necessarily prevent violence on an airplane, but that is not the TSA’s mission. TSA’s mission is to prevent a successful, catastrophic terrorist attack.…”

In other words, if a terrorist with a machete kills everyone on board the plane and yet the plane lands safely, the TSA would have successfully done their job. Could a representative of a business that depended on serving the needs of consumers take such a position?

The problem is that no matter how insane the TSA’s policies, the TSA continues to be funded with taxpayers’ money. They are a government monopoly; they can choose to serve themselves as well as their politically connected cronies from whom they buy dangerous and ineffective scanners. What else are they buying?

The TSA is a division of the Department of Homeland Security. Recently it has been revealed that the Department of Homeland Security has ordered heavily armored personnel carriers as well as 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition—enough to sustain a 20 year war.

Do they have dark motives? Are they preparing to make war against Americans, as some believe? Ralph Benko writing in Forbes has a simpler explanation. He writes: “About 20 years ago this columnist worked, for two years, in the U.S. Department of Energy’s general counsel’s office in its procurement and finance division.” “Wise to the ways” of the bureaucracy, Benko offers a simple explanation: They have no incentives to not be wasteful. Why wouldn’t they buy what they felt like buying and what their cronies sell?

So we come full circle; good intentions are not enough. For sound policies to emerge, what is needed are incentives to serve the public. Decision makers in government monopolies do not have those incentives which only competition provides.

Of course, the reality is often far different than the “truth.” Sometimes the “guru” is not all that “advanced” and their followers really don’t want to change. Followers may wish for the impossible—answers that solve their problems but leave their self-identity and their view of the world intact. In truth, this is an impossible wish because real change requires us to question our beliefs.

There are, of course, legitimate “gurus” who do help to facilitate a process of increasing awareness and shedding of false beliefs. In contrast, the worst, such as the notorious James Ray, help to inflict serious psychological and even physical harm on their followers.

Hugo Chavez, El Comandante, the late dictator of Venezuela, was known for his long speeches and his call-in radio and television shows where citizens could seek his advice about problems. Every, Sunday beginning at 11 AM, Chavez would begin his Aló Presidente show. One newspaper gave this account of one eight hour marathon by Chavez in 2007: “Seldom referring to notes, he ranged over energy policy, constitutional reform, low-cost housing, European integration and Colombian peace talks. He engaged with officials and supporters from the audience and from other locations via a satellite feed.”

Guru El Comandante

Chavez fancied himself as an expert on all things foreign and domestic. It was not uncommon for him to spontaneously issue new edicts on the spot in the course of his pronouncements. How did that work out for the Venezuelan people? Not so well; not even for his “beloved” poor. Consider this recent news story:

Venezuelans have been coping with sporadic shortages of foods ranging from cooking oil to sugar, and lately a dearth of flour is preventing some bakeries from making bread.

Marco Freitas, a manager of a Caracas bakery, is selling mainly cold cuts and dry pasta now that his bread shelves are nearly empty. Freitas said he hasn’t been able to get enough flour lately.

Or this news story:

Staples such as sugar, coffee, cooking oil, meat, wheat flour, rice, cornmeal and chicken are in very short supply, leading to long lines outside supermarkets. Toilet paper, toothpaste and dishwashing liquid have also disappeared. Canisters of liquid natural gas, which Venezuelans use to cook their meals, are in short supply.

Toilet paper? Toothpaste? Rice? In the history of the world, all attempts at central planning have failed; Chavez’s attempt is no exception.

I have no way of knowing how well-intentioned Chavez really was. In any case, good intentions do not matter. One man or a small group of individuals do not have the knowledge to plan an economy. A modern economy is so complex that the knowledge required to run it is beyond the comprehension of anyone.

Productive use of human energy is ignited when individuals are free to make the best decisions for themselves based upon all they know of their circumstances. Hugo Chavez could not ignite enough human energy run to put toilet paper on grocery store shelves.

Chavez’s failure to do the impossible didn’t matter too many Venezuelans who are quite sincere in their grief of his passing. Nor did his failure matter to his foreign sympathizers, such as actor Sean Penn who proclaimed: “Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion.”

Penn, like many Venezuelans, is ignorant of what it takes to ignite human energy toward productive ends. I can’t help but wonder how compliant Penn would be if he were expected to sit at the feet of his director for hours at a time while his director issued on-the-spot edicts for Penn to carry out. I would guess that Penn would refuse to work for such a director, yet he thinks it’s great that a whole country is run that way.

Like some Satsang devotees, Venezuelans don’t want to examine the faulty beliefs that are causing their misery. An now that Guru El Comandante won’t be there to convince Venezuelans that better times are coming and that the shortages and the deprivations that they endure were the fault of imperialists, the inevitable hangover is bound to happen. The government will be blamed, and more chaos in Venezuela will result.

She believes “she can be free of her sad stories.” She believes her stories “can float away like memories of a dream the night before.”

There is only one problem—she still has to face the same messy life that everyone else does. Her employer has not held her former job for her; indeed they are eager to get rid of her. Only the threat of a lawsuit gains back for her a demeaning job in a department reserved for misfits.

Amy now has to live with her mother, who is skeptical that Amy has changed at all and not at all supportive of the more positive way that Amy wants to see the world. Amy still has tender feelings towards her ex-husband, but he is content to still drown his misery with substance abuse.

I’ve only watched the first season, but Enlightened is really the universal tale of every person who has ever embarked on a spiritual journey. We think that this time we really understand things; we think we will never fall into negative thinking or destructive behavior again. And then boom, it is not long before life gets in the way.

In Enlightened, Amy returns from her substance abuse retreat with false beliefs. She believes that her new understanding will translate into things going well for her in her external life. She believes that there should be no messy situations or people to encounter. She believes she should be able to raise others up by her own positive her state of mind.

None of these false beliefs work out for her, but that is really the good news.  She begins to realize that she doesn’t have to wait for the world to “right” in order to feel good.  She may not be able to change her reality, but she can change her experience of reality.

For Amy, like for most of us, this will not be any easy lesson to learn. Events occur; and naturally, personal thinking occurs: “How can I make this better?” “Why are they behaving this way?” “Why is this happening to me again?”

As long as Amy is focused on the interaction, no peace is possible. On the level of interaction, she is focusing on fixing herself and others. She wants a better outcome, but a better outcome may not be possible. Yet, from a deeper place inside, inspired ideas will arise when we get out of the way.

The messy situations are there precisely to help us find the place inside that cannot be touched by the external. How secure is our peace of mind if we only have it when things go our way?

A Course in Miracles encourages us to allow gratitude to replace thoughts of “anger, malice and revenge.”  A Course in Miracles goes on to say:

We have been given everything. If we refuse to recognize it, we are not entitled therefore to our bitterness, and to a self-perception which regards us in a place of merciless pursuit, where we are badgered ceaselessly, and pushed about without a thought or care for us or for our future. Gratitude becomes the single thought we substitute for these insane perceptions.

Strong words, indeed—“we are not entitled … to our bitterness.” But what is the “everything” that we have been given? Everything is our connection to Wholeness or God [or, please use the word that you are most comfortable with] that can never be broken. That connection provides Love, Peace, and Wisdom as soon we get our thoughts of interaction out of the way.

Many years ago I received a call from a physician I did not know who asked if I would talk with her about natural foods. Like many physicians, she had not learned the principles of healthy eating in medical school. We talked over the phone, and the physician asked if she could pay a visit. Little did I know that the visit was to provide an indelible memory.

The physician arrived at my home with her young daughter. While we were talking, her daughter got into mischief. I don’t recall what kind of mischief, but the physician got very angry (most would think inappropriately angry) at her daughter. Now comes the indelible memory. Within seconds after getting angry, the physician dropped her feelings of upset.

No, I don’t mean she dropped her feelings of upset because she was in a social situation that required her to put on appearances. No, I mean, she really dropped it completely. I deeply felt that in her world there was complete forgiveness both for her daughter’s behavior and her own; not one spot of judgment was left. She was not processing her daughter’s behavior with thoughts of what does this mean about her daughter? What does this mean about me? She was able to completely return to the business at hand, which was talking about natural foods.

Angry thoughts had arisen and, indeed, were disruptive. But there was no identification with those thoughts. They were free to come and go. There was nothing to hold on to.

This is about as close to “enlightenment” as most of us are likely to come. The default setting in human beings is mental well-being—we have only to get out of our own way.

In the last episode of the first season of Enlightened, Amy muses: “Everything can be transformed. Every single thing. Goodness exists. It’s all around. It’s just sleeping. It can be awakened.”  A Course in Miracles puts it this way:

Deep within you is everything that is perfect, ready to radiate through you and out into the world. It will cure all sorrow and pain and fear and loss because it will heal the mind that thought these things were real, and suffered out of its allegiance to them.

There is a fundamental and paradoxical law of change that Amy and all of us must learn: change is very difficult until we accept ourselves as we are now. Why is this so? The part of us that leads change is the part of us that never judges. Thus, condemning ourselves for our failures prevents change by barring the door to the real source of change.