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[rossjoedwards]

The Last Post, For Now

Thanks for reading the blog! As of March 12, 2017 I will be taking an extended hiatus so I can consolidate my writing on the blogging network Medium, and work on a larger writing projects. 

Here's the link to my Medium page, where I’ll be reposting some of these pieces, and publishing new articles at least every Wednesday: https://medium.com/@rossjedwards I love the blog because it gives me an opportunity to write shorter, weirder pieces, so I probably will return to it someday.

Cheers, thanks again for reading.

The painting above is Van Gogh’s Wheatfield With Crows (1890).

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Notes on Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens’ and the Philosophy of Mysticism

A friend last week mentioned that I might be interested in Yuval Noah Harari, an author and historian with whom I was unfamiliar. He was right. Even before finishing his fascinating book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), I’d like to take a brief look at a passage in the section on the history of religion.

On page 213, Harari writes: “The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans. It’s pointless to ask this power for victory in war, for health or for rain, because from its all-encompassing vantage point, it makes no difference whether a particular kingdom wins or loses, whether a particular city prospers or wither, whether a particular city prospers or withers, whether a particular person recuperates or dies.”

Harari’s description of this fundamental insight is similar to the the words of Advaita author and teacher Wayne Liquorman, who writes in Hello My Loves: 10 Years of writings to seekers of Truth (2015, page 60): “The notion of God (be it seen as a wise human figure or an impersonal force called Consciousness) is generally associated with benevolence towards humans (except in cases of just punishment for wrongs committed, aka karma)... Is this True or is it simply another human conceit? Does the Universe actually have a preference? If so, what evidence is there that the preference is for humans?”

Harari continues (page 214 of Sapiens): “The only reason to approach the supreme power of the universe would be to renounce all desires and embrace the bad along with the good - to embrace even defeat, poverty, sickness and death. Thus some Hindus, known as Sadhus or Sannyasis, devote their lives to uniting with Atman, thereby achieving enlightenment. They strive to see the world from the viewpoint of this fundamental principle, to realise that from its eternal perspective all mundane desires and fears are meaningless and ephemeral phenomena.”

Harari goes on to compare this universal perspective with the development of monotheism, in which a sole, all-powerful deity is called upon to reward and punish human action. Broadly speaking, monotheistic religions have an anthropocentric creator at their core, whereas polytheistic and mystical (although Harari does not use this word) traditions revolve around an inexorable, inhuman Fate, which includes us, and unfolds events to our benefit and detriment without bias. It makes no sense to bargain with Fate, as, from the larger perspective, no event is more important than any other.

The mystic, as I understand it, is someone like a Sadhu or Sannyasi who approaches this concept of an all-encompassing, impartial Fate, and grapples with their place within it. As Harari acknowledges, approaching Fate interests relatively few people (“Most Hindus, however, are not Sadhus,” he writes). But, on the other hand, the expression of mystical thought can be found in many time periods and eras, clad in contrasting religious symbols and cultural assumptions, and yet in some way, expressing the same journey into Fate. The mystically curious has plenty of options: we can explore Sufism, Zen Buddhism, Kabbalah, Advaita, secular works of literature, and modern spiritual writers of endless variety.

At first, the paradoxes expressed and the apparent linguistic discrepancies of these mystical traditions looks like nonsense to us. The etymology of the word “mystic,” after all, is “mysterious, full of mystery,” and “one who has been initiated.” To even approach mysticism we have to grapple with weird ideas for a long time. What does it mean to realize, in Harari’s words, that “all mundane desires and fears are meaningless and ephemeral phenomena”? What about the desire to realize that “all mundane desires and fears are meaningless and ephemeral phenomena”? Is this desire for transcendence meaningless as well? Mysticism quickly leads us into dizzying self-reflection.

We might eventually acknowledge that we don’t even know what mysticism is! Is mysticism the practice of giving up desires and preferences? Or is it rather an investigation of the assumption that one has the power to give up these desires in the first place? Who has these desires, anyway? And where do they come from? The existential questions that obsess the mystic cannot be resolved by answers from outside authorities. When the mystic is beckoned to look inward via contemplation or meditation, he or she is meant to consider what is true in subjective experience.

Hence, the mystical perspective really can’t be imposed on someone else. You can’t force someone to look inward. And yet, this turning inward happens naturally all the time. People find their own way to mystical thinking, with their own reasons and means for doing so. As expressed by Sufi poet and philosopher Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (1207 - 1273, found in Karen Armstrong’s History of God: The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam):

“What seems wrong to you is right for him What is poison to one is honey to someone else. Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship, These mean nothing to Me.           I am apart from all that.”

The image above has been dated at 40,000 years old, located in the caves at Maros in Sulawesi, Indonesia.

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On Unpayable Debts

In a cold, empty Manhattan office, I think of words read weeks ago, yet still clanging around my head, and particularly reverberant this Monday morning. The author is David K. Reynolds, whom I encountered in Gregg Krech’s The Art of Taking Action, which I read about in Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote. Reynolds, in Scattered Showers: Constructive Living Notes, writes, in a chapter entitled “Instructions for the Office Worker”:

“For your own sake use your vacations well; not during working hours. Use your breaks well during working hours, but not for vacations’ sake. Moving from task to task is a kind of break, too. It would be a shame to construct your life around vacations and breaks. What a waste the rest of your life would be!”

This passage of straightforward advice has evolved into a lingering question, which could be phrased: what is the point of work? Or: who do you really work for? These are simple questions, but also quite profound. Do we work for our bosses, our companies? Do we work for the money we make to spend on vacations and breaks? To give our families comfort and safety? These are all good and understandable reasons to work. They are probably the reasons we feel we must work.

When I finally, begrudgingly found my first post-college job some years ago, I told myself it was a temporary thing. It seemed like work would only feel like “work” until I discovered something to be truly passionate about, something that would make me feel fulfilled. Reynolds challenges this line of thinking. 

Perhaps it is not only important to consider what I am doing, but also how I approach it. What role does my attitude about work play in shaping my experience forty hours per week? If I work solely for what I’m getting out of it, what emotional quality hangs over my day? What happens to me if I really do construct my life around vacations and breaks?

At the suggestion of a cousin I read some essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, where I found the following (in “Compensation”): 

“Always pay; for first or last you must pay your entire debt. Persons and events may stand for a time between you and justice, but it is only a postponement. You must pay at last your own debt.”

Emerson’s words are a sword of wisdom, terrifying and swift, cutting me down to size. “You must pay at last your own debt.”

How could I ever repay it? How could I pay back those I owe for my body, my mind, my education, my clothes, my shelter, the shoes on my feet, the apartment I now live in, the spouse I love, the family that supports and supported me since I was born? How could I ever repay these debts? This is, really, a life’s work, and still it could not be done. As Reynolds points out, every step creates new debts to repay, and our efforts can therefore never cease. We strive to repay, and the recognition that we cannot succeed spurs us on.

In A History of God: The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Karen Armstrong, a writer whose work I was introduced to by my dad, quotes Sufi mystic Rabia Basri: 

“O God! If I worship thee in fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine Everlasting Beauty!”

Perhaps we can change the subject of Rabia’s insight to my day job, and yet retain its message:

If I work out of fear of losing all I have, I will always be afraid; and if I work out of hope of accumulating wealth, I will never accumulate enough; but if I can work just for the sake of working, I will be in the moment. 

David Reynolds continues: “Life isn’t money. Who is your employer of life? When will life’s business hours end?”

In this moment, I am grateful to be open for business. 

The image above is Edward Hopper’s Office in a Small City (1953). 

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How to Dance to the Music of Life

“Just because a record has a groove / Don’t make it in the groove / But you can tell right away at letter A / When the people start to move.”

Stevie Wonder, from ‘Sir Duke’

There is a great quote from Alan Watts, popularized in part by this animated YouTube video: “We thought of life by analogy was a journey, was a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the point was to get to that end—success or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we’ve missed the point the whole way along: it was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”

This is a wonderful, liberating analogy, when it sinks in: life as a dance! Perhaps life doesn’t have to be a constant struggle for accomplishment and recognition. Perhaps the often quoted Shakespeare from As You Like It may be taken seriously: “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.”

We may suddenly feel lighter, imagining ourselves swaying along with the rhythm of life itself. First we are pulled onto the center of the metaphorical floor, dancing with abandon and intensity. Then we drift toward the outskirts where the crowd is thin, shyly mingling with wallflowers and searching for familiar faces. When the music changes we may feel compelled to enter the fray once again. The dance of life continues on its unpredictable course. What song will come up next? Who will we meet in the crowd? What adventures lie before us on the long night of life?

But for all its grace, Alan Watts’ quote doesn’t have the quality of practical advice. “You were supposed to dance while the music was being played,” gives us only a vague sense of direction, leaving us to negotiate the details. What good is it to look back at our life and say, “I really should’ve danced!” We have to figure out how to do it in the moment. How do we join the dance?

One way is to try to actively enjoy life more as it’s happening. We may, in other words, simply start moving, searching for the rhythm of life tenaciously. I’ve done this before. I’ve tried to look at my problems, my frustrations and failures, and see them as a part of the dance, believing that I should enjoy unfortunate events because they are the spice of life. I’ve attempted to see my life as a movie, where the greater the problem for our hero, the more fun it is to watch.

There’s a problem with this approach, however: most of the time it doesn’t work. Sometimes we look for the rhythm of life but cannot find it. Unfortunate events really are unfortunate events, and in some instances there is no avoiding our darkest and most dreaded feelings. When bad things happen to us, explaining them as part of a vast art piece doesn’t do much to alleviate our suffering. It may even make things worse, as we are further removed from our pain by a layer of denial.

Another problem with trying to dance is that secretly this method is actually not dancing at all. It’s work! Work in disguise. As I’ve written about on this blog before, when we force ourselves to play, we are working contrary to the nature of playfulness. Treating dancing as a job that we must accomplish is dressing up a wolf in sheep’s clothing. To return to Alan Watts’s rhetoric, we are still thinking of life as a journey, but instead of materialistic success as our goal, we simply switched it for the ambiguous “having fun.” Compelling ourselves to dance when we’re not feeling the beat isn’t the answer.

So what do we do? Perhaps we may take the meditative approach and observe ourselves, rather than attempting to do anything. Simply notice how you feel in everyday life. When do you dance? When do you feel lighthearted? Can you induce those feelings from nowhere, or do they seem to have their own rhythm? Be wary of paying attention in service of some accomplishment, however, because once again that is work. We don’t want to make the mistake of mindlessly switching out one goal for another.

The effect of your attention may be to realize that even the moments when you are completely involved in frustration, or anger—moments when “dancing” is the furthest thing from your mind—are, from a broader perspective, part of a more mysterious, unpredictable dance of life. This larger view is one of wholeness, encompassing opposites and containing surprises. As 13th century Sufi poet Rumi points out, we don’t have to try to do something we’ve been doing all along:

We rarely hear the inward music, but we’re all dancing to it nevertheless

The image above is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Wedding Dance (1566).

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The ‘Rat’ in Rat Race

In Manhattan, encounters with nature happen rarely, but they do happen. Recently I had two reminders of this fact; the first was from author and professor Adam Frank, who wrote an article for NRP’s 13.7 blog about the great American beat poet Gary Snyder. Snyder, in his 1990 book The Practice of the Wild, reminds us that cities are a part of nature, often overlooked: “So we can say that New York City and Tokyo are ‘natural’ but not ‘wild.’ They do not deviate from the laws of nature, but they are habitat so exclusive in the matter of who and what they give shelter to, and so intolerant of other creatures, as to be truly odd.” I am very aware of the intolerant attitude of New York, as I feel it in myself from time to time.

This brings me to my second reminder, which was a bit more visceral. Walking through a scaffolded tunnel on the Lower East Side, talking with my sister on the phone, embedded between construction cacophony on my right, and the honking chatter of afternoon traffic on my left, a large rat appeared from who knows where and ran straight for me. Before I could register what was happening I’d thrust the entire weight of my body onto a wooden railing, lifting my my feet off the ground, as my eyes met the cheery gaze of a shocked stranger walking the opposite direction, all without missing a conversational beat. Nature, like it or not, reared its hungry, confused head.

But it wasn’t just the rat: my own reaction was a reminder of the natural pulse of human life. Gary Snyder (via Adam Frank) writes about this inner nature, too: “Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments relaxing, staring, reflecting—all universal responses of this mammal body.” Beautifully put. Sometimes our assumed civility is revealed to be circumstantial. At any moment we might return to the unthinking, irresistible flow of instinct.

I am reminded of a video I saw some years ago of author and speaker Byron Katie, who can be a bit more challenging and shocking than some of her self-help peers. In the video she is asked about free will, and Katie responds thoughtfully: “Your entire life in this moment is over. Everything you’ve ever thought, ever been, ever lived, ever seen, ever done—in this moment now it’s done, it’s over. So where’s free will?” This is a startling thing to hear from someone providing advice, but I think worthy of consideration.

Another way of approaching Katie’s question is, do we ever see ourselves in the present moment? Or can we only reflect on ourselves as we were in moments that have past? The present moment is where everything that can happen happens: thoughts, actions, decisions, introspection, retrospection, and so on. These are all things that we do, but, strangely, there is no discernible us to do them, at least in the present moment. There is just the experience of doing things. In the words of philosopher David Hume (from A Treatise of Human Nature, 1738): “Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot therefore be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is derived; and consequently there is no such idea.”

Usually we consider ourselves apart from nature. But cities, in Gary Snyder’s terminology, are ‘natural.’ The city comes from people like us, congregating, building, striving over hundreds of years, tearing down and building up. Cities reflect the human mind, the human experience in all its ugly, disgusting, crowded glory, as if summoned from our inner structure like a dream. We are natural creatures, talking on phones, dodging rats, smiling awkwardly at strangers. Let us stop imagining that we are more than the world supporting us, and take our place among the chaos and beauty of life.

The lithograph image above is Howard Cook’s New York Night (1931).

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Meditation: No Wrong Way To Do It

Meditation, by which I mean the act of sitting in one place for a period of time, is a strange practice. It is wholly unique among human activities, in this way: you can’t do it incorrectly.

Usually we are aware of our own effectiveness. Our minds judge and adjust our actions almost constantly. We wonder: did we jog fast enough, did we do a good job at work, did we offend someone with a certain comment, should we be studying more, practicing more, have we planned enough, worked hard enough, and so on. Considerations belabor us, and rightfully so, as we strive to balance our difficult paths and fulfill our dreams. Hopefully our judgments lead us to become more productive, accomplished people.

But meditation, as we practice it over time, is something of a contradiction: the more we do it, the more we realize there is no “right” way to do it. Sometimes we sit down and barely notice the minutes pass by. We are just empty shells, sitting peacefully. Other times, moments stretch out to excruciating lengths as we fidget, annoyed by our own impatience. In both situations, however, meditating happens. Our rebellious mind did not prevent us from meditating, but rather was a part of it. Meditation has no goals.

Of course, meditating may have beneficial effects for our mental health, and this is probably why we started doing it in the first place. But when we’re actually doing it, we are just sitting there, stuck with whatever comes up in our own minds. The act of meditating isn’t like target practice, where we easily see our successes and failures. It’s more like archery: when you miss the mark, you’re still doing it. One moment of meditation is as good as any other.

Perhaps this is why meditation is such a profound activity. Subtly, it cracks the door of our everyday life, and gradually our perspective shifts. Where we once thought that there is a correct way to live, we start to see that there is only our own way.

The painting above is Ferdinand Hodler’s Lake Thun, Symmetric Reflection (1905).

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Your Life in 17 Syllables

For a year or so now, a few friends and I have fallen in love with the haiku, a Japanese-derived form of short, three-line, non-rhyming poetry that most of us learn in elementary school, probably because it is a pretty easy and empowering introduction to language as art, and a means to examine some aspect of everyday life usually taken for granted.

Here’s a famous haiku by Matsuo Bashō, a wandering Japanese master poet who lived from 1644 - 1694, as translated by Alan Watts (here’s a site with 29 other translations)

The old pond, A frog jumps in: Plop!

At first glance, there’s nothing to it! But look again, and attempt a few of your own. I usually stick to a classic, if arbitrary, format, consisting of a line of five syllables, then a line of seven syllables, and finally another line of five syllables, although sometimes I play around with the order of the lines. The syllabic limit of 17 is a useful constraint. Here’s a couple of mine (I live in New York, by the way):

Life’s simple pleasures! Taking the stairs to avoid speaking with people

Like flowers in spring so frustration blooms in the hearts of commuters

A haiku forces you to portray some event or thought with very little information. The process of figuring out how to do that is an exciting challenge, but it also allows the author to become clear about exactly what is being expressed. How often do we speak or write without really knowing what we’re trying to say? A haiku cannot exist in this state of unknowing (at least for the author), because stripping away extra words or syllables has brought our point into undiluted focus: we figure out what we think about something when writing a haiku about it.

In a way, writing a haiku is sort of like writing a joke, because you have the set up (the first two lines), and the punch line (the last line), which puts the first two into a different context. Setup, twist. This is the spontaneous delight you get from writing one; lay out your setup: “Haikus grow in minds / like apples on tree branches.” Then finish with your twist: “And sometimes, they’re soft.”

Of course, the difference between haikus and jokes is that haikus don’t have to be funny. They can be whatever. Your twist can be emotional poignancy, or stark reality, or unsettling contradiction, or something else entirely. Plop.

But we can get an additional kind of entertainment from haikus. Most of us are thinking about the future all the time: who we’re going to be, where we’re going, what we’re trying to get out of life, and so on. A haiku can be a moment to see where you are in this moment, and this process of rediscovering where we are may lead to insights about ourselves. When we write a haiku, we come face to face with who we are right now, not in a future moment when we might be someone better.

Take, for example, this haiku from Kobayashi Issa, Japanese poet and amateur Buddhist priest who lived from 1763 to 1828. Upon the death of his child, Issa wrote:

This dewdrop world -- Is a dewdrop world, And yet, and yet...

This is a beautiful haiku, because it expresses a Buddhist concept, that the world is in some sense an illusion, or “maya.” Life, Issa knows, is an unknowable web of causes and effects, and so, in some sense, unintended and always changing, like a dewdrop rolling off a leaf. But Issa immediately brings this concept down to earth with the final, “And yet, and yet…” Sorrow is palpable in that final tragic line, as the author acknowledges that although the world really may be an illusion, there is, nonetheless, the human experience of longing, sorrow, yearning, striving, and compassion. Tragedy is a part of the dewdrop.

Issa’s “dewdrop” shows us that haikus work on many levels. He illumines, in three lines, something about human nature: we are logical, we have the gift of reason and insight, and yet, we have undeniable depths. But from another perspective, Issa does none of these things. He just expresses his sadness over the loss of his child.

Here are a few more haiku I love. These are from the excellent collection Haiku: An Anthology of Japanese Poems, edited by Stephen Addiss, Fumiko Yamamoto, and Akira Yamamoto.

Out from the gate, I too become a traveler- autumn dusk           - Buson

“Every woman…” he starts to say, then looks around           -Anonymous

Very secretly the medicine peddler is sick           -Anonymous

Heaven knows, earth knows, every neighbor knows - parents don’t know           -Shishōshi

Seeing that I’m old even the mosquito whispers closer to my ear          - Issa

And here are some from another great collection, Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death, by Yoel Hoffman, consisting only of the last poems of haiku masters.

Lotus seeds jump every which-way as they wish.           -Sosen

Fickle winter shower: up the road comes an umbrella.           -Shinseki

On a journey, ill: my dream goes wandering over withered fields.           -Basho

This is one poem people won’t dispute - the winds of winter.           -Chowa

I lean against the stove and lo! eternity.           -Gazen

Twitter is a great platform for haikus, so let me know if you write some, @thespirecrane.

The image and calligraphy above is by Sengai (1750 - 1837).

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The First (and Last) Step Toward Happiness: A Journey Into the Unknown

“This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.” Jorge Luis Borges

In my experience, the first step toward leading a happier life is counterintuitive. At first glance, it’s even nonsensical. Perhaps this is why the first step to being happier is hard to take, or even to see. Sometimes a long path of life experiences, contemplation, and self-discovery occurs before the first step. In this essay, I want to explore this path toward happiness not as an authority telling the reader what to do, but as someone interested in well-being and spiritual philosophy, who thinks that some of you might be interested as well. There is not one path to any destination, and someone else’s discovery is not your own, so make sure that you search your own experiences and intuitions. As Joni Mitchell wrote in the song ‘Amelia’, “People will tell you where they’ve gone / they’ll tell you where to go / but till you’ve get there yourself you never really know.”

First, allow me to say a few things on why I think the first step is hard to see, and then we’ll get onto what it actually is. Recently I visited my parents in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and was pleased to find that during the entirety of my vacation, just by coincidence, the television channel AMC was airing a Breaking Bad marathon, a show that actually took place in Albuquerque. I’d watched when it came out and enjoyed it, and it felt fortuitous that a marathon would coincide with extra time to kill. Late at night, the TV beckoned my family and me to witness the exploits of protagonist Walter White, meek high school chemistry teacher turned notorious meth maker.

It was fun to rewatch some of the show, but a few episodes in I became aware that now, only a few years later, I see it in a different light. There was something I missed the first time around: the whole show is a control fantasy. A middle-aged man, frustrated by his job, stricken with worry about his family’s future, and faced with his own mortality, transforms his mundane world into a high stakes drug empire. As an audience, we follow on the edge of our seats, living vicariously through Walt as he grows confident, gains power, and learns how to be a badass. Leaving aside the moral deplorability, how much we would all love to experience these same triumphs?

(Mild spoilers for Breaking Bad in this paragraph.) In the final episode Walt admits that he did it all for himself. “I was good at it,” he says. As viewers we recognize that Walt lost his moral compass along his journey, that his actions were unforgivable, and yet, deep down, we wish to reclaim our lives like Walt did. We want to show everyone that we too have unfulfilled, unlimited potential.

One doesn’t need to be a murderous drug dealer to feel like Walter White. When someone questions our judgment, our thoughts might immediately turn to revenge, before we even realize it. “You don’t think I’ll succeed?” Our thoughts take on a Walt-like quality. “I’ll show you.” This kind of thinking can actually be a tremendous motivating force for us. We strive for years to become wealthy enough to gloat to our doubting friends, while someone with different values and social pressures is driven to meditate for twelve hours a day, to prove his or her “spiritual progress” to the community.

While that kind of intense motivation may bring worldly achievements in droves, happiness, unfortunately, doesn’t necessarily follow. We may, like Walt, explode in the supernova of our ambitions, but if we were to stop and look back on the journey itself, we see one of anxiety, paranoia, and self-righteous pride alternating with shameful defeat. And this is only considering our own happiness, let alone that of those around us.

One day we may stop to wonder if our adolescent dreams of dying in a hail of gunfire, or drinking ourselves to death in artistic abandon, or winning the competition of life at all costs, is really what’s best for ourselves, our loved ones, or anyone else. Is life best spent taking what’s rightfully yours? Or is there more to it?

This is an excerpt from a longer article that can be found here: https://medium.com/@rossjedwards/the-first-and-last-step-toward-happiness-a-journey-into-the-unknown-c69d36530fcf#.stuim6rap

The image above is Georgia O’Keefe’s Ladder to the Moon (1958).

[rossjoedwards]

Who am “I”? An Introduction

In Kathryn Schulz’s book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (2010), Schulz admirably sums up the train of thought behind 17th century philosopher René Descartes’s famous cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) as follows:

“I might not have arms and legs, although I feel quite convinced that I do; I might not have free will; I might not have a sky overhead or a laptop and a coffee cup in front of me. An all-powerful evil genius could make me believe in all these things, even if none of them exist. But an evil genius can’t trick me into thinking that I’m thinking. If I think I am thinking, I am necessarily thinking. Moreover, there must be some kind of “I” hanging around doing this thinking, even if it doesn’t happen to have limbs or free will or a caffeine addiction. And there you have it: cogito, ergo sum.”

This argument is about 400 years old, and I think, for many of us, still stands. The first point, that thinking is occurring, is hard to argue with, because it can be true in our experience. If we experience thinking, who is anyone to say, “No, you are not!”? Clearly, these objectors are misguided; they don’t have access to the information which shows whether you are thinking or not, because you are the one experiencing your thoughts, while they are only privy to their thoughts.

However, the second part of Descartes’s argument, the point that there must be an “I” doing the thinking, has been considered by philosophers since (and before) Descartes; I will make no attempt to write an overview of the issue, but I do think it’s a crucial matter for personal consideration. What does the word “I” refer to? Do you have a self? Or, are you a self? What are the traits and qualities of this self, if we think we are one (or have one), and how do we know what they are? These questions are important, because our conclusions have implications for the way we live and think about ourselves. For example, if we conduct an investigation and conclude, inconceivable though it may be at first, that there might not be an “I” doing the thinking, then we start asking questions like, “well, then what is doing the thinking?” And, “how can we know for sure?” And maybe even questions like, “If no “I” is doing the thinking, then what does it mean to punish someone for their individual actions?” Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s take a moment to consider the “I” that Descartes is talking about.

Here is the second part of Descartes’s famous statement, as recounted by Kathryn Schulz: “...there must be some kind of “I” hanging around doing this thinking, even if it doesn’t happen to have limbs or free will or a caffeine addiction.” Or, as Descartes wrote, “For it is so evident of itself that it is I who doubts, who understands, and who desires, that there is no reason here to add anything to explain it.”

What is this “I” that doubts, understands, and desires? To answer this question, we might look within ourselves to see if we can find an “I” or self, as philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) once did. Hume found no constant “self,” but only perceptions, constantly shifting experiences, without an experiencer to be found. He wrote, “I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

Here is a different approach, from biologist, philosopher, and neuroscientist Francisco J. Varela (1946 - 2001), who explores the question of “self” in his book Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom and Cognition (1999) with the theory of a ‘Virtual Self’: “Our sense of a personal “I” can be construed as an ongoing interpretative narrative of some aspects of the parallel activities in our daily life…” Varela proposes that what we call “I” is a story of continuity that we tell ourselves to make sense of actions.

A similar idea is expressed by philosopher Wei Wu Wei (Terence James Stannus Gray) in the book Open Secret (1965): “Nevertheless “volition” is only an inference, for, search as we may, we can find no entity to exercise it. All we can find is an impulse which appears to be an expression of the notion of “I.” It would seem to be unjustifiable to assume that such an impulse could be capable of affecting the inexorable chain of causation or, alternatively, the process of manifestation which produces apparent events, unless itself it were an element of one or the other.” Wei Wu Wei states that our “I” is an inference we find to be non-existent upon further reflection.

This brings us back to Kathryn Schulz, who wrote a great piece for New York Magazine in 2013 called ‘The Self in Self-Help,’ with the subtitle ‘We have no idea what a self is. So how can we fix it?’ If you want to dive further into the mystery of self, this article is a great place to start, and an interesting companion piece to Francisco J. Varela’s Ethical Know-How, and any of the fascinating books by Wei Wu Wei.

In considering Descartes’s “I”, we may steal his methods for our own examination. Descartes set out to doubt everything, in order to see what is true. Schulz, Varela, and Wu Wei are just three of many great thinkers who help us apply the method to our “selves.” Is there an “I”? If so, where?

The painting above is Snowy Landscape (Deep Winter) by Cuno Amiet (1904).

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To Err Is Human

“To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.” Shrunyu Suzuki, from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970)

For one brief, intense period of my youth, I kept a journal. Recently I revisited this journal and found the ravings of a madman, full of hatred, anger, and self-pity. Despair and angst dripped from every page, as if I were the victim of betrayal comparable to Edmond Dantès, or Julius Caesar himself. What was all of this conceited self-torture about? A relationship, of course.

I was in a short relationship. I wanted, however, to be in a never-ending, always-wonderful, saturated-with-joy-and-praise relationship, the likes of which have never existed before. I did my best to deny the reality of my situation, but that didn’t change anything. The result was misery. Looking over my obsessive chicken-scratch, I am grateful, because, as many know, the process of suffering can provide insight.

I am no psychologist, but in retrospect I find my adolescence filled with denial. I thought the world should recognize me for who I am, and that I shouldn’t have to work for what I want. When events inevitably did not meet my secret expectations, I fell into deep sadness and confusion. For many of us, we learn the hard way that the tighter one’s grip on life, the more one is disconnected from reality, and the greater the pain when we eventually must face it.

This is not to say that once some of our delusions crumble we will be altogether different. We will not always treat those we love respectfully, nor are we free from the constant slew of mistakes that goes with trying new things, nor even days of oppressive meaninglessness. “To err is human,” as half the saying goes. There is no cure, it seems, for day-to-day hardships and struggle.

So what may we attain by going through the immense suffering of our delusions? Dare I say it: nothing. It is rather what we lose. We lose our sense of self-righteousness; we lose our assumption that the world should fit our image, rather than the other way around; we lose the hatred we felt for ourselves and others when they disobeyed our will. Lacking pride in even our greatest accomplishments, we are more in touch with both the comedic and tragic flow of life. 

We loosen our grip, tentatively at first, terrified of what may happen; remarkably, we find that the world does not fall into disarray without our dogmatic guidance. We start to see, occasionally, things as they are. 

The image above is Agnes Martin’s Untitled #1 (2003). In her early career, Martin claimed to have burned her own work at the end of each year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/arts/design/all-things-agnes-martin-at-the-guggenheim.html

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See For Yourself

There is a Zen story from The Gateless Barrier, a collection of koans (or ‘public cases’ for vigorous inquiry) from early 13th century China, wherein pupil Huike cuts off his arm to show his dedication to his master, Bodhidharma. After presenting his arm, Huike says:

“My mind is always wavy and disturbed. Please make it peaceful.”

Bodhidharma answers: “Bring your mind to me. Then I will make it peaceful.”

Huike thinks for a moment and responds: “I have sought it within, but I can find no mind.”

Bodhidharma says, “I have set your mind at rest.”

I’ve read this story in various forms for years, but running across it in Shoei Ando’s Zen and American Transcendentalism (1970) I am struck by the koan’s compassion. Stumbling our way into Buddhism or meditation, we Westerners often feel the burden of stopping the mind. From our meditation cushion we seek to mitigate our thoughts, though we may know enough to ‘allow them to dissipate of themselves.’ Our first transcendent steps are really a giant, bumbling leap toward perfectionism, and when the mind continues its chatter we either throw up our hands and quit, or we pretend to be ‘further along’ than we feel we really are.

But Bodhidharma, in the koan above, interrupts our efforts. We are busy wrestling with the mind, trying to make peace where there is clearly war. Bodhidharma, with a simple statement, changes our perspective: “Bring your mind to me.” In that moment our struggle pauses as we wonder what it is exactly we’re trying to make peaceful.

Reading between the lines, we see that Bodhidharma points us to a false assumption: we’ve assumed that we have the mind. We think the way toward happiness is to reign over our thoughts like a tyrant, beating them into submission. But who is this tyrant, if not the mind itself? Does one part of our mind control another part? If so, why do we have such trouble getting our thoughts to behave? This koan, like all in The Gateless Barrier, asks us to question the obvious and see for ourselves what is true.

The image above is M. C. Escher’s woodcut The Second Day of the Creation (1925).

There are many translations of The Gateless Barrier online. 

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The Inscrutable Personality of Jorge Luis Borges

Reading a biography of one of my favorite writers Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986) recently (simply titled Jorge Luis Borges, by Jason Wilson), I encountered this quote from the Argentine storyteller, then in his 20s and under the spell of Walt Whitman: “Unexpected and elusive is the world, but its very contingency is a richness, as we cannot even determine how poor we are, given that everything is a gift.”

Besides the grace of this sentence, the amazing breadth of Borges’s concision, we may be startled to hear the elusive, unsettled autodidact express a cliche so exhaustively aphorized: “everything is a gift.” This is the sort of phrase we’d expect from an inspirational tweet, but not a budding (and aesthetically prickly) genius.

What does Borges mean exactly, and is it true? Is everything really a gift? What about all of life’s unforeseeable unpleasantness that we hope to avoid? Surely some things are gifts, like meeting a future lover by happenstance, while others, like the death of a close friend, are something more akin to punishments or sacrifices.

But Borges, I think, is looking from a much weirder perspective. In one of my favorite Borges short stories, ‘The Aleph’ (1945), our hero (a thinly disguised Borges), rife with petty grudges and forlorn regrets, approaches a strange object hidden in the cellar of a despised acquaintance: an Aleph, described as “the only place on earth where all places are - seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending.”

Borges as protagonist encounters the Aleph and struggles to find words to describe the deluge of visions, resulting in the longest sentence in Spanish literature. He has, in other words, a mystical experience, and yet, when he recovers from the storm of majesty known as “the unimaginable universe,” Borges himself is much the same. The Aleph doesn’t remove his jealousies or bitterness, nor his desires for approval or revenge. In a devastating post-script, our narrator even surmises that the Aleph was a fake, one of many “mere optical instruments.”

I don’t know exactly what Borges meant with this post-script, as his theme crumbles from redemptive unity to distorted loss, but I do think it has something to do with human nature. The hero is not saved from himself, and this is Borges’s radical and idiosyncratic form of acceptance. The personality remains, as if destined to live out its own quirky yearnings. “Our minds are porous and forgetfulness seeps in.”

Borges, again and again, defies resolution. He embraces paradox and uncertainty, distorting our notion of ‘gifts’ to an unfathomable jumble. We no longer know what’s good for us, what’s bad for us, who we are, or why. The limits of identity are confounded and reborn, implying that we never had control over them in the first place. Borges’s gifts are sometimes insidious, always inscrutable, and mysterious beyond our wildest imagination.

The painting above is Max Ernst’s The Forest (1927).  Here’s a full translation of Borges’s ‘The Aleph.’

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Why We Long For Culture Shock

Sometimes the most obvious facts are ones that escape us again and again in our daily lives. For example, looking at my past I see that I am a very different person than I was only a year ago, and yet, in my everyday experience my personality seems to change at a glacial pace, if at all. Perhaps other people are the best authority for viewing changes within ourselves: when you reunite with an old friend, you suddenly feel torn between two identities, and the changes within yourself become obvious.

The transformation of our personalities is obscured partly because our daily routine is structured around the idea of stability in our personalities. For practical effect, we stick to our routines: working everyday, seeing the same people everyday, returning to the same restaurants and bars and so on. Our environment encourages repetitive behavior. In fact, our whole society is structured around it. What would life be like if no one was expected to do at least some of the same things every day? I suspect we’d have a culture of well-rounded charlatans, with greater breadth of experience, but far less skill.

The stasis of routine might explain the appeal of traveling. The term ‘culture shock’ accurately portrays the jolt we feel from exposing ourselves to unimaginably novel daily routines. Lest we fall victim to the idea that we are ‘fixed,’ that our personalities don’t change, that there is nothing new under the sun, we visit somewhere new, basking in the unfamiliar. Take Japan, for example.

I studied jazz performance in college, and in four years I played, studied, and heard every variation of the genre from dixieland to bebop to free jazz to experiments beyond definition. My musical cohorts and I lived and breathed jazz history, while familiarizing ourselves with the always exciting New York jazz scene. None of this prepared me for my experience at a club in Tokyo. My girlfriend found the place, nestled beneath a row of indistinguishable skyscrapers, packed with studious, stern-faced musical seekers, and surprisingly expensive. A nine-piece band whose name I sadly will never recall took the stage and counted off into a pitch-perfect (almost too perfect) impersonation of early ‘60s post-bop. They were incredible. Every note was exactly in place - a stunning impersonation, performed with obvious reverence for jazz history. With one exception: the cello player.

Hidden in back, stage left, sat a middle aged man with wild hair, obscured partly by a worn cello, feet flying eagerly at a row of effects pedals. From the first to the last note of each song, as the eight others deftly executed musical calculations, the cellist thrashed at his instrument, producing squeals of atonal noise filtered through digital delays and distortions. He was like a tuneless whirlwind, spreading chaos over immaculate cityscapes, never hesitant or self-conscious.

The schizophrenic combination of tradition and spontaneity was, to me, a culture shock like I’d never heard. It was brilliant. What a genuinely strange blend of noise and clarity! Who would ever think to do such a thing? Certainly no one in my musical background was capable of that effortless, earnest cacophony. I’ll never forget it.

Of course, we don’t only experience life-changing moments across the world, but often enough in our homes, as readers and lovers know. Culture shock remains the same, however, in that we never expect it. It hits us out of the blue, even when the source is someone we’ve known for years. Our reaction to the shock is a surprise even to ourselves.

The lesson to be learned is profound: our lives are, at some level, circumstantial. The consistency of our daily lives provides a bedrock from which we extrapolate our stable, independent selves, but when this consistency is altered we feel ourselves as dependent, as components of an environment, reacting naturally to whatever comes our way.

This idea is scary. It undermines the sense of security about our very identities. But, on the other hand, accepting this insecurity gives us a more accurate sense of self as interconnected with environment, rather than independent from it. We start to see life as a flow of shifting relationships, rather than a battle between fixed entities. Exciting, isn’t it? We never know what’s going to mess up our routines, and reveal something we didn’t know about ourselves.

The painting above is Jackson Pollack’s Number 8, 1949.

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The Only Thing Worth Talking About

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)

“Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.”

Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives (1998)

The first line of the Tao Te Ching is:

‘The Way that can be spoken of is not the true Way.’

This idea has been expressed in various forms by great mystics and philosophers. The meaning is essentially that life cannot be spoken of accurately. When you speak of the flow of life, you are speaking from within the flow.

The purpose of words is to represent objects (and implicitly define our relationship to them), but words like Tao, or Way, or ‘life’ as I used it previously, are in fact not objects at all. They are the space and form of all subjects and objects. We are included in the flow of life, or the flow of Tao, and thus we cannot speak about it as if we are separate, individual objects.

And yet, as many have pointed out… it’s the first line of the Tao Te Ching. Many verses follow, elucidating this Way that is not the true Way. As this irony illustrates, writers are in the wonderful position of forever dashing off the inexpressible, like idiots! The greatest among poets are not immune from this inadequacy, as exposed by T.S. Eliot (from ‘East Coker,’ Four Quartets, 1943):

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years - Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres - Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it...

For those of you disposed to poetry, Eliot’s stanza inimitably illuminates the writer’s folly. Certainly this is the same earnest humility which rose in the words of Moby Dick’s Ishmael: “God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught – nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!” Perhaps the feeling surged overwhelmingly in Franz Kafka, Agnes Martin, and Sergei Rachmaninoff as they burned much of their work. These are but a few - hardly sufficient to demonstrate the infinitude of art, and the delicacy of artist.

It is no secret that the artist continues not despite clumsiness, imperfection, and even insanity, but rather because of these human weaknesses. What is really worth expressing? What urge compels the words 'I love you,' and leaves us grasping for more, falling into gibberish sentiment to express lingering devotion? All words miss their mark, but we cannot remain silent. Do we only wish to express the mundane, the prescriptive, the descriptive, the understandable? Or is art mixed up with the boundaries of language and cohesion? We reach further than words allow, exploring feelings that cannot be shared, because they are the only topics worth talking about.

“...in these words what have I said, my God, my life, my holy sweetness? What has anyone achieved in words when he speaks about you? Yet woe to those who are silent about you because, though loquacious with verbosity, they have nothing to say.”

St. Augustine (from Confessions, 397 - 400 AD, translated by Henry Chadwick)

The painting above is Complex City by Howard Cook (1956).

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Surrender! If You Can

“The way of the artist is an entirely different way. It is a way of surrender. He must surrender to his own mind.” Agnes Martin 

As artists, we give ourselves to our work, to our emotions, to the flow of inspiration. As people, sometimes we let go, drop our guard, relax our claustrophobic psyches, and go with the flow. From time to time, we’ve experienced the wonder of dissolving in the stream of events, rather than struggling futilely against it. Billy Strayhorn recalls such moments in his song ‘Lush Life’ (written 1933 - 1938):

“I used to visit all the very gay places Those come what may places Where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life To get the feel of life…”

A recollection encapsulated by painter Agnes Martin (from ‘Beauty is the Mystery of Life’, 1969): “Happiness is being on the beam with life – to feel the pull of life.”

There is a great paradox, contemplated throughout the ages, in this kind of letting go: How do you do it? How do you let go? How do you relax on the axis, and feel the pull of life? As anyone knows who has unsuccessfully willed oneself to fall asleep, or forced oneself to relax, or attempted to resist a surge of anxiety, this matter of letting go does not always happen when we want it to. The problem is expressed by Alan Watts (in This Is It: and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, 1960):

“[One] is called upon, in other words, to do something contradictory, and this is usually within the sphere of self-control, the sort of contradiction epitomized in the title of a well-known book, You Must Relax. Need it be said that the demand for effort in ‘must’ is inconsistent with the demand for effortlessness in ‘relax’?”

The idea of doing something, in order not to do that very thing, is a contradiction. Psychologist and writer Daniel Wegner touches on this point in The Illusion of Conscious Will (2002):

“Religious traditions such as Zen Buddhism teach a philosophy of relinquishing the pretense of control and view a break with the illusion of conscious will as the ultimate form of enlightenment (Breer 1989). One wonders, however, whether it is possible purposefully to renounce the illusion of purpose or whether one must only sit back and wait for the loss of illusion to happen.”

Again we find an echo in the words of painter Agnes Martin (from her notes on a lecture given in 1973):

“It is not possible to overthrow pride. It is not possible because we ourselves are pride... But we can witness the defeat of pride because pride can not hold out. Pride is not real so sooner or later it must go down.”

Sooner or later? Sit back and wait? These are frustrating consolations. If we cannot surrender for ourselves, then how does it happen?! Arrogantly, we think that if we can’t do it, it will never occur.

Fortunately, this is not the case. In my experience, many things occur that are not “up to me,” and this realization is the very heart of surrender. If we can, we might even surrender to the fact that we cannot 'achieve' surrender anytime we want it.

‘To get the feel of life' is to reconsider where we are, where we're going, and where we think we've been. As in the final paragraphs of a J. L. Borges story, we may feel like cogs in an enormous system, like automatons in a web of cause and effect, like flowers blooming and withering in an endless garden.

On the one hand, it is scary to lose autonomy. On the other, we may be astounded at the power that lies in genuine surrender. Of course, it isn’t personal power, for such fantasies may at some point be left behind for the at the sake of art, love, and happiness.

“Why do we go everywhere searching out works of art and why do we make works of art? The answer is that we are inspired to do so.” Agnes Martin

The painting above is Martin’s Gratitude (2001).

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Where Faith Meets Taoism

There is a story from the Lieh Tzu (a central Taoist text, thought to be compiled around the 4th century) involving a precocious twelve-year-old at a dinner party. The host, gazing at their culinary bounty, announces, “How kind Heaven is to humanity. It provides the five grains and nourishes the fish and birds for us to enjoy and use.” 

As the crowd reverently agrees, a twelve-year-old boy, the son of a guest, breaks the silence:

“My Lord is wrong! All life is born in the same way that we are and we are all of the same kind. One species is not nobler than another; it is simply the strongest and cleverest rule over the weaker and more stupid. Things eat each other and are eaten, but they were not bred for this. To be sure, we take the things which we can eat and consume them, but you cannot claim that Heaven made them in the first place for us to eat. After all, mosquitoes and gnats bite our skin, tigers and wolves eat our flesh. Does this mean Heaven originally created us for the sake of the mosquitoes, gnats, tigers and wolves?”

We can imagine the communal response. (Translated by Martin Palmer, from his introduction to The Book of Chuang Tzu).

Through the voice of a child, Lieh Tzu cannily questions our assumed Heavenly favor. Is someone up there really looking out for us? Or are we, like other animals, simply fending for ourselves?

This is a troubling passage because it contradicts an impulse we have for faith. We want to believe that things will work out alright.

I remember as a child my mother and father coming into my bedroom late at night upon overhearing my tearful gasps. I explained, haltingly, that they were not going to be around forever. What a terrible realization! My parents replied that that wouldn’t happen for a very long time. “It will be alright.” And, at the time, it was.

This consolation, perfect for a child, now strikes us as hollow. As adults we grapple with the the notion: perhaps it won’t all work out in my favor. Perhaps, as Lieh Tzu’s twelve-year-old instructs, supernatural forces do not exist to ensure our successes. Our faith, in that moment, is questioned, and we are overcome with uncertainty.

This revelation of doubt, however, offers us an opportunity for honesty. What can we really have faith in? What does faith really mean? Furthermore, how do we even know what outcome would be really good for us? If we look into our pasts, we often find that our greatest, most cherished moments occurred unpredictably, beyond our control. And if we look to others for example, we may see that favor and success do not necessarily provide fulfillment and happiness.

Here is an interesting passage from The Book of Chuang Tzu (translated by Palmer, Elizabeth Breulily, Chang Wai Ming, and Jay Ramsay):

How great is the Maker of All! What will you be made into next? Where will you be sent? Will you come back as a rat’s liver? Or will it be as a pest’s arm?

Chuang Tzu, with characteristic eccentricity, offers a very different kind of ‘faith’: total acknowledgment that we do not know what will happen to us, nor even what we will become. Chuang Tzu’s natural wonder may eventually dissolve our untenable insistence on a rightful place in Heaven.

To be replaced with… what? We’ll see what happens, within and without.

The image above is Picasso’s Self Portrait Facing Death (1972).

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In Winter We Shiver!

For those of us drawn to Eastern philosophy, or perhaps philosophy in general, the idea of ‘enlightenment,’ however vague, pulls us inward into obsession. We want to be free from our petty problems, free from our emotions, free from the terrible anguish of our own thoughts and preferences!

This is why I like the following story about Marpa Lotsawa, a Tibetan buddhist teacher in the 11th century, who fell into mourning when he heard of the passing of his son. When a disciple saw Marpa crying, the disciple asked him: if you teach that everything is an illusion anyway, then why are you so sad to hear of your son’s death? Marpa responded, “Indeed all is an illusion. And the death of a child is the greatest of these illusions.” We don’t like to think of an ‘enlightened person’ filled with sorrow! We prefer to view our role models through rose-colored glasses, with only the traits we seek in ourselves.

Broadly speaking, this is the paradox of studying mysticism - humans are not perfect, not even the special ones. It is the embodiment of the Sufi saying, “He who has realized his humanness has realized his divinity.”

For years we try to transcend our humanity, to free ourselves from destructive passion, until finally we experience enough to know that real freedom lies in unconditional acceptance of our own humanity. We are (sometimes) lost, confused, powerless, pathetic, lonely, isolated, unhappy, and angry, and finally with some luck we see that those things are not the problem. The problem is thinking that they’re the problem! As the Zen saying goes, “In summer we sweat; in winter we shiver.”

Today we see if we can look into our limitations and failures, because they might lead us to finding our place, which is where we already are. Of course, we can’t always do it... But even the thickest ice may melt with the change of a season.

The image above is Miners in the Snow by Van Gogh (1882).