Aww Q Finale Sun Jan 26 3:06 pm             (about 4000

Summary of Aww

Look for a moment at the accompanying photo of an unhappy child. Does it arouse feelings of pity? Tenderness? A desire to comfort and help? These are the things we feel when we see a helpless, unprotected child or animal. Simply seeing such a child will arouse within virtually all of us the hormone oxytocin, sometimes called the parenting hormone.

We all recognize that at any age we may be subject to moments of helplessness and desperation, moments perhaps not totally unlike what that little child must be feeling. In effect throughout our whole lives we all carry such a vulnerable, needy child within us. If you notice that child inside someone else--anyone at all, not just children--and if you reinforce that connection with a glance at the photo of the little kid, or just bring up the memory of the photo, you can establish a reflex whereby your oxytocin is elicited by the object of your attention, the person.   

Game-Like Behavior

If we think like gamers in the beginning, we might make good use of the ways that social games enlist, retain, and encourage recruits (leader boards, earning points, bestowing gifts, and the like).  If we do this we might avail ourselves of the standard terms of game developers, such as DAU...daily active users (in our case, daily recruiting attempts and successes); PCU...peak concurrent users; EED...entry event distribution (evaluating the success of variations in the Aw initial approach, with a view to improvement); and XED...exit event distribution (actions or attitudes that are possibly slowing the forward momentum of Aw).  

Triggering Oxytocin

From time to time keep looking at the picture of the kid. Become familiar with the feelings it engenders. Soon, when you practice Aw, you can do it without the picture.

Later, when you perform “Aw,” your first action should always be is to whisper a silent “

“Aw”  within yourself, like a  warm-up. After all  this  is approximately what many of us sigh to ourselves when we see helpless puppies or babies looking unhappily at us.  Simply recalling the photo of of the kid in your memory may give you the desired effect.

The “Aw” you feel is instinctive and doesn’t last long--a few minutes at most. But during those moments you will probably feel a softness and warmth inside you, a protectiveness directed toward the child. And after the immediate effect there is a residual feeling of acceptance and calm. With a bit of persistence, the primary Aw feeling itself can become a continual state. (There is scientific evidence that the repeated release of oxytocin strengthens each further response.)

Anyway, this is the very first step in doing Aw and for a little while we are liberated into gentleness from the harshness of our lives. As you continue to do it, you’ll find it a pleasurable activity, soothing in its own right.

Many biologists now claim that in humanity’s earliest days this protectiveness may have been the chief mechanism that kept our children alive (see Paul Zak, The Moral Molecule). And just as it may once have helped save us all from extinction, it may still be doing so today. If so, our job should be to intensify the process.

The softness and protectiveness that you feel within is the release of a substance called oxytocin (oxy-TOE-cin), the protective “parenting hormone” that has lately become the subject of much study (see Zak’s end notes).

Some Personal Benefits from Using Aw

Imagine that you could evoke that same instant empathy--the “Aw” feelings--toward a perfect stranger, an adult who doesn’t seem to be suffering from any problems at all. The fact is, you will quickly make the process your own, after which you can enjoy all the blissful feelings it arouses in you, in addition to its potential for hostility-free relationships. Over time it is a changer of lives, and can create happier people.

Sounds too good to be true. So how do we go about it? The accompanying picture of that little kid--who isn’t exactly crying but is plainly upset--is the best way I’ve seen so far to elicit a genuinely nurturing empathy toward a stranger, though other ways are described, for instance, in Loving- Kindness, by Sharon Salzberg, (I must say, though, that compared to every other method I’ve tried the unhappy kid wins hands down.)

Metta or Loving-Kindness

This empathy business is not an obscure activity. As a single example, Gautama Buddha developed a practice called metta which was designed to warm us up to others. This was and still is performed, laboriously, after long effort, via a precise set of silent wishes for the other person’s well-being, a program unchanged for the last 2500 years. (It’s still around. Free lessons are available Wednesdays and Sundays at the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco.)

Trouble is, Buddha’s metta gets the person you’d like to help exactly nowhere, as they may never even know it’s happening, though it’s true that by practicing metta you may eventually, after long effort, do yourself some private good. Whereas our own scientific, hormone-based practice of Aw is designed to help both parties (both you and your target) in deep and fulfilling ways, and to have broader social potential as well. (Sorry about that, Buddha.)

Practical Superiority of Aw

Nurture, as we sometimes call Aww, is also much simpler than metta. You need only recall that the helplessness felt by that pictured child has at times afflicted us all, including the person you are now concerned with. It still happens to every adult in the world. At various times in our lives we all of us feel like frustrated, helpless children, in need of solace. But when you connect the person you are focusing on with the unhappy little kid in the picture, oxytocin becomes triggered, the feeling of “Aww” arises in you, and you feel a protective, parental compassion for the targeted person.

In short, you match the person you are focusing on to that little kid, conscious that that unhappy, needy state potentially exists in all of us, including your target. The oxytocin then takes over. It is a practice almost instantly learned, because there’s really nothing to learn. It’s all instinct, and it quickly becomes habitual, not to say automatic. You think of the child, out pours your “parenting hormone,” and the result is instant compassion and real, active concern for the adult person you have targeted. And you yourself feel more relaxed, centered, and peaceful.

Part 2 of the Recruitment Approach

The recipient of your sympathy needn’t be a stranger, nor, for that matter, an adult. It can be your own lover, spouse, parent, child, or friend--or in fact yourself. Literally anyone. And in most cases she probably won’t know a thing is happening until you tell her. But telling her is Part 2 of this process, and it is crucial. You really must step up and do it to complete the interaction and cement the viral process we envisage. If he or she is receptive, that very connection could plausibly set off a wildfire epidemic of empathy and caring, with no end in sight. At the very least it should set off a new morality within you.

Using the Picture of the Kid

To proceed with Part 2--to bring your target into the experience--you must show him the photo of the kid. Even as you first speak to him, while offering him a copy of the picture, he will quite likely already sense that he is the focus of something unusual. You should not fail to mention that you and he are, even now, participating in a wave of empathy that, who knows? mjustpeed unstoppably around the globe. If you make clear this aspect of Aww, you mighr prospect may come to realize that something truly important might be happening, something that could give his life powerful meaning.

Taking Credit for Recruits (and Later, No Longer Taking Credit for Them)

Of course your recruiting success will be mainly due to your enthusiasm and persuasive powers, and your recruitments will be chalked up to your credit. And if each of your recruits enlists a third person, and more, the credit for that further recruitment will go both to you and your recruits. This is like a multi-level marketing program, such as Avon, and we should examine such programs for useful ideas. Even if a given effort to recruit fails, your effort still counts in your behalf, especially in this stage when we are obliged to rely heavily on numbers. Facebook and many other programs offer protocols for the analysis of results, designed to maximize those results.  (Of course competition and personal comparisons based on them are in a personal way our enemies, the product of ego, and in the long term we would expect to dump such outworn and damaging habits from the human repertory.)

My Own First Approaches

In my first trials in Union Square in San Francisco, I found that a bit more than half of my targets were receptive. When you’ve briefly, smilingly, explained your general purpose (which, not to oversimplify, is to get people to react kindly to each other), about half of my sample asked for, and got, a copy of the picture of the unhappy child. Then, as I pleasantly urged them on with further explanations, a few got fired up and tried it out on nearby strangers as I watched. No delay at all. But out there in the park I had no chance to properly orient them, or even to explain a basic simple approach to use on someone else. Thus none of my contacts herself had any luck. They gave up partly I think because I had no pre-existing structure through which I could involve them--no pre-planned meeting for interested people, no printed materials beyond pics of the kid, and no back-up person helping me.

(Truth time: I’ve made two trips to Union Square and made contact with a total of 14 people, with just eight positive results (positive in that they immediately tried to approach another person). My whole approach was hasty and still requires a lot of tune-up--or else it should be junked for something better. I should add that my sample was skewed strongly toward prosperous-looking, young-adult-to-middle-aged females. whereas I was not myself terribly well-dressed: I was wearing my dirty old hippie geezer look, which I’m sure didn’t exactly help matters. Another problem was my so-called “record-keeping,” which consisted of half a dozen jotted-down email addresses. These might have netted some interesting insights, but I lost the addresses on the bus. Ah, science…)

Sudden Enthusiasm of Recruits

But do you see what might be done here? Within minutes of my approach, at least a few of my targets were quite eager to try it out on some third person. The mere idea had appeal to them. On the web or off, this has got to be about the strongest virality imaginable. And potentially it might perfectly well go on ad infinitum. This is the social game aspect of Aww: an eagerness to “play” is called forth. Give your target a bit of instruction and she will want badly to “win.”

The problem then, of course, is to stay in contact with her, continue to educate her (materials are needed), and most of all, maintain her level of commitment.

I think a killer approach could be fashioned here by studying Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken. Especially her discussions of fiero (the thrill of winning) and eustress (hard play).It seems evident to me that Aww is one game that ought to be played hard, and unrelentingly, if only because of its extraordinary importance.  (By the way, McGonigal also gives some consideration to oxytocin. And the book Social Game Design, by Tim Fields and Brandon Cotton offers many tricks for ensnaring players of games. And while I want to insist that Aww is not a game, some of these exploits may be necessary to add to our initial momentum. We need to think this way because this is not a game we will stop in a day or a week. We are playing for keeps and for all time.

Reality is Broken looks at the whole panorama of people now playing social games. The latter part of the book focuses on the most serious games, the ones which really do propose to “change the world” (as Aww does). These games, like Ground Crew, Evoke, and Sparked, reveal the presence of admirable ethical drives in large numbers of (mainly younger) people. If nothing else, this gives one hope for the success of an activity like Aw, or anything better that might come along.

Instinct and Thought

Note that virtually no thought is involved in actually performing Aw. It’s almost all instinct, the working of that amazing hormone oxytocin. This is human healing at a pre-verbal, pre-brain level, as we were perhaps meant to be before thinking got in our way. At any rate this non-brain aspect of Nurture is delightful but I don’t see how to take it further, e.g., build some sort of grammar of feeling, without thought tagging along.

Getting to Us: Group Behavior and the Possibilities of Group Feeling and Action

So what have we got? To be honest, at this point nothing except maybe some people staggering around smiling all soft-eyed at each other. But actually something big has changed: that harsh confrontive competitiveness, that sizing up, comparing, attempting to outdo others at any cost--all that behavior that is so distinctive in our status society, whether rich or poor, East or West--for a brief time it melts away as we become preoccupied with empathy and genuine concern. In fact, with the Other. With you. With us as a unit, and a whole cornucopia of assorted gorgeous feelings a deux, or more than a deux. Maybe a trois. Or a hundreds and hundreds. Because Aw, undeveloped though it is, already has the heft of much more than a unitary feeling. It seems to encompass a vast potential, wider than humanity, involving groups of every sort, including animals and all living things. The recruitment drive we’ve been talking about is after all only the earliest beginning of the process.

And as we engage, for a brief time the whole texture of our lives is transformed into a bit of what it was perhaps meant to be, what we’ve dream of. Yet we still haven’t even begun to experience our new world based on these glimpsed, lovely new attitudes of empathy and mutual assistance.

The Habit of Aw

But clearly, even before that, we’re going to need at least some initial ways of maintaining Aww as a personal habit--that is, something that we’ve integrated into our lives. To help us here we have a great many examples to look at. For instance, examples of groups, often religious groups, that have promoted techniques of self-change in their members. Medieval monks offered ways to lock oneself into a specific, desired emotional profile, doing and even thinking set things at each moment of one’s life. More recently, groups from est to the Moonies have tailored their members’ psyches to “higher” purposes. Some of these members, even after quitting the group, have maintained their own lives at much higher ethical level than previously (I’ve met some of these). So we have much material here to look at, not in terms of content but of method: how have certain groups managed to cement a higher ethic in members and even ex-members after they have left.

Nearly all such groups sustain their membership through one-on-one meetings between experienced practitioners and their recruits, or through larger meetings of affiliated groups based on a single practitioner and her sign-ups and their sign-ups--or through other types of grouping.

But above all, Aw is relational. It happens between people, to make the relation better. If any of these approaches can help us; if we do find a viable way to extend and deepen the empathy we are arousing between people, if we succeed in working out some truly usable framework to replace the old one--then hey, why might we not build a kindlier world? And not merely have another dead utopian experiment to hang on the wall like a moose head, or just one more sterile “intentional community” that disintegrated..

Aw in the Future

In short as we proceed we must find paths that will lead us onward toward something that is self-evidently better than the narcissistic, self-involved life we want to leave behind. And of course we must carefully preserve personal and group rights and equality, doing so in ways much stronger than those now currently bandied about. Take for instance “the pursuit of happiness.” This is hardly a strong demand. We need to guarantee happiness, as none of us should tolerate knowing that unhappiness is occurring next door while we ourselves remain happy. And of course all our approaches must be non-violent, as violence would only throw us right back where we started.

I hope, first, that more of us have now become more stubborn and are no longer willing to just fold ‘em and quit the game. But a greater hope is that this viral process can be made perpetual (unlike most current high-minded social games, which have endings).

First Steps

I suppose we really can’t pre-plan such a seemingly quixotic project. It can only be nudged a bit as it goes along, gradually evolving into previously unguessable situations. But if Aw is to be our starting point, the first steps do seem pretty obvious: the aggregation of groups of participants united by common interests, or by a lineage of enrollment, And some sort of mentoring process, perhaps like A.A. or ACoA, or perhaps more like Reevaluation Counseling (the latter two of which I myself know all too well).

Don’t Wait

I want to keep my nose out of the later stages--for instance any possible socially engineered Walden-esque stuff. My jottings here concern only the beginning, namely, our focus on a kindlier way of relating.  But I think it would be a mistake to do nothing until we know something about future stages, which are pretty much\ inherently unknowable.

The Matter of Feminism

One further matter should be mentioned here, though not in detail. Women have been oppressed in thousands of ways by men throughout those same long  eons we’ve just been  talking about. Until now we have simply noted the ways all humans of whatever gender have trashed each other. But the entire half of the human race which is female has been brutalized in unique and sometimes vicious ways, some subtle and some crude, ways that go far beyond the nastiness by which we humans have dealt with each other simply as humans,

This subject is too vast and too incendiary to include here. It concerns the male gender’s evident genius for self-deception, denial, secret lifelong agendas toward their mothers, and the resultant sleazy, defensive, and glib ways that they respond to feminism, and in fact to all women. It can’t be repeated often enough that so-called “grown-up” men simply want their mothers back, and as we all know, the mother must do everything, while the boy does as little as he can. A delusional sense of his own superiority is engrained in him from birth and that includes the primacy of all his purposes over women’s purposes (as Hitler used to say, “kuchen, kirk, und kinder”--excuse my awful German). The examination of this terrifying male wall of resistance requires a whole new study, and indeed, a movement of its own. The good news is that I believe we (a few men and women together) have worked out a really promising plan to deal with this, and it will soon be available to anyone interested--that is, any human being, especially any woman at all and any male with a shred of ethical awareness. If nothing else, our feminist program is highly unique.

--Seth

cell phone: 415-596-2368

home phone: 415-673-2511 #122

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1000 Sutter St.

San Francisco, CA 94109

nurturingtheearth@gmail.com (email)

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