Well, I’m minutes away from stepping off the grid. I think for some of you, this is not a big challenge. Perhaps, it won’t be for me either. As I’ve alluded, giving up food has been surprisingly easy – although I continue to fantasize over all manner of meals.

But, as I step closer to no electricity, I should reiterate why this is part of my Aththai at all. We live in a world that depends on violence for its very existence. There is human-to-human violence, violence against animals, violence against plants, and violence against the entire biosphere. As a point of fact, neither Jainism nor Buddhism nor Hinduism says that we can live without violence. This is an impossibility. But, in the holiest of our celebrations, I want to take some time to remove myself from the violence that our civilization demands. I am not sure what I will learn yet, but I need to take these steps.

My next three days will be interesting. Most of them will be occupied by a combination of kriyas, meditation, walks, contemplation, reading, and writing. I hope something good comes of it. Thank you to all who have wished me well. I will be glad to let you know how this finally unveils.

Report card for day 5:

Hunger level (0-10):3-4

Water consumed: ~100 ounces (unboiled)

Miles driven: 0

Approximate kilowatt hours used:~1.0 KwH

Things I wanted to buy but did not: None

Hours in silence: 16 (8 waking)

Weight (originally 160 lbs): 153 lbs

One thing I haven’t been entirely clear on is how hunger is treating me. In general, I’m saying the hunger level is low, but that’s probably biased by when I’m writing. Some have a tendency to remember the difficult moments and cling to them; I probably remember things being easier than they were. So, for posterity, I’ll say that I’ve had moments of extreme hunger verging on fears of death. But they quickly pass.

The thing that I’m excited about and anxious for is the pending loss of electricity and communication. Minimizing these things is not hard. Going in their absence is something else. To re-iterate, tomorrow is the last day I will be using any foreign energy source intentionally.

Report card for day 4:

Hunger level (0-10):2 (with brief occurrences of 8 )

Water consumed: ~70 ounces (unboiled)

Miles driven: 0

Approximate kilowatt hours used:1.5 KwH

Things I wanted to buy but did not: None

Hours in silence: 10 (2 waking)

Weight (originally 160 lbs): 155 lbs

I went to Jaina 2007 this year and had the distinct pleasure of seeing Sri Sri Ravi Shankar speak. For those of you who aren’t in the know, this is an amazingly cool person -

1. He leads an incredible course on meditation, breathing, and life. (To wit, it made me relaxed, improved meditation, and weirdly shaved about 15 seconds off of my mile-time-splits on distance runs. Now that is a guru!)

2. He really embodies the hopes and ambitions of anyone who believes in Ahimsa. To wit, he went to Iraq to espouse peace and he meant it. He genuinely believes there’s a possibility for peace and love to win out there. You can call him crazy, but he was willing to stand outside of the Green Zone and get his message accross.

Anyway, at Jaina, I had the opportunity to hear him speak twice and I was able to ask a few questions of him. My main focus was on this issue of the survival instinct versus peace and love. His belief was that through demonstrations of compassion and conviction, love will always win.

Call me a skeptic, but I’m not sure. My cousin sent me a comment about a man who fasted to end horrible conditions in a prison in India. Gandhiji underwent many struggles of deprivation to show his passion for love and peace. Yet, Gandhiji failed to stop the horror and anarchy of the partition of India and Pakistan. What does that mean? Did he not do enough? Was the violence inevitable?  Or do we need a hybridized solution of compassion and pragmatism to deal with these quagmires?

I think of the US anti-war movement. Around 40 years ago, several people were so convicted of their anger of the war and its implications that they set themselves on fire. It was stirring, heartrending, and completely ineffective.

You may be a bit confused by my point here. In theory, Aththai is not designed to achieve an end.  And I have no illusions that this little experiment of mine could ever achieve anything outside of my own head. That said, it is about making me open up to understanding the nature of reality. And heretofore, most of the religious/theological/philosophical scholars have come down on the side of truth, peace, liberty, and all that jazz. The transcendentalists gave us tools and claimed that if we live with love in heart, obey only just laws and disobey the unjust, we might perish but it won’t be in vain. And Gandhi walked with that message and so did Martin Luther King, Jr. and at times Nelson Mandela. And does it amount to anything?

Would the war in Iraq be any different if protestors set themselves on fire? Or are we too tuned out to care anymore? And were we then? Is it ever possible to convince someone who is possessed of hate and fear that they should abandon those notions?

A confession: I’m trying to have the face of a stoic or live through the Tirthankars‘ spirit. I’m trying but failing. I’m at a crossroads between my brain trying to make me eat and giving up.

Supposedly, the fascinating Famine Response is underway like some odd biochemical superhero and the next four days will improve. I find the whole concept of this to be incredibly appealing and interesting. Evolution is out-thinking our brain. My brain wants to tell me, “Eat, you idiot or I ain’t working over here no more.” My concentration is down, my energy level is down. And tomorrow, apparently a series of hormones will conspire with my liver to tell the brain it doesn’t know what’s really going on.

The funny thing is I think the brain rarely knows what’s really going on. Popular culture, war stories, and great dramas are made that glorify the magnificence of the “survival instinct”. There’s an underlying theory that people will do anything they can to survive. To most, this is supposed to encourage us by showing – what? – a human need to live through anything. This fast has only increased my belief that this view is completely and utterly fallacious.

Newsflash: you’re gonna die soon. So am I. There are no ifs, ands, or buts. This is certain. The human race will go extinct. America will eventually disappear, Survivor will cease to air. The greatest poems, hopes, civilizations, whales, and skyscrapers are just moonshine over the span of time. That’s the objective reality of the matter. (True, subjective reality is where it gets trickier.)

Mortality is assured. It’s a certainty so certain that it might be cliche to bring up. But, I wonder how seriously we take our own mortality. As I’ve brought up earlier, I think we constantly optimize in the short-term without understanding our long term needs.

Let’s start with the first concept: the survival instinct brings out the “best” in us, teaching us to transcend. For some, sure. There are some marvelous tales of human survival and endurance. But, is this not the classic example of survivor bias? In trolling for stories on a tragedy (war, famine, natural disaster), the living tend to be able to relate their tales better than the dead. Anyone moderately conversant with some of the 20th century’s great tragedies (the Holocaust, the Killing Fields, the Rwanda Genocide of 1994, or the Cultural Revolution to name a few) will run into countless tales where survival was on a razor’s edge. Two people would pursue the same outcome and one lives. Why?

If this were just about stories that let us sleep at night, that would be one thing. But as someone concerned with human violence, I don’t think this is the whole of the matter. Buried in the supposed “lessons” of human tragedy is the exaltation of our predatory instincts; the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict begat the tragedy of the War on Terror. We say we don’t want to inherit the crises of Israel, the suicide bombings, the horrors. And of course we don’t. But it is odd that we never asked how Israelis felt about what it is taking them to hold back the bombings and terror? I imagine few of them have the moral stupidity to say “bring it on” in regards to Palestinian dissidents.

I am confident that Israelis are at best ambivalent about the situation they are in. Perhaps this is partly because they are witness daily to the acts and outcomes of their security forces. Again, American civilization has led the world in obfuscation of moral questions. It is easy to tolerate or casually ignore a war, routine torturing, or endorsements of abhorrent tyrants around the world if you don’t see it. Sort of like how we tolerate sweatshops, brutal treatment of migrant workers, and sexual slavery. (To say nothing about slaughterhouse conditions.)

What are we seeing ourselves as? What is a person without principle? I’ve long wondered this simple question: if we see ourselves as animals, what is the value of any principle or ethical system? And I wonder if that’s a key question of this age: what will we live as? Biological products that are dependent only on their instincts or something unique with freewill, hope, and yes, love?

Still alive. 72 hours in, approximately 120 hours left. I planned to write a lengthy entry on the nature of the survival instinct and another on the strange failure of telecommuting in corporate America. Instead, I’m going to go to sleep and get back to those tomorrow.

Report card for day 3:

Hunger level (0-10):2

Water consumed: ~90 ounces (unboiled)

Miles driven: 0

Approximate kilowatt hours used: Hard to calculate (offices seem wildly inefficient) but way too high

Things I wanted to buy but did not: None

Hours in silence: 10 (2 waking)

Weight (originally 160 lbs): 156 lbs

(I’m alive, I’m awake, I’m aware. I’m always on the scene, look at me go, vo-de-yo-do. $10 to your favorite charity if you can cite the reference.)

The past day-and-a-half was interesting. From a food perspective, I am not hungry, but rather I am lusting after food. The difference? My body isn’t really asking for food at this point – I’m a bit weary, but the normal desire for food isn’t there. Instead, when I walk by any food items (peanuts, casserole, eggs, potato chips) or even get a whiff of something fragrant (lavender, in particular), my brain starts fantasizing like those shipwrecked guys in that Warner Brothers cartoon. Yesterday, I probably spent half an hour fantasizing about my next meal. (Tie between penne arrabiata and an El Farolito burrito) There’s a point here.

Yesterday, I also rode in a car for a last time until the fast ends. (It is also the last time I will use transportation of any kind). On the verge of a loss, there is a great, defining moment which captures the essence of the thing being lost. For me and my wonderful Acura RSX, it was cruising up on Highway 101 while blasting Wilco, Bob Dylan, and Blackalicious and singing along at the top of my lungs. Something magical about the link between music and an automobile.

Here’s the funny thing: as wonderful as cars are, we could mostly do without them. Think about this for a moment. After the “white flight” in America, we started to develop massive sprawl to connect city jobs to suburban homes and vice versa. This was possible because of automobiles and (rarely) mass transportation. Yet for many adults, we choose the areas we live in, work in, and relax in. The presence of cars allows us to tolerate the distance between these spaces. And in the process, cars have become more and more important. Like the snake eating its tail, the cars ended up not just a means for a lifestyle but an expression of that lifestyle itself.

Highway 101 gives a driver (who cares to notice it) an astonishing picture of the intersection between identity and automobile. There’s the million BMWs that are largely “owned” by people without the clear financial means for ownership. The thousands of thugged-out or pimped-out cruisers and SUVs. The gentrified SUVs with immaculate paint jobs for a car theoretically made for rural or apocalyptic living. The pickup trucks with extended cargo compartments. If you don’t think about it, the veneer indicates something specific. But then, you wonder: What does a status car like a Beamer mean if you don’t make money? If you aren’t a gangsta, what’s the value of a pimped ride? What is the difference between an SUV and a mini-van? And has that pickup truck ever carried anything but tailgaters?

I drive a car designed for “sportiness”. I’m not sure what the sport is. I have driven it fast – 145 MPH is my record. (I know, I know… it was 5 years ago. Don’t yell at me.) I would like to think I’m a sporty person with or without the car.

At Jaina conventions over the past few years, I have proposed this idea of going off of cars to many people. Strangely a lot of them balked. And I realized there was something astonishingly odd transpiring: though we need food to live, we will do without it for a fast. Though we don’t need a car to live, we can’t go even a day without it? What the heck is going on?

This is where it gets theological or at least Maslowian. I think something odd is happening to people in this post-industrial/information age: the phantom dependencies of consumerism are usurping even our material needs. Check out the Maslow hierarchy (linked above).

Here are some things that people are routinely doing without (or with less):

• Sex and sleep in the physiological strata
• Security of morality and security of family in the security strata
• Friendship, family, and sexual intimacy in love and belonging.

I won’t go into esteem or self-actualization here.So, here’s a question to Jains: what does it mean, exactly, if we have a fast designed to liberate ourselves from our ego and we can’t go without needs that aren’t even human or animal needs? Strange, no?

Report card for day 2:

Hunger level (0-10): 1

Water consumed: ~80ounces (unboiled)

Miles driven:25

Approximate kilowatt hours used: 1.5 KwH (I watched a football game)

Things I wanted to buy but did not: a few books, and an album on iTunes

Hours in silence: 14 (6 waking)

Weight (originally 160 lbs): 157 lbs

(Still not dead. Yesterday was pretty straightforward and the hunger of today seems very minimal as well.)

At the end of Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist“, Kafka and the artist reverse positions on the motivations of the character. Throughout the piece, the artist had viewed his starvation as a symbol of his stoic commitment to art and perhaps even grander elements of existence. And then, the artist toils in total obscurity (hidden under a bed of rotting straw) and is forced to reconsider his perception. In the absence of a public, he now sees the meals he might have eaten differently. He imagines that there might have been a food that would have voided the logic of his fasts; a food so good that he would have been willing to eschew his whole existence within the story. The thought is so shocking and essential to him that he releases it as one would a confession to a priest.

I’m not thinking about food yet. I’m thinking about choice. In economics, we study the nature of utility of a good or of an act. A bosc pear might be worth two bananas to me or one Granny Smith. And financial currency allows us a way to convert the subjective valuations into objective ones. Economists are so crazy about the idea of utility that they think we can use it for almost anything. Modern environmental economics is very interested in this topic. Let’s say a given heavy chemical processing plant is damaging a river’s fisheries and the potability of the water supply. We believe the company can properly assess this damage and calculate the cost to remediate it along with perhaps some administrative and punitive costs. If these net costs are less than the cost to alter the plant’s underlying operations (to prevent pollution), the plant can use the differential to negotiate with a community or government. This is interesting, but flawed.

A critical question that is poorly addressed is this: do any of us properly understand the utility of anything? Utility is highly mutable. This seems true of the utility of any product. On a given day, I might prefer the tart of a Granny Smith apple, but quickly move to preferring a kiwi. That’s just fruit. Let me ask a different question: how valuable are the lives of other people to you? What is the specific economic utility of biodiversity?

We don’t have answers to these questions, but more importantly we don’t ask them. This seems to lead us to terrible conclusions. Consider this: the operating theory of the Iraq war was to ensure the peace and welfare of US citizenry. Let’s take at face value that this was indeed the mission of the war. A question that seems to never be answered is: at what cost? Certainly nobody wants terrorism. But, is there even a rough calculation that trades off what we are willing to do to achieve the objective of combating terror? The US government and public seem to sidestep the issue by putting the declining fortunes of the Iraqi people in the hands of the Iraqis: it is their fortune that they made by not accepting democracy. But this even misses the point. What if we had successfully brought democracy. Even then, it seems worth knowing what we might be willing to do to achieve that end.

Some would shudder to make such calculations. Is it reasonable to determine the value of a human life? I’d only argue that if we are willing to destroy or compromise life, we probably do need to know these values. And I haven’t even talked about the value of the environment or the welfare of future generations.

This topic has obviously been on the minds of many over human history. And we still don’t get the point.

Matthew 16:26 – “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?”

We’ve accepted capitalism and it is probably useful to have some clarity on objective values. But, it seems worth knowing what our personal trade offs are. I’ll come back to this topic throughout the week.

The first day of a fast is actually not necessarily the easiest, but it is probably one of the most exhilarating. Like most endurance activities (running, biking, writing, starting a company come to mind, and falling in love come to mind), the first step is usually a bit of a rush. But there’s also a great bit of exertion in the rush because you have to insist to yourself that you’re doing what you set out to do.

That’s a long way of saying I feel very good. As I understand the biology of this, my brain is going to give up soon on trying to convince me to eat. This could happen as early as tomorrow or as late as day 4. At this point, I move into “Famine Response“.

The bigger question is about the electricity and the consumption.  There’s no real biophysical mechanism to make me want to go for a drive any less. There’s no mechanism that I know of that will make me more tolerant of sitting in the dark rather than reading. I’m quite excited about how that will all pan out.

Today, I drove my car down to the Peninsula to my friends’ house in Santa Clara. Long story short, the lives of two cats hinged on my presence in their place. I’ll be in the Peninsula throughout the week. After tomorrow, I’m done with transportation until Saturday.

Report card for day 1:

Hunger level (0-10): 1

Water consumed: ~64 ounces (unboiled)

Miles driven: 45

Approximate kilowatt hours used: .75 KwH

Things I wanted to buy but did not: a new bicycle, three books, and concert tickets

Hours in silence: 16 (10 waking)

So, now I’m going back to the darkness to do a Sudarshan Kriya  and ideally meditate for a while. Here’s some good links if you’re bored:

Footprint Network

Kafka’s The Hunger Artist
I have a sense of humor about this…

Charlie: Candy Mountain
My sadistic friend’s attempt to get me to hallucinate about candy. This may pay off by day 4 or so.

Secrets of Happiness

I woke up this morning with a tease of a sensation. Although I’ve fasted before, I forgot about one of the most irritating aspects of a fast – the preliminary desire. Long before your body is actually hungry, it signals you to eat because either it is 1) time for a meal or 2) your sugar levels have randomly shifted. The second reason in fact accounts for a lot of our behavior from overeating to the chaotic people who get angry and emotional when deprived of food. This isn’t real hunger.

I’ll probably be getting up and down from a soapbox throughout this blog, but this brings me to another point: I wonder whether phantom preliminary desire is something we indulge in so much today that we are destroying ourselves with it. Consider your life for a moment. Likely, if you are reading this you are from a somewhat privileged background – at least relative to other humans on Earth and moreover your predecessors.

You have a number of wants and yet it is hard to separate the actual urgency of getting those wants resolved versus the possibility that you are overstating the need. I’ll draw on my life for an example: do I need a $1500 bicycle? I have a bicycle now. The limitations are it is of poor quality to go for any trips over 100 miles in a day. Do I need to get tickets to the ridiculously talent laden Bridge School Concert this Sunday? (Tom Waits, Regina Spektor, Emmylou and Neil Young… that sounds like need, right?) Yet I have been to an obscene amount of music shows this year. What’s the line, beyond my budget. If there is none, when and where do I become a musical-hedon? Am I getting cliche and insipid? Let me get on to my point.

Listen. A wise friend recently argued that most great corporate and personal wealth was the byproduct of passing some economic externalities to others – other peoples living, future generations of people, our ecosystem, or perhaps most interestingly our literal selves in the future. A frequently observed point is that we are lousy at understanding the trade offs between near-term and long-term gratification.

So, this is why it’s important to know what we really want versus what we really need. Importantly, our very system with easily abundant credit is designed to counter this viewpoint: today, if you are flush with easily attainable credit, you are a superhuman who is very able to buy nearly anyone and anything. And yet, you are certainly potentially painting yourself into a corner in the not-too-distant future. I’m suggesting that maybe economic utilities are not things we calculate over sustained periods of time. Rather, if I buy a new M5, I might effectively be subconsciously saying, “Screw you, future Samir!” (Note: I will not now, nor ever purchase a BMW.)

And that’s just me doing that to myself. The sane of us can at least bear the accountability of our own mistakes and live with them. But, here’s where things get hard: what does it mean to live in a society that depends on doing things to people that I don’t want done? And what if my very want or need makes things so? I like abundant power, but not so much that my niece grows up on a planet with a chaotic climate. Not so much that I like the fact that only 40 miles away from where I type (in Northern California’s East Bay), literally and figuratively poor children will face an asthma crisis by living near refineries.

The cop-out answer is usually: I didn’t break it. I don’t have to fix it. I wonder if that is enough for us. I’m not playing arm-chair Marxist here, either. I believe that capitalism is probably the best current way to create incentive for innovation. And yet, it seems essential that we get a better picture on what it means for our needs to be addressed. Of course, the bitter irony of it all is that in order to stave off our own personal “phantom” hungers, we perpetuate a society that ensures “literal” hunger in others.

A brilliant and dear friend of mine once put my vegetarianism down as “a luxury of being a well-to-do American.” I saw her point. Though vegetarians do not need to be rich, it demands a greater energy and consideration of consumption than is practical. The cheapest typical diet in America is built around omnivores; it is not healthful nor is it designed for sustainability. And to thumb one’s nose at the people who are too tied to the system to think about it is mean-spirited. And yet.

The freedom of choice (in every sense, down to the famous reproductive one) has long been the purview of the wealthy and slowly devolves into the hands of the poorer and poorer people. It is certainly unfair. It is one of the many ways that our hierarchical system is unfortunate. Locking people into positions of economic and material need is terrible. Locking them into personal and ethical choices that they might deem unsound seems perhaps worse to me.

It seems to me that the well-off have several ways to interpret their abundant resources. One school of thought argues that they should enjoy wealth to its maximum – we are not meant to be martyrs, et cetera. Another school would say that we have some sort of obligation to consider the world that we have some say in determining. In America at least, with wealth and education comes a greater access to controlling the destiny of society.

And that’s sort of why I am doing this. I don’t judge people who aren’t fasting. I don’t want to guilt anyone into choices that are not theirs. But, as we tinker with what makes our lives work we might get better insights in how we help shape the world around us. Given that my life will soon tilt heavily towards public interest, I think it’s good to make these sorts of calls. And ideally, those of us who are possessed of wealth and education and time can help ensure that others aren’t bound to be tied to a system that is fraught with peril. So, I want to run this experiment now and more as I go on with the dim hope that I might be able to see ways that the system can allow better choices to others. But running headlong into bad decisions because that’s what our socioeconomic system is geared towards seems like a lousy proposition.