Abandon Text!

Brave New Blog

2007-06-12T06:40:00.002-04:00

So . . . I've finally made the move to a new blogging platform.

You can read the daily posts at: http://www.abandontext.com/

I'm still working on moving all the archived content over . . . so this abandontext.blogspot.com will remain available for the foreseeable future.

I'm not entirely at peace with the new software (Serendipity), either in the look-and-feel department or the usability . . . but in the spirit that inspired me to start blogging in the first place, I figured I'd make the jump and see what happens.

Truth in Action

2007-06-11T05:21:00.000-04:00

So, if finding the truth is the most fundamental goal, then we should stop trying to do good in the world and give ourselves completely over to metaphysical reflection, yes? After all, why try to do good when you don't know what good is?

Um . . . no. Not hardly.

The paradoxical corollary to the the primacy of truth is:
The fastest and most reliable way to validate the truth is in the realm of action.

A lot of so-called "spiritual" people chafe at the notion that spiritual truths can and should be empirically validated. Our beliefs in God, grace, or the nature of mankind are a lot easier to live with if they remain safely ensconced in books and church services and are never really tested in the context of the real world. We're supposed to take these things on faith.

The problem with "faith" or other non-verifiable justifications for our beliefs, is that human beings have a demonstrably enormous capacity for deceiving themselves. Augie tells a classic story of this in his essay "Brother John":

[Father Christian] launched into a story about a Presbyterian minister having a crisis of faith and leaving the ministry. The man was a friend of his, and Christian took his crisis so seriously that he actually left the monastery and traveled to his house in order to do what he could. The two men spent countless hours in fruitless theological debate. Finally dropping his voice Christian looked the man steadily in the face and said, "Bob, is everything in your life alright?" The minister said everything was fine. But the minister's wife called Christian a few days later. She had overheard Christian's question and her husband's answer, and she told Father Christian that the minister was having an affair and was leaving her as well as his ministry.
Christian fairly spat with disgust, "I was wasting my time. Bob's problem was that he couldn't take the contradiction between his preaching and his living. So God gets the boot. Remember this, all philosophical problems are at heart moral problems. It all comes down to how you intend to live your life."

Rather than developing a personal philosophy and then living according to it, most people seem to do the opposite: live a haphazard life, and then concoct a philosophy that rationalizes and justifies their position. Or, as The Onion Sunday section once offered: "Finding a Religion that Doesn't Disrupt Your Current Lifestyle."

Our notion of what's right and true and good is strongly influenced by our own personal psychology. Such psychological knots cannot usually be unravelled by metaphysical speculation alone. You have to examine your actions, and examine their consistency with your beliefs. Do you really live as someone who actually believes these things? And do those beliefs actually justify themselves in your real-life experience? By combining reflection and action, you can to some extent overcome the limitations of both.

True, true

2007-06-10T06:12:00.000-04:00

I often hesitate to describe myself as a "spiritual" person, simply because of the monumental potential for being completely misunderstood. The label has lost almost all meaning at this point. Some people think it means not going to church on Sunday but still believing that you take God seriously. Some think it means collecting crystals, drinking funny-smelling tea, and believing in the direct intervention of angels. I can live with people not understanding what I'm about . . . but being mis-understood, and taken for one of the funny-smelling-tea crowd, is almost unbearable. So when I try to describe what I mean by spiritual work, I try to find the characteristics that are most distinctive, that most differentiate it from other notions people have.

One of the those key differentiators could be stated like this:
"The Truth is more important than anything else."

By "truth", I mean "correctly discerning the way things really are." Most people think knowing the truth is good, but they don't put it at the top of the list. I suspect that if you poll most people, knowing the truth isn't even in the top three. If you asked them what the most important thing is, they would probably give some variation of: "Being good is the most important thing." And I wouldn't argue with that, either . . . except that you have to know what's true, before you can know what's good.

For instance, some serious-minded, truly compassionate people are standing on the sidewalks, screaming at me that I am doomed to an eternity of hell-fire. I don't doubt their good intentions. I think they really mean the best for me, much more than the average stranger. They are risking all kinds of public attention and scorn, for the sake of trying to save me from an eternity of suffering. The only problem is: as near as I can tell, they're wrong. Wanting the best for people is worth exactly squat if their perception of what's true is totally off kilter.

You could expand on this in almost any direction. The world is full of well-intentioned idiots. No, let's not say "idiots," because that implies they're not smart. You can be plenty smart and still be totally, dead wrong.

This was the message that Augie Turak put out that first got my attention: there can be no good without the truth. So, before you go out to save the world, you'd better make sure you've got true discernment. It still boggles my mind that people can say, "What good is all this spiritual knowledge?" What good? Better to say, "What good could you possibly have without it?"

Howl's Moving Castle

2007-06-09T15:03:00.000-04:00

After seeing Spirited Away only once, I was deeply in love with Hayao Miyazaki's animation. Finally, someone who realized the medium's capacity to be surreal, magical, and transformative. "It's like spending two hours in someone else's deeply meaningful dream," said Janet. So Howl's Moving Castle, Miyazaki's 2004 adaption of a Diana Wynn Jone's novel, moved to the top of my NetFlix queue.

The two films have a striking number of parallels. Both feature young heroines who become entangled in magical worlds as the result of enchantments, who unravel the past of mysterious magical benefactors and liberate them by helping them find their true selves. But Castle is more grown up, a little darker and scarier than Spirited Away, but also with more complexity in the characters and the plot.

It is, more than anything, a story about transformations: every single character undergoes a physical as well as metaphorical reshaping. Sophie, a young woman cursed by the jealous Witch of the Waste, is turned into an old woman, and goes on a quest to reclaim her youth. Howl, a perpetual adolescent of a wizard, transforms into a giant bird in his efforts to avert a war, and struggles to regain his full humanity. Enemies turn into friends, friends into enemies, minor players become major players . . . and all their stories are linked together in a beautiful synchronicity.

The movie has some funny moments that struck me as very Buffy-esque in their mash-up of the fantastic and the all-to-human. In one scene, Howl reads a curse that has magically appeared during breakfast: "That is ancient sorcery, and quite powerful too. 'You who swallowed a falling star, o' heartless man, your heart shall soon be mine,' " Howl recites seriously. Then, after a beat: "That can't be good for the table." Or, when the enchanted fire Calcifer (voiced by Billy Crystal) is asked to cook breakfast: "No! I don't cook! I am very powerful and scary fire demon!" Or when ominous shadows gather around a despondant Howl, his apprentice Markl says, "He's summoning the spirits of darkness . . . I saw him do this once before, after a girl dumped him."

I could (and probably will) write a full-length essay giving a Jungean spiritual analysis of Howl's Moving Castle. Some college senior taking a graduate seminar in film studies will probably thank me for writing his term paper. Or maybe not . . . I found it interesting (and a little sad) that most of the links that I googled up on "Howl's Moving Castle analysis" were ads for term paper services. But among mountains of online reviews (many mixed in their reactions), only one pointed out that the heroine's name was Sophia, literally "wisdom", and saw it as a pointer to a larger allegory. In dream analysis a house is a standard symbol for the self, and moving castle of the title undergoes a continual transformation through the story, reflecting the wizard's own internal evolution.

Rite of Passage

2007-06-08T05:20:00.000-04:00

My son graduated from kindergarten yesterday. I used to be mildly contemptuous of calling anything below getting your diploma a "graduation" -- it smacked of an overweening praise-everything-and-everyone parenting culture that watered down real standards and discredited real achievement. Surely we don't need pomp and circumstance for someone learning to tie their shoes and sit quietly in circle.

But that's why I send my kids to a Waldorf school. They are much wiser about these things than I am. The teachers understand that the work the kindergartners are doing is real work. The capacities they are developing for cooperation, self-control, consistent application of energy, and respect for others are the bedrock of a successful life. It is an accomplishment to learn those things.

The ceremony was simple. Miss Patricia told a story about a young princess who played in a garden every day, until one day she strayed through garden walls and explored the outside world, worrying the king at first but prompting him to let her explore the world some more. Miss Patricia handed each child an orange ("to sustain you in the work you have to do"), a stone ("for wisdom to always choose to do the right thing") and a flower ("to remind you of the beauty of the garden, and find beauty in the outside world.") And when the children went outside to join the other classes, the rising first-graders walked through a flowered trellis, to symbolism their transition out of the garden.

None of this would have impressed me particularly, except for the effect that I saw it had on Aidan. There was no visible effect at the time, other than him just enjoying himself. But at home, he asked if he could use a tool that were previously off-limits: a swing-blade for whacking down large weeds. And I let him. He accepted my instruction seriously and without argument. He was extremely careful in using it, and worked hard to make sure his little brother was never threatened by the blade. Later that evening he picked up all the toys, telling his little brother that, "You don't have to worry about it, I'll do it." He fed the dogs without the usual arguments and tantrums. He asked if he could make it his regular job: "I know I could remember to do it . . . I would just need help telling the time."

I never had to tell him, "Now that you're a big boy, you should be accepting new responsibilities." (I remember in my grade school, the teachers always bellowing, "Now, children, you're no longer (x) graders, you're (x+1) graders, so you should behave better." I always despised that for some reason, and it never worked, anyway.) I didn't have to have that conversation, because the ritual had already told him.

The logical, rational mind will always chafe at ceremony and ritual. There is nothing rational about ceremony. It smacks of superstitious magic -- the vain belief that saying the right words and doing the right symbolic actions will mysteriously make the world obey your desires. But the human psyche is not rational, and the will and imagination do obey the laws of magic. You will hear people say that something is "merely symbolic" or "only metaphorical" when they discuss religious practices, as well. The mistake is not to call them symbolic or metaphorical; the mistake is to say, "merely symbolic." In the context of the human mind, nothing is merely symbolic. The mind is just one huge cavalcade of symbols, "a mobile army of metaphors" as Nietzsche put it. Symbols have real power.

What I'm Reading

2007-06-07T05:53:00.001-04:00

I've got a new slew of books that I'm diving into this summer, any one of which would be a good book to discuss with a group. The nominees for book-of-the-summer-months include:

The Not So Big Life, by Sarah Susanka. After hearing Ms. Susanka on the radio, I sensed a kindred spirit who is putting spiritual truths into everyday language. The best-selling architect describes how constructing a satisfying life is not that different from building a good house: rather than piling on more and more stuff we don't want or need, we need to simplify, removing the unnecessary and focusing on what really matters. If this sounds like the blurb of every self-help book you've ever read, don't be deceived; Susanka is not merely spouting platitudes, but rather has some real sophistication and depth in her approach. The message is not that different from the via negativa that Augie Turak might describe, although the tone is significantly different. Augie's description's of spiritual life are unrelentingly intense, while Susanka is composed and relaxed. (500 words: Compare and contrast. Go!)
Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, by Soren Kierkegaard. If you want to crank up the intensity, look no further than Kierkegaard, who got the "founder of existentialism" label for a reason. Kierkegaard has the audacity to take the Gospel seriously, and he deconstructs Christ's commandments with insightful psychology and an unwaveringly look at how demanding it really is. Kierkegaard, too, is calling for simplicity and integrity, but with no holds barred.
How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker. Kenny Felder and Augie Turak turned me on to Pinker with The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, and I've moved on to get more of his solid cognitive science wrapped in witty and readable prose. Warning: Pinker is so persuasive in his thorough scientific-ness that he'll make a materialist if you don't pay close attention. But Richard Rose once defined meditation as "thinking about thinking," and that's exactly what Pinker does.
Software Testing Foundations, by Spillner, Linx, and Schefer. (Just kidding.)
I Am a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter. The Pulitzer-Prize winning Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid set the standard for really smart, really deep, really fun books that are not only worth engaging, but almost require a group of people to read it because there's so much stuff. Now Hofstadter is back, decades later, with a book focused solely on the question of consciousness. I'd love to have some help with this one.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I mean, who isn't reading it? I've had enough intelligent conversations about Harry Potter with Kenny to convince me that it should be good fare for conversation, and will give you something to talk about with most of the literate world. And it might be slightly more upbrow than Stephan King.

What are you reading this summer?

Ready, Fire, Aim

2007-06-06T07:35:00.000-04:00

The world is so fast-paced now that we actually publish stuff before we've written it. I've set up a new website, the next great nexus of spiritual energy: www.thedynamicground.com

Of course, if you go there, you'll see that there's hardly anything there. And that's precisely the point. In the past, I've nearly always succumbed to the temptation to craft something in secret, under wraps, and then have the "ta-DA!" presto presentation that amazes all. And it just doesn't work very well. At least, not for me . . . and not for every organization I've worked with that tried to build a website that amounted to more than brochureware.

Website design usually bogs down into inaction because:

Glitzy presentation is overrated. Especially in the dot.com days of yore, everyone wanted a website that looked great -- which was fine for that all-important first-impression. But after that . . . people cared about content. They wanted useful information, presented simply, as easily as possible. Nowadays the only sites that are heavily Flash-enabled are movie sites: one-time events with limited updates. And the king of all sites is Google, with the simplest interface ever designed: type what you want here, and here's a list of what we found. So, when it comes to making compelling websites, less is more. That is, less design, more content.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. Most of the time, the content doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough. But the amount of time required to get new content on a website was so long (what with hard-to-understand techie tools, or worse, hard-to-understand techies) that we would only ask for stuff to be posted once we knew it was perfect. But blogging has taught me that sometimes quick-and-dirty is just fine, maybe even 80% of perfect.
Collaboration is difficult, bordering on impossible. Most sites have one or two webmasters who can load up new content, so all changes went through a bottleneck that made rapid, timely changes almost impossible. Getting multiple people together to provide the necessary content either meant an exhaustive round of extracting material, or an equally exhausting round of could-you-fix-this from contributors after posting.
Websites are too much work for one person. No single individual ever had enough time to make a perfect website . . . not even a pretty good website. It usually requires collective effort. But since the threshhold for collaborating was previously so high, the good stuff rarely made it out to the web. I can't begin to count how many times I've heard people say, "That ought to be on the website," but it never made it there. The Wikipedia proved that if you can tap into tiny contributions from lots and lots and lots of contributors over time, you can have extremely rich content without someone dedicating their whole life to maintaining it.
Navigation and search design hampered availability. Even once you got good content online, it used to muster, unused and unappreciated, because it was buried beneath menus or orphaned by dead links. Google changed all that. Now, if your content is distinct enough, it will be found by somebody looking for it, no matter how deeply buried, or poorly promoted. Now people who have something to offer can focus on creating content, instead of designing navigation.

Hence, my current fascination with wiki technology. "Build it and they will come" has turned into "They will come and build it." Now, I'm not completely seduced yet by the promise of easy content -- "this time it's different" was the rallying cry of the dot-com boom, and the ironic scorn following the dot-com bust. Somebody still has to bust their hump to create content, direct vision, promote and cross-link the site, sustain the community, blah, blah. But now, at least, that someone is not alone.

Into kinda-good silence

2007-06-05T05:27:00.000-04:00

The day after watching Into Great Silence Joanna commented that we didn't talk much about silence, per se. While asceticism, selfless, sacrifice, and isolation were all recognized, we didn't even hit on the title aspect of the film. So, ignoring for the moment the irony of talking about silence . . . what's so great about silence? And how could we have more of that in our own lives?

The film itself only made one reference to silence, by quoting a passage from I Kings 19:

The LORD said, "Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD,
for the LORD is about to pass by." Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

God manifests in the whisper, the "still small voice," and that we usually need to abide in silence before we are able to hear it. Nothing really new, there . . . a chestnut of spiritual traditions. Nor would I be adding much by talking about the opposite of silence, which is noise. Yes, these are indeed noisy times, with an exponential increase in the sheer volume of communications competing constantly for our attention.

I would add that silence is as much about energy conservation as it is about tuning into Grace. We grossly underestimate how much energy is consumed in communiction. When I was in a ten-day Vipassana retreat, we were forbidden to speak, read, write, or even make eye contact. As a result, I built up a tremendous amount of energy, so much that I could barely sleep at night. One the final day of the retreat, when we were allowed to talk again, I could feel all that energy go PSSSSSSSTTT right out of me again. It was a little humbling, as someone who had dedicated much of my life to spiritual conversation, to realize that talking used up so much power and focus. Nor did silence compromise intimacy, either . . . deprived of all small talk and personal stories, I found myself in rapport with all the others in the retreat. I knew who was sick and who was healthy, who was having a good meditation and who was frustrated. All kinds of subtle knowledge from unspoken cues becomes conscious when you are liberated from the gross.

Are we talking about literal silence, here? Do you need to take a vow of silence to realize the spiritual benefit of stillness? Or can you abide in stillness in your daily routine, as a gush of slim self-help books proclaim? Well . . . yes, I think we're talking about literal silence, or at least, minimal noise. Many teachers have witnessed to the capacity of maintaining stillness-amid-noise -- even, as Fleet Maull describes, stillness-amid-sheer-hell. But that only comes from becoming comfortable with periods of real silence, within and without. Like the monks, I'm a big fan of doing spiritual disciplines in the early morning hours, when the world is asleep and your own stillness has not yet been stirred up by the day.

And then, if you can establish yourself in some stillness at the beginning of the day, the trick is to not give it away. The Buddhists have a notion of "right speech," which really breaks down "don't say anything you don't have to say." If you eliminate gossip, complaining, and small talk, you could do away with 80% of all typical conversations. And if you could do the same with your internal dialog, you could probably cut out a similar percentage of distracting thought. That's actually an enormous challenge . . . and you may find it easier, as the monks do, to be completely still.

The greatest good

2007-06-04T05:36:00.000-04:00

After we watched Into Great Silence, one young woman (who had only managed to watch half of the movie before giving up and waiting in the cafe next door) asked us, "How are those monks helping the world?" It's not an uncommon question . . . Augie told of another guest at Mepkin who said something to the effect of: "Those monks are really something . . . but I don't see what they're doing to move the ball down the field." I still find it one of the saddest and most infuriating of questions . . . where do I begin?

I suppose I should begin with the answer the monks themselves gave, in the only interview in the entire movie. "It is such a shame that the world has lost it's sense of God," the monk said. "If you remove the thought of God, then why even be alive on this planet? If you get as close as you can to God, then you are happy." If you truly believe in a transcendant God, whose timeless reality transcends all that will ever happen, what could possibly be more important than getting in touch with that reality? As far as the monks are concerned, we are the ones wasting our lives in futile, self-serving action.

"Well," said the young woman, "What are they doing to help others find God?" To my tremendous relief, three other SKS students had good answers for that question before I even had to open my mouth: they show the way by example. Prosyletizing is aggressive and usually unwelcome; but demonstrating a better way to live, for people to observe and emulate, is the most peaceful, most compelling ministry possible.

Besides . . . how many people do you have to help before you can claim to have "done some good in the world?" Those monks are helping the world -- they help each other. They have utterly dedicated themselves to helping each other lead a life of complete holiness. And they freely share that gift with any who will join them. The fact that few are ready to accept their gift is hardly their fault.

In fact, I would go so far to say that anyone who would accuse the monks of selfishness or self-absorption, does not truly believe in a transcendant God. I think that includes most people, even most Christians. They simply can't conceive of a good that is not manifest in the material world. Christ made it clear that there were two great commandments: "Love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart . . . and love thy neighbor as thyself." The monks are doing that. What more can you ask?

I could even answer the question on the terms in which it was asked. I could talk about how many of these monastics had already spent a full life in dedicated service to others as priests or monks in other orders, before retiring to the contemplative life. Or I could point to the enormous scholarship of the monks, and how they continue to contribute to the world of letters with their enormous understanding. But that would only perpetuate the basic misunderstanding. To a world that has lost its sense of God, the monastic life will not make any sense.

The silence is indeed great

2007-06-03T19:59:00.000-04:00

I sat down to Into Great Silence prepared for a very foreign experience. (Latin-chanting monks, speaking in French, subtitled in German, and sub-sub-titled in English . . . doesn't get more foreign than that, without leaving Europe.) And yet in the first few minutes, as we dwelt with a single monk in his cell, a saw a bunch of things that were surprisingly familiar to me. The young brother reached over to close the damper on his little wood-stove -- a stove almost exactly like the stove I used in a tiny little cabin in the woods of West Virginia, when I lived on Richard Rose's farm. And the wooden floors, the wooden doors, the crude masonry . . . a kept having flashbacks to the farmhouse where Rose presided over students.

And the beautiful monotony of it all . . . oh yes, that too. You have to be in a certain state of mind to watch someone in prayer, minute . . . after minute . . . after minute. You realize that his mind may be full of weighty questions of God, grace, redemption, penitence . . . but we don't get to share his thoughts, nor can we even read what he might be reading, or understand the prayers that he chants. So you have to fill in those gaps for yourself . . . and that drives you inexorably inward, and ironically takes you to the same place the monk is in.

When you have a film in which very little is ever spoken, and almost nothing ever happens, you are left with feast of mise-en-scene. And the film lets you do that, dwelling patiently on every sight and sound: a bowl, a piece of fruit, a cluttered desk, a snow-covered view through a narrow window. That, more than anything, reminded me of what it was like to live in contemplative isolation. No matter where your head is at, you spend long stretches of time with your eyes settled on a door, a window, a hole in the wall . . . until the whole world is contained within a few views. A casual viewer might think: "Geez, that film could have easily been an hour shorter; how many times do we need to see a darkened chapel?" But that misses the point entirely, which is to get you into the timeless rhythm of their office. It turns out it really does take about two and a half hours to get into that frame of mind.

The film has no plot, but that doesn't mean that there aren't threads of consistency that you can follow. Early on we see two new brothers make their Simple Profession, asking to be accepted into the community; one of them, Dom Marie-Pierre, happens to be the only black man there, which helps us follow him along in his path. We see one of the brothers making a new robe for him, and later helping him into it. We see the new brothers studying the liturgy, practicing the chants. We see his cell, at first bare, but gradually fill with books, and notebooks, and devotional pictures.

For those who have had some exposure to monastic orders before, there are some telling details. Once, when the brothers are discussing some finer details of a hand-washing ritual, one says, "At such-and-such a monestary, they actually have six basins, so you can properly wash your hands." And another monk quips, "Yeah, but their Trappists," and everyone laughs. When someone can cap on the Cistercians for being extravagent . . . now that's ascetic. Sadly, I saw some other all-too-familiar sights: more choir stalls than monks, an enormous monastary occupied by less than two dozen brothers, and the majority of them quite old. Their order, like most, is struggling to stay alive.

The film doesn't editorialize at all, but it does pause occasionally to repeat some passages from scripture on the screen. The most-repeated one was: "Unless you give up everything you have, and follow me, you are not worthy to be my disciple." The average Christian might start out thinking that these men are super-Christians, zealots, extremists . . . but the film reminds us they are only doing exactly, and completely, what Jesus commanded. They are not zealots; they just took Jesus seriously. We are dabblers in comparison.

Connecting the Dots

2007-06-01T22:54:00.000-04:00

Ok, let me back up and see if I can make my posts on meaning and purpose string together in a coherent pattern. (There's a chance they may not.)

I started by saying, essentially, that I didn't know my life's purpose -- or, at least I didn't know it's final goal, a satisfactory end-point.

I then went on to consider that, "Well, maybe that doesn't matter, because meaning may come from the present moment instead of some final outcome."

Either way, the frustration (for me) comes from the not knowing how to answer the question . . . but that ambiguity is built into the process . . . and tolerating that ambiguity is the only way to arrive at a true answer.

I anticipate that some people will find "I don't know" to be a wholly unsatisfactory answer. The only way that "I don't know" can be satisfactory is if you invoke process: "I don't know, but I'm going to find out, because the process will take me there." We use processes all the time to move from the unknown to the known. Science is a process that leads to objective truth. The legal system is process that leadds to justice. The democratic process leads to good governance. And spirituality is exactly the same way: we shouldn't be asking for the answers, so much as asking for the correct process to arrive at the answers.

So, as an exercise for the reader (to be explored in future posts):

What is best process for arriving at spiritual truth?
What process will you use to evaluate that process of truth seeking? (ooh, recursion, wince . . . )

Faith in the process

2007-06-01T07:11:00.000-04:00

In contemplating the nature of teleology (evaluating everything in terms of an end goal) and finding meaning in the present moment, I've been thinking a lot about process. Process may do a lot to bring the two together.

You'll hear a lot of talk about process these days -- the artistic process, the legal process, the democratic process, the diplomatic process, the therapeutic process . . . and let's not forget the spiritual process. In all these different processes, people begin with a specific end in mind, and at the same time don't know how things are going to turn out. They believe that things will work to their best conclusion by application of the process . . . and yet it is not a deterministic process. When the artist makes his first brush stroke, he doesn't necessarily know what the whole picture will be like. The novelist may start typing with the story only half-formed (if that) in his mind. And yet they still dive into the process. They have faith in the process; they believe it will work, even though they don't know how or even why it works.

Faith in the process is the closest I can come to describing what feels like the most appropriate way to consider meaning and purpose. We can apply certain principles to our life and work, and faithfully apply ourselves to the process, trusting that the process will produce a good outcome without necessarily knowing what the outcome will be. It might even be counter-productive to insist on a clear vision of the outcome before beginning to act. We should have a notion of where we might want to go -- otherwise we are just aimlessly drifting -- but we can hold that vision of the future very lightly, allowing it to evolve and unfold in a dialog with our own experience. Process is not necessarily squishy, just because it is non-deterministic. A writer may not know what he's going to write every day, but the process of "sit in the chair and keep writing until you've produced 2000 words" is very demanding and not squishy at all.

Finding that process -- consciously understanding what to do, even without knowing it's final outcome -- is the goal of all philosophy. I don't think most people want to know how their lives will turn out -- otherwise, why live at all? -- but they do want to have principles to guide their moment-by-moment action, inevitably but unpredictably leading them towards the good, the right, and the true. In process, being faithful to the moment can ultimately mean being faithful to the final end.

Biography of the Future

2007-05-31T06:10:00.000-04:00

Most biographies are factual examinations of the past: what someone actually did in their lifetime. But if you want to know what someone's experience of life was like, it would be just the opposite: what they thought their future life would be like, and how that vision changed over time.

So, for instance, my biography-of-the-future might read like this:

1970. I am born into a world American middle-class possibility. Everything is wide open, although it is already considered a certainty I will go to graduate school and do something science-y.
1977. Based on two books about sharks and whales, a recorded version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and some encouraging comments from my mother, I decide I will be a marine biologist.
1981. I move from Philadelphia to Brevard, NC. Disappointed with my current persona (geeky, non-social, high-strung), I dream of recreating myself in a model of Walden-esque self-sufficiency in our new 24-acre farm. I buy into my mother's vision of a self-sufficient homestead, where we do everything for ourselves and rarely venture into town.
1982. Crushed to find that a change of place did absolutely nothing to change me (although my mom is successfully recreating herself as a farmer.) Anticipating a life of an awkward outsider. Experience a profound questioning of religious faith, condemning me to either live in a world without God, or to be damned to Hell -- either way, I'm screwed.
1986. Accepted to the NC School of Science & Math, I look forward to a new life with real peers. Based on my work with our farm animals, I think I will be a veterinarian. I dream of being both smart and wise, a James Herriot with both education and rustic approachability.
1988. Heart-broken after a high-school romance, I look forward to a life as The Guy Who Blew It. The vet thing isn't panning out either: all the vets think I would be bored with it.
1989. Start the Self Knowledge Symposium under the teaching of Augie Turak. My life will now be that of a spiritual seeker, a "brahmacharya" single-mindedly focused on enlightenment. I expect to become enlightened before the age of 30, and spend the rest of my days as a spiritual teacher. My science career will just be my day-job until I "make the Trip."
1996. Get married to another spiritual seeker. Still seeking, but now with altered expectations. Hoping to become a writer.
2002. Still hoping to be a writer, despite spending six years becoming a techno-geek instead. Really, it's just a job. No serious expectations of attaining enlightenment, though I hope to do some good in the world with the spiritual movement I helped to start.
2007. Renewed hopes of some sort spiritual attainment, mostly because life doesn't make sense otherwise. Expecting a career change at some point, maybe go back to school, maybe write for a living (in some nebulous world where people get paid to write thoughtful essays).

What can we conclude from such a biography?

What we hope and expect to happen has only a slight bearing on what actually happens.
A whole lot of incredible stuff happens that never figures into our hopes and plans. (In my outline above, where are my kids? Where are all the miraculous transformations that happened in my spiritual community?)
In short, our dreams and plans for the future occupy huge amounts of brain-space . . . but they aren't Life. And the more we can pay attention to what's really going on, instead of weaving stories to keep our egos warm at night, the better off we will be.

Club Monk: I'm here for the live silence

2007-05-30T06:35:00.000-04:00

This weekend the Self Knowledge Symposium will be going as a group to see Into Great Silence, a documentary of Carthusian monks. I would say, "a documentary about Carthusian monks," except that this is not a film about anything -- the objective knowledge is not the point. Instead the movie invites the viewer to directly experience the stillness of the cloistered. This is, as one reviewer put it, "film as meditation," so come come prepared for a meditative experience.

Popular spiritual publications like Yoga Journal or BeliefNet.com pump out a cliched headline, as regularly as women's magazines put out diet tips: "Slow Down". A truism among spiritual-minded maintains that our modern lifestyle is too fast, too frenzied, too distracted to allow for a deep, contemplative state of mind to emerge and have any staying power. And yet . . . I'm lookin' around, and I don't see very many people slowing down, or even really trying that hard to slow down. Even me. Why is that?

Being busy is an ego trip. Everyone I know, even the slackest of the slackers, insists that, "Man, am I busy. I'm just slammed right now." It's a way of demonstrating one's importance. "I've got a lot going on right now." Having a multitude of roles and activities competing for one's attention makes life seem full . . . the temporal equivalent of materialism. We might complain that we don't like being so busy, but we continue to set ourselves up for it . . . perhaps because we're afraid of what life would be like without it.

Not only do we not dislike our busy pace as much as we claim, we also don't relish simplicity as much as we might claim. With all distractions removed, the mind rebels, desperate to wrap itself around something. Spiritual retreats, rather than being placid floats through paradise, are excruciatingly intense encounters with one's one mind. Augie Turak's greatest success in his writing about Mepkin Abbey is clearly communicating that spiritual life is not merely quietude, but an intensity born of single-minded focus.

High tolerance for ambiguity

2007-05-29T05:59:00.000-04:00

My wife commented the other day, "Gee, I read your blog [about not knowing the purpose of my life] . . . it must be depressing to spend so much time in spiritual work and still not have an answer."

Actually . . . not really.

The goal of spiritual life is to see things as they really are . . . and sometimes the truth is, "I don't know." Zen teacher Albert Low, in his book The Butterfly's Dream, went so far as to say that the essential truth of the human condition is "I don't know," and that awakening to that "I don't know" was the door to a perfect unconditioned state beyond all form. Augie Turak's teacher Richard Rose once said, "Your task is to remain undefined, except to define yourself as the person seeking definition." In the sense of "The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao," if I knew for certain the full purpose of my life, I would almost certainly be wrong.

It takes some very alive and subtle thinking to be able to tolerate ambiguity. When I was a scientist, I once worked for a professor who was always in a hurry to get the meaning of things. Every time I showed her the results of an experiment, she would say, "So what does it mean?" And she literally would not walk away from the conversation without declaring what the results meant. And, as a result, everyone in the lab learned an important lesson: hide your results from the boss, at least until you had enough data to form a conclusion you could live with. Otherwise, there was a high likelihood of getting sidetracked by a premature (and incorrect) conclusion.

When I was in a math class at the NC School of Science and Mathematics, one of the students, obviously frustrated, threw down her pencil on her desk and slumped in her chair. "What's the matter, Lake George?" asked Dr. Davis. (He had nicknames for everyone, and he called Laurie "Lake George" because she often wore a gray sweatshirt with "Lake George" embroidered on the front.) "I just don't get it. I'm just confused," she said. "So?" he answered. "Stay in the confusion. Don't stop working just because you don't know what's going on. All new understanding emerges from confusion. You've got to learn how to operate while confused, to work when you don't know."

Augie's role as a spiritual teacher is exactly like that. Many times you're just slumped in the chair, and he's saying, "Stay with the confusion. Keep going, keep working, keep looking. The Answer is there, but you have to stay with it."

Greater love hath no man . . .

2007-05-28T06:07:00.000-04:00

Secular humanists are continually tempted to see virtue and civilization as a manifestation of enlightened self-interest. As the Avenue Q song goes: "When you help others, you can't help helping yourself." In this pro-social, non-violent view of the Cosmos, we give freely to help others, feeling good about it and reaping the rewards of reciprocity. Modern environmentalism is founded on this attitude: "Don't destroy the earth, because you're destroying your own home."

Memorial Day calls us to a very different moral view of the universe. This is a world where all is not sweetness and light, and not all conflicts are resolved by dialog and diplomacy. Conflicts are real, and real people are called upon to struggle and fight. And there is more than mere sharing . . . there is sacrifice.

Try, just for a moment, to release all your filters for overblown nationalistic rhetoric, and just try to grok the notion that someone, a real person, actually died so that you can live your life as you do now. Someone actually voluntarily gave up their future happiness, deprived their children of a parent, deprived their spouse of a mate, in order to make this cultural experiment possible. Pick anyone at random in your life: a coworker, a friend. Kenny Felder. Now imagine that person gone, blasted off the face of the planet, because they wanted you to have a life worth living. Just let the reality of that sacrifice sink in for a moment. Don't even bother trying to multiply it by a thousand, a million . . . your mind will not contain it. Just think about that one person who gave up everything for you.

Since the beginning of time, martyrdom has been recognized as a miraculous event. The cynical will see it as madness. Many will see it as misguided or stupid . . . which, oftentime, I suppose it is. (Suicide bombers provide a continual reminder that not everyone who dies willingly necessarily died for a good reason.) But sometimes it is a manifestation of genuine transcendence. Somebody literally loved something more than life itself. May we all love so much, to live, and perhaps to die, for something beyond ourselves.

No Union Left Behind

2007-05-27T07:47:00.000-04:00

Time Magazine gave a "report card" to the "No Child Left Behind" education reform. Parts of the story they got perfectly right: states have continually dropped their standards to create the illusion of progress, and an enormous emphasis on basic reading and math skills is deforming the educational process, squeezing out other subjects and ignoring students at either end of the Bell curve.

And yet . . . how did Time manage to get through an entire seven page article without ever talking about what was causing the schools to fail in the first place? Not once in seven pages could they screw up the courage to talk about suspected (but still hotly debated) causes of low performance in inner-city schools: black culture that undervalued education, low involvement of parents, diminished expectations due to continuous poverty (perhaps caused in part by racial discrimination), more single-parent homes, less unstructured play, more television watching, and (God forbid we should say it) poor quality of teachers. At least the New York Review of Books could talk about these issues, addressing important factors without rushing to find single causes or single solutions to the problem.

I suspect, more than anything, that discussing such factors would make their recommendations less compelling. Every single recommendation that Time makes -- remove punitive measures, create national standards, don't do drastic overhauls of schools, provide more funding for teachers -- are practically identical to the talking points from the teachers unions. Hmmm . . . is this really an unbiased evaluation?

I should hope that it's clear that more money is not the answer . . . at least, not pouring more money into the current system. While those defending the education status-quo have sliced and diced assertions that we spend more money than any other industrialized nation on education, there are numerous internal examples of how some schools get vastly improved performance without spending more money. (See the NYRB article for descriptions of the KIPP Academies.) Some complain that the strategies of such schools "cannot be widely reproduced." That may be true . . . in the current culture and the current system. But who said we have to keep the current system? Oh . . . yeah . . . the unions.

I Am Your Child's Teacher

2007-05-26T23:41:00.000-04:00

Last night all the parents of rising first-graders gathered at the school to meet The New Teacher. In the Waldorf pedagogy, a teacher starts with a first-grade class, and then remains the teacher of those students for the rest of their time in the lower school, through the eighth grade. In terms of having a teacher intimately familiar with his students, it's a very useful arrangement; everyone is spared the awkwardness of readjusting to each other from year to year, and so they can stay focused on the curriculum with a minimum of disruption over time. It also means that you've got a lot riding on one person in your child's education. So, when the parents are gathered together to meet The New Teacher for the first time, it's rather like an arranged marriage: "Hi there, we're going to be a major part of each others' lives for the better part of a decade."

It would be gauche to "review" the guy in a blog, so I won't get into details, but suffice it to say that I'm pleased and think he's going to work out fine. I will share a few things that struck me:

One parent asked, "What is your goal for the year? How will you know that you've succeeded with these kids?" He answered: "If, at the end of the year, these kids love school, then I've done my job." I thought that was a great answer, and one of the things that sets Waldorf schools apart from so many others. Nobody else gets this part right. Under the regimine of "No Child Left Behind," the public schools teach (if you can call it teaching) to a zombified objective standard; their only concern is to get as many kids over the lowest of bars as possible. Meanwhile, most private schools, nurtured on the overweening ambitions of rich parents for their children, teach at the other end of standardization: what matters most is testing high, high, high on the subject matter, accelerating growth beyond all nature standards. But Waldorf recognizes they have one, and only one, critical job at the beginning of the grades, which is to make the kids love learning. If they get that part right, everything else will fall into place naturally.
On several occasions, the teacher emphasized what we've heard before about Waldorf education: "Look, there's a reason we do things a certain way." As far as I can see, it's true: Waldorf education is, if nothing else, extremely self-conscious and deliberate. Every detail is thought out, and done for a specific reason. (It might be a wacky Steinerian reason, but still, an explicit reason.) I was reminded, yet again, of how rare it is to have institutions with real spine to them. The New Teacher was reminding us of this fact because he knows, eventually, he's going to be taking us to task for putting Ho-Hos in the lunch box or not letting the kids get enough rest, or whatever.
On the subject of media, especially television, he said: "Look, since you're paying for this education, I would hope that you wouldn't want to undo my work. And television will just blow away anything I might accomplish with these kids." Amen.

The Meaning of Now

2007-05-25T05:25:00.000-04:00

When I wrote yesterday about judging one's life, I was coming at the whole question from a teleological perspective: that is, I was evaluating a whole life from the perspective of where you end up. It's the final end, or teleos, that matters, and everything else is judged by how it gets you there. From a traditional Christian perspective, that approach makes perfect sense: we are preparing for a final Judgement Day, and how things play out on that last day is supposed to have eternal consequences.

That is not, however, the only way to go about thinking about meaning. You could start evaluating meaning at the other end of time: the present moment. A rich tradition of mystics across ancient and modern traditions would assert that past and future are only projections of the mind, and that only the present moment has reality. In the context of that theology, the question of the meaning of one's life becomes very different. Instead of saying, "What's the goal? Where I'm I going?" the question changes to: "This is it. All I have and all I ever will have is right now. So . . . how do I feel about right now? Is this the life that I want? Am I the kind of person I want to be?" And, if you feel like your life ought to be different, you change it . . . right now.

This flip in meaning evaluation -- from "The End" to "The Present" -- was brilliantly captured in my very favorite episodes of Angel ("Reprise" and "Epiphany", Season Two). Angel, the vampire cursed with a soul, struggled for centuries to enough good to redeem himself of all the evil his vampire-self has caused. A sense of redemption continually eludes him, though. When a "senior partner" from the demonic law firm Wolfram and Hart visits from the "home office," Angel seizes the opportunity to go through the demon's portal. Clearly he wants to make a suicide run at the source of all evil, to use himself up completely in his fight against wickedness. But when he arrives at the "home office," he finds that he's . . . back home in Los Angeles. Evil, it turns out, is in the hearts of humanity, and no permanent victory is possible. In describing his "epiphany," Angel later says, in effect, "If there is no final victory, no end, then all that matters is the good that you do right now. And that good, no matter how small, is the most important thing in the universe."

Whether you accept the non-teleological theology or not, focusing on the present moment has a lot going for it. Rather than making grand speculations about the end of life and the end of time, the present moment has an existential simplicity that cuts through endless rationalization. You don't have to posit the meaning of capital-L Life to be able to discern what's better or worse in the present moment. Richard Rose called it "backing away from untruth" -- rather than presuming to know what the truth will ultimately look like and setting out to find it, we start where we're at and reject the less-true in favor of the more-true. Even if you believe in ultimate truth and ultimate ends, the best way to get there might be to pay attention to what's right in front of you.

Judged Good

2007-05-24T05:48:00.000-04:00

I've been chewing on an existential question for the last few months, and have not made any serious headway on it. I'm not even sure it's a legitimate question, but it keeps popping up in my contemplations. The line of thinking goes something like this:

In order to know what you should be doing right now, you should know what you want to ultimately achieve in your life. It's the whole Steven Covey, "start with the end in mind" principle: you can't pick a sensible direction if you don't know where you want to end up.
In order to formulate a goal for one's entire life, you need to establish an absolute standard for what a good life would be. In other words, you need to know how you are going to judge a good life.
What, then, is the proper standard for judging a good life? Ostensibly, this is the sort of question the Self Knowledge Symposium is supposed to help people answer, and it's precisely here that my theology starts to break down.

There are a couple ways to answer #3. The classic theistic response is surrender to a higher power: "I'll do whatever God wants me to do." That's a whole new can of worms, with lots of underlying assumptions to root out:

For many, that answer also entails: "...because then God will love me and reward me eternally for my faithfulness." And I'm a little sketchy about the whole "eternal rewards" thing. If there is anything remotely like an afterlife, I don't think it's an everlasting, fully funded retirement.
It also assumes that God has something specific for you to do, apart from your own dreams and desires. It is entirely possible that you could ask God, and he would say, "I dunno . . . what do you want to do? What would make you happy?" If that seems implausible, consider the fact that this is exactly the position most earthly parents take. Would a heavenly father wish anything different?

So . . . if you decide that there is no judging God in heaven (either because there is no personified God to begin with, or because He's just not the judging type), how then will you formulate your life mission? Now you are thrown back on your own resources to answer the question. And that's a mess to sort out as well:

Your desires and aspirations are a conflicting mess. The whole reason you wanted a mission was to organize your desires into something consistent and sensible.
You could reduce all your desires and aspirations to, as your parents say, "whatever makes you happy." But that seems to resolve to a blunt sort of hedonism: "whatever makes you feel good." And that seems like a lousy, very unreflective standard upon which to base one's life. That approach defines self-centeredness, which feels like a dead end.

Comments are welcome. I haven't completely finished all the different lines of thought I have on this, but this is the basic shape.

Oligarchy of the interested

2007-05-23T07:51:00.000-04:00

Kenny makes a good point about democratic systems of government: only a minority of people are really qualified to participate. Or, as the Onion put it in a recent headline: "38 percent of people not actually entitled to their opinion." And I, like Kenny, put myself in the category of the unqualified, at least for the vast majority of local elections and many national issues as well.

Unfortunately, it's very easy to go from that insight straight on to the sort of snooty, the-intellectual-elite-know-best kind of attitude that Al Gore and many New England-educated blueblood blue-state progressives evince. Underneath Gore's plea for a more reasoned government, I hear an intellectual's arrogant frustration: "Fools! Everything would go so much better if you just acknowledged that I'm right."

The weird thing is, in spite of the seeming collective stupidity of so many people, massive amounts of useful information can be extracted from collective opinions. For instance, predictive markets that allow people to wager on the outcomes of elections are incredibly accurate at predicting the outcomes. And free financial markets have worked for decades on the assumption that the market as a whole is going to be smarter than any single individual. Markets are messy and they are often wrong, but they seem to be pretty good at handling all kinds of complex calculations. So maybe the same principles can be applied to political decisions, as well. Any one of us might be pretty stupid, but collectively we may manage to make reasonably good policy.

Revenge of the Nerd

2007-05-22T21:06:00.000-04:00

In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Al Gore bemoans the diminishing role of reason in public discourse. "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" he intones seriously.

Ok, Al, if you just stopped at "reason playing little role in decision-making," I would have been right there with you. You're right: a population that spends most of it's free time watching American Idol is not likely to be a hotbed of intellectual debate. But the moment you say "sharply diminished," I just had to bust out laughing.

Sharply diminished from what? Perhaps you thought you and Bill and epitomized rule-by-policy-wonk -- government by the smart. Perhaps you flattered yourself by thinking that you shared the essential ingredient of success with Clinton, which was being really smart. But that's where reason has actually clouded your vision. You saw William Jefferson Clinton, voracious reader of white papers. We saw Slick Willy -- a creature of charisma, for whom intelligence was merely a tool for power and pleasure, and definitely not a being dedicated to "the truth."

No, we didn't have more rational policy and reasoned debate back then. There never was a Golden Age of civil debate, even if you go all the way back to ancient Athens. Read the newspapers of century ago; the invective was more furious, the slanders more vile, the demagogery more numb-skulled than even today. Even Jesus was sold out by the mob . . . so why should you be surprised, if things are no better now?

Nor has the populace at large changed that much, either, for all of our television sets. Television was merely quantitative -- not qualitative -- advancement in mind-numbing technology. Before television, we had booze, and cards, and dice, and burlesque shows, and many other methods of pleasantly stifling the activity of our neurons. You needn't lecture me on the evils of television -- believe me, Al, I'm with you on that one -- but don't for a moment presume that, if you took away their televisions and gave them all blogs, you would have a nation of philosopher kings.

And don't think I'm putting down the intellect, Al. I'm a nerd, too. I believe in brain-power. I want to believe that the geek will inherit the earth. But that is not human nature, Al. Go back and read your Hume: reason is the handmaid of emotion, and not the other way around. Or, as Augie Turak puts it in more modern language: "Intellect has no oomph." People might be persuaded by intellect, but they are not motivated by intellect. Motivation is a phenomena of the imagination, desires and emotions . . . and politics is ultimate game of mass-motivation. Do not be deceived by raw intelligence, or the lack thereof. Political power always belonged to those who were long on conviction and brief on their talking points. Reagan was the "three-by-five card President" . . . and Clinton was the stay-on-message candidate who forsook analysis for "It's the economy, stupid."

Flushed Away

2007-05-21T05:15:00.000-04:00

Flushed Away embodies the battle for animation's soul. The film has two parents: Aardman, the astoundingly clever creators of Wallace & Gromit who demonstrated the power of strong story-telling and sophisticated wit a decade before Pixar even existed; and DreamWorks, the also-ran of animation that produces four or five forgettable, regretable features for every Shrek. Flushed Away is every bit as entertaining as any of Aardman's previous features, and yet sadly shows signs of both legacies.

I can only imagine how the conversations might have gone with the producers:

Aardman: "Ok, so then, the stove falls through the floor, and behind it is a cockroach, and he has a pipe in his mouth and he's reading Kafka's Metamorphesis, and he says, 'A new stove would be nice.' "
DreamWorks: ". . . I don't get it."
Aardman: "Well, you know . . . Metamorphesis . . . cockroaches . . . "
DreamWorks: "Seems a little weak. Why don't we have one of the kids hit Roddy in the nuts with a soccer ball?"
Aardman: "You mean . . . a football?"
DreamWorks: "Whatever. But before that, Roddy falls off the drain pipe and lands on his nuts on a drainpipe . . . and then, slides off of that, lands on another drain pipe on his nuts, slides off of that and lands on a spoon handle on his nuts, and then finally hits the ground and groans."
Aardman: "..."
DreamWorks: "You can still do your cockroach thing. Just keep hitting the rats in the nuts."

Clearly DreamWorks felt compelled to foul out to a PG rating (for "crude humor and strong language") for fear that media-drenched ten-year-olds couldn't enjoy anything remotely subtle. Or perhaps their notion of animated humor really is limited to the bathroom variety, sprinkled with heavy-handed pop-culture references.

And yet, over all, the spirit of Aardman prevailed. Thank God they stuck to their British roots, using real British talent (Kate Winslet and Hugh Jackman), a London setting, and British humor (including the traditional digs at the French and, suprisingly, ugly Americans). One sequence with a frog mime and a cell phone left me gasping for breath, it was so incredibly original. I will gladly tolerate the belches and farts and pratfalls to get to such marvelously clever payoffs.

Trust, integrity, and higher education

2007-05-20T14:07:00.000-04:00

Time Magazine described the new high-tech means students use to plagiarize essays for their assignments (e.g. affordabletermpapers.com) and the counter-measures that universities are using to suss out the cheaters (e.g. turnitin.com). Some students have objected to their own papers being added to turnitin.com's massive database of term papers that it uses to identify non-original work, claiming their intellectual property is being scooped up without their consent. Why, they ask, should some for-profit company make money off their work? Some professors, too, were skeptical about pursuing draconian measures to catch cheaters, fearing it might actually undermine the honor code spirit that insists and expects ethical behavior from its students.

Two questions arise from this debate: can high-tech anti-cheating measures be taken (is it technically and legally possible), and should they be taken (is it morally correct and realistically advisable to do so)? I hope the answer to both is obvious.

As far as the legal case goes . . . those students are dreaming if they think they can squeeze concessions from turnitin.com. No expectation of copyright control ever existed before in the schools, so it's useless to pretend it does now. Reading a text in order to identify possible plagiarism is going to be way, waaaay inside the bounds of "fair use" in copyright law, anyway. Any school that wants to cover its butt can simply make the non-expectation explicit: "When you turn in your papers, you give us the right to share it with whomever we please to verify it's originality." Case closed. If students still feel like they want to opt out of such a system, let them vote with their feet: transfer to a school that doesn't use the systems. Or, perhaps, let them come up with their own alternative for verifying the originality of their papers -- like, say, writing them in a controlled test room . . . and paying the fees of the proctors who administer them. I have a feeling all the high-minded objections from students would vanish if they were actually asked to pay to defend their precious term papers.

Should we try to catch the cheaters? This is a slam-dunk for reducto ad absurdum. If you think that rigorously pursuing cheaters will compromise a spirit of integrity, we might as well close down all the police stations, disban the SEC, and dismantel all the accounting firms' audit departments while we're at it. A presumption of individual innocence does not mean a presumption of collective innocence. We know that over half of students admit to cheating at some point in their college careers. Anyone who wants to defend the validity of their grades should be willing to accept a level of oversight . . . especially if it's as non-invasive as an automated plagiarism test. It's like the sleazy suspect on Law & Order who refuses to provide a DNA sample -- they claim all kinds of high-falutin' moral reasons for refusing an invasion of privacy . . . while the police, and the entire audience with them, says, "Uh-huh. Something to hide, huh?"

What I find even more sad is that people don't see how terribly important these ethical matters are. Academic misconduct is not a small matter. Look around at all the countries were free civil society has completely broken down: Iraq, third-world Africa, etc. The common denominator in all these places is corruption. Once corruption becomes commonplace and accepted as a part of life, you are condemned to world in which there is no trust at all . . . which is to say, a world in which all collective effort for collective good is utterly doomed. Is this what we want to school our children in? That success can be bought? That all that matters is what you can get away with? That personal success and fortune matters more than personal integrity and goodness? If corruption (and that's what we should call it -- not cheating, not misconduct, but corruption) prevails in the university, we will have planted the seeds of our society's destruction.

I also think, coincidentally, that this whole debate only exposes the arbitrary, unrealistic, totally bogus nature of most school assignments and tests. I heard of a Duke business school teacher who told his students: "In my classes, anyone who is asked for help, and refuses to give it, is a cheater." The dean of the school heard of this policy, rushed to his office and said, "We can't have this. What kind of a world do think this would be if everybody went around helping everyone else?" (Beat . . . .wait for laughter.) If, instead of working on individual essays that are canned and arbitrary, students worked collectively on real-life problems with real-world benefactors, the problem of cheating would not be so much of an issue.

Writing as a Spiritual Discipline . . . no, Really

2007-05-19T22:12:00.000-04:00

I was pitching some SKS students on a collaborative spiritual blog, and one of them raised a concern: "I would think that constantly publishing your thoughts would be egotistical, and be counter to an attitude of humility and service." Granted, he had just come back from many months with the brothers at Mepkin Abbey, who probably would find a blog to be somewhat self-aggrandizing. But I wanted to take the question head-on: of what spiritual value is blogging?

Public exposure can kill egos as well as create them. Public forums, and constant exposure to your peers, is actually less likely to inculcate intractable egotism than staying isolated. Other people pick up on your egotism far faster than you will . . . and they are usually only too glad to point it out. If your egotistical monologue remains only in your head, it can live their for decades unchecked. But if it expresses itself out in the open, at least it's more likely to be challenged and deflated. This is one of the primary directives in the whole SKS philosophy that Augie Turak has articulated for decades: you need a group of peers in a spiritual search, to provide a check against the untrammelled ego as well as providing general support and fellowship.
Some truths only emerge clearly when put into words. I think it was Socrates who said, in essence, "If you can't say it, you don't know it." I have often started blog entries with a firm opinion in mind, only to ditch them halfway because I realized my arguments sucked. I have been accused (usually behind my back) of (gasp) talking too much. Ironicially, it's not necessarily because I think I have a lot to say. Rather, I figure out half of what I'm really thinking by saying it. By blogging, at least, I'm sparing some poor souls the burden of politely listening to my half-baked ideas.
People perform better for an audience. Almost all performers (actors, musicians, etc.) will tell you that a good audience makes all the difference in giving a good performance. Audiences can evoke the best in the performance, literally giving them a reason to give their all to the performance. I would never put as much effort into my writing if I didn't know it was actually being read.
You actually have a duty to share. You have to share what you've learned with others. That's part of the formula for spiritual enlightenment, according to Augie's teacher Richard Rose, among many others. True, you may only be saying something someone else said, much better, at a different time and place. That really doesn't matter. For someone, it's probably still new, and better than what they heard before.
Writing is continuous meditation. Writing makes you engage life more completely. I read more, listen more, think more, reflect more, for the sake of my writing. None of these things is spiritual in and of itself, but the spiritual path is just a continuous attempt to "keep your head on it," to keep your attention focused on the truth.

Go forth and consume

2007-05-18T05:32:00.000-04:00

In the first session of a poetry writing class in college, Jerry Barrax asked us, "What are you reading? Who are your favorite poets?" A few students ventured to say that they didn't read much poetry, although they liked to write it. "I'm really not much interested in what you're writing," Jerry said, some edge in his voice. "I'm much more interested in what you're reading. Because if you want to write poetry, you need to read poetry. A lot of poetry. And not just the classics from half a century ago . . . you need to read contemporary poetry. You need to know what your peers are doing."

That stuck with me. Jerry is a poet who believes in craft -- that good writing is much more a matter of skill and experience than inspiration. Nor was Jerry alone in the advice he offered. In a possibly apocrophal story, when J.D. Salinger was last sighted (a truly rare occurrance) by an aspiring writer who asked him for advice, he simply said, "Read." The Pultizer-winning playwright Marsha Norman advised writers to keep their current work relatively private ("Don't talk the play away") but otherwise to read voraciously. "Read at least four hours a day, and don't let anyone ask you why you're doing that instead of writing."

I think the advice could be generalized: if we want to create, we need to consume. If you're writing a blog, you'd better be reading other bloggers . . . and looking for new blogs all the time. If you want to get an online community going, you'd best participate in a bunch of other online communities to see what works and what doesn't. And if you want to create a spiritual community, you'd better see what other spiritual communities are doing. I see (in myself, anyway) the same sort of egotistical parochialism among spiritual seekers that dogs would-be writers. Sometimes we are so sure of our own wisdom that we don't allow ourselves to be educated by a wider world.

Let God sort 'em out

2007-05-17T05:35:00.000-04:00

Well, I had a nice neat post prepared to follow up on my post on inclusivity and exclusivity, but Joanna stole most of my thunder. Communities interested in growth and stability should be wide open at the entry-level, but then set and enforce communal standards that make membership ultimately self-selecting.

Another analogy to use (if it doesn't seem to crass in spiritual contexts) is that of sales. (Augie Turak, God bless 'em, is a consummate salesman and the first and last spiritual teacher I've ever found to unabashedly use business language in a spiritual context.) Most businesses try to make it as easy as possible to engage their products; they even come to you to tell you about them, in advertising, phone calls and appointments. At some point, though, potential customers are qualified, and the qualification process usually requires an increased commitment from the prospect (answering more questions, getting on waiting lists, making deposits, undergoing credit checks, etc.) until they finally buy. A community goes through the same process, reaching out widely to new prospective members but eventually going through some kind of qualification process before ultimately demanding a commitment.

Sounds good on paper. But all the art and science of business and culture hangs on where you set those threshholds and standards, and how you communicate and enforce them. You can describe the essential nature of a community by the following factors:

How much commitment does it require? Some communities, like a pick-up basketball game, are ephemeral and don't require much commitment at all. Others, like a basketball league, require much more commitment. Usually, greater rewards require greater commitment.
How are the standards communicated? Some communities have very explicit standards: written policies, rulebooks, codes of conduct, etc. Others have more implicit expectations: e.g. nobody said you have to bring some food to the party, but it's still expected.
How are the standards enforced? Some communities have designated enforcers: authorities that let people in or kick people out, according to explicit or implicit criteria. Others have peer-enforced standards; other members exert pressure to get people to comply. Sometimes standards are enforced explicitly ("Congratulations! You have been admitted to Duke University") or implicitly (you stop getting invitations to the parties.)

Successful communities can be found throughout the spectrums of commitment, communication and enforcement. (If I was more industrious I would give lots more examples, but I will leave it as an exercise for the reader.) But if you're going to try to consciously build a new community, you probably need to figure out where you're going to stand on all these factors.

Inclusivity, Exclusivity

2007-05-16T05:19:00.000-04:00

As the SKS beefs up its online presence over the summer, I've been ruminating on inclusivity and exclusivity as factors in building a community. Inclusivity is a value normally associated with the progressive liberal: we want institutions and communities that are inclusive, that don't reject people out of hand, for all the wrong reasons (race, sex, gender, etc.). Inclusivity also happens to be one of those values with a certain amount of theological grounding to it: Jesus made a big deal about accepting those who were rejected, and sweeping aside the usual boundaries for who was worthy of your love and concern. So it seems sensible that a spiritual community (virtual or otherwise) would want to be reaching out and pulling people in. The power of radical inclusivity has been demonstrated by the likes of the Wikipedia. By rejecting all notions of "who's an expert," and letting the masses participate to whatever extent they feel like, the Wikipedia has become a staggeringly huge resource of scholarship, comparable in quality to the "exclusive" club of Britannica authors and vastly bigger.

"On the other hand . . ." (as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof might say) we are hard-put to define a community that has any meaning at all unless we draw certain boundaries. When examining the unbridled, innocent liberalism of his parents, Barack Obama's critique was: "If everyone is family, then no one is family." In a world of limited resources (especially our time and attention), we have to make value decisions, and that inevitably leads us to put some people ahead of others. St. Paul did an awful lot of work to cultivate the standards of the early Christian community. The Christians were supposed to love everyone, but they were supposed to really love (and help) their fellow believers. Exclusive standards exist in every major institution -- education, business, politics -- to insure that you don't waste your time on people who are not equally committed to the same values and goals that you are. Exclusivity is demonstrated in other online phenomena, such as social networks: we still pick our friends and mates, and we like to think that's a pretty exclusive club.

So how to we synthesize inclusivity and exclusivity as real values? I still don't have the answer, but I suspect the meta-rules for inclusivity and exclusivity do exist and are active in all communities. More on this later.

High Concept

2007-05-15T06:59:00.000-04:00

The technology section of yesterday's Wall Street Journal blared, "How to be a Star in a YouTube World." That's a nice hook -- everyone who does anything online is trying to find the magic combination of factors that makes a website, blog, video series, podcast, etc. find an audience. And therein is the secret -- the hook.

In a world of infinite options, with a text-based search engine to sift through it, popularity (or at least instant popularity) belongs to the describable. You want to rise high in Google merely on the virtue of your content? You'd better have the right keywords that describe exactly what you are, so that someone can read approximately twenty words of text and decide to click. You want to get a buzz going in the social networks? You need to be easily talked about. People don't rave about things they can't describe.

Having a hook is a gift to the clever marketer, and also the doom of subtlty. I have been perpetually frustrated that the most incredibly valuable things fail to get popular, because they don't neatly fit into the mental categories to facilitate easy description. Augie Turak is an incredible spiritual teacher, psychologist, and philosopher . . . and yet he doesn't get nearly as much press as he deserves. Part of it, I'm sure, is that he's complex and subtle, so much so that a market agent wouldn't quite know what shelf to put his book on. He's definitely not New Age . . . but he's not traditional religious "inspirational" either. He's not a Buddhist, although much of his philosophy is described as "Zen." He's not exactly Christian, in spite of his powerful award-winning essay about the monks of Mepkin Abbey. He's a businessman, but his philosophy transcends business. What Google AdWords are you going to buy for that?

More significantly, his is a challenging philosophy, in the literal sense. He gives people headaches. He kicks them in them in the ass. It might be the best kick in the ass you ever get . . . but people don't burble excitedly on MySpace when they get their heads handed to them. Usually they just sulk. He is similar to Kierkegaard in that respect -- tremendous thinker, super-influential, but he didn't make any friends in the Church for the sake of his scathing critiques of the prevailing apathy in so-called spiritual communities.

It also has implications for my own blog, as well. Abandon Text! was literally the first thing that popped into my head. Now that I'm finding some direction and motivation to do an explicitly spiritually-oriented blog, some rebranding is in order. Stay tuned.

On the Waterfront

2007-05-14T04:20:00.000-04:00

Since Marlon Brando appears in two films that are long-standing part of SKS fare -- Apocalypse Now and The Godfather -- I figured it made sense to go back and watch his earlier stuff. We watched On the Waterfront, the 1954 classic about a washed-up boxer standing up to a corrupt union boss.

Everyone remembers "I coulda been a contenda," and it is a great scene, when Terry Malloy confronts his older brother about their shared compromises. Brando is very convincing as a sensitive brute, miles ahead of King Kong and other shlocky attempts to make the less-civilized morally superior. Ahh, that was in a time when films dared to be more subtle, when men could have touchingly intimate scenes with nary a hug, and every drop of romantic tension had to be squeezed from the heroine's lovely face, since the only on-screen consummation would be a kiss.

What stuck with me was a scene much less commented on, when one of Terry's young friends kills off all of pigeons Terry had cared for since the death of their owner, another man who broke the omerta. "A pigeon for a pigeon!" he cries, crying and visibly heartbroken. There was almost more pathos in the murder of a few birds than in the death of Terry's own brother. The slaughter of innocents by an innocent, in the name of a morally bankrupt code of silence . . . now that's complex. Perhaps the boy did it willingly, feeling utterly betrayed by his hero . . . or perhaps he did it reluctantly, afraid to be associated so closely with a turncoat. We don't know; Terry says simple, "Aw, what he have to do that for?" His sympathy is not (thank God) merely for the birds, but rather for the loss of the boy's innocence, the making of another sensitive brute. That scene is the moral pivot-point for the whole movie, more so than even his decision to testify in court. "I'm gonna go down there, and get my rights." That's when he goes past knee-jerk notions of loyalty and finds real principle. That's the moment when he transcends mere revenge and moves into self-sacrifice.

Ah, sacrifice. What with the priest's impassioned speech in the hold of ship, calling a stoolie's death "a crucifixion," I thought for sure that Terry was not long for this world. It wasn't clear, by Hollywood storytelling standards, whether Terry was culpable enough in the mob killings to deserve to die, but with so much Christ-like prefiguring I thought it was a sure thing he'd go down. He does get sold by the mob, a scourging by the soldiers, a stumbling walk on the way to redemption . . . but miraculous resurrection instead of death.

The Essential Mom

2007-05-13T16:07:00.000-04:00

What makes a good mom? We might as well talk about "what makes a good person" . . . but still, there are some essential things a good mother does:

Set the expectation for how the world will treat us. While we come into the world with lots of our own nature, we do not come into the world with any self-concept. The way we learn to think of ourselves is the way we are regarded by our mothers. It's the only model we have. My mother gave us the most remarkable thing, which was her time. We sensed it when we were young, but I've grown to know it as I became older: my mother could do anything she wanted to do . . . but she chose to spend her time on us. And she pretty much expected us to be the same way. I grew up really believing I could do most anything, too. Sure, I had my share of neurosis as well (if you could do anything, you better not screw it up) but that seems a small price to pay for confidence-at-the-core.
Set the template for all human relationships. The relationship with your mother is the first relationship you ever have. It is the template upon which all other relationships are based. Ours was not a very touchy-feely, intimate sort of home, but there was a prevailing sense of respect and dignity. We were spoken to with respect, and we freely gave it back. I wasn't even aware of it until I was at a friend's house and I saw him behave like a total ass to his mother. I remember thinking, "I would never treat my mother that way," closely followed by, "Nor would she ever stand for it." My mom cultivated an iron-fist-in-silk-glove reputation, or what Augie would describe as: "She's a really, really nice person; just don't piss her off." That basic attitude -- to be fair to all, but nobody's doormat -- is still my ideal (though temperamentally I'm much softer than that, for all my occasional shrillness.)
Set the example for how to meet the world. Our parents' ways become our own. Both may parents are paragons of frugality and ingenuity, a sort of Depression-era MacGyver. I prefer to do for myself, and when I can't to do without. I save money rather than spend it. Middle-class to our bones, we are embarrassed by extravagence, unless it is particularly clever extravagence. We have faith in work.

So, what do mothers do? They are, quite literally, our World. How we see ourselves, others, and the whole of existence begins in that one essential relationship.

I think mine did a pretty good job.

The real Symposium

2007-05-12T23:17:00.001-04:00

When people hear "Self Knowledge Symposium," they usually think of symposium in its academic usage: a conference at which several speakers present on a given subject. But, from the beginning, we always intended it in its original Greek usage: a really good party with impassioned intellectual discussion. We had one of those last night: people from all three local student groups got together just to hang out . . . which is the best way to have the best conversations about things that really matter.

"I think Eckhart Tolle entirely misses the point," proclaimed Augie, beer in hand. "Five pages into his book, he says, 'I reached a point of utter despair that led to a catclysmic experience' . . . and then he spends the rest of the book talking about his meditation techniques! It was the despair that gave him the experience, not the mediation! Nothing wrong with his techniques, they're probably better than most, but that's not the essential part. That's the problem these days: nobody's talking about passion."

Well, not entirely true . . . there are some teachers and traditions that talk about passion. Andrew Cohen put "singleness of intention" at the very top of his teaching: "You have to want enlightenment more than anything else." And Nisargadatta was pretty explicit about it as well: "Earnestness is all." But his point is still valid, when you consider the spiritual landscape in general, especially in America. Everyone keeps acting like spiritual insight is the product of the correct techniques and practices, instead of the motivation and drive that brings the person to the practices in the first place.

But that was only just the opening argument for the evening. I talked with people about the dynamic tension of exclusivity versus inclusivity in spiritual communities . . . the virtues of different media for spiritual communication . . . the value of public communication for routing out egos . . . the creeping conservatism of age. I got enough to blog about for a week, from just a few hours with the right people. I only wish I could do it every night.

The Once and Future Blog

2007-05-11T05:29:00.000-04:00

The Self Knowledge Symposium really needs a blog. For most of this past year I've been thinking about it, and I think the time has finally come to start making it happen.

Why does SKS need a blog?

The website needs content. We've got some cool stuff on the site, but cool stuff is usually only enough for one or two visits. If you want people to keep coming, and remain engaged in what you're doing, you need to give them a reason to come. Nothing wrong with having a cyber-brochure, but that was never our vision. We really wanted something that reflected the nature of our community: dynamic, participatory, something with a spine and an organizing principle but still open-ended and continually emerging.
Alumni need a way to engage. We've had many, many students come through our student communties, and then go on to remarkable lives . . . usually somewhere else. We try to keep tabs on our alumni, send them mailings and announcements, make them feel like a part of what we're doing, but when all your contact is one-way and group-initiated, it's extremely time-intensive and inefficient. We need to give the alumni a way they can really participate in what's going on. As both readers and guest writers, a blog gives them that avenue for active participation. We've had some remarkable email threads in the past that accomplished the same end, but they were sporadic and ephemeral.
Student groups need visible center to look towards. The campus groups tend to become isolated from one another unless something pulls them together. Sometimes it's easy to forget that there's a larger world of fellow-seekers out there. A blog could keep students engaged on a daily basis, too, which helps supplement weekly meetings to keep students constantly engaged.
Bite-sized content. The virtue of blogs (good ones, anyway) is that they provide "snack" content. It's small and easily consumed. Our current content is usually much longer: essays and white papers of several thousand words. As good as that content may be, it doesn't lend itself to online consumption, especially by newcomers. Blogs give a glimpse of style and content, enough to intrigue and engage, without overwhelming the reader.
Bite-sized contributions. Big content takes a big time investment. When we published The Symposium magazine, we discovered that getting people to write 3000-word articles required extreme forms of torture and duress. The end product was good, but it was always hard-won. We burned out a lot of good, creative souls bringing that magazine to press. Blogs, however, can (and should) be written in a single sitting. It's something small enough that even a busy person can contribute to it. And publication is instant, automated, and entirely non-centralized . . . so we can both produce content and get it out the door without meetings, budgets, and other pain-in-the-butt logistics. Low-threshhold contibution might seem like a (literally) small thing, but the vast wealth of content in the Wikipedia was built the same way: small, incremental additions by a distributed network of interested parties.
Leveraged effort. Of course, the usual reasons for putting stuff on the web still apply: the world gets to see it. If people are talking about good books, sharing experiences, planning their lives, arguing about weighty issues, and doing all that SKS stuff, I'd like to can it and get it out to whomever might find it.
Very cool. I'm excited about it. When I started blogging I didn't know where it would take me; I just knew I needed to start writing. But I did expect it to take me somewhere, and ultimately tie back into the spiritual work. This feels like the next step. Stay tuned.

Five Commencement Speech Ideas

2007-05-10T07:29:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine is giving a commencement speech this weekend. She's a fine writer, but "commencement speech" is a pretty broad canvas, and you don't get a lot of direction to channel your creativity. So here are some starting points, for her and all those commencement speakers sweating out a last-minute address:

"In my end is my beginning." (from T.S. Eliot's The Four Quartets) The metaphor of education as a "journey" is so hackneyed it will have audiences asleep in no time. But you might be able to recover the metaphor if you approach it as T.S. Eliot did: "And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time." We aren't trying to get somewhere, so much as we're trying to find out who we really are.
"Summa Cum Laude." As I discussed in a previous post, many students have performed well in school, striving to get the grades and the praise of their parents and teachers, but have yet to come to terms with the inherent ambiguity in life. No one will be handing out grades any more . . . are you ready to deal with that?
"Don't Be Evil." The Google corporate motto captures a popular reaction to an increasingly ambitious, achievement-oriented society. School teaches us how to do things; it doesn't necessarily teach us what things are really worth doing. Graduates move into a world with an ethical dimension in everything; they have to figure out what's worth doing. If they don't, the run the risk of chasing more achievements for achievements' sake, possibly at the expense of real goodness.
"Things You're Not Supposed to Say at Commencement." If you're feeling really bold, you can try to tackle all the difficult topics that are usually taboo at commencement. Are you prepared to be a good parent? Will you sacrifice your family for the sake of your career? Are you prepared to start a completely different career within five years? If graduating from Duke is such a big accomplishment, why do I still feel confused, scared, and unfulfilled? (I don't think you want to pummel people with too many hard, unpleasant questions on a day of celebration, but it might build some credibility and interest if you actually ask questions the graduates are actually asking themselves.)
"Gratitude." Rather than slathering on advice that will most likely be forgotten after five minutes anyway, it might be better to lead the students into an experience. The most important emotion to feel at this moment is not pride, or excitement, or ambition, but gratitude. You could spend twenty minutes merely recounting everything that had to happen for you to be standing here at this minute, starting with the Big Bang and the origin of life, up to your own parents sacrifices and your own, and all the aspects of our free society that made it possible. Just stop and say, "(wow)."

Sizing up Obama

2007-05-09T03:50:00.000-04:00

The New Yorker had a detailed profile of Barack Obama this past week ("The Conciliator," by Larissa MacFahquhar, May 7, 2007), which helped fill in my picture of the person and the candidate. Some impressions:

I was especially pleased that he was described as "freakishly comfortable with himself." Politicians tend to be Enneagram Threes (performers dying to please) or Eights (charismatic powerhouses), and Obama breaks the mold by being low-key, reflective, and really well integrated in his being. Some political observers wonder whether that is entirely a good thing for his campaign -- what sane, well-integrated person would ever embark on a national political campaign? -- but I'm sure it is the secret to his status as a political phenome.
I also was glad that he was confirmed to be a true "regular guy." Most politicians have larger-than-life notions of themselves and have to strain to pretend to be a regular guy; they seize upon the props, the hot dog and the coat over the shoulder, to look like a regular guy. Obama, amazingly, is a regular guy. Part of that stems from the fact that Obama struggled his entire life to become that regular Midwestern black man, securing an identity for himself outside of his turbulent upbringing.
The article correctly identified the source of his cross-party appeal: he talks about liberal causes with conservative language. Someone with a conservative philosophy will not have an allergic reaction to his rhetoric, and still have the feeling of moral uplift by being "the good guy" who is trying to help the poor and the downtrodden. He really is the "compassionate conservative" that Republicans have tried to become in the last few years.
Just because someone has great appeal as a person does not mean he is necessarily the right person to vote for. I could easily be seduced by Obama for his personal bearing, his personal story, and his conservative outlook, but not be entirely happy with his governance. Critics have said his voting record is about as liberal as they come.
Still, what comforts me the most is that his notion of progress is slow, careful, and incremental. His policy proposals are strikingly modest and realistic. And actually, I think that's what our federal policy needs right now -- a tiny nudge to the left, not a swing. At least that would be better than what we have now: Republicans who fail to deliver on a truly conservative platform of fiscal responsibility.

Darned smart people

2007-05-08T11:30:00.000-04:00

"The State of Things" will be discussing the in-state tuition waiver for graduates of the North Carolina School of Science today at noon. Evidently, some legislators want to do away with the benefit. As an alumni of NCSSM (Class of '88), I feel obliged to listen in and defend it.

As I understand it, the waiver was enacted to do two things:

Increase competitive enrollment in the school. Many prospective students saw that going to NCSSM would give them a better education, but it would most likely hurt their college prospects. If you were at the top of your class at your old high school (as many NCSSM students were), you would be surrending a top class rank and GPA, and probably a lock on the school's nomination for the big in-state scholarships like the Caldwell and the Morehead. At NCSSM there is no class rank; you take a tougher course load, and your grades are inevitably less than what they would have been before. Many students (or their parents) decide that remaining the big fish in the small pond with have greater benefits for them. The tuition waiver helps remove some of that concern.
Keep graduates in-state. The graduates of NCSSM are much more likely to remain in the state if they go to school here. By enticing them to the state university, the state keeps more of its educational investment in the local economy.

I graduated long before the tuition waiver was enacted, so I never had the benefit of free tuition to our state schools, although I did attend N.C. State. So I imagine that many will argue, "Hey, we didn't need to give them that benefit before, and we don't need to do it now." And, to be honest, there is some truth to it. I didn't need a guaranteed scholarship to want to go to NCSSM. I was in a backwoods high school where football reigned supreme and science geeks were at the bottom of the social ladder. I jumped at the chance to get out of there, and go to school with people who valued what I valued.

Still, I imagine the current attacks on the waive are similar in tone to the attacks on the whole concept of the school itself: "Those darned smart kids don't need no help. Give the money to the poorest, the lowest, not the best and brightest." Elitism is always a tough sell, politically.

Tough, but not impossible. I do happen to believe in a meritocracy. I think educational dollars should belong to those who will make the most of them. NCSSM was a demonstration of an educational free market: I had a choice of where I wanted to go to school, and I voted with my feet. Students access to superior education should not be limited by where they happen to live.

Not So Big Life

2007-05-07T23:16:00.001-04:00

Today I heard Sarah Susanka, of The Not So Big House fame, on the local NPR station's talk show, "The State of Things." I had read her books before, and like many, many people I alternated between marveling at the profound simplicity of her advice ("why build a house with rooms you don't use") and the sheer beauty of her home designs.

While I resonated with her philosophy of making our surroundings conform to our real values, I had no idea she was as spiritually-minded as she had turned out to be. Her latest book, The Not So Big Life, looks like so much of the SKS work: hard-core contemplative philosophy, stripped of its cultural baggage and packaged for a mass audience. As I listened to her on the radio, I thought, "This is classic Vedanta. This is awareness meditation. She might as well be reading Eckhart Tolle on the air." I was surprised she was getting as much traction as she was, with such bona fide spiritual content. There was a small voice inside me griping about how she wasn't citing her sources; it seems untruthful to not acknowledge that these ideas have roots in other places, and didn't just emerge wholly formed from one's own head. But it was a small voice; she would not be the first person to take universal truths and present them as, well, universal.

I called into the show and asked her if she came upon these ideas in the context of a spiritual path. She said that she had, and that she considered herself a "spiritual mutt" because she had explored many spiritual traditions without identifying with any one. (At least, I think that's what she said -- they cut off my phone connnection the moment she started to answer the question, so I missed the first part of her answer.)

Mostly I was just deeply impressed with how well she articulated the ideas, and how she spoke with personal as well as theoretical understanding. I will be very interested to see how well this book does, and how it's received.

If I grow old before I wake . . .

2007-05-06T10:44:00.001-04:00

The New Yorker had a fascinating article on aging, and how we (fail to) cope with it. ("The Way We Age Now," Atul Gawande, April 30, 2007.) The delusion of the young is that they will live forever; the delusion of the middle-aged is that they will never grow old. It seems conceivable to us that life will someday end; we make estate plans, buy life insurance, arrange for succession in our roles. But very few seem able to accept simple diminishment -- the fact that we will inevitably lose more and more of our physical and mental powers.

I think, ultimately, the ego finds death less threatening than diminishment. Why else would a "live hard, die young, make a pretty corpse" philosophy ever arise? We will readily embrace a kamikaze death if it establishes our eternal meaning and purpose, an expression of our being at it's highest state. But to diminish . . . to have our abilities robbed slowly, until we spend our days either dozing or shuffling around in confusion -- that is intolerable. And so we pretend it will never happen to us.

And while the evidence of anyone cheating death is sketchy at best, there are at least a few examples of individuals cheating age. We love to read about 90-year-olds running marathons or amassing fortunes or still having some decent looks. It gives us hope that with the right medicine, the right vitamins, and a little bit of luck we could live pretty much as we do now, our entire lives.

Alas, the exceptions are indeed exceptional. The best most of us can hope for is to postpone, not evade, the ravages of age. And while that might be something very good, it's not as much as we were hoping for. When we exercise and eat low-fat and go to the doctor, we want to be supermen in our eighties, not merely mobile and self-sufficient. But that's what you're working for: just hang on to the basics for as long as you can, because life gets very difficult once you lose them.

And the secrets to aging well are not exactly secret, either. It's the same things the doctor tells you to do now, and which you routinely ignore: get more exercise, eat more fresh vegetables, work on your flexibility, floss your teeth. And maybe a few things he doesn't tell you: stay involved, work as long as you can, avoid isolation, have lots of friends. If you find yourself saying, "I don't really have time for those things right now," remember that the time will come when you have nothing but time. Really . . . nothing . . . but time. Are you ready for that?

Do I have to think about "have to"?

2007-05-05T19:55:00.001-04:00

Yesterday was all the abstract philosophical stuff about "have to," the projection of necessity upon our daily situations. But what I didn't really talk about was the personal . . .

I confess there are times when I've felt like Gil Buckman in Parenthood: "My whole life is 'have to.'" A neurotic, performance-minded guy, I've always felt an inexorable pressure (wholely self-generated) to meet certain standards of success and to be liked and admired by all. Since it is wholely impossible to please everybody, and probably not even desirable, it makes for a life of constant frustration and tension. I spend a lot of time feeling like I "have to" do things that are not achievable.

Fortunately, I have had a few bosses who have helped me past those hang-ups. The conversation always goes something like this:
"I have to do X for so-and-so."
"Why?"
"Because if I don't he's not going to be happy."
"So . . . ? Let him be unhappy. It's more important to do Y."
"Oh . . . I guess you're right."

When you're working too hard to please all the wrong people, you tend to get burned out. Burnout = no joy in your work = everything is "have to." You work out of duty, or habit, or sense of obligation, rather than whatever motivated you to the work in the first place. And that can be deadly.

When talking about building spiritual communities with Augie Turak, he told me, "All I know is that nothing really creative and powerful can happen until people are working on things they really want to do. So ask yourself, 'What do I want to do?' And then go do it."

In my spiritual life, in my career, and in my life in general, I'm at a point where it makes sense to ask, "What do I really want to do? What kind of life do I really want to have?" I've lived out most of my life driven by a sense of necessity; to see my path as freely chosen is an altered state of consciousness.

Do I Have To?

2007-05-04T18:10:00.001-04:00

So, yesterday I suggested you consider the difference between "want to" and "have to," and question the motivation beneath "have to." I ran this experiment myself, and here's what I found:

"Have to" is a rhetorical way of removing choice from a situation. Although the truth of the matter is that we always freely choose our actions (and are therefore fully responsible for them), sometimes we take choice off the table.
Sometimes we are deliberately taking choice off the table. Sometimes there are good reasons to do so; we want to deny ourselves choice in certain circumstances, because we know we might make the wrong choice in if given the chance to do so. "I have to do my homework tonight" is another way of saying, "I have chosen to do my homework tonight, and the decision is not open for reconsideration." Sometimes our reasons for removing choice are not so good: "I have to have a drink now" takes a conscious moral decision and turns it into an inevitable consequence of powerful forces beyond one's control. Or, more sinisterly, "I have to; I have orders."
If "I have to" is freighted with all sorts of hidden meanings, then it is doubley so for "you have to." Someone can impose all kinds of restrictions on you with only the slightest of justification, by cloaking the command in the rhetoric of necessity: "You simply have to come to my party this weekend," or "You have to fill out this paperwork first." These rhetorical gambits are the equivalents of: "Do this, but I'm not telling you why." Listen to politicians and salesmen: they lace their speech with have to all the time, building urgency without having to make long explanations or justifications.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of this. I am not suggesting that you banish all have to language from your speech. I am suggesting, though, that you need to be conscious of how the language is being used, and what is being left unsaid. So much psychotherapy and marriage counselling is a long drawn-out process of the patient claiming, "I have to," and the the therapist asking, "Really? Why?" All kinds of flaws in reasoning are exposed, all kinds of misunderstandings eliminated, once the language of necessity is translated back into explicit motivations and purposes.

Necessity and Desire

2007-05-03T05:16:00.001-04:00

"I don't care if you want to do it, you have to do it."

How many times have you heard something like that? If you're a parent, you might find yourself even saying it dozens of times a day. And yet, Marshall Rosenberg's nonviolent communication insists that it's simply not true: there is no "have to."

"Nonsense," you say. "I have to do lots of things I don't want to do. I have to go to work. I have to get my kids to school. I have to brush my teeth. There's all kinds of things I have to do."

But what do we really mean when we say that? No one is holding a gun to your head, telling you to brush your teeth in the morning. You brush your teeth because you decided to do so. You consciously decided that you like have clean teeth, that you don't like having bad breath, and you definitely don't like going to the dentist and having your teeth drilled. You brush your teeth because it gives you something you want.

"Po-tay-to, Po-tah-to," you say. "It amounts to the same thing. I still have to do some things that aren't fun."

Maybe it is just semantics. Maybe it is "just" the way you express it. But why express it that way? Why would you want to take something freely chosen -- something you want to do -- and turn it into a compulsion -- something you have to do? One way of looking at it implies freedom and choice; the other, restriction and limitation. Why would you want to go through life seeing everything as forced? You may end up like Steve Martin's character Gil Buckman in Parenthood. When his wife asks him if he "has" to go to Little League practice, Gil snaps, "My whole life is "have to"!"

When you find yourself saying "have to," you have removed freedom from the situation. You probably just become disconnected from the real reasons you do what you do: you have literally forgotten why you do it. If you reconnect with those reasons, maybe it won't feel so forced. You often hear: "Ah, now I remember why I got into medicine to begin with," when someone reconnects with their original motivations.

If you can't find that original motivation, a compelling reason to want to do what you do . . . well, then, maybe you really don't want to do it. Shouldn't you stop doing it, then? If you can't find the reason, then you are, literally, doing things for no good reason.

It makes for a good mindfulness meditation. Every time you think "have to," stop and ask yourself, "Really? Why?" See what happens.

The thrill of victo- ! Shit.

2007-05-02T21:42:00.001-04:00

Today was the sort of day that led me astray into bad work habits. I stayed up late last night trying to fix up a program, in a desperate lunging attempt to regain a customer's confidence. I worked until my brain ceased to function, around 1:30 pm. I solved some difficult problems, the sort that leave you muttering to yourself, "I'm a genius." I crashed on the couch, and came to again around 4 am. I continued to work until 6:30 am, still obsessing over code and missing my optimal blog window. I did manage the rest of my morning routine. While everything wasn't perfect, the client was impressed with the progress we had made and very upbeat and positive. When I finally get off the phone around noon, my arms are raised in victory, and I go off to take a brief nap.

I cruised through the afternoon. Another customer had some issues, but I solve them fairly quickly and came off looking like a hero. I'm starting to think that I'm actually really good at what I do.

I take the kids out for ice cream after supper. As they run around a grassy field, smudges of chocolate around their lips and bundles of clover-flowers in their happy fists, I'm thinking that life couldn't be better. Only mild exhaustion clouded the experience. I went from good-tired to not-so-good tired to man-I'm-wiped in the space of an hour.

More phone calls came. More issues, more things to fix. But by that time I was too tired to care. I worked hard, won the day, and feel like I deserve to crash. Except . . . man, I didn't write this morning. And now my brain feels like it's been put in sidewise. Have I sold a little bit of my soul for another fleeting thrill?

Schedule check-in

2007-05-01T05:58:00.000-04:00

At the beginning of the year I committed to living according to a strict schedule, with all time accounted for and specific time committed to particular priorities. I hadn't written about it in a while, and people keep asking me how it's going, so I figured I'd check in.

Overall, it's going great. My morning routine is really solid: up and 5 am, write, exercise, shower & dress, breakfast with the family and get the kids out the door by 8 am. It hardly ever changes, and it makes life better for me. I find that writing first thing in the morning is vastly superior to writing during the day or late at night. I do it, I don't worry about it, and it's much easier and more enjoyable when the house is quiet, I'm rested, and focused. On the very few days that I haven't written first thing, I find it's much harder to find a good block of time to do it, and more difficult to stay focused on it to the end. Exercise has yielded tangible results: I shed about five pounds, my abs have the faintest ghost of six-pack-ness about them, and I feel pretty good.

Sleep . . . well, my sleep habits are much, much better than they used to be. I'm getting enough rest more days than not. I had a rough time through February and March when I was almost back to my old ways, pushing the limits of how little sleep I could function on. But I'm on the wagon again. What I've found is that between the ideal amount of sleep (when I ought to go to bed) and the point of exhaustion (when productivity becomes almost non-existant) is only maybe an hour or two, tops. I just can't get enough done in that time to justify feeling like hell the next day.

Work . . . that's the beast that refuses to die. I still don't have control of my work-time. The habits that led me to hit bottom on the scheduling front to begin with (over-committing, frantically working, falling short, leading to more over-committing, etc.) are still there. I've had to resort to more drastic means to support myself through the temptation to work more than I ought. I check in with my boss at the beginning of every day, to tell him the schedule and commit to sticking to it. I write up my billing notes every day, mostly as a means of confessing where the time actually went, and to get perspective on the schedule. I'm still working in the evenings, which I would eventually like to get away from entirely.

I have managed to give consistent time to the important-not-urgent things like the SKS and financial matters. I could, and should, have done a lot more with the SKS. Now that summer is here I will have to resist the temptation to ignore it entirely. At least I got the books entirely caught up with the taxes, and I'm starting to chip away at more long-term things: rolling over retirement accounts, reconciling investments, etc.

The Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff said, of spiritual work: "In the beginning: roses, roses! Later on: thorns, thorns!" It was his way of saying that the fruits of spiritual work are pleasant in the beginning: you shed some psychological burdens, you get healthier, you get happier, things feel great. But, as you delve deeper into demands of spiritual life, you start to feel the pinch: rather than being ego-affirming, the spiritual life becomes ego-reducing, which is experienced at the time as stress and trauma. My scheduled life is following the same arc: I had some easy and wonderful gains in the beginning, but now I am facing up to the challenge of cutting away things that I'm tightly identified. My work life will not change until I stop identifying so much with my work.

Jet Li's Fearless

2007-04-30T04:40:00.000-04:00

Ever since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won four Oscars in 2000, a whole new line of movies opened up for me: arty martial arts films my wife will actually watch with me. Since then we've seen House of Flying Daggers, Hero, and now Fearless. (Unfortunately, we have to call it "Jet Li's Fearless," lest it be confused with Jeff Bridges' 1993 film Fearless, which is also a good film with spiritual epiphanies, but with vastly fewer cool fights.)

What makes these films an entirely new genre? We can probably thank Ziyi Zhang for giving us beautiful heroines that can sustain romantic themes worthy of any chick-flick without slowing down the action. We can also credit Ang Lee for making art-house beautiful films (in Chinese with English subtext, no less) that take advantage of the ubiquitous bullet-time slow-motion to add a Zen-like clarity and visual depth. Not to mention complex plots that scramble time sequence and perspective in ways that Pulp Fiction and Memento pioneered. Oh, yeah, and genuinely spiritual themes, as opposed to the pseudo-spirituality served up by Kung Fu and its many successors. We've come a loooong way from Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris slug-fests.

Fearless is actually based on the true story of Huo Yuan Jia (1869-1910), the founder of the Jin Wu Sports Federation. Rather than lingering on the gravity-defying acrobatics of the new genre, this film works hard at historical accuracy in hair and dress, and the shows the gradual invasion of Western dress and culture in China at the turn of the century. The title comes from a quote from Lao Tzu, used as the film's tagline: "Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself makes you fearless." That may sound trite and hackneyed after Kung Fu got through with it, but that is, in fact, the theme of the film. Huo Yuan Jia is transformed from a foolish, ambitious, and angry young man into a master of genuine depth, and it really is about him mastering himself. There is no attempt to try to correlate spiritual understanding with fighting prowess, a la The Karate Kid. Just the opposite: as Huo Yahn Jia matures, he learns when not to fight, when to pull back, when to let go of revenge and hate. And if Taoist philosophy is not your bag, be comforted that the film loads up Huo with Christ imagery, including symbolic burial, resurrection, baptism, scourging, and heroic martyrdom.

The plot of the film is not complicated, and at times a little slow. Aside from its big arc and spiritual themes, it has its surprising moments. One scene that stuck with me is when, after his fall from grace, Huo is working in a rice paddy, and he is surprised to see all his fellow workers straighten up at one moment and stand perfectly still. A slight breeze has come up, and all the workers take that moment to allow themselves to be cooled. At first Huo is baffled, and he keeps on working at a frantic pace. Eventually, he too learns to stand still when the moment calls for stillness. Any American movie would feel compelled to comment on that scene; but here is is quietly offered up, as it is. It's those moments of stillness, between the action, that make the film interesting, and give more than just lip-service to notions of respect, understanding, and restraint.

Jackals and giraffes

2007-04-29T06:56:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I started watching a video of Marshall Rosenberg, the developer of Nonviolent Communication, a method for "compassionate" interaction that totally eschews moralistic judgements and seeks to get everyone's needs met without coersion. I had heard it mentioned in various Attachment Parenting circles . . . evidently it's AP-squared, an even more counter-cultural viewpoint on managing conflicts, especially with children. Janet had gone in on a set of training videos with a group of AP leaders, and when I was completely burned out on programming yesterday I decided to watch something totally squishy and psychological.

Rosenberg started talking in his seminar, and I was settling into the usual talking-head seminar mode, and then he said, "Here's a song that says what I mean," and he picked up a guitar and started singing. That totally blew me away. Of course I'm thinking, "Hey, why not sing a song to say what you mean? Perfectly valid media." Still, in our culture only Mister Rogers moves from didactic lecturing to singing a song without missing a beat. The effect was only intensified when Rosenberg put on a wolf handpuppet on one hand and a sheep puppet on the other hand. There he was sitting in a chair, talking about dehumanizing Nazi speech like any other academic, but he's got some freakin' puppets on his hands. He hadn't introduced the puppets yet, but that didn't stop him from making a few casual gestures with a sheep on one hand. It was mildly surreal.

And yet effective. Rosenberg talked about "jackal language," judgemental right/wrong, win/lose modes of talking frame situations as conflicts where none need exist. Then he moved on to "giraffe" language (he has a giraffe puppet, too) that comes from the heart (giraffes have really big hearts, evidently.) It's corny, but it works. Rosenberg offers these labels with a wry grin, and manages to simplify a complex idea without being condescending.

I'm interested in his approach. I'm sure I'll have lots of intellectual nits to pick, but it's clear that he's trying to accomplish something that is emphatically not about analytical judgement.

Questioning credentials

2007-04-28T06:43:00.001-04:00

I had written earlier about a revolt in the world of college admissions, and how the dean of admissions at MIT was trying to defuse a high-pressure system that encouraged people to exaggerate their credentials. Now, sadly, that very same dean of admissions has quit her job because she lied about her own credentials on her original resume for her first job with the school. And not a small lie, either . . . she fabricated three college degrees, when she had only attended college for one year and never graduated.

Jones must have been exceedingly popular and well-loved, because no one seems have a shred of schadenfreude for the incident, and the tone of everyone's announcements have been regret and sadness, not outrage and calls for reform. (Although someone, somewhere must have it in for her, since it was an anonymous phone call that tipped off the administration.)

When somebody screws up, and then we find out they falsified their credentials, people are outraged that an incompetent managed to dupe us. But the story is more complicated when someone who is obviously talented, highly skilled and very effective in their career turns up with false credentials. We're unhappy that the system has allowed someone to cheat, because that undermines the validity for all the people who paid their dues. Why spend half a dozen years working hard to get degrees, when you can just pretend you got them and still get the job? Jones' dismissal was clearly a matter of integrity and ethics, not competence.

But what's more troubling to the colleges (and those who attend them) is not a question of people counterfeiting credentials that have real value. It's worse than that. It's the sinking realization that maybe the degrees don't have that much value to begin with. If someone can have a successful twenty-eight year career with high visibility, and nobody could tell that she didn't have the degrees she claimed, can the degrees really mean that much? Could it be that a college degree is not all it's cracked up to be?

A college degree is not so much a certification of competence as an insurance policy against incompetence. Just because someone has degree, doesn't mean they will be good at a particular job. It just lowers the odds that they will be utterly unqualified. Employers look at college degrees as a proxy for real experience. Once someone proves they can do a particular job and do it well, the degree is somewhat superfluous. Which is probably why so many people lie about their degrees: once they get their foot in the door and prove their worth, they figure, "No harm, no foul."

I certainly don't want a world where more and more people lie about their accomplishments. But I wouldn't mind it at all if people start to give real-world experiences and demonstrated ability more consideration than degrees, diplomas, and certifications. That might lead people to focus more on really learning what they need to know to be successful, instead of just chasing after a potentially meaningless piece of paper. Which, in fact, was what Marilee Jones has been telling us for years.

Mr. Mom

2007-04-27T05:34:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine from college, a brand-new parent, is contemplating becoming a stay-at-home dad. His wife has stable job that she really loves; he has a job that he hates, though he makes more money. He knows his mother will give him a hard time about it, if he does.

Here was my response to him:

Sounds like you've thought it through fairly well, but here's my take:

I agree with your starting assumption that one full-time parent is required for at least the first four years.
If you're still in the programming/consulting line of work, absolutely you'll have an easy time reentering the job market. In IT the only thing people care about is whether you can do the job. So no sweat there. Plus, it's relatively easy to work out of your home as a programming consultant, so you have a good path to resuming work when you're ready for it.
Full-time parenting can be stressful job, mostly because it's a 24/7 gig. You are always, always on call, and the client is very unreasonable and demanding, and you have little or no control. Your ego will get crushed into dust. If you ever believed that life was about you, this child will drive home the fact that what you want doesn't matter anymore.
My wife never muched like work either, or at least she never found a job she really, really loved. She was happy to leave the workforce. But at the same time, she went through a profound change in her identity by being a mom. If you're used to defining yourself by what you do, parenting is going to be hard, because you have no visible accomplishments. Because parenting is a 24/7 gig, it tends to suck the oxygen away from any extracurricular activities as well. So be prepared for the psychological hit.
No matter who stays home with the kid, GET SUPPORT. All that "Gotta have a Group" stuff that Augie pounded into our skulls applies to parenting as well. You need peer support, at an intellectual and emotional and practical level. Janet is an Attachment Parenting leader, they're pretty good at supporting more enlightened child-raising. In California, you could probably find a group that specifically supports stay-at-home dads.
You wife does have one advantage as a full-time parent, which is her biology. Breasts are extremely useful for the first couple years of raising a child. I'm not being sexist here but . . . Well, I am being sexist. Millions of years of evolution have made a remarkable mechanism for instantly feeding the perfectly appropriate food to a child, whenever they need it at a moment's notice. To say that a bottle is the same thing is like comparing a real human leg to a prosthetic leg. There is a stunning amount of scientific evidence for significant physical, intellectual and emotional benefits for extended breast-feeding. Not to mention the sheer convenience . . . Mixing up formula in the middle of the night is a pain in the ass. Now, the advantages of breast-feeding may not outweigh the benefits of having a full-time parent in a stable and supportive home situation, so this is not a deal-buster, but it IS an important factor to consider.
Your parents . . . Well, nothing to be done about your parents. I don't know anything about your mom. If she's the kind who will kvetch about the same thing endlessly, then I would not hestitate to tell her that you don't want to hear it. Period. As in, go home and don't come back until you can shut up about the job thing. Parenting is hard, and the last thing you need is someone with emotionally privileged position in your life telling you that you shouldn't be doing it. I suspect she will be willing to keep her opinions to herself if she sees that it is necessary in order to have a relationship with her grandson. Again, GET A GROUP to support you through that sort of thing.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

Divining purpose from talent

2007-04-26T04:16:00.001-04:00

I started listening to The Purpose Driven Life again. I had started in on Frank McCourt's Teacher Man a while back and got distracted. So much for finding my life's purpose in 40 days.

One of Rick Warren's premises for the book is that a person is specifically shaped by God to serve a specific mission on the planet. Your talents, personality, and circumstances are (literally) designed to make you fit for a specific ministry. So, if you study yourself carefully, you should be able to discern what it is you're supposed to do.

That sounds reasonable, especially since it's approximately what every parent and high school guidance counselor ever said: "Find something you're good at and that you enjoy, and do that." But the fallacy of finding your purpose from your talents is shown somewhat in one of the stories in the Millenium episode I wrote about earlier. One of the devils, Blurk, tells of how he hitchhiked one night with a young man, Perry, who confessed to be interested in true crime and serial killers. The devil, seeing all the signs, pointed out that the young man was probably interested in the subject because he himself shared all the attributes of a serial killer:

Blurk: White male in his 20s; the abused product of a broken home who spent
his youth setting fires and/or torturing animals; an early addiction to drugs
and/or alcohol. Inability to hold a steady job or relationship with women.
Spending all your free time thinking about turning your masochistic/
mutilation/sex fantasies into reality! To say nothing of the fact that you
drive a van, and keep a roll of duct tape in your glove compartment!"

Perry: How the hell did - ? What are you trying to tell me?

Blurk: Play the hand you've been dealt.

And so Perry goes on to become a serial killer . . . just because he would be good at it. That's an extreme example, but it illustrates the point: talent alone is no guide at all to divine purpose. You still have to discern what's the right thing to do. And the right thing might, in fact, be entirely opposed to one's nature.

(As an aside, I saw a story in the News & Observer about former state agriculture commissioner Meg Scott Phipps returning home after serving four years in federal prison for extorting campaign contributions from State Fair vendors. Her local community was supportive of her, but they didn't talk about her actual crimes much because, as on business associate put it, "they accepted the fact that that was the hand she was dealt." I couldn't help but think of Blurk's promptings . . . people really do use that phrase to excuse all kinds of things.)

In fact, I would go so far as to say that divine calling is more visible precisely when it opposes one's own natural inclination. In a documentary on Mother Theresa and the Sisters of Charity, a number of the sisters confessed to feeling completely unmatched to their calling: "Every day I got up with the intention of leaving. But God wouldn't let me go." After her death, some of Mother Theresa's writings indicated that she herself suffered profound and lasting doubts about the nature of her ministry; she had an initial inspiration to work in Calcutta with the poor, but afterwards she went her entire life with no divine affirmation for her work. Far from seeing this as a problem, the Chuch officials overseeing her candidancy for sainthood see her doubts as evidence of a miracle: "How could she do so much, without the benefit of any divine revelation?"

Poor me

2007-04-25T05:26:00.001-04:00

Whenever I am driving off to some job I am dreading, or maybe even off to some routine chore but I'm obsessing over some other problem, I will experience the EEHIETM effect: "Everyone else has it easier than me." I'll see a guy riding his bike on the sidewalk, or a pair of blondes in Carolina sweatshirts running (and there are always, at any time of day, multiple pairs of blondes in Carolina sweatshirts running in Chapel Hill) and I'll think, mostly unconsciously and barely articulated: "They have it so easy. They don't have the worries I do. I wish I could be one of those normal, untroubled people." The effect is nearly universal; everyone I see gets the same reaction. Only the homeless or the profoundly ugly prompt the opposite response: "Jeez, I'm glad I'm not them."

These thoughts don't stand up to a moment's rational analysis. I know that I'm one of the luckiest SOBs on the planet, and I wouldn't trade places with anyone. I know that no matter how carefree someone else may seem, they have their own seething cauldron of anxieties. That guy throwing a frisbee in the quad is probably putting off doing his thesis. Those girls maybe trapped in dead-end relationships with guys with dead-end jobs. For all of my worries, I don't have any real problems: my family is healthy, I have enough money, I enjoy my job, I am hopeful for the future.

And yet, in the moment of anxiety, everyone else seems to be better off. A self-righteous narrator screams in my head: "Why can't these idiots understand how much stress I'm under!?!" Nor am I alone in this line of thinking. No matter how busy I am, every single person I meet, be they college student, housewife, or CEO, seems to think they are busier than me. "No, I couldn't possibly, I'm way too busy for that, maybe some other time."

So, it's become a mindfulness exercise for me:
If other people don't have the worries and troubles I do . . . that's ego.
If nobody understands how hard I have it . . . that's ego.
If the stress of my commitments seems unbearable . . . that's ego, too.

Everyone has worries. Everyone is busy. Nobody is appreciated as much as they ought to be. You will bear up under the stress.

Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me

2007-04-24T21:48:00.001-04:00

At last night's SKS meeting, Kenny showed an episode of Millenium, a supernatural/crime TV show from the mid-1990's. The episode is entitled, "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me," and it's been a staple of SKS meetings for the last ten years because it is one of the most extrordinarily philosophic pieces ever to appear on television. If you've never seen it, I would strongly encourage you to do so -- you can rent the Season Two DVDs from most video stores or NetFlix.
It's sort of a Screwtape Letters story -- four demons, disguised as old men, gather at local coffee shop to discuss their techniques for damning souls, and gradually realize that their is at least one person who can see their true essence. Follow the links to read a synopsis, if you can't stand to wait, as other fans have made much better descriptions of the episode than I could.

(Warning: Spoilers follow.)

I could write at length about each one of the demon's stories and it's implications, but I'll stick to what struck me about the stories last night:

Kierkegaard, among others, have been critical of modern Christian churches for their relative apathy in regards to sin and salvation. The bar for salvation is set remarkably low these days: a simple profession of belief is all that is required to win eternal life, and while virtue is seen as a result of a lifetime's development, salvation is considered a gimme. Such casualness about salvation is in direct contradiction to Jesus' teaching, which stressed that it was a rare thing: "Many are called, but few chosen," (Mathew 20:16) not to mention "Straight is the gate and narrow the way that leadeth to salvation." These stories were the first suggestion I've seen in a long time in the popular culture that saving your soul might require extraordinary means. All the humans discussed by the devils led live dominated by inertia, continuing unvaried in their path until they met their untimely end. It was only those who made a conversion (literally, "to turn around"), who escaped the damnation awaiting those who live ordinary lives.
This story almost trumps C.S. Lewis' vision of devilry for sophistication, because it has the audacity to actually sympathize with the demons as well as their victims. When Frank Black sees the demon Toby for what he really is, the most cutting, most true thing he can say is, simply: "You must be so lonely." No burning lakes, no hellfire and brimstone is required to punish these beings; their punishment is eternal isolation. The devils try to brush off the comment: "See? He just took you for the grieving boyfriend." After all, humans are the lonely ones. But when Toby repeats it again, "You must be so lonely," all the devils are silent. They all slink off, one by one, into the darkness, trying to forget.
Most people who come to the SKS would not initially consider themselves to be "spiritual seekers." They usually have to sit through a semester or two before they start to see their life through a spiritual lens. What is it, then, that brings them to the meetings? "They want to know that they are OK, and that they belong," Lauren said. In some ways, you could define the spiritual impulse as an ever-deepening attempt to connect, to be accepted by God and man. This show takes the same position, seeing damnation as isolation, and salvation as communion.
One of the demons' techniques is that of minor annoyances: he throws newspapers in puddles, gives undeserved parking tickets, verbally abuses coffee shop clerks. I thought it was ingenious to take such things seriously; it doesn't really take that much frustration to make us prone to evil acts ourselves. Most of my own unkindnesses are the direct result of "losing my cool," being overwhelmed by minor adversities just long enough to forget what's really important. I have often devalued disciplines like yoga or transcendental meditation that deified relaxation as a spiritual state, but there is a lot spiritual value in being able to remain calm.

Kurt Vonnegut 1922-2007

2007-04-23T05:24:00.001-04:00

Here's what Kurt Vonnegut taught me:

Vonnegut was the first author I read with whom I could not identify, and at the same time had a profound effect on me. Vonnegut was, at the time at least, a polar opposite from me: he was an atheist, a humanist, a pacificist, and perpetually irreverent, while I was an stiff-necked conservative agnostic struggling to be a believer, with little tolerance for flippancy towards profound things. Looking back on it, I can see how valuable that experience was. I wish everyone could be moved by things written by someone they disagree with, and come to love and admire someone who has all the wrong opinions. It creates a heady vertigo of the soul; it makes you believe, perhaps for the first time, that you could be wrong about some things, and that that might not be altogether a bad thing.
Vonnegut's writing was probably the best portrait of existentialist experience. Nobody ever did a better job of showing how senseless the world was, and still love it anyway.
I often told people, "Read one Vonnegut novel a year." As much as I enjoyed his work, I couldn't stand more than one a year. Humankind cannot bear much reality. Still, that will last you quite a long time. If you start as a senior in high school (which is the exactly correct time to start) you will finish in your mid-thirties, which is about the time you will start to feel like you really know what he's talking about.
Stylistically, Vonnegut was the first to teach me that less was more. He succeeded where Hemingway failed utterly. He was probably also the first to show me that simply telling the truth was the best way to have any hope of having any impact.
God dammit, we must be kind.

Summa Cum Laude

2007-04-22T06:25:00.001-04:00

Friday's Wall Street Journal had a story on "The Most Praised Generation Goes to Work," describing how many employers now struggle to heap praise onto the twenty-somethings that grew up with lots of positive affirmation and can't stand to be without it. Older managers are baffled by the trend, and while handing out an unending stream of "atta-boys" is contrary to their nature, they feel they have to do it or else lose their younger talent.

According to the Enneagram personality typing, I am a Type Three, a "Performer." It might as well be labelled "Praise Junkie," because Threes fundamental sense of worth derives from how they imagine other people see them. I understand all too well how legitimate ambition and desire to succeed can degrade into a reflexive, unending need for praise and recognition. I have great sympathy for those who became hooked on positive affirmation; vanity is a cruel master.

Still, I don't think those managers are losing too much if their uber-stroked employees hit the door. This is not merely a matter of communication style, where you can swap one set of words for another and keep going. This need for constant affirmation is a serious limitation on a person's capacity. When I hire someone to do a job, it's not necessarily because I need a skill set that I don't have myself -- usually it's because I don't have time to do everything, and I need to delegate to others. I hire out work because I want to stop thinking about it. By that standard, the best employees are the most autonomous: those who just do their jobs, reliably and well, with a minimum of supervision. But if I have to watch an employee's every move, providing feedback every minute, then my attention is still chained to that job. If the management overhead is too much, I might as well have done it myself.

Could a praise junkie possibly be fit for genuine leadership? Could someone who needs a pat on the back every day possibly start and run a business? Because, last time I checked, customers are not known for giving out unstinting praise. Just the opposite: they tend to be full of demands. Vendors do not fret over your feelings. Employees, if they think about you at all, usually complain, or (these days) demand that you give them the pat on the back. Entrepreneurs, with their large and varied constituencies and perpetually limited resources, play an unending game of "Who am I going to disappoint today?"

I suspect that the younger generations praise-fixation is also an attention deficit in disguise. The trend towards "snack culture" -- where the content is short and the payoff quick -- has attenuated their capacity to stick to something for a long period of time. In those realms where they did exercise discipline -- school, sports -- the activities were completely defined, with clear winners and losers, beginnings and endings. They probably didn't get enough unstructured time: time to play in the sandbox, time to read a book, time to organize their friends into a baseball game. Their parents taught them to win the game; it never occurred to them the world needed people who can make up new games.

To accomplish anything of real significance, you have to be liberated from the need for praise. You have to want something else. You have to be focused on the accomplishment itself, rather than people's opinion of it. Rather than teaching managers how to praise, they should be holding workshops for the employees: "Learning to live with ambiguity."

How can it be justice if nobody got hanged?

2007-04-21T11:22:00.001-04:00

I really thought the media zoo was over when Attorney General Roy Cooper dropped all charges against the Duke lacrosse players (falsely) accused of raping a dancer at a team party. But then I heard that there was still a group that was holding a protest against the dismissal of the charges. I thought, "Which part of 'completely innocent' did you not understand?' "

But, hey, maybe I'm not getting the full story. Did they come up with new evidence that was not presented? Was the dancer bringing a civil suit?

Well . . . no. The "protest" was fifteen "community members," at least three of whom worked with specific causes that had been trying to make hay from the allegations. ""They took the whole process as if all the defense and all the prosecution had been heard," said Shafeah M'Balia of the Black Workers for Justice Women's Commission."We say that is a travesty."

Ahhhh. Ok, let me explain something to you, Ms. M'Balia. Just because someone makes an accusation, doesn't mean that it gets to go to trial. You have to have, you know, credible evidence to bring someone to trial. That's how the system works. If you think a mere accusation should be sufficient to run someone into court, please go watch The Crucible two or three times and let it sink in.

I fail to understand why the self-appointed defenders of the helpless consistently think they need to accept every allegation at face value without a shred of critical appraisal. These leaders no doubt feel like they need to stand by the "victim" in solidarity, and cling to the cultural mythology that any accusation by a black woman about a white man simply must be true. A century ago the inverse was true -- a black man could be strung up on the mere say-so of a white woman -- and I have no desire to embrace mob justice again. To use such rationale shows that these activists are not interested in justice, but in power, and are no better than the lynch-mobs of yesteryear.

To accuse the Attorney General's office of being biased in dismissing the case is equally jaw-dropping. It's not like the state's lawyers didn't want to run in the lacrosse players into jail -- Nifong was savoring every last politically juicy drop of the of the case. The community, the university, everyone gave that women a huge amount of consideration in hearing out her case, to the extent that the players were tossed from the university on her mere accusation. Now the deparment is facing censure and Nifong faces disbarment for being too biased in favor of the accuser. And yet the activists are sticking to their guns -- anyone who disagrees with them is a racist, a bigot, a sexist pig.

Thank goodness it was only fifteen people at their little protest. The rest of the world has come to their senses.

What he lacked . . . and why

2007-04-20T05:36:00.001-04:00

"Do you believe in 'bad seeds'?" my wife asked last night.

Is evil the result of trauma and deprivation, or are some people just born bad? Kenny pointed me to an op-ed piece in the New York Times in which a professor made a case for "evil genes." While the mood of tragedy still hangs in the air, no one is willing yet to assign blame, but nature/nurture debaters are standing by on high alert, anxiously awaiting details on Cho's background.

American psycho-mythology has two models for understanding this sort of case. No one will be surprised if Cho was the victim of some sort of neglect or abuse: another basically-good kid who had his humanity strangulated at an early age. Then again, it seems equally likely that he might have just been born that way: a smaller amygdala, a paucity of serotonin, a mix-up in the wiring. Both models are difficult to falsify: both abuse and bad genes can lurk under the surface, hidden from view. Both the nature and nurture sides will probably claim points in this case.

I, for one, will back up NBC in their decision to air some of Cho's video. We do need to see this. I don't think we need to fear for Cho's immortal soul, because looking at that video confirms, for me, that he had lost his soul long ago. His words are angry, his face is fixed in hate, but fundamentally I could sense no affect in him. He was dead inside. (I find it somewhat ironic that his affectless face reminds me so much of the Botox blankness of certain celebrities, the very people he probably despised.)

Whether born or created, it certainly happens early on. As his great-aunt said: "He didn't talk. He was always cold." Even by eight years old, "warning signs" were present. So much of our fate is determined so early on . . .

Era of the self-documented

2007-04-19T05:54:00.001-04:00

What are we to make of Cho Seung-Hui's pre-rampage video?

What a nut.
What a fucking nut.
No matter how much it seems like other people are the cause of your misery, suffering is ultimately self-generated. Cho's martyrdom began and ended inside the walls of his own skull. The scary part is that we are no different. We generate our own drama, our own self-pitying attitudes, our own fantasies of persecution or heroism, in exactly the same way. Our only salvation is our connection to other people, which puts a reality check on our delusions and cultivates the essential sympathy for others that defines what we call "humanity." I think it's important to recognize that Cho's evil was not in what he had -- hate, resentment, anger, frustration -- but in what he lacked: the slightest sense that other people mattered.
Cho may have done us a favor by striking so many action-hero poses. Should we be surprised that all the images of gun-wielding power are embraced by those who feel powerless? I'm not saying that a violence-glorifying culture caused the tragedy . . . but those images are going to make it difficult for Hollywood to push its muscular fare for a few months. Suddenly, the stock image of "man with gun" has renewed horror.
Nonetheless, we should not blame the media. Every man with the slightest trace of testosterone saw that photo of Cho pointing a gun and the camera, and had the immediate mini-fantasy: "I wish I could have been there, with a gun, to blow that guy away." The violence, the urge to power, are a part of the masculine psyche, for better or worse. Again, it's not what was in Cho that caused the tragedy; it was what he lacked.

Death Threats

2007-04-18T19:41:00.000-04:00

When news of the Virginia Tech shootings trickled into my house, my wife said, "You should probably read up on that, the students might want to talk about it tonight." And I replied, "What's to be said? I just watched five students on CNN say exactly what everyone always says: I'm shocked, I'm stunned, this is terrible."

The UNC students, too, had kind of the same reaction. They didn't want the tragedy to go unnoted, but they were smart enough to know that these things defy explanation. One said, "I don't want to know why these things happen. I only marvel at the fact that they don't happen more often."

I've thought the same thing. Haven't you ever been driving down a two-lane road, and had the thought pop into your head: "I could just give this wheel a little jerk to the left, right now, and it would be all over." The mind amuses itself with these morbid imaginings, and yet, day after day, time after time, I don't come anywhere near the thought of actually doing it. And as much murderous rage as we might feel from time to time, we still manage to avoid acting on it a remarkably high percentage of the time. Whatever it is that keeps us from killing each other, it must be mighty powerful, that only the most deeply disturbed break its bonds.

The equally ludicrous question arises: "How can we keep our campuses safe?" As if lone gunmen were the leading cause of death for college students. Accidents, especially auto accidents, cause more deaths of college students than shooters, by three or four orders of magnitude. And yet everyone still climbs into their cars most every day. Clearly the problem is not the actual threat of violence, but the perception of threat: "Our students don't feel safe anymore."

That, too, has been a remarkable luxury for us. Many people are threatened by gunfire every day; they just happen to live in all the places the college students and their families don't. The wake-up call is not: "Oh my God, a new menace is on the loose." It's the realization that death can find you anywhere, any time, which has always been true for all people. Perhaps, instead of convulsing into fits of paranoia, we should seize the opportunity to relate more deeply to all those people, both here and abroad, who face the threat of death daily. Only the recognition of our own fragility, and our shared mortality, can inspire the kind of compassion that might prevent more violence in the future. Early warning systems and more campus police might help, but force and threat and lock and key have never been what ultimately protected us from violent death at each others' hands. The answer is inside of us. Let's look there.

The music of poetry

2007-04-17T23:10:00.001-04:00

The Self Knowledge Symposium is developing a track record for filling up Duke Chapel with unlikely events. Ten years ago we packed in a standing-room-only crowd to hear Father Francis Kline play "The Spiritual Bach" on Duke's renowned organ. And tonight, the echoes of that event were felt again, as over 700 people turned out to hear Dr. George Gopan read T.S. Eliot's "The Four Quartets."

How rare and wonderful when all the random factors align to make a perfect event. A string quartet played a Beethoven (Or was it Bach? Jeez, where did I put that program? . . .) piece to begin the evening. That was nice, but only nice . . . until Joanna Childers delivered an introduction that put the music in perfect perspective and connected the music to the poetry. A little "aha!" bubble quietly exploded in the audience's mind, and suddenly everyone was in the right place to listen to a very long, very demanding poem.

And, thankfully, George Gopan delivered the goods. He has been reading the poem aloud, once a month, for several decades. His scholarly understanding of the poem was impeccable and perhaps peerless . . . and made all the better because he was in love with the music of the poem. And you could tell that he was moved, to have an audience of that size. "I would say it's a pleasure to look at all your faces . . . but there are so many of you, going so far back, I can't even see all your faces."

And all that was perfect before we even listened to the poem. I was struck again by how many different lines of the poem had worked their way into the SKS theology and tradition:

A condition of complete simplicity
(costing not less than everything)
...
Humankind cannot bear very much reality
...
Distracted from distraction by distraction
...
Raids on the inarticulate
...
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
...
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
...

Damn, but we've taken a lot out of these poems, over the years. I'm so glad we got the chance to share it, so well, with so many.

And all shall be well

2007-04-16T22:49:00.001-04:00

THE FOUR QUARTETS
A reading of T.S. Eliot's spiritual masterpiece poems, with live music
Tuesday, April 17
7:00 pm
Duke Chapel(Duke University campus, Durham)

* * *

"A condition of complete simplicity(costing not less than everything)"
-- from The Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot

* * *

You haven't lived until you've heard The Four Quartets.

In the world of spiritual poetry, T.S. Eliot is right at the top,rubbing elbows with Lao Tzu and Rumi. Not only are his four linked poems beautiful and profound, they are packed with hidden meanings and a lifetime's study of philosophy and religion. No wonder the dude won a Nobel Prize.

Like most great poetry, you need to _hear_ it to fully appreciate its power. Dr. George Gopen, Senior LecturingFellow in the English Department at Duke University,combines both depth of understanding and dramatic energy in his reading. A reception will follow, so youcan hang out and talk poetry afterwards.

If you really want to impress your date with your how cultured and deep you are, you can't go wrong withthis event. Go on, just try saying it: "Would you careto join me at a reading of T.S. Eliot?"

More Secret-Bashing

2007-04-15T06:17:00.001-04:00

Readers chimed in on my pan of The Secret. Kenny rightly pointed out that action is not only the primary means of changing your mind, it is also the primary measure of determining whether you really did change your mind:

If you say "I really want to (lose weight / help the poor / find God)" enough,
you may start to believe that you really want that. But do you really want it,
or are you fooling yourself into thinking you want it? Once you ask that
question, you start into an endless cycle of self-questioning, re-examining, am
I being too easy on myself, am I being too hard on myself, is that my mother's
voice in my head, blah, blah, blah. The way to cut through all that is to watch
and see what sacrifices you are willing to make: are you (eating right and exercising / giving money and time to the poor / praying, reading, meditating, joining a group)? That is the easy way to see how much you *really* want it.

I didn't even scratch the surface of all the contradictory notions that were present just in the short section of the book from which I quoted. For instance, Rhonda Byrne doesn't stop to question the nature of the desires people are trying to fulfill in the first place. Why, exactly, would I want to ask the Universe to make me a "perfect weight"? Why, because people believe that changing their physical circumstances (lose weight, get rich, find a mate) will change their state of mind -- that is, make them happy. But if someone had the perfect mind control that Byrne prescribes, loving their body completely and accepting it totally, then they don't need a "perfect weight," because they have already achieved the thing that they sought to get by having a "perfect weight."

It's rather like the old saw about investing: "How can I make lots of money in the stock market? Well, start by putting a lot of money into the stock market." You can only get what you want by already having what you sought to get. Oddly, people immediately see the contradiction with material things, but don't see it when something as intangible as the Mind is invoked.

My new guru Puppetji cuts straight to chase: "It is true: you can have anything you desire. But ask yourself: who is desiring?"

The dirty secret about The Secret

2007-04-14T05:21:00.001-04:00

Everybody's talking about how everyone's talking about The Secret. Occasionally a spiritual fad sweeps through the cultural landscape -- the last one in recent memory was The Celestine Prophesy -- and suddenly it seems everyone is talking about it. Thankfully, this time it is more culturally acceptable to talk trash about it.

I have not read Rhonda Byrne's self-help book, beyond a short exerpt online. That was enough. I had already gathered from the media buzz that the Secret was another variation of "your mind controls your reality" New Age philosophy. Ok, I thought, there's enough truth in that to perhaps do someone some good. Lots of genuinely useful self-help gurus have affirmed the power of focusing the mind upon one's desires. Napoleon Hill had done essentially the same thing with Think and Grow Rich 70 years ago. Richard Rose once told a group of his students: "If you just read [Think and Grow Rich], and replace the word "money" with "God," you'll have the formula [for a spiritual path.]"

Such self-help gurus usually attributed certain mystical attributes to a focused positive mindset: somehow the universe would hear your request and, through a series of synchronicitous events, conspire to give you what you want. But it was, I think, used more metaphorically than literally. Most gurus knew that the reason controlling your mind was important was because your mindset determines your habitual actions, and it is your actions that determine the outcome.

Byrne, however, skips right over that "mind controlling action" bit, and goes straight to the payoff:

Food is not responsible for putting on weight. It is your thought that food is
responsible for putting on weight that actually has food put on weight.
Remember, thoughts are primary cause of everything, and the rest is effects from
those thoughts. Think perfect thoughts and the result must be perfect weight.

Such "magical thinking" formulas contradict everyday experience and common sense so drastically that only someone who has mastered the art of suspending rational thought could begin to believe them. That is: people who buy diet pills, respond to get-rich-quick spam, and every other form of infantile wish-fulfillment.

What people who crave such "mind over matter" powers don't understand is that Mind is actually a hell of a lot harder to manipulate than matter. We actually have very little, if any, direct control over our minds. Almost all traditions aimed at true transformation of mind and spirit do just the opposite: use the world of matter and circumstance to change the mind. Music, prayers, chanting, incense, artwork, quiet words, posture, breathing, the company of others, the absense of others . . . all spiritual disciplines are attempts to structure circumstance to affect a transformation. Of course, as Augie would say, "The arrows go both ways": mind affects matter, and matter in turn affects mind. But let's not kid ourselves here. Alcoholics Anonymous also preaches the power of a transformed mind . . . but the whole process is useless if you don't actually stop drinking.

So, when someone declares, "I've got it! I've found the secret! Just change the way you think and everything works out!" I am not inclined to disagree with them. I would just ask, "So . . . how exactly do you go about changing the way you think?" And suddenly you are right back to where you started: daily discipline, habitual action, hard work.

Peace and carrots

2007-04-13T06:39:00.001-04:00

I stayed up late last night working on my long-neglected financials so I'll be able to file in time. Quicken fulfills a need for compulsive orderliness, and I couldn't bring myself to stop until I had reconciled the last transaction.

Anyway, I'm running behind today, so I'll just do what I thought I would never do: share a YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0wQnVy5lqE&mode=related&search=

Puppetji is a rare creature: a parody that understands the truth and is still able to make fun of itself.

Anti-poverty measures

2007-04-12T05:37:00.001-04:00

I got a few responses from yesterday's post on social justice. One writes:

The thing that always keeps me fundamentally a liberal, despite having so many
points of disagreement with the liberals and Democrats on a variety of issues,
is this: there are people who were born into a position so low that their merits
simply don't matter. No matter how smart, hard- working, honest, and thrifty
they are, they simply do not have the opportunity to succeed. Furthermore, these
people are not a tiny minority: they are, in fact, the vast majority of the world.

This is a typical liberal viewpoint. It starts with the assumption that economic freedom (and the inequality that it inevitably creates) is the polar opposite of helping the poorest of the poor. Both conservatives and liberals concern themselves with helping the poor; they just have radically different philosophies about how to do it. The liberal answer is, in a nutshell: let's build a government that takes care of everyone. The conservative answer is, in a nutshell: this is too important to leave in the hands of the government -- WE need to take care of this problem.

I know, all the liberals are groaning: "Oh, God, don't get started with that compassionate conservatism crap." But consider this: conservatives give more time and money to charitable causes than their liberal peers, at all economic levels. American economic freedom has created lots of greedy, self-centered millionaires; it has also created generous people who give freely to help others. Conservatives are not uncaring souls who don't care about the poor: conservatives really believe that government cannot address social and economic woes as well as individuals and private organizations . . . and they put their money where their mouths are.

This is why Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are my all-American heroes. Instead of futzing about with U.S. politics (which, in the grand scheme, is rather like carping about Imus) they are quietly channelling billions of dollars to help the poorest of the poor. They demonstrate that it is possible to use capitalistic freedom to create wealth and then share it with those who need it most.

The conservative and liberal philosophies on social justice have other key disagreements, most notably about the importance of economic freedom. I think most liberals believe that world poverty is caused by evil capitalist corporations who exploit the world's resources and people. The vast majority of the world is living in poverty because men with guns oppress them. Thugs, warlords, militias, armies, governments oppress people. These men are not capitalists, trying to create wealth; they are thieves who take wealth. The people are poor because anything they try to build of lasting value can (and is) taken away from them. All the other ills of the world -- disease, hunger, ignorance -- ultimately flow from a lack of basic civil rights, especially property rights. Capitalist corporations might be complicit with this oppression, standing on the sidelines or maybe even supporting the dictators . . . but it's the dictators, or the rebel warlords trying to become dictators, who are the real oppressors.

(That doesn't mean that unfettered capitalism is always good. It is possible for capitalism to oppress and destroy. I just think the evils of capitalism are miniscule compared to the evils of, well, evil: bands of men using their power to steal, kill, and rape.)

Inequity and social justice

2007-04-11T05:36:00.001-04:00

"Growing inequality" keeps reappearing in the news cycle, as regularly and uneventfully as rising obesity rates, falling test scores, and evidence of global warming. While most reporters stick to the facts, the unstated implication in all these reports is that inequality is bad, and a cause for moral concern. I give the BBC kudos for at least recognizing the assumption in their last round of coverage, when they spoke with some people from the Ayn Rand Foundation, for whom "egalitarian" is not considered a compliment.

I don't know what to think on the matter. On the one hand, I'm a staunch free-market capitalist. I believe that freedom inevitably creates economic inequality, and that people (both rich and poor) value having that freedom more than they value the wealth itself. Class warfare political rhetoric consistently fails to get any traction with voters primarily because everyone wants to believe that someday they will be rich.

On the other hand, I struggle with the usual upper-middle-class low-level angst about social inequalities. You only need a few stories about Indians working for fifty cents a day to wonder at your own relative wealth, and question the fairness of it all. The usual antidotes -- personal generosity, increased charitable giving of time and energy-- are only partially effective without a consistent philosophy about what's really for the greatest good. In college I dabbled with John Rawls' Theory of Justice to come up with a more consistent rationale for what society ought to be like. I liked his "veil of ignorance" standard: create a society in which you would be willing to participate, without knowing what your lot in that society is destined to be. For all its hypothetical impracticality, it's a clean standard that allows for lots of inequality but not too much. I have some problems with Rawls, too -- I am, at heart, still a meritocrat. I believe that the intelligent, diligent, and hardworking should prosper, and the stupid, lazy and slothful should sink . . . even though I can take no more credit for my native talents than any other environmental factor in my good fortune.

In the end I wind up where I began. I believe our society is the best model, or at least has the greatest chance of all models of getting things right. I think even my own questions and uncertainty about it are themselves a part of the model, and a part of what makes it work.

Teacher Man

2007-04-10T05:21:00.001-04:00

I just finished up Teacher Man, Frank McCourt's third memoir. Since he had already had a smash hit with a memoir of his miserable Catholic upbringing in Limerick (Angela's Ashes) and his miserable immigrant struggles in America ('Tis), he must have figured it was safe to come out and share the bulk of his life, which was teaching public school in New York for thirty years.

It's funny, in retrospect, how the mind romanticizes the troubles most removed from your own current lot. You see it in the progression of McCourt's books. Though the horrors of his youth -- the abject poverty, his father's drunkenness, constant disease in himself and death in his siblings -- are clearly the worst times of his life, they are still tinged with a magical aura of Dickensian sympathy. Once he gets back to this side of the ocean, his struggles to be something more than just "some Nick straight off the boat" are less horrifying, but still from another time. They have a romance of their own: an all-American, West Side Story kind of romance, tinged with ethnic tensions and New World ambition.

But then we arrive at his middle-age struggles, and here we are: back home in the here and now. His troubles are pretty much our own: struggle to get through school, struggle to get a decent job, struggle to make sense of his own life. He knows he's come a million miles from his miserable beginnings, and that he ought to be grateful, but he's still aching under the burden of his own limitations. His job is an awful grind; his marriage is unhappy; he sees flashes of beauty and meaning bobbing in a gray sea of term papers. Welcome, Mr. McCourt! You have arrived in the Land of Plentiful Anxiety.

McCourt is a truth-teller, and I read this book because I wanted an insightful truth-teller to lay bare the teaching life, since it's somthing I have contemplated doing for a long time. I got my money's worth. He sees the value in good teaching, but he also freely admits he's only half-sure what good teaching is, anyway. He is not shy about describing the burdens: meddlesome asshole administrators, front-row seats at adolescents' home life tragedies, the circus of discipline issues, the absolutely crushing burder of papers to take home. It's not the sort of book to inspire someone to take up teaching, though it might be enough to inspire a teacher to bear up under it. He does celebrate the victories: unexpected breakthroughs from students, the triumph of creativity and joie de vivre in the face of middle-class meaninglessness. But it's not an all-upside, Rafe Esquith memoir of incredible transformations in the classroom. It's probably closer to the truth.

Frank McCourt is a kind of Irish Woody Allen. His constant anxiety and self-doubt, delivered with a somber light-heartedness, is always fun to listen to. I hope he hasn't run out of stories to tell.

Creeks and Romans

2007-04-09T05:26:00.001-04:00

Easter was cold this year. The sun shone brightly on a clear blue sky with white clouds and green grass; if you stayed inside and looked out the window you would have declared it to be the most Easter-y of days. And then when you stepped outside into 28 F, the world would seem like a giant Easter bouquet kept in a florist's chilly refrigerator. It's a little hard to have a spring-time festival of rebirth and renewal when you feel like going back inside and hibernating. Yes, it's the resurrection of Christ that we're supposed to be celebrating, but our heathen blood is still warmed more by sunshine than philosophy.

And yet we still had the Easter egg hunt, bundled in jackets and hoods and gloves. The kids seem to be impervious to cold. The anthroposophists insist that children have underdeveloped temperature regulation systems, so they literally don't realize how cold they are . . . which is why parents are constantly chasing them around and insisting they put on a coat. I was not inclined to believe it, until now.

The boys are old enough now that the cuteness of toddlerhood is giving way to the loudness and brashness of true boyhood. The egg-hunt, and following chocolate-bunny binge, was still fun, and Aidan did an especially good job of helping his younger brother in the hunt. But the day as a whole had more "did-not-did-too" squabbles, especially while they are cooped up inside with their thin-blooded parents. The high point of the day, the time of greatest brotherly love and spring-time zeal, was when we finally went back outside to play in the creek. Sunlight on natural water is magical; sand, mud, rock, grass, all primative and beautiful. Even the hacking at mud with sticks, the futile attempts to build dams and bridges, is a part of the natural beauty. All our spirits were resurrected.

Fantastic wealth can be yours

2007-04-08T07:21:00.001-04:00

Actually, fantastic wealth already is yours.

I heard a segment on NPR about the lives of the those in "the other India," the 80% or more in the rural parts of the country that are still living in absolute poverty while the urban economies are racing into the world scene. Phillip Reaves travelled down the the length of the Ganges River, interviewing what he hoped would be a cross-section of the population. He spoke with a Muslim woman who makes her living scouring the beaches for coins tossed in by Hindu pilgrims. Her take on a good day is about 25 rupees, or 50 cents.

Ok, just let that soak in for a moment. Loose change that you would throw away is someone else's day wages. What's more, this woman knows about the other world, the world with television sets and cell phones and automobiles.

So why do so many people feel like they are poor, like they are "struggling to keep up?" Perhaps it is because we, too, have our super-rich with whom to compare ourselves. Larry Elison, CEO of Oracle Corporation, would have to spend $11 million a week just to keep his fortune from growing. He, also, would likely throw away our day wages.

On Easter, we are supposed to remember how much God has given us. While you contemplate the supernatural miracle of grace, don't forget the material blessings as well. In the context of the larger world, we are kings, millionaires, lottery winners all.

Toys that make noise

2007-04-07T17:21:00.000-04:00

Some toys are supposed to make noise: clacking, whirring, popping, banging. That's to be expected, and it's as ancient as toys themselves. Equally ancient are parents screaming for their kids to play more quietly, and the urge to kill all the toy-makers who needlessly amplified their children.

When I was growing up, a new sort of noisy toy came on the scene: the electronic toy that made roars, shrieks and whistles. My favorite was the Star Wars blaster, a black plastic match for Han Solo's pistol. It made a buzz-saw-like shriek that was supposed to sound like a blaster, but really sounded like a dentist's drill underwater. It drove my mom nuts.

Now my kids have a number of electronic toys, but unlike anything I had growing up. These are toys that talk and play music. Now, talking and playing music is not that unusual; we had "Operation," talking Barbies and toy pianos in my day. But no one had yet to dream up completely superflous music and speech. If you told me, "Let's put an electronic speaker in this truck so it can have an engine sound and back-up beeper," I wouldn't have agreed but I could at least understand the urge. But if someone said, "Let's put an electronic speaker in this truck so it can play 20 seconds of electric guitar riffs and have some masculine voice holler 'Catepillar Power!' ", I would have been speechless. But such noise-for-noise's-sake is now so common-place it's hard to find a simple Big Wheel or Sit-n-Spin that is not equipped with its own prosthetic enthusiasm.

What's going on here? My guess is that such things are geared at getting the attention of toy-buyers, not the kids themselves. The toys lining the shelves thrash and scream, as if to say, "Buy me! Buy me!" And the confused adult, not really knowing what's cool or interesting to kids these days, will be easily swayed to grab the biggest, loudest, brightest item they can find.

Or, more depressingly, it may be that the toys are competing with other loud, bright, annoying things like, oh, say, the television set. Perhaps the average parent is not annoyed by these screaming music monstrosities, since they long ago learned to tune out the background noise of their TVs.

For our household, it is now a rule: all toys must be capable of quiet play. That doesn't mean the play will be quiet, of course, but at least all shrieks, explosions and roars are human-generated.

11th Commandment

2007-04-06T04:51:00.001-04:00

When I was giving my "world religions quiz" to college students, we discussed whether the Ten Commandments were still relevant, and what if anything we would add or take away from them. Some students made some half-hearted calls to strike the first commandment ("No Gods before me" and, depending on how you count them, "No graven images") and the fourth ("Keep the Sabbath"), but with only a modest liberality of interpretation we immediately made good cases for keeping them. While literal idolotry is not a big concern in our culture today (I can't remember the last time I saw a golden calf), we do see lots of people putting things other than God at the center of their lives. The Sabbath was not voted off the island, either, once people decided to interpret it as "dedicate specific time to thinking about spiritual things." Everything else -- the prohibitions against lying, stealing, murdering, screwing around -- were still seen as self-evidently good.

Very few people had anything to add to the commandments, which speaks well of the original ten, I suppose. Jesus' summation of the Law ("Love God, love thy neighbor as thyself") was included, but in a Christian nation that's a gimme anyway. Some attempts were made to enshrine liberal values ("Don't hurt others" or "take care of the earth"), but those generally fell apart as people realized they were so vague as to be almost useless.

I could only think of two that I thought deserved to make the list. I don't think the ancient Jews ever felt the lack, because these principles were so engrained in their world view that they hardly needed saying:

Keep your promises.
Honor and love your children.

"Keep your promises" didn't make the list because it was embedded in the Law from the very beginning. The Law itself was a covenant, a commitment, between God and man. But today the world needs a very explicit reminder that everything in our society hangs on our ability to commit ourselves to good things and then keep those commitments.

Loving, protecting, and forwarding the interests of your children is not only obvious, it's even built into the stereotype of the Jewish mother. But again, it seems like the world needs reminding. We've had generation upon generation of people growing up both loving and hating their parents, spending half their lives (if not more) trying to transcend the physical, psychological or sexual abuse they endured. How much evil could be removed from the world, if people understood and kept the commandment, "Thou shalt not fuck up thy children?"

Superman Returns

2007-04-05T05:39:00.000-04:00

For Valentine's Day my wife gave me Superheroes and Philosophy, a nice collection of thoughtful essays on the philosophic questions and implications explored in the superhero genre. Since the world has seen rise to "Buffy Studies" and mountains of thoughtful discussion online about fantasy-driven pop culture, the book seemed about as square as Clark Kent. But it still managed to give me new appreciation for Superman, which led me to throw Superman Returns into the Netflix queue. (Warning: spoilers follow.)

I was tempted to call this post "Superjesus," were it not for the Australian band by the same name. Of course you need a little Christ imagery for a Superman movie . . . what self-respecting movie doesn't have a little Christ imagery? But this movie made it a full-time job, outstripping even The Matrix Revolutions in its blunt persistence to push the savior theme, almost to the point of sacrilege. I suppose its a credit to the film that it made the otherworldly awesomeness of Superman's power quite real; we can't help regard him, not as a turbo-charged man, but as a kind of god.

Thankfully, the new installment to the franchise was extremely careful not to tinker with the Superman mythology, lest they anger the fans for whom he really is a god. They kept the original music score, without the least attempt to dress it up: just clear honest horns and strings. Superman's look is scrupulously returned, with only tiny modifications to the texture (is that a leather cape?) Clark Kent as superdork is also preserved, maybe even more convincingly than before.

And, the liberties they do take feel a little off. Kate Bosworth looks like Lois Lane, but with almost all the sweetness and innocence extracted and replaced with worldly cynicism. It's dramatically useful, proving that god-like powers are not enough to keep a woman happy, but in the end we, the audience, do not fall in love with Lois, which is critical for making the whole thing work.

I was also somewhat uncomfortable with the notion of Superman as SuperCuckolder. How can the man who "never lies" participate in the ultimate deception, letting another man believe he is the father of your child?

The real hero of the movie is Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor, who brings every positive evolution imaginable to the role, and a welcome relief to the pristine uprightness of Superman. Villains always get to have the most fun.

Catch that Confluence

2007-04-04T06:20:00.001-04:00

Occasionally, you meet someone new that you really like, and come to realize that they are friends with a lot of your friends, and you never even realized it. The network of shared likes and dislikes and mutual acquaintences creates an instant friendship that feels fated, even though it should come as no surprise that in a six-degrees world, such clusters of connections would exist.

I’ve had the cultural equivalent of that experience listening to Dan Zanes. With my cultural critic hat on, I should refer to him as “Zanes” for the rest of the post, but it seems almost impossible to call him anything but “Dan,” as he exudes such a friendly approachableness. I first thought of Dan as a niche folk singer, as I first heard him a couple years ago when my wife bought me his recording of Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag. I’m a huge fan of Carl Sandburg’s poetry, and his dedication to preserving folk music was a strong influence that lead me to an appreciation of the whole genre of folk.

That was connection #1. Anyone who likes Carl Sandberg is ok in my book. And when I listened to the album, I discovered a really enlightened, eclectic music collection, almost like the soundtrack of “O Brother Where Art Thou” in its depth and breadth. Many artists, as great as they may be, sound too much like themselves, song after song, so that you can barely get through a whole album without hitting Shuffle. But Dan, tapping into an artery of traditional music without any pretense of old-timey-ness, has an inexhaustible variety.

I thought, “He’s really good, he’s the kinda guy you’d expect to here on Back Porch Music.” And darned if I didn’t start hearing his songs on the WUNC radio show. (Maybe he was there all along I just started to recognize him.) Connection #2. And then one day I was wandering through the cultural desolation that is the toy section in Wal-Mart, and I found Dan Zanes name emblazoned on a CD in the (tiny) kids music bin. Ahh, I thought, he’s just like “They Might Be Giants,” a musical act of genuine talent and originality that has found a niche playing to young people. So I got it for my son’s birthday.

And then I listened to Catch That Train myself, and I had more shocks of recognition. Hey, that’s Natalie Merchant! Hey, the Kronos Quartet! How is it that someone I barely knew is playing with artists that I’ve known and loved for years? And then I check out his bio online as I’m writing this post, and more shocking connections. Suzanne Vega! Aimee Mann! This is spooky. By modern iTunes standards, my exposure to music is tiny, and this guy is working with all my favorites. I had a similar experience when I listened to Sandra Boynton’s Dog Train, another kid’s hit that pulled together name-brand talent.

I can see now a trend, hopefully a good one: music for kids used to be a barren, almost empty landscape dominated by a few Raffis and the occasional Free to Be You and Me collections. But modern artists are discovering that what kids like to listen to is (gasp) just good music. Remove sex and violence and heartbreak and cynicism, and just play good music: that is the new formula.

Service (with or without the smile)

2007-04-03T05:31:00.001-04:00

When he spoke to the SKS last week, Fleet Maull had said that "service work is an essential part of a spiritual path -- not just a good idea, not just a by-product, but an essential part of the path." I think most spiritual practicioners would agree . . . in theory. But the only question is: what qualifies as "sevice work"?

Say "service work" to the average American college student and their minds jump to one of three or four categories of charitable activity: soup kitchens, homeless shelters, Habitat for Humanity, and maybe hospice. They think Mother Theresa: helping people at the absolute bottom of the heap. And why not? Isn't it just, that our impulse is to serve "the least of these?" And the people working in those realms, the Mother Theresas and Fleet Maulls of the world, have testified to the powerful experience of making a human connection to people radically different from oneself. When you serve those who you aren't even especially likeable, you discover both the unity of the human condition, and the divinity of love that transcends mere preference.

But I can't help but notice that so much of the charitable service that has sprung up in the world is not about serving people far removed from our circumstance. It's usually just the opposite: we spontaneously want to serve those who are most like ourselves. If (God forbid) my son was killed by a drunk driver, I will feel instant solidarity with anyone and everyone else who has lost a child, and spontaneously want to help them in their need. No medical charity ever sprang into existence without someone's child or spouse falling gravely ill. The recovering alcoholics reach out to other alcoholics. We can't help ourselves: once we see ourselves in other people, those are the ones we want to help.

If you are serving others, and transcending your own egocentric perspective in the process, then I suppose that's spiritual. Fleet would certainly agree that mindfulness and compassion should be manifesting in your everyday life, and changing the way you relate to your spouse, your kids, your coworkers. But is it really spiritual to "serve your own?" If you're kind and helpful to to the people who surround you . . . is that enough? Complacency could so easily creep in . . . I sense that its called service work for a reason: it ought to be stretch, going beyond the bounds you normally live in.

The Scooter Effect

2007-04-02T04:12:00.000-04:00

The current brouhaha over the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys seems to be another politicizing of legal process, in almost exactly the same vein as the prosecution of Scooter Libby for perjury in the Plame affair. In both cases, you have a supposed "crime" that gets downgraded to an "outrage", once everyone figures out that nobody has broken any laws. There is absolutely nothing illegal about the firings; the U.S. Attorneys are political appointees, hired and fired at the President's will. However, just like in the Plame case, there is the appearance of misconduct, or at least political hardball; once again the Administration appears to be punishing people who cross their path or don't do their bidding.

Now, the Democrats have no problem with the notion of political payback: witness the abuse that Senator John Kerry heaped upon ambassadorial nominee Sam Fox for having the temerity to fund opposition to his presidential bid. Everyone is used to that sort of thing as just a part of the game. So why should we be shocked, shocked to find that the hiring and firing of U.S. Attorneys is somehow linked to political concerns?

In the Plame affair, the underlings dutifully obfuscated the role of the higher-ups in the political non-crimes. Scooter Libby was rewarded with a perjury conviction. Now it looks like the underlings have gotten the message; covering for your boss can put you in hot water, regardless of the legality of the underlying matter. So aides like Michael Battle and Monica Goodling are either invoking the Fifth Amendment or letting the blame roll right back uphill.

It's interesting to note that hardly anyone, either Republican or Democrat, is talking about the particular reasons these U.S. Attorneys are being let go. The real underlying political reasons for the dismissals are related to indictments of lawmakers; evidently these attorneys didn't pursue prosecution of certain Democrats when they could, or went ahead with prosecution of Republicans that perhaps they could have let slide. Perhaps they don't talk about it because it's complicated and involved and doesn't make for good sound bites. Or, more likely, they really don't want the public to witness how lawmakers abuse power themselves, and then use their power to deflect prosecution for their crimes. If the public really understood that, they would not be able to sustain any moral outrage. It's one thing when justice is undone by politics; but when we see that it's not a question of justice at all, but just a legal and political knife-fight between two parties, we tune out.

Mise en Scene

2007-04-01T03:58:00.001-04:00

My brother Gene and I just did a little test video call via Skype yesterday -- we've been wanting to give our kids a way to get together more often than just our once-a-year visits over the holidays. Now that I've done these calls with a few different people (Fleet Maull, Harry, and now Gene), I'm starting to notice something about the media. It does make your communication with the person seem more real and in-person . . . but that effect has only a little to do with seeing the other person. It has just as much to do with seeing that other person in their environment. The little office, the stacks of papers and CDs cases by the desk, the light of the window, the O'Reilly book covers in the background . . . in short, another place, as well as another person.

I tend to unconsciously dismiss the importance of place. Somehow, in my mental categorization of the world, place is arbitrary, merely the scene and staging for the people who are in it. And yet, when I have a chance to talk to those people, I'm spending my time looking at everything else besides their face. I feel like a know Fleet a little better, just for the sake of seeing his handsome and uncomplicated study, with the recognizable clutter of desk used for real and varied work.

I used to think that TV reporters doing their "live-on-the-scene" monologues with streets and buildings behind them was hopelessly contrived, a sort of visual "look-Ma-I'm-really-here-in-Russia" validation of their authenticity. But now I'm starting to realize that the placement in the scene has a lot less to do with "I'm really here" and more to do with, "We take you there." The reporter does not need to be standing in front of the White House in order to do a credible story about the President's new policy, but we need to see the White House back there to really put ourselves in the Capitol. Maybe I'm a little more sensitive to that sort of thing since I use audio media (phone and radio) vastly more than I use visual media like TV or, well, actually being there.

And what a relief, knowing that I don't need to clean up anything or worry what my office looks like for these video calls. Far from distracting from the call, all those random things in the background are actually giving the other person a sense of place, a sense of what it's like to be me.

Thou Shalt Not . . . Um . . . Wait a minute . . .

2007-03-31T14:57:00.001-04:00

I did another SKS meeting at NCSU with the religious traditions quiz: write down as many of the Ten Commandments, Five Pillars of Islam, and Four Noble Truths that you can remember. (They actually did a little better on the Commandments than the UNC kids, but they totally wiped out on Islam and Buddhism.) Things I noticed:

On more than one occasion, I've had students put "Love thy neighbor as thyself" with absolute confidence on their list of the Ten Commandments. I suppose Jesus would be glad that his summation of the Law is sticking in their heads better than the nitty-gritty details of the actual Commandments, but it also shows that they have no idea how revolutionary Jesus was in his universalist approach.
We had an argument early on about how to divide up the commandments: some people thought "No god before me" and "No graven images" were one commandment, and broke out "Thou shalt not covet" into two pieces, while others did the opposite. It turns out that we were replicating an old argument: whole churches have disagreed on that point. Some people started to get a little heated on the point, until it became clear that everyone was merely repeating what they had gathered from what they assumed to be an unquestioned authority. It only served to emphasize the point that even when you've talking about the same set of rules, differences of opinion will erupt immediately.
We talked a lot about the nature of the positive versus negative framing of the commandments. Lots of people have carped about the Law being a bunch of "thou shalt nots," just authoritarian dictums instead of real wisdom. But the more we talked about it, the more apparent it became that you need to avoid a lot of evil in order to make room for the good. Most of the commandments could be seen as just the beginning of the spiritual work, the establishment of a life and society within which the real work could begin.
One of the students had a good spin on the Tenth Commandment. "Not coveting" is something most people can understand, but he went on to reframe it in an affirmative statement: "Be content." I had always thought of simplicity, contentment and gratitude to be spiritually wholesome states, but I had never considered them as Biblical commandments.
We did have the usual argument about generalities versus specifics. Most people wanted to believe that it was more important to have internalized the core message or attitude of the law (love God, love thy neighbor) and to let that manifest in the specifics, rather than adhering to a very specific set of rules. But at the end of the meeting, they reported in on how they were doing on their "Zen Challenges" (an SKS tradition of making public resolutions to improve oneself), and many people reported missing their goals, largely because they had defined their goals somewhat vaguely and then started rationalizing about it. (E.g. "I said I would exercise every day; gee, I walked to class really fast, that counts.") They found out through experience that you need hard-and-fast, detailed rules in order to live according to your abstract ideals.

But this is how I really talk

2007-03-30T05:31:00.001-04:00

I rarely exercise the blogger's perogative to bitch about things that are merely personal irritants. But today I'll let myself go:

What the hell is going on in the heads of people who use fake accents in regular conversation?

I run into one of these people every year or two. They are usually college students (but sometimes not), often geeky (but sometimes not), who are sporting some kind of vaguely British accent. And I'm not talking about the linguistic phenomena of "code-switching," in which people sometimes unintentionally adopt the accents of the people with whom they are speaking. This is the exact opposite: trying to adopt an accent different from everyone else, presumably to sound exotic. It happens often enough that I'm sure everyone else has known one of these people.

It's clear to me they must have no friends, because surely someone who really cared about them would slap them across the face and tell them they are acting like an idiot. First of all, accents are exceedingly difficult to fake, and actors study diligently to be able to pull it off. (I remember the first time I heard James Marsters ("Spike" on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) speak in his native American accent, instead of the street Cockney of his character, and my jaw dropped. Now that was a professional accent.) So what makes anyone think that an unhealthy number of hours watching Doctor Who qualifies them to begin faking an accent?

Also consider that anyone who dares to fake an accent in public life is heaped with ridicule. If you Google "fake accent," the list is topped by bloggers savaging Hilary Clinton for attempting a Southern drawl, or the withering contempt for Madonna's assumed accent. Nobody is fooled, everyone is annoyed. A fake accent screams to the world: "I'm a phony! I'm a BIG FAT PHONY! And I'm either too stupid to realize it or too self-absorbed to care!"

So why do they keep doing it? I have to chalk it up to adolescent attempts to create an identity. I suppose everybody tries to conform to their ideals and alters their dress, speech and manners to fit an constructed identity. It's just not so freakin' obvious most of the time. And the reason it's so disconcerting to listen to is that, deep down, we wonder whether our own mask is slipping . . . "Jesus Christ, I hope I never sound like that . . . "

Even more see-through

2007-03-29T06:12:00.002-04:00

I wrote yesterday about the current business craze for "transparency," and as folks wrote in their comments I found the need to clarify:

Both the Wired articles and some of you did make the point that many processes require secrecy. Industry mavens suggested that Steve Jobs and Apple did such a good job on the iPhone because they didn't seek input from everyone. Kenny pointed out that George Washington insisted on absolute secrecy during the first Constitutional Convention, presumably so the Founding Fathers could stay focused on building a lasting framework for a government and not get bogged down in the political influences of the day. I didn't mean to suggest that every aspect of business or life be made glaringly public. I just think that openness is generally more constructive than secretiveness, and that we could afford to let the pendulum swing the other way for a while.
In my own personal work, I found that writing about transparency actually helped me be a little more transparent. That morning I shared a lot more of my current problems with my co-workers, and as a result I got extra help that I needed to deal with an emerging crisis with a customer. All too often, people hide their problems from the very people who can help them. (Ok, ok, I hide my problems from the people who can help me. Some people have no trouble complaining about all their problems to anyone who will listen.)
The biggest surprise in greater transparency is how little people actually care to look. I remember in my teenage years when I was angsting about how I looked or acted, and my mom said, "Don't worry; everyone else is too busy worrying about themselves to notice." It was true then, and its still true in business. Nobody has time to ogle your calendar or read your notes. A lot of it is pretty boring. This is one of the great liberating insights of greater self-knowledge: there's an awful lot that you're hiding that you don't need to hide.
As Montaigne wrote: "No man is a hero to his own valet." Some things need not be shared, not because their secret or important, but because they are mundane or boring or gross. As Ernest Becker emphasized in The Denial of Death, most of our social taboos revolve around hiding the fact that we are animals, and I see no reason why the notion of radical transparency needs to cross those lines. We don't need webcams in bedrooms or bathrooms.

See-through top

2007-03-28T06:33:00.000-04:00

This month's cover of Wired declares that "radical transparency" is the future of business. (It probably wasn't just an excuse to put a naked Jenna Fischer of Office fame on the cover, either.) In a world of democratized instant communication, secrets are hard to keep, lies are quickly exposed, and jaded consumers are a rapt audience for under-the-covers views of what's going on. So why not embrace the reality and just "let it all hang out?" Ironically, the usually button-downed and secretive Microsoft is leading the way, encouraging its engineers to blog about all their projects, while the media darling Apple retains its super-secretive, always-on-message glossy image.

Really, none of this is new. I was fortunate to learn about transparency in a small software start-up, Raleigh Group International. RGI had an intensely sales-driven culture, and salesmen with quotas are used to having a big board with their numbers visible for all to see. Augie took that same sales-board transparency and applied it to the entire company. Not only were sales numbers on the board: company AR and cash in the bank were also up there. A lot of small-business owners would not be comfortable with their financials so exposed, but it actually quelled a lot of internal strife. Any time someone complained about having to take out the trash, or why didn't we do more marketing, or whatever, Augie always just pointed at the white board. Most of the time he didn't even have to say anything else. Occasionally he would say, "When that number hits x dollars, then we can have a cleaning service." Such exposure went a long way to dispelling the image of the business as a paternalistic power, and that the CEO has infinite control. People started looking at the company the way the CEO looked at it. They realized, very tangibly, that the good of the company really was their own good as well.

As a CRM consultant, I preach the same sort of visibility to my customers. Even the executives and managers who hired me to integrate all their data together in one collaborative system eventually get nervous: "You mean Joe is going to be able to see what accounts Bob is calling on? You mean the West Coast team can see what the East Coast team is selling? Ummmm . . . " Some people have spent their entire professional lives hiding behind trumped-up status reports, dealing with salesmen individually rather than collectively, and trying to enhance their aura of infinite power rather than sharing their pain. Take away all the secrecy and positioning and . . . well, there's not much left to play politics with.

But transparency requires trust, and our culture is rapidly losing its capacity to trust. All our lawyers, contracts, disclaimers, pre-nups . . . it all signals a fundamental distrust of the other guy. How can we expect people to trust their co-workers, when they can't even trust their husbands and wives? Fortunately, transparency and trust is a two-way street. As soon as a system creates two-way visibility, lying becomes harder, and we have no choice but to tell the truth, and trust.

DIY Distance Learning

2007-03-27T06:10:00.001-04:00

Last night the Self Knowledge Symposium hosted Sensei Fleet Maull in a live videoconference, after a showing of the documentary The Prison Sutras. It was our first foray into "virtual" events, and it was an excellent event for us. A few observations, especially for anyone else contemplating hosting a virtual speaker:

High-end conferencing isn't. High-end video conferencing facilities are available at many universities and at outlets like Kinkos, but the fees are astronomical and the options limited. Many systems, like the one at UNC-Chapel Hill were geared towards conferences between points in their own system, and you have to pay extra "bridge" or "conversion" fees to get connected with some other location. With fees at over $300 an hour, its hardly worth it if you're just trying to avoid the time and money costs for bringing a speaker in.
Do it yourself. You can get reasonably good videoconferencing with off-the-shelf internet technologies. We tried a number of video chat clients, and wound up using Skype because it was extremely firewall-friendly, easy to set up, and totally free. You do have to invest in webcams and maybe some decent microphones, but good webcams can be had for $50, and we used audio equipment we already owned (microphones, mix board, mike stand, etc.) to handle sound at the event.
Test, test, test. If you're going to do an event with a virtual guest, you have to test the bejeezus out of your setup. We ran tests prior to the event with connecting to Fleet Maull, and also testing making Skype calls from campus classrooms. While no technical challenge was insurmountable, there were lots of little things to check: can this laptop get on the network from this classroom? Is the lighting ok? Are the sound levels comfortable for everyone? How are we going to get the microphone to people to ask questions?
Have separate techie and emcee resources. For this particular event, I was being both the host of the event, and also the technical guy running the videoconferencing. In retrospect, I wish I had had someone else do one of those jobs. I was so nervous about making everything work that I couldn't pay closer attention to do doing proper introductions, monitoring the response of people in the room, etc.

Phasebook

2007-03-26T06:10:00.001-04:00

Nothing makes you feel quite so old and un-hip as new media. As a professional techie who had spent most of my youth working with then-cutting edge technologies – email, desktop publishing, the Web, etc. – I thought I was immune to the normal process of technoscherosis. I never thought there would come a day when I said, “I just don’t understand young people with their (technogadget goes here)s.”

Cellphone? Check.
Smartphone? Check.
iPod? Check.
IM? Check.
Blog? C’mon.

But now I keep running into the world of web-based social networking, where I remain a hopeless dork. When we were distributing publicity for the SKS Prison Sutras event, I was told in no uncertain terms that we needed to get something up on Facebook. Not only had I not thought of that, I did not even entirely understand what that meant.

I have had similar so-square moments when SMS texting was mentioned or used. My free 25 text messages on my cell plan remain unused after the last two years. I think I tried it once, and it didn’t work for some reason, and I never felt compelled to figure out why. Jeez, I sound so much like my grandmother when I say that.

My only comfort (at least, the one that I’m clinging to) is that some of these phenomena are not really technological breakthroughs so much as youth-culture phenomena. An interview in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal with 22-year-old Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed it. The author did an informal survey of Facebook users and found that the primary, and often exclusive, use of Facebook was to keep tabs on prospective romantic partners and their current availability. Phew. It’s not that I’m square, necessarily: it’s just that I’m happily married. (Ok, let’s just assume, for the moment that the two are not inextricably linked.)

Text messaging was similarly dispelled for me once I saw people use it in its most common circumstances. “Oh, now I get it,” I said. “The only people doing lots of texting are stuck in boring classes or boring business meetings that they can’t escape. Or maybe hanging out in bars.” (While laptops are cool, laptop use in bars remains totally uncool.) And again . . . thank goodness I don’t feel the need to use those technologies.

Of course, some saavy adult user of these technologies is still going to slam me for my backwards ways and Luddite prejudices. They’ll tell me about Zaadz, or some other social network that might transcend mating applications. But those networks just don’t seem to have experienced same growth that solidly youth-oriented sites like Facebook or MySpace enjoy. There is only one niche of networking, personal-profile posting sites that has had the same growth, and it is quite honest about its intent: online matchmaking sites. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Blogger ate my homework

2007-03-25T15:55:00.001-04:00

I just posted a lengthy post about social networking, only to be told that "a security token" error prevented my request from being fulfilled. Of, course, hitting the back button did not get me back to my text. I was happily using the Word add-in for Blogger until it was absorbed into the Google Borg, to avoid just this sort of thing.

ARRRRG!

When such things happen, I have learned to say, "Surely I'm not the only person who has this problem. Surely someone else has solved this problem." And so I went poking around for an updated Blogger add-in. It turns out there is a new Word integration . . . for Office 2007. Of course the Microsoft geeks (who are big blog users) will jump in to add value to the latest version of Office. And just as surely, they have absolutely no vested interest in supporting anything earlier than that. And the Google engineers dare not build such a thing themselves, lest they anger their partner in what must be a touchy relationship anyway. (In case you've been under a rock for the last five years, since Google inherited the earth, Microsoft and Google are the bitterest of foes.)

And, ironically, there is a glimmer of geek excitement in me when I think: Hey, I could build one! I started looking at the API documentation, visions of functions and interfaces dancing in my head, when I have to slap myself and come back to reality. Of all the things I could possibly do in my "free" time, writing software for the greater glory of Google is not one of them.

I Am Not a Strange Loop

2007-03-24T11:31:00.001-04:00

I've been lingering on the theme of non-intuitive truths for the last couple of days, and just by strange coincidence Douglas Hofstadter's new book, I Am a Strange Loop, goes on sale on Monday. Hofstadter did more than anyone to popularize Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which is a widely-accepted proof that there are some truths that cannot be proven (or disproven) within the realm of any formal logical system. Ever since he won a Pulitzer Prize for Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Hofstadter has been the patron saint of head-twisting paradoxes, especially those related to consciousness.

Good news! Hofstadter is finally going to get down to business and really drill into the question of consciousness.

Bad news! Hofstadter calls consciousness a "mirage." D'oh!

I suppose I should read the book first before passing judgement. (I just placed my order.) But I find it aggrevating when people use such ephemeral language to describe what is actually the most obvious truth which we can directly apprehend. The one thing that we know for sure, more than anything else, is that we are aware. Another Douglas H. spent most of his life demonstrating to people that our apprehension of awareness was more fundamental than anything else we knew. Mirage, my ass.

Ageless

2007-03-23T05:40:00.000-04:00

Last night I heard Dick Gordon interviewing Marion Downs, the 92-year-old author of Shut Up and Live (You Know How), a guidebook for living well into old age. At first the interview was exactly what you'd expect it to be: the interviewer has a perpetual smile in their voice, an overly supportive tone that is reserved for children and old people. The woman tells stories from her life in a clear-but-paper-thin voice. And the theme was pretty much what you'd expect: an upbeat, you-can-do-a-lot-when-you're-old inspirational.

What was a little different here was the usual, "Aw, shucks I don't know why I lived so long" humility about one's age. Ms. Downs was (I think, quite rightly) insisting that this is going to be a common thing: "You don't realize it yet, but YOU are going to live to be ninety-two, and you need to prepare for it." I guess everyone hopes for a long life, but in the moment she said it I realized that it was most likely true, and not necessarily the blessing one normally expects. "Once I passed seventy-two, the age both my parents died, I didn't know what to do. I had no map. I thought I was supposed to die then, and I didn't. I had to find my own way."

Dick Gordon, sensing now that perhaps his guest didn't require the usual deference, asked a real question: "Why? Why should I prepare for old age? You didn't, and here you are." And she gave a practical answer: "Well, I was very athletic, and physically active my entire life. That prepared me." It gives my daily exercise more significance, when I realize that I am not merely warding off the extra pound or two, but preparing for a life that could go another fifty years.

And though her core advice was a chestnut I've heard a million times, she said it as one with authority: "Be here now. That's what really matters. Live every moment fully, 'cause you only come this way once." I think this is the gift of diminishment, the advantage of outliving your egoic notions of how your life ought to run. Eventually you stop thinking about your self, and just start to pay attention to life.

Consciousness Ensnared?

2007-03-22T05:31:00.001-04:00

The New Yorker recently did a story on Paul and Patricia Churchland, two philosophers who have worked together on the mind-body problem for all of their 37-year marriage ("Two Heads," by Larissa MacFarquhar, February 12, 2007). The Churchlands are avowed materialists when it comes to the consciousness question -- they are so sure, in fact, that consciousness is identical to the brain that they look to neuroscience to provide an explanation for the apparent mind-body dualism. This is somewhat unusual, even among materialists and especially among philosophers of mind, who do by and large believe that the brain gives rise to the mind, but who don't like to entangle themselves in the squishy and seemingly arbitrary complexity of a living brain.

The Churchlands are attacking the non-materialist, non-reductionist views of mind, especially those articulated so well by Kenny Felder in his "Are You a Robot?" lecture. Those arguments run something like this: no matter how complex a computer gets (and the human brain is an exceedingly complex one) it still doesn't explain what consciousness is. Doing lots of really complex operations in no way necessitates the rise of a subjective observer who witnesses those operations happening, and is aware of the witnessing. That awareness of thought and experience is, to the subjective observer, completely irreducible. It just is. That's what leads meditators and mystics to conclude that consciousness is what philosophers call a "primative," a fundamental building block of reality itself. This line of thought is also the bedrock of my own personal theology, so I take this question very, very seriously.

The Churchlands critique of this line of reasoning runs like this: OK, you can't imagine how a mechanistic brain gives rise to experience. So what? The history of science is chock full of truths that were unintuitive and completely unimaginable until scientific disciplines and knowledge evolved sufficiently to make sense of them. At one time, it was perfectly obvious that the world was flat, and no one could imagine how you could explain the experience of earth and sky any other way. And yet, eventually, that "obvious" truth was eventually overthrown, and everyone takes for granted their current concept of a round earth. Consciousness is just another phenomena that will eventually be explained. To argue otherwise -- "I don't believe it because I can't imagine it" -- is to essentially argue that ignorance is absolute, and is indistinguishable from the position of those who would have killed Galileo for suggesting the world was not the center of the universe. It is the same sort of reasoning creationists use to establish the existence of God: "I can't imagine how such a complex world could come to be without a Creator; therefore, there must be a God." To which most scientists reply: "No, that doesn't mean there must be a God. It just means you have a pretty lousy imagination."

The Churchlands don't really have a compelling explanation of mind; they just don't want people to assume that all truths must be intuitively compelling to be acceptable or true. And I think that's a perfectly legitimate (and troubling) bit of epistomology to wrap your head around. You can't assume that you will recognize the truth when you first meet it. Nor can you assume that the mysterious and irreducible will stay safely mysterious.

Faith and the unintuitive

2007-03-21T19:34:00.001-04:00

I've been mulling over the role of faith in spiritual life. "Faith" is an irksome term for pretty much everyone. Skeptics see it as the religious person's "get out of jail free" card, a blanket justification to believe whatever you please. The esoteric, mystical spiritual traditions tend to see faith as the consolation prize of religious life; you can take God on faith, but if you're really hard-core you'll seek out a direct, personal, unmediated experience of the divine. And even the contentedly religious have trouble with the concept, since it is never directly addressed in the scriptures, and used to cover a range of sentiments and intuitions.

Faith can, in fact, be used in almost entirely contradictory ways. Some people refer to faith as the core, inexpressible intuitions of their being, the a priori revelations of their consciousness: "I believe in God, I have faith in God, because it just seems right to me. I can't imagine a universe without a God." But, when the rubber hits the road and the shit hits the fan, exhortations to "have faith" are usually implying that the object of faith is unintuitive and not at all obvious: "I know it seems right now like life has no meaning and God is absent, but you have to have faith that things will work out." So . . . is faith the recognition of the intuitively obvious, or the conscious acknowledgement of truths that aren't obvious?

C.S Lewis was wise enough to point out that the answer was: both. We have occasions of beatific revelation, when God is obvious and real, when peace is tangible, and truth is easy. And yet, those moments don't last. Then we are struggling to remember what it was that we experienced, and to carry on with our lives as if that point of view were still present. Even if you decide to only trust your own experience, you will be struggling to remember and live by your insights from day to day. "Faith" is really "faithfulness" -- that is, being true to what you've already found to be true. "Faith" is when vague intuition and aspiration are put to work in the real world.

Who is Fleet Maull?

2007-03-20T06:05:00.001-04:00

The Self Knowledge Symposium will be hosting Fleet Maull, a Buddhist priest who served time in federal prison for drug smuggling, and who went on to found the Prison Dharma Network and the National Prison Hospice Association. It's going to be unusual because we are showing a documentary film that some SKS students produced about Fleet, The Prison Sutras, and then do a videoconference with Fleet to answer questions from the audience. It's our first big experiment with distance learning, and I'm really excited about the possibilities it could open up for us.

So I was trying to tune up our verbiage for him for the marketing:

For years, Fleet Maull lived a double life. Half of the time, he was a Buddhist meditator, attending intensive retreats and seeking enlightenment. The other half of the year he was a drug smuggler, moving cocaine from South America into the U.S. When he was caught and sentenced to 25 years in federal prison, his spiritual practices of mindfulness and compassion was galvanized by witnessing the suffering of his fellow prisoners. Fleet went on to found the National Prison Hospice Association, to provide dignity to those dying alone in prison, and the Prison Dharma Network, to provide Buddhist mediation instruction and support to
inmates.

Come see The Prison Sutras, a documentary film produced by two SKS students about Fleet's life and work, and talk with Fleet Maull himself via videoconference after the showing.

Final Exam

2007-03-19T05:08:00.001-04:00

I had a dream, and it felt significant:

I was a student of some kind, and I was going through the library near the end of the term. I think I was returning textbooks that I would no longer need. I run into my German instructor, who happens to be Ms. Amelie, the kindergarten teacher at Emerson Waldorf school. She says "hello" in a bustling, business-like sort of way, and informs me that I need to take two exams right now, in the library. The first exam is very hard, she said, and she said it in such a way that implied she thought it was unfairly difficult. The second one was longer, she said, but not so bad.

So I have to take these tests . . . but I realize that my three-year-old son Malcolm is here with me. How am I going to manage this? Mal is sitting at a table, totally absorbed in some books, so I think that maybe I have a chance. I start into the first test, and it's the sort of test where they give you entirely new material to learn and then test you on it. And it's all local dialect stuff -- weird alternative vowels for things you knew before. The new material keeps going on, and I never seem to get to the actual questions.

Then I realize that it's nearly noon, and for some reason I need to make an appearance at chapel for some kind of brief service. (I guess it's that kind of school.) And so I'm racing down the halls to the chapel, realizing that Malcolm is still in the library, and who's looking after him? I realize at that moment that I haven't eaten, either, and I'm facing the prospect of a long set of exams on an empty stomach. The entrance to the chapel seems to go through the buffet line of a cafeteria. A woman minister of some kind is near the front of the line, and she suddenly turns around, grabs a male student by both hands, and launches into some kind of prayer for his soul. The student, spooked, pulls away and dashes into the chapel. The minister says, "Nuts. Lost another one." As I push passed her into the chapel myself, I say something like, "Yeah, you can't just grab 'em."

Somehow I'm back at the library, ready to begin the big exam. Rupert Giles, the Watcher from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is handing me the big heavy leather-bound "Vampyr" tomb. Evidently this is supposed to be my test. The way he talks and looks at me, I can tell that if I'm the Chosen One, I'm supposed to be able to read this, and if not, I won't. I open to the title page and I can read it, though it seems more like a personal scrapbook, with pictures and ticket stubs, than any kind of mystic lore.

Exegesis:

Richard Rose always said that the meaning of dream was in the mood of the dream. In this case my attitude during the dream was half panic, half resignation. It was obvious that I wasn't going to be able to get through all these challenges without failure, so I just braced myself for whatever was going to happen. I think that's becoming more typical of my stance toward life right now: I'm overwhelmed, but I'm just going to muddle through. I even thought of the Kobayashi Maru, the test which you are doomed to fail, which is all about testing your ability to perform in the midst of failure.

The dream touched on the conflicts and tensions between my work (the German exam), my family (Malcolm) and my spiritual duties (the chapel). My work feels like an endless series of learning exercises, localized and perhaps trivial in scope, which never seems to reach a resolution. Clearly I thought I might be able to swing work and family together, as long as family didn't act up. But spiritual duty called me away from both. In retrospect I feel a little guilty that I left Mal to go to chapel, even though I knew it was a prefunctory appearance on my part. That, too, seems typical of my current attitude towards the Work: I can't even remember, sometimes, why I do it, and yet I keep doing it.

The minister grabbing at the student . . . well, I guess my own group work with the Self Knowledge Symposium feels about as awkward and ineffective. Or maybe I think that I ought to make a lunge, take a risk to put pressure on the students, and risk them just walking away. I was sympathetic to the minister, I understood her absolute desperation to try to make some kind of meaningful contact with people, but I also understood why the student was freaked out.

And Rupert Giles . . . I think this was supposed to be an affirmation of my spiritual life. In the TV show, when Giles heaves out the tome and slams it before Buffy, it was symbolic of the heavy role that Buffy did not want, and yet was destined to undertake. And that's kind of how spiritual life feels to me right now. I didn't ask for this calling, didn't seek it out, and yet it found me. On the one hand, it's a pain in the butt. On the other hand, it is the fulfillment of a destiny. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. And (surprise!) it is so much more personal than I anticipated.

High Bid

2007-03-18T20:15:00.001-04:00

Janet and I went out to "The Rites of Spring" party for parents of the Emerson Waldorf School last night. It's a charity event, with a big live auction and silent auction on goods and services donated by parents and friends of the school. A few small psychological insights fell out of the experience:

I understand the whole notion of fundraising dinners and events now. If you want to make people especially generous, above and beyond their usual threshholds of generosity, you need to make them feel rich. And the best way to make someone feel rich is to have them dress up in their best clothes, go out to party with everyone in the community, give them something to drink, and glorify spending outrageous sums on things for the heck of it. For all of its low transaction cost and convenience, online fundraising will never compare to the glowing aura of irrational exuberance that surrounds a charity auction.
One of the community pillars had dressed in drag and was "Vanna White" for the auction, and it actually worked surprisingly well. I wondered for a while: "Why is that working?" Is someone behaving in utterly ridiculous fashion good for generosity? Well, maybe not, but it is good for loosening inhibitions. When someone behaves ridiculously, it gives everyone else permission to to go a little wild, too. Maybe it makes it just a little bit easier to raise your number. I've got to remember that, the next time I'm trying to make people go outside their comfort zones.
Going in to the auction, I had the preconception that the whole point of the auction is to have ferocious competition between bidders to stack up extra value to a given sale. But as I watched, there weren't that many hard-fought bidding wars. What I did notice, though, was that the auctioneer was very good at keeping the increments of bidding relatively high. If someone opened a bid at $100, he would have no trouble saying, very quickly, "Who'll give me $200!?" He could just as easily put the next bid at $150, or even $110, but it's his job to make that impulsive grab for the item go as high as possible. It probably added quite a bit to the average final price . . . which, of course, is why people hire auctioneers in the first place.
We got home really late, so of course I was completely off my usual mandated 10:30 pm bedtime. No problem with that . . . I could sleep in on Sunday. But then my day started with dealing with the kids, and then covering for Janet while she's at yoga, and then getting group work done, and it's halfway through the afternoon before I think, "Jeez, I haven't even blogged! I haven't even exercised!" And I felt a nudge of stress that I hadn't felt in quite a while, as I wondered how I would get those things done, and felt the fleeting temptation not to do them at all. Everything that routine had made effortless, now became an effort, once it was out of its usual context. It reminded me again of why the routine was so important; if you want consistent virtue, you have to make it as easy as possible for you to do the right thing. Its so much easier to do the right thing out of habit than to do it out of manifest conviction. "Lead us not into temptation," indeed.

Attachment, detachment, equanimity, and meaning

2007-03-17T14:27:00.001-04:00

Kenny and I just keep digging into the whole detachment thing. He writes:

Suppose you live your whole life with the attitude "This, too, shall pass."
Something bad happens--a mosquito bite, a broken arm, a divorce--"This, too,
shall pass." Something good happens--a yummy bowl of ice cream, a great
vacation, a wonderful child--"This, too, shall pass." What would be the effect?
Would you become emotionally distant from it all, removed, detached? If so, I
would say that you are doing it wrong, or it was a bad idea in the first place.
But suppose the opposite happened: in abandoning all thought of this incident as
a stepping stone toward something long-term, you simply accepted it as the
reality right now. Accepting that the current reality has no permanent future
enables you to focus on it as the present. And the two apparently opposite
viewpoints are one.

So the recognition of impermanence is not the same as cold aloofness. We don't stop caring about things just because they are impermanent. We are, in fact, more free to engage things in the present moment if we are not preoccupied with whatever implications it as for past or future. What we strive for is equanimity, which is neither blind attachment nor cold detachment, but the absolute settleness that comes from recognition and acceptance of the truth.

However, that raises another (apparent) contradiction: how can you have meaning if there is no real past or future? When most people talk about "meaning" or "purpose", they usually have some kind of teleology in mind: this happens in order for that to happen, in order for that to happen, in order for everything to wind up there. What happens in the present moment is not seen merely as an isolated incident, but as part of a sensible progression to a desired end. In fact, the very people who are preaching the timeless reality of the present -- Eckhart Tolle, Andrew Cohen, etc. -- are also the ones who are heralding the dawn of a new age of enlightened consciousness, an inevitable evolution of the universe to greater consciousness. So, just when it seems like we've surrendered to the present moment, some overarching teleology has crept in the back door. Once again, we are trying to invest the present moment with future significance: "I'm going to be present now, in order to ultimately become enlightened, or allow the meaning of the universe to unfold" . . . or whatever.

Can you have your future and eat it, too?

Brave New

2007-03-16T05:27:00.002-04:00

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's futuristic novel about a society that had simultaneously eliminated all suffering and all meaning, has always been high on my recommended reading list. But there were parts of it that I always thought were a little far-fetched. The people of the future had such super-attenuated attention spans that they couldn't begin to tackle a full story; their entertainment consisted of hyper-abridgements, Hamlet in 60 seconds and such. "Ok, he's exaggerating for effect," I thought. "Surely people wouldn't really subsist on minute-long entertainment."

And yet the future is here, and about 500 years ahead of Huxley's timeline. The cover of this month's Wired blares: "Snack Culture: Tasty Bits o' Fun!" They chronicle the inevitable progression of cultural condensation: the rise of abridgements, Cliff's Notes, and most recently, the emergence of YouTube and other one-minute-media. People don't have the patience to sit through a whole hour of TV anymore; they watch one-minute clips on their iPods. Even a ten-minute piece of music is deemed too long, and services now rip them down to about two minutes. Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube is seen as the death-rattle of old media, full-length content vainly struggling against a sea of snippets.

And who am I to scoff? This blog is representative of the same trend. I don't have time to write a novel, so I content myself with 500-word essays instead. Nor is anyone interested in reading more than 500 words at a go. . . mine or anyone else's. I was seduced by the power of instant entertainment last year by Scrabble on a cell phone . . . it's amazing how many hours you can kill five minutes at a time.

The only bright spot that I see, the one place where our society is not following Huxley's script, is the realm of user-generated content. We are not merely soma-doped cows consuming government-mandated entertainment. More people than ever before are creating the content. A five-minute blog reading can take an hour to write, and a five minute video can take days to create. So there's the sliver of hope that the interactive, participatory nature of the new media will engage more brain cells than it kills.

Paradox revisited

2007-03-15T05:25:00.001-04:00

After I set up the apparent paradox between "living in the moment" (complete focus on the Now) and "this too shall pass" (complete detachment from present circumstances), Kenny had these comments:

I think about this stuff a whole lot when I'm on the elliptical machine in the
morning. I really, really hate the elliptical machine. My legs get sore and my
whole body gets covered with sweat--neither of which I mind too much--and I feel
like I can't breathe, which is the part I really despise. And yes, sometimes my
coping strategy is to tell myself "I only have five minutes left" or even to
actively picture the five minutes being up and getting off the damn thing. And
sometimes my coping strategy is to distract myself, composing an email or
solving a math problem in my head to make the time go.
But the better strategy goes like this. Suppose I suddenly realized that there were only five seconds left. How would I feel then? I would feel fine. Because the truth is,
the way I feel right now is fine, legs and sweat and breath and all. The thing
that makes it so very very awful is the "Ohmigod-I-don't-think-I-can-do-this-for-30-more-seconds-and-I-have-to-do-it-for-five-more-whole-minutes" thing. Right now, here in this moment, it's fine. It's the projected future that is terrifying.
The solution is, of course, to simply observe . . . What "this too shall pass" and "living in the moment" have in common is that neither of them is about "Ohmigod-I-don't-think-I-can-do-this-for-30-more-seconds-and-I-have-to-do-it-for-five-more-whole-minutes."

I think Kenny's in the ballpark on this one. The problem with life experience is not the experience itself, but our relationship with the experience. Something happens, and then our minds generate all kinds of illusory attachments or aversions in response to the experience. Recognizing the illusoriness of past and future, as well as recognizing the transience of the present moment, are both ways of saying, "Don't identify with things that aren't real."

It's easy to see the "experience" vs. "relationship with experience" distinction in a three year old child. Young kids see the world much differently than we do, and have extreme reactions to seemingly benign things. You give the boy his milk in a blue cup, and he has a screaming meltdown. "NOOOOOOOoooooooOOOOOOOooooooOOOOOO! I want the RED cup! AAAAAHHHH!" Sigh. It's hard to be patient, because it's so freaking obvious to you that the child's suffering is self-inflicted. Were he not so attached to the damn cup, this would not be a problem.

Now, the parenting pundits will have all kinds of things to say about "developing autonomy" and "testing limits" and all kinds of other psychological subtlties, but I think that's probably making it more complicated than it needs to be. The fact is, the kid is attached to something relatively insubstantial, and you see that, and he doesn't. But his reaction, and the suffering he endures, is identical to what we suffer when we have similar attachments to impermanent circumstances. "NOOOOOOO! I want the corner office! The CORNER office!"

Once you catch on to the fact that suffering is the creation of the mind, you might start to get smug and think you've got this game licked. "Ahh, now I just control the mind, and suffering goes away." But I've known that intellectually and experientially for about twenty years, and I'm not sure it's made much difference to my level of suffering. Why is it so hard?

Over the Hedge

2007-03-14T05:34:00.000-04:00

Things have been so stressful lately that I started filling the Netflix queue with lighter fare; I thought Over the Hedge, a Dreamworks animated feature with animal characters, would fit the bill. But it turned about to be about a raccoon who cons a clan of forest creatures into gathering food to help him pay a debt to an angry bear. Lies, deceit, looming deadlines . . . ah, yes, very relaxing.

Janet and I had a hard time engaging the movie at first. RJ the Raccoon, the anti-hero turned hero of the movie, was just too self-serving to inspire much love. Normally, when you have a main character on the lower echelons of life, you have to have some scenes to establish their likeableness and virtue. Disney's Aladdin might be a street rat and a thief, but he winds up giving his bread to some other poor urchin; he’s low but he’s noble, and oppressed by an evil order to boot. We don’t get that with RJ; we just see a greedy, theiving creature, who’s compulsion to have everything lands him on the bear’s bad side. And his predicament was peculiarly dire for a kid’s movie; it’s not often that a villain is so blunt to say, “I will find you and I will kill you.”

Admittedly, we needed to have such a despicable character in such extreme duress to have a personal transformation to build a story on. From a narrative standpoint, I liked RJ’s arch. He continues to follow his self-serving trajectory, even as he begins to feel greater and greater guilt for his con. He still leads the Family into great danger, and (once again) risks everything to get the very last can of Spuddies. It’s only when he hits absolute bottom – realizing that he has become the moral equivalent of the Bear – that he has his conversion. I have a soft spot for redemption stories, especially ones that follow a character waaaay back into the dark and bring them back out again. (That’s the only reason Angel held my interest for so long.) But this is a kids’ movie, for God’s sake.

Thematically, the film was a few shades too dark, as well. It was quite acidic in its critique of suburban life, in the Fun with Dick and Jane genre. Are we supposed to feel smug and superior, that we see the vacuousness of our own lifestyles and can laugh at it? Maybe we think we’re better than the Evil HOA President because we don’t drive an SUV and wish vicious deaths on woodland creatures, but really, how different are we? And if “civilization” is just one broad swathe of air-conditioned shallowness fed on junk food, blotting out the natural order, where does that leave our heroes? The story may austensibly praise the virtue of families, but it leaves them living in a very insecure world, surrounded by corruption. It’s not a world I would wish on my young kids, even in a story.

Eternal present vs. impermanence

2007-03-13T05:39:00.001-04:00

When I wrote about students dreaming of a stress-free time that would never come, I suggested that there might be some healthy value in recognizing that the current stress would not last forever. Kenny disagreed:

"But Eckhart Tolle would, of course, completely dis- agree with your suggestion
that "It's probably a healthy way to deal with stress" and right now I'm
inclined to agree with him. Believing it will end soon is precisely what enables
you to sustain it indefinitely--right up to retirement or beyond--without really
confronting what it's telling you, and changing something."

Two prime truths of Eastern thought seem to be in conflict. On the one hand, if you pay attention to the moment, you are released from the tyrrany of past and future. On the other hand, if you recognize the impermanence of the current situation, you are liberated from the compulsions and reactions to the present moment, and are capable of detachment: "This, too, shall pass" was one of S.N. Goenka's favorite teaching phrases.

I have been meditation on this seeming contradiction, and ran out of time (ironically) to say any more about it now. I am guessing that it is only an apparent contradiction, but it's going to take a little longer for me to find the right way to express it.

Who's winning?

2007-03-12T06:18:00.000-04:00

On the plane home from Birmingham I saw the woman sitting next to me was reading The God Delusion: What's Wrong with Religion by Richard Dawkins. I was tempted to strike up a conversation, but I have such contempt for Dawkins' point of view on this subject that I wasn't sure I would be able to remain polite. I was also tempted to take out my rosary, just to provoke her, but that seemed counterproductive, too. Anyone who was reading Dawkins with so much interest would probably be someone either newly liberated from some tyrranous childhood faith, or someone so thoroughly atheistic that they could match Dawkins shrillness. Neither felt like much fun to talk to. So I just sat back and slept, and occasionally snuck a peak at what she was reading.

What surprises me is how often Dawkins uses words like "emergency" and "crisis" to describe the state of religious culture in the country today. If half the country was goose-stepping and saying "Sieg heil!" he could not have used stronger language to denounce it. As he tells it, we are on the verge of slipping into utter chaos and darkness because of these unenlightened idiots.

The funny thing is, the religious fundamentalists are saying exactly the same things. They do not see a world getting increasingly religious; they see a world becoming increasingly secular, and fear a downward slide into moral relativism and social anarchy. When I mentioned the article in USA Today about Americans' religious ignorance to my client (who was a church-going man), he had the typical response: "Is it any wonder the world is going to hell in a handbasket these days?"

So . . . who's winning? Is religion gaining ground, as so many articles in Time and the Wall Street Journal attest? Or is secular humanism carrying the day? My guess is that both sides must be dead-even in influence, because neither side is feeling particularly secure. The volume of the rhetoric is turned up across the board, because everyone senses that the country is teetering on a tipping point, and could go either way. And there may yet be a niche for a Third Way, if someone can articulate a vision of spirituality that transcends both literal-minded mythology and soulless rationality.

The Measure of a College Education

2007-03-11T17:58:00.001-04:00

U.S. News & World Report addressed the question of the quality of college education in their latest issue ("The Measure of Learning," March 12, 2007). Evidently the feds are finally starting to scrutinize higher education with the same intensity they have been putting on public primary education for the last ten years, and (surprise, surprise) they find U.S. colleges to be performing poorly. The feds want an objective standard to measure whether the colleges are really educating people, and of course the colleges are aghast to think of somone trying to apply a universal standard to the college experience.

I've written before about how little our education system does to prepare people with essential real-world skills. But I thought some more about how I would gauge whether a college was doing its job, and I came up with a simple, albeit subjective test:

A college graduate should be able to carry on an intelligent conversation.

Every aspect of a good college education is engaged in spoken discourse:

The person must be generally well-informed and well-read to be able to hold up their end of a conversation on any given subject. That means that they read newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals with critical understanding. It means they have read enough philosophy and literature and history to be able to draw connections between current issues and broader principles.
The person has to be able to listen, learn, and critically assess information, all at the same time. A good discussion requires you to hear the other person's point, pick out the substantive points, and spot weaknesses in reasoning or information.
The person must be able to communicate effectively. They have to assess their audience, compose their thoughts, pick their points, and package it with a certain degree of artistic sense.
The person ideally has a sense for the people they are talking to, as well as the content of their discussion. They should be asking themselves, "Why does he care about this? What's his angle? What's really going on here? Does he really believe that, or is he trying to impress that girl?" That requires some practical psychology, sociology, and politics.
The person needs to be able to ask good questions. You don't even necessarily need to have lots of specific knowledge to have a conversation, as long you can ask good questions. Most forms of human endeavor -- science and business, especially -- rely more on asking the good questions than having the good answers.
They have to be the kind of people who enjoy having intelligent conversations . . . perhaps the best measure of all as to whether they have really become a cultured person.

The colleges can rest easy -- no one is likely to come up with a good standardized test to measure an intelligent conversation. But those of us who care most about the quality of college education -- the employers, and the parents -- will probably be able to make a good assessment of how the schools are doing. There, at least, the feds and I can agree: they aren't doing very well.

Travel Time

2007-03-10T07:06:00.001-05:00

I went to Birmingham this week for three days. I am fortunate that I had almost forgotten how un-fun travelling can be, especially travelling for business. I know that I should be grateful; it is a modern miracle that I can get 500 miles in couple hours for a little over a hundred bucks (thank you, Southwest). It's also a peculiarly modern hell that, for all the speed and ease of travel, getting from here to there is a series of stressful deadlines. Any one section of the journey is ok, but stringing it all together demands eternal vigilence. I counted out a dozen connections on this trip:

House to car (Did I forget anything?)
Car to airport lot (Am I going to get there on time? Did I forget anything?)
Airport lot to terminal (Where did I park? When is the bus going to get here? Omigod omigod my wallet where . . . phew.)
Terminal to gate (wait in line, walk, wait in another line, walk some more)
Gate to airplane (wait in line, make five phone calls while departure time slips, move to another gate)
Airplane to another city (exhausted sleep, cramped neck, ten minutes of productive work before someone tells you something about the "off position" -- who came up with that term?)
Airplane to another gate (more waiting, phone calls, blaring CNN broadcast of non-news, happy families hugging, and no one to hug you)
Another plane to another city (some enormous guy is taking up half my seat, can I get away with finding another seat on the almost-full flight?)
Plane to rental car (no, Jesus Christ for the last time I don't need insurance)
Car to final destination (where are the headlights on this thing? Where am I going?)
Parking at final destination to real final destination (where can I park? How do I get to that building? Yes, they are expecting me. Yes, I'll wait.)

You've put in the better part of a work day just trying to get there. And, for all the stress, nobody particularly seems to appreciate what it took to get there. No wonder all those guys in suits are hitting their CrackBerries so hard. Thank God I'm only in purgatory once a quarter and not every day.

Pardon Libby

2007-03-09T05:32:00.000-05:00

Scooter Libby was convicted of various forms of lying (making false statements, perjury, obstruction of justice), although it sounds like everyone, even the jurors who convicted him, were not very happy about it. Nobody can call it justice when one guy faces 25 years in prison for lying about something that ultimately was determined not to be a crime at all.

I understand the necessity of the whole concept of perjury. I know that we need to have strict penalties for not telling the truth on important matters. But it still feels like an abuse of power, when the only crime a special prosecutor can find is that someone got in his way.

I wonder how Libby feels about the whole situation. Clearly he is taking a bullet for the Cheney office, though we don't know if it was merely to avoid political embarrassment for the administration or to cover up something more dastardly. Does he feel like a bodyguard who falls in the line of duty? Are indictments of perjury merely an occupational hazard for a high-ranking administration official? Or does he resent having his life upended by an affair in which he had such a tangential role? Or maybe both? For that matter, I wonder how Cheney feels, having a close colleague take a hard and undeserved fall for his political benefit. (I have no special insight into the Vice President, but I do not assume, as many do, that he is a heartless super-villain.)

The Bush administration is famous for demanding unswerving loyalty from its staff. I wonder if they, in turn, will show an equal loyalty to them. Don't talk to me about political consequences. This administration is the lamest duck we've seen in some time. No doubt they will let the case go to appeal, hoping that the verdict will be overturned and spare them that particular political cross to bear. But soon, before the presidential race heats up too much, they should appease their conservative base and spare this scapegoat. If there's one thing George W. can do, it's blunt candor, and his supporters would only love him more if he looked into the camera and said, "I pardoned him because I thought he got a bum deal. He's a good man and he doesn't deserve this."

Religious Knowledge vs. Religious Experience

2007-03-08T05:09:00.001-05:00

Right on the cover of McNews this morning: "Americans ignorant of religion." Some surveys of basic knowledge of world religions showed that most Americans couldn't name at least half of the most basic tenants of faith -- their own, or anyone else's. Not even being able to name five of the Ten Commandments, or four out of seven sacrements . . . that's pretty disappointing, but hardly surprising. Americans haven't put any value on rote learning of any kind for decades.

Some of the pundits cited in the article blame modern attitudes towards religion, which puts an emphasis on experience and steals focus from real doctrinal knowledge. I have to admit that I think they're on to something. If people base their religion on a feeling of inspiration and hope, but don't have any grounding in explicit principles and rules, it's going to be pretty shallow. It leaves you open to manipulation by demagogues who will twist the religion to suit their own aims. And even if America is a fundamentally secular society, the rest of the world is not, and as we've learned in our recent wars, it pays to understand what the hell people are fighting about.

Unfortunately, nobody agrees on what it would take to fill the gap of religious knowledge. The people who take straight-up religious knowledge most seriously -- by definition, the fundamentalists -- are also the ones who most strenuously object to critical or analytical readings. Ironically, the preachers want you to be able to recite scripture by heart, but not start to question its true meaning, intent, or veracity. And the people with the most interest in open-minded approaches to religion are the ones most likely to brush past the details and gestalt the big picture. "Just groove on the message of Love, baby."

Ideally, we'd like to have the best of both worlds: a religion with flexibility and subtlty, but also with some spine. I am all for people being guided by their own conscience in moral matters . . . but a lot of pain and heartache could be avoided if people just took a few more "thou shalt nots" more seriously. I've been thinking of doing an SKS meeting along these lines: have them write down all the religious rules and doctrines they can remember, and then have them evaluate which ones they really believe in, and how much. What are the rules? Is anything sacred and inviolable?

I believe in rules. Maybe they are rules that you accept on faith from religious scriptures, or maybe they are rules that you carefully evaluate and formulate on your own . . . but there have to be some rules. And we might as well start with the ones that have been around for a few thousand years.

Taking the fifth

2007-03-07T23:53:00.001-05:00

This morning, while waiting for a plane, I wrote a post about a transgendered professor at an evangelical college who is now bringing a complain to the EEOC. I thought it was going to be a thoughtful, balanced piece that recognized the plight of the transgendered but was frank and honest about how most people (myself included) find sex changes to be really weird and disturbing.

But I found myself staring at piece, and not really agreeing with it. That happens, sometimes; I'll write an opinion, and before I post I'll realize that it's not right. I guess the truth is I don't know what to make of transgendering. It is, by its very nature, a matter of confusion. The people it affects are confused, or their bodies are confused, and everyone else is confused right along with it.

Anyway, I lost my nerve to take a stand on the matter. I'll just do what most people do, when confronted with a woman who looks like a man trying to be woman . . . mind my own business.

When the wars are over

2007-03-06T05:25:00.001-05:00

At the SKS meeting last night, we talked about what was stressing us out. Talking about other people's problems is usually a relaxing affair, because we generally realize that we're pretty well off with our problems and wouldn't trade them for anyone else's problems. "Phew, I don't have any real problems, thank goodness."

But another thing we noticed was how everyone imagined there would come a time when they would no longer have to be so stressed out. They still believe in Someday. "Someday, when I'm finished with school and I've got a job, I won't have to be so stressed." I'm like the character of Bryan in Avenue Q, marvelling at the naivete of the newly graduated: "Look at that guy, all fresh-faced and not knowing anything . . . he thinks the hard part's over. But it's just beginning."

They all know it's an illusion, too. They wouldn't be coming to the SKS unless they suspected the whole game was rigged, and that a life of endless mad pursuits of one goal after another was, by itself, pointless. And yet they still have faith in it: "Someday it's going to get easier. Someday I will Arrive."

I am no different. Even while I am cramming code into another high-stress project, I am telling myself, "It will get easier soon. Once I get past this project . . . once we master this new product . . . once we get established in this vertical . . . once we have more employees . . . we will arrive." It's probably a healthy way to deal with stress, because of course nothing lasts forever, and this too shall pass, and we can tolerate most anything if we know it's temporary. But fostering the belief that all our struggle will ultimately make us Free . . . that seems like a devil's deal.

Stress test

2007-03-05T05:37:00.001-05:00

A couple people responded to yesterday's post about the spiritual significance of stress, and I wanted to clarify my position.

Kenny pointed out that it would be pointless and irrational to get stressed out about things that were beyond your control, and that in fact our real stress comes from not controlling the things we could have but didn't:

If God stepped down and said "Here is an hour-and-a-half's worth of work. I want
you to do it in the next hour," you would not necessarily freak out about it. You would simply say, "That's impossible." Our real fear is that we have been given 45 minutes of work to do in the next hour, and we're not going to make it. That we could have made it if we worked harder, but we just didn't give it our all.

Some stress certainly does come from failing to live up to one's true capacity. That's the point at which stress takes on a moral dimension: I should have done it, but I didn't. In such situations, you not only fail, but you also take the rap for it.

Not all stress is like that, though. It is also possible that you are doing everything right, morally speaking, but that you are still on a course with failure. In fact, I am leaning towards that as my definition of stress: "Stress is the anticipation of failure." Whether it's your fault or not, stress is the result of recognizing the real possibility, or inevitability, of a significant failure.

We still have a lot to unpack from that definition. What's "significant"? What's "failure"? We can only get stressed out about the things that we care about. A significant failure is when we fail to come through for something we care about. So you have to evaluate the things that you care about, and decide if they are worth caring about, in terms of their ultimate value and importance. I'm sure that a lot of stress comes from neuroticism: caring about things that aren't worth caring about.

"Failure" is a judgement that is inextricably tied up in our expectations, and the expectations of others. That makes it somewhat squishy and maleable. Lots of self-help gurus would reduce your stress merely by fiddling with the definition of failure: "Don't see it as a failure. See it as a good experiment. See it as a learning experience." Or, they would caution you to reevaluate your expectations and set reasonable goals: "If you're constantly failing, you're trying to do too much." This, also, is good (as far as it goes) to eliminating the unnecessary or unhelpful stress in your life.

But of course we can't always control these things. We don't always get to choose the things we care about, nor are our obligations neatly packaged in a reasonable, achievable project plan. Our most important cares are the open-ended ones, the ones that make infinite demands: our children, our fellow man, and our God. If we can't raise enough food to feed our families and our children starve, that's failure, no matter how you slice it. And that, of course, is why we are doomed to failure, since we are programmed to want nothing but life and order, and destined to end in death and entropy. That also defines the miracle of grace, the call to embrace the stress anyway. Our caring is called to exceed its proper bounds.