I recently came to terms with two facts in my life:
I read a lot and really, really, really have been wanting to write book reviews for my blog for YEARS now.
I HATE writing book reviews.
What you see above is my solution. I have officially joined the world of video bloggers thanks to my 3Gs iPhone and YouTube. I hope you enjoy it (and I hope I leanr how to make them better as I go along. )
I outlined the heck out of this book. Lots of good stuff in it. Here are some quotes I found particularly yummy:
“… if words are true, who cares whether the guy who wrote them has Shiho (a term for transmission in Zen – ed.) or Divine Inspiration or the power to fly faster than a speeding bullet?”
“Nothing can be separated from everything else.”
“If the meaning of life, the universe, and everything could be put into a few definitive words that everyone on Earth could agree upon now and for all time, someone probably woulda figured them out and written them down. But, even if they did, it would still be someone else’s truth – not yours.”
“Emptiness is that condition which is free from our conceptions and perceptions.”
“The universe desires to perceive itself and to think about itself and you are born out of this desire.”
Okay, so I am far from a customer service guru. However, I do have 17 years experience in the industry at all levels of customer service from clerk behind counter, to ice cream shop supervisor, to customer rep/tech support grunt, to customer service & billing department manager, to lead support rep. I’ve been through the ringer from the service side of customer service.
They say that doctors and nurses make the worst patients. I have also seen the opposite be true. My mother was a career psychiatric nurse and I watched her be both the best and worst patient when under hospital care. Both of those stemmed from the same source: she knew the job, what it took, and how to do it.
The same is true in customer service. From the service side I know what it is like on the far end of the phone/email thread/chat log.
I make it a point of pride to be both very courteous when I am being a customer in the customer service equation, and I also take pride in being veryu effective at getting what I need/want from the interaction. Here are my tips for doing the same:
Courtesy – This goes a long way. Try and remember that the person on the other end of the line (or other side of the counter) is not the problem. They are who you are speaking with to resolve the problem, and you want them on your side. Be civil. Explain your issue, and how you would like it resolved in a clear and concise way, and patiently re-explain anything that needs it until the human being on the service side knows what you need.
Don’t get annoyed by use of scripts – This can be tough, but it’s worth it. Most of the time the person on the service side is working with a trained formula on how to process calls. Let them do their thing. It’s alright to interject for clarity, but if you suddenly interrupt you will knock them off their train and now you have a confused human being to deal with.
Talk to the Manager – Every customer service worker has a certain set of things they are able to do. They can’t do more, so pressing them to will result only in frustration and antagonism. They also do not know the full range of what is possible. That’s not their job. Don’t blame them for it. However, once they have told you that they are “unfortunately unable to help you”, ask for a manager or supervisor. There are always more buttons that can be pushed. Make it clear that you are not escalating in order to make a complaint, but simply because you understand that they are not able to assist yu, so you would like to speak with someone higher up who might be able to.
Remember you always get more with a carrot than a stick. Use the Golden Rule, treat the human being helping you like you would like to be treated.
What are your tips for effectively dealing with customer service workers?
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Note: This is a reprint of an article that originally ran in the Colfax Record last year. I thought it would be an interesting piece to present after all of the commentary and debate on my blogs last week regarding Miss California, same-sex marriage, and religion.
SS. Sergius & Bacchus - 7th cent.
A Kiev art museum contains a curious icon from St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai in Israel. It shows two robed Christian saints. Between them is a traditional Roman ‘pronubus’ (a best man), overseeing a wedding. The pronubus is Christ. The married couple are both men.
Is the icon suggesting that a gay “wedding” is being sanctified by Christ himself? The idea seems shocking. But the full answer comes from other early Christian sources about the two men featured in the icon, St. Sergius and St. Bacchus, two Roman soldiers who were Christian martyrs. These two officers in the Roman army incurred the anger of Emperor Maximian when they were exposed as ‘secret Christians’ by refusing to enter a pagan temple. Both were sent to Syria circa 303 CE where Bacchus is thought to have died while being flogged. Sergius survived torture but was later beheaded. Legend says that Bacchus appeared to the dying Sergius as an angel, telling him to be brave because they would soon be reunited in heaven.
While the pairing of saints, particularly in the early Christian church, was not unusual, the association of these two men was regarded as particularly intimate. Severus, the Patriarch of Antioch (AD 512 – 518) explained that, “we should not separate in speech they [Sergius and Bacchus] who were joined in life”. This is not a case of simple “adelphopoiia.” In the definitive 10th century account of their lives, St. Sergius is openly celebrated as the “sweet companion and lover” of St. Bacchus. Sergius and Bacchus’s close relationship has led many modern scholars to believe they were lovers. But the most compelling evidence for this view is that the oldest text of their martyrology, written in New Testament Greek describes them as “erastai,” or “lovers”. In other words, they were a male homosexual couple. Their orientation and relationship was not only acknowledged, but it was fully accepted and celebrated by the early Christian church, which was far more tolerant than it is today.
Contrary to myth, Christianity’s concept of marriage has not been set in stone since the days of Christ, but has constantly evolved as a concept and ritual.
Prof. John Boswell, the late Chairman of Yale University’s history department, discovered that in addition to heterosexual marriage ceremonies in ancient Christian church liturgical documents, there were also ceremonies called the “Office of Same-Sex Union” (10th and 11th century), and the “Order for Uniting Two Men” (11th and 12th century).
These church rites had all the symbols of a heterosexual marriage: the whole community gathered in a church, a blessing of the couple before the altar was conducted with their right hands joined, holy vows were exchanged, a priest officiatied in the taking of the Eucharist and a wedding feast for the guests was celebrated afterwards. These elements all appear in contemporary illustrations of the holy union of the Byzantine Warrior-Emperor, Basil the First (867-886 CE) and his companion John.
Such same gender Christian sanctified unions also took place in Ireland in the late 12thand/ early 13th century, as the chronicler Gerald of Wales (‘Geraldus Cambrensis’) recorded.
Same-sex unions in pre-modern Europe list in great detail some same gender ceremonies found in ancient church liturgical documents. One Greek 13th century rite, “Order for Solemn Same-Sex Union”, invoked St. Serge and St. Bacchus, and called on God to “vouchsafe unto these, Thy servants [N and N], the grace to love one another and to abide without hate and not be the cause of scandal all the days of their lives, with the help of the Holy Mother of God, and all Thy saints”. The ceremony concludes: “And they shall kiss the Holy Gospel and each other, and it shall be concluded”.
Another 14th century Serbian Slavonic “Office of the Same Sex Union”, uniting two men or two women, had the couple lay their right hands on the Gospel while having a crucifix placed in their left hands. After kissing the Gospel, the couple were then required to kiss each other, after which the priest, having raised up the Eucharist, would give them both communion.
Records of Christian same sex unions have been discovered in such diverse archives as those in the Vatican, in St. Petersburg, in Paris, in Istanbul and in the Sinai, covering a thousand-years from the 8th to the 18th century.
The Dominican missionary and Prior, Jacques Goar (1601-1653), includes such ceremonies in a printed collection of Greek Orthodox prayer books, “Euchologion Sive Rituale Graecorum Complectens Ritus Et Ordines Divinae Liturgiae” (Paris, 1667).
While homosexuality was technically illegal from late Roman times, homophobic writings didn’t appear in Western Europe until the late 14th century. Even then, church-consecrated same sex unions continued to take place.
At St. John Lateran in Rome (traditionally the Pope’s parish church) in 1578, as many as thirteen same-gender couples were joined during a high Mass and with the cooperation of the Vatican clergy, “taking communion together, using the same nuptial Scripture, after which they slept and ate together” according to a contemporary report. Another woman to woman union is recorded in Dalmatia in the 18th century.
Prof. Boswell’s academic study is so well researched and documented that it poses fundamental questions for both modern church leaders and heterosexual Christians about their own modern attitudes towards homosexuality.
For the Church to ignore the evidence in its own archives would be cowardly and deceptive. The evidence convincingly shows that what the modern church claims has always been its unchanging attitude towards homosexuality is, in fact, nothing of the sort.
It proves that for the last two millennia, in parish churches and cathedrals throughout Christendom, from Ireland to Istanbul and even in the heart of Rome itself, homosexual relationships were accepted as valid expressions of a God-given love and committment to another person, a love that could be celebrated, honored and blessed, through the Eucharist in the name of, and in the presence of, Jesus Christ.
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I just recently finished reading Daniel Ingram’s, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. (It’s also available for PDF download on his site here.) I quite enjoyed it, and for me at least Daniel’s occasionally caustic style suited me just fine. He pulls no punches.
Part 1: The Fundamentals, is well worth the price of admission. It’s an honest, in-depth look at the basics of Buddhism by a man with lots of practical experience and a tremendously strong scholarly streak. Daniel manages to get across all the key points without losing the reader in odd minutia or archaic language. It’s a heroic effort that I am very much grateful for. That part alone truly transformed my core view of what it means to walk the Buddha’s way.
I was poking around Daniel’s website today in the Practical Essays section and enjoyed the sensitively title piece, Why The Notion That You Cannot Become What You Already Are is Such Bullshit. In it Daniel deals with the phenomenon of people on spirituality focused sites posting something along the lines of, “you can not become what you already are, awakening is not about more knowledge but instead about less knowledge, and that awakening happens regardless of study and meditation.”
I’ve come across this view point on more times than I can count. There seems to be a thread of it running through just about every spiritual community, and particularly amongst members of the “non-dual awareness” movement centered around people like Eckhart Tolle, Adyashanti, and numerous modern day teachers in the advaita vedanta tradition. [SIDEBAR: I am not saying any teacher in particular is promoting this view but that the people who claim to be following them often are.]
Daniel’s piece is an excellent response, fully fleshed in his unique (and sometimes cynical) style. What it brought to mind for me was this:
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding that this view comes from. Awakening is not about changing something about you, your circumstance, or your style/method of getting along in life. Awakening is about seeing what you actually are. There is no change implied there. You already are what you are, obviously. The people who get stuck in this particular trap seem to find that notion to be of such profound wisdom that no further effort need be made. But, that’s not the thing. The thing is to see that directly. Not just to be what you are, but to see and know what you are fully and at present.
I am not entirely sure where the idea that awakening, or enlightenment (a word which has become poisoned and abused to the point of near uselessness), involves some change in who you are comes from. As far as I have been able to tell by reading the works of those that the general public accepts as awakened, they never put forth this idea. If there is any change they speak of it’s changing the way in which you see your self, not what is seen.
In any event, if you are looking for some easy to grasp Buddhism principles I can’t recommend Daniel Ingram’s book enough. If you read it, or have read it, I would love to hear your thoughts.
Cheers!
Why The Notion That You Cannot Become What You Already Are is Such Bullshit
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This video has made the rounds a few times in my circle of buddies. Carl Sagan reading a passage from one of his books (can’t recall which at the moment) set to a stirring photo montage. Take a watch if you can, and contemplate this little gem of a world we call home.
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ENTP - "Inventor". Enthusiastic interest in everything and always sensitive to possibilities. Non-conformist and innovative. 3.2% of the total population.
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. (It’s also available for PDF download on his site 
