Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
Yesterday we were at Tibet House in New York, filming an interview with Dr. Robert Thurman, the first American to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk. The talk was all about karma, the role of chance events in life and, because we were filming in New York City, we talked traffic. (We all remember the ancient spiritual puzzle, “What is the sound of one car not moving in traffic?”)
I’m from New York, so when I complain about it I do so as a professional. I’ve always found New York to be challenging for film crews – just finding parking can eat an hour of the shoot, to say nothing of getting camera gear through security checkpoints, jammed into cranky old service elevators staffed by even older and crankier service elevator operators, and determining how much to bribe the nut next door who decides to hammer on the wall for a couple hours.
But now, there’s something else to contend with – Mayor Bloomberg. He wants to turn the city green.
“The city has changed completely in the past year. Eighth Avenue was down to one lane yesterday,” one crew member told me. Many other streets are the same way: one lane. Why? It’s crazy, but the Mayor is putting in bike lanes. 
The city’s full of them, big generous paths of green subtracting road space from cars and adding New Yorker-style bikers aggressive enough to turn you into road kill unless you’re vigilant. The West Side Highway is gaining green space, too, and there are 376 lawn chairs scattered around Times Square. They are, exotically enough, just for sitting in, provided as part of a plan to make the city more pedestrian friendly. That’s just weird.
“I’ve had people say to me both that it’s a stroke of genius and that I’m the king of trailer trash. The lawn chair decision is far and away the most controversial decision I’ve made in my seven years as head of the alliance.” — Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance.
According to Popular Science, among America’s greenest cities, New York is ranked number twenty. (Portland is number one.) The NRDC (National Resources Defense Council) ranks New York as environmentally smarter than Los Angeles. New York was the first US city to require that manufacturers recycle the electronics they make. As of this summer you can’t just dump your old computer out on the street. You have to recycle it — and its maker, be it Dell or Apple, has to help. New York City is even playing around with using the tides in its waterways to generate electricity with turbines. San Francisco has outlawed supermarket plastic bags. Are you listening, Los Angeles?
LA has more palm trees, but the concrete canyons of New York might be the greener place.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
A while ago I did a search for my name on Google to check in with my Internet self. It’s time to hit “search” again to see how busy I’ve been.
I still have my old job in Dallas/Fort Worth, workin’ away at strategic procurement for HP. I also have something to do with movies in Santa Monica. When I’m not studying hard at the UC Berkeley School of Information I’m marrying Tabby Biddle, for some reason using the name Leland Schneider.
The New York Times knows I was a producer on Front Page and senior producer on Strange Universe. Hollywood.com knows that I wrote episodes of ThunderCats, and mentions that I did a documentary about Apollo 13. In 1993, they say, I did one for E! called In Censors We Trust. Back then, E! was in black and white and hosted by Lucille Ball, or it might have been a very young Flavor Flav. 
Those true credits appear with “The Hottest Alien Babes Ever,” which I don’t really remember working on. Maybe those alien babes erased my memory of it. I hope they were gentle.
If you add up all three of my Twitter personalities (leeschneider, xree and docuguy) I have 312 followers. Hey, catching up on you, Mr. Ashton Kutcher (3,449,823 followers).
We can laugh at these “errors” Google makes when you search for my name, but it makes me wonder, how do they rank all those websites and blogs? I did some investigation, checking with Google’s worldwide headquarters located at Praha City Center, Klimentska 46, in the Czech Republic. Here’s what I found out from them. The Google ranking system begins with a live goat, which they sacrifice over a bonfire. Then 27 virgins are brought in to read the charred entrails using 3D glasses. Oh, and they use some kind of algorithm too.
Even though the ranking system is a little spooky, Google has changed my Internet life. When you Google my name with the word “blog” or “500 words” I can get first page ranking. And starting my other blog, the user-content driven www.chancehappens.com, has offered the occasion to break out the pinot noir sometimes to celebrate its even better ranking.
But it’s strange to think that online I don’t own my own name and I certainly don’t own what I write. People I don’t know are re-posting these words and Tweeting them. Writing for the Huffington Post has also boosted things, sending what I write far and wide, although I have gotten a few negative comments from curmudgeonly folks who don’t like adorable puppies, Oprah or East-West medicine.
The take-home for me is that there’s only one thing more volatile than the stock market, and that’s what constitutes a hot search on Google. As I type, the number one search on Google is Maia Campbell — and that will surely change by the time you read this.
Now I have to get back to posting my rabidly devotional You Tube video about Oasis.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
I’m in New York City spending time in hospital rooms. I have learned two things so far. It’s an outrage that there’s no 72nd Street stop on the Lex Ave line. The closest is 69 Street, which is more of a vague sexual joke than a useful location. The other thing I’ve learned is about the incredible lightness of being.
I wasn’t in the room when it happened, but I have it on good authority that you can stop a man’s heart, cut out a malfunctioning aortic valve, pop in a new one, bypass years of accumulated disease and then start up the system like a reliable old car. And I know for certain – I was in the room – that a man might lie in a twilight state among machines, seeming like a machine himself. But no, not like a machine: There was a glimmer of consciousness. It was a paradox to be witnessed with awe, this man-machine breathing slowly, leaking consciousness.
Funny thing, when people hold heavy objects they think they are more important than lighter ones. A big book, say a Bible, seems more important than the slim volume of famous left-handed athletes. The idea resounds in the languages we speak. You have your heavy issues and light entertainment. There’s research on this:
A research team found that they could alter people’s judgment of importance just by getting them to answer questions using a heavier clipboard. In a series of short elegant experiments, a research team led by psychologist Nils Jostmann found that people holding a heavy clipboard would, for example, value foreign currencies more highly than those using a lighter clipboard.
That’s good science, because the experiment was simple and the measurement clear. Science works because it measures things and assigns values. Sounds good, till you look at a guy in a hospital bed and ask what weight do you assign to consciousness? What weight do you put to love? As Lotta Alsen has written in her blog, everybody knows that love is good, but what measure can we assign it to prove that it exists? Do you look at the number of Valentine’s Day cards sent? Quarts of chicken soup consumed? Love exists, but there is no measure for it.
In the hospital room the next day the human machine does something amazing. It wakes up. It starts talking. It wants things. “I want you to call Milton.” “Get me some water.”
Miracle? No. This was the work of a heroic guy in green surgical scrubs going seven hours straight in order to take a man apart and then reassemble him. That’s great training and expertise and amazing science. But still, there was something else. The human machine has consciousness. There is a soul, and spirit, stuff for which no measurement exists and therefore no science.
What happened in the hospital has affirmed my trust in scientific work, rattled my position as person who takes nothing on faith, and made me wonder if science, in order to fully understand the world, will need to stretch outside itself.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
If your ear gets clogged does it mean that you are trying to avoid hearing something that you don’t want to hear? If you have a cough that won’t quit, could it be that you are “barking” for the world to pay attention?
Everybody knows that illnesses come from “germs” that we “catch.” You fly on a plane with a hundred other people and breathe their exhaust. 
You hang around a kid with green stuff coming out of his nose and soon you have green stuff coming out of your nose. But then, strangely enough, one day you go for a run in the rain, jump on a plane and later stop to wipe a few runny noses of strangers in the airport and come through just fine. What’s going on? Why do illnesses show up at certain times and not at others?
Could be that your mind is playing a role in the illness drama.
The term psychosomatic was coined in 1860 to define a disorder having physical symptoms, but originating from mental or emotional causes. This sounds like the illness I used to stay home from school. The symptoms included sore throat, dizziness and dementia and the cause was usually an upcoming test.
Can the same be said of a “real” illness? Can you heal with a shift in attitude? Consider this: If you think the same thought again and again it becomes a feedback loop in your mind. What if that feedback loop was not limited to your mind? What if you are programming your body as well without realizing it?
Louise Hay, a writer and lecturer, believes we’re programming ourselves to be ill or well. We have a choice. She claims to have cured her own cervical cancer by using affirmations and concluded that the cause of the cancer was her unwillingness to let go of resentment over a tragic childhood.
Hang on, before I lose you here, we need to track back to where Hay originally got her ideas. She read metaphysical essays by 1920s-era authors like Frances Scovel Shinn, who said that positive thinking could change people’s outward world. She also read the founder of the Religious Science movement, Ernest Holmes, who taught that positive thinking could heal the body.
At the time of these writings doctors were still administering whiskey as a painkiller. Medicine has changed a lot since then. But people haven’t evolved much. (Whiskey still works as a painkiller.) It’s intriguing to consider what attitudes Hay says contribute to illness. A sampling:
- Abdominal cramps, she says, are about fear, and “stopping the process.”
- Knee troubles are expressions of pride and ego.
- Post-nasal drip represents “Inner crying. Childish tears. Victim.”
- Stiff neck is the expression of unbending bullheadedness.
She even says that you might catch poison ivy when feeling defenseless and open to attack. My personal “BS” meter hits the red zone on that one, but I have to admit that Hay is giving us a tool to take control of our own wellness. She and others like medical intuitive Dr. Mona Lisa do not offer cures, but they suggest that the ability to heal has a lot to do with the way your mind interacts with your body. Could it be that the metaphysical religious thinkers of the 1920s may have pointed to a healthier future for everyone?
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
“The river isn’t dirty, it’s your mind that’s dirty.”
I was watching the waters of the Ganges flowing through the town of Rishikesh, India. I’d heard that the Sadhus, or holy men, said those words about the river to explain why the holy Ganges looked like a garbage dump. I must have been really enlightened that day, because with vision better than Superman’s I could see the E. coli, the hepatitis A, B and C, the typhoid and cholera and dysentery swirling downstream.
I was trekking a glacier in Patagonia, Argentina. The only sign of life was an ink black beetle walking carefully on blue ice. My Super Vision was also working that day. 
I scanned the vastness all around, intoxicated with the way the ice ripped into the sky. I saw no disease of any kind, not a single speck of trash anywhere. That’s because if you bring trash there you also have to take it out. If the Argentine park rangers find that you’ve left any, they will unsheathe their ice axes, dig a grave for you and dump you in; I think that’s the rule, anyway. The ice is so clean that you can mix it with whiskey and drink it down, using it to jump start your heart so you are able to walk the trail back to the boat that circles icebergs, to the little bus bouncing on a gravel road, to your room where you will finally be warm again.
“The river isn’t dirty, it’s your mind that’s dirty.”
Was the voice of that holy man trying to tell me that there’s no such thing as “pure” perception? Sometimes your eyes don’t see what they’re seeing? Could I have been distracted by all the noise and chaos that is India?
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This is where science comes in handy. It can measure stuff, and researchers at Montana State University have concluded that the Ganges contains untreated sewage, cremated remains, chemicals and disease-causing microbes.
“The Ganges has become the kind of place where genetic material could transfer between pathogens and create new pathogens.”
– Dr. Tim Ford, Montana State University
Scientists can also measure how fast glaciers are melting in Patagonia and elsewhere, documenting climate change. So you might conclude that human perception, filtered by memory and experience, won’t get you far when trying to prove anything. For example, if you come from a dirty place, India may look clean to you. If you come from a noisy place, Patagonia may seem unbearably still. Without objective measurement, you get into “everything is relative.” Messy business.
Spiritual folks will tell you that faith helps you experience the unseen. (“Is that the face of Jesus on my bathroom wall?”) For the science-minded, this notion is easy to dismiss. But this is tricky territory. Some scientists are doubting whether we can really measure anything objectively – that the consciousness of the investigator changes the outcome, for one thing.
When science meets spirit, when objective measurement meets faith, could it be that boundaries of both science and spirit are going to be changed?
That makes my mind spin, and thankfully I notice I’m over 500 words – but I will continue this thought in another blog. No matter what the Sadhu says, I’m not going in the Ganges.
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