Zen Mind is described as a state of egolessness, devoid of self consciousness. One can utilize this state of mind, Zen shows us, in archery, martial arts, and calligraphy. Zen and the Art of Archery, by Eugene Herrigel, is the short classic story of a westerner’s attempt to achieve Zen Mind and become a skilled archer. During the author’s eight years of training he is continuously redirected from trying to hit the target. The arrow should release itself, you see, like a tree branch that bends to release a load of snow. One doesn’t aim. Without ego the arrow finds the target. Zen Masters blow out candles with their arrows at 80 yards, blindfolded.
The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of LIfe, by Alison Gopnik, reviewed by Michael Greenbergin the New York Review of Books, March 10, 2010, describes what the author has discovered about human consciousness before age 6. Children this age, she reports, have “lantern” consciousness as opposed to “spotlight” consciousness, which develops soon thereafter. In “lantern” consciousness one does not have a sense of being a self observer as one is having experience, one is just “taking it all in”, with no intentionally focused attention. This is likened to what an adult experiences watching a movie, immersed in the unfolding visual and auditory experience, with a suspended sense of self.
In “spotlight” consciousness, after age six, we develop the focused intention of the self-conscious observing self. We direct our ‘show’. We have a sense of me looking to see what I seek to see. We have ego, filtering and directing our experience.
As adults we seem to be able to do both “lantern” and “spotlight” consciousness. This is empowering, and maddening. Zen shows us that suspending “spotlight” for “lantern” consciousness can take some effort and training – it doesn’t seem natural – but it can be quite beneficial for perceptual and motor tasks. Having unattached attention, any golf professional will tell you, refines skill and improves ability to perform body kinesthetic and hand-eye movements.
“Lantern” consciousness seems more like animal consciousness. “Spotlight” consciousness may be uniquely human. Why did it evolve? Perhaps “spotlight” consciousness is for social living. Having me at the center of my perception may be very important for negotiating the interpersonal landscape. The social environment is every bit as perilous for humans as the predator environment is for animals. Human survival depends on successful membership in groups.
“Lantern” consciousness may be more effective for acts in the natural world. Animals hunt, move, and fight very well.
This duality can be maddening. Our consciousness can shift. This is not fully manageable. We choke in sports, freeze on stage, lose our golf swing, suddenly forget what we were going to say.
Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, and author of American Lion, Andrew Jackson in the White House, reviews Christianity, the First Three Thousand Years, by Diamond MacCulloch, in the New York Times Book Review, April 4, 2010.
Meacham tells us he is officially sympathetic to christianity. ” I am an episcopalian who takes the faith of my fathers seriously“, but then, with qualification: “if unemotionally“. He notes, too, that MacCulloch is also sympathetic to christianity, but also with qualification: “I would now describe myself as a candid friend of christianity. I still appreciate the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human experience and I appreciate the solemnity of religious liturgy as a way of confronting these problems” . . yet, “I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species.”
So, Religion is OK, but only unemotionally, and don’t forget it is crazy.
Meacham seems to accept that religious faith is necessarily dogmatic, rigid, opposed to critical thinking, and intolerant. He doesn’t seem to know that what makes religious faith, faith, is that it is a decision held knowingly in the face of known doubt and uncertainty. And contrary to his concerns, the history of christianity is full of debate and philosophy and disagreement.
Meacham seems also to equate having religious faith with being ‘literalist’ – taking the words of the Bible as only factual, without metaphor. In this thinking, one is all or none – the Bible is all factual truth or all metaphor. Yet he very likely would not deny that the Bible is great literature, written over thousands of years by numerous authors mostly unknown to each other, truly an authentic compilation of human literary effort. And he would without doubt affirm that there is great truth in literature. Not one element of profound literary theme or structure is missing from the Bible.
To the religious, the question of the literal truth of the Bible is not a meaningful, or even valid question. It seems intended to diminish the sophistication of faith, and deserves no answer. Is not all knowing, all conceptualization, ultimately metaphorical? Is not story a powerful way to communicate profound truth?
Meacham approves of MacCulloch’s accusation that the Apostle Paul justified slavery. But this is a weak point. Paul wisely advised the very fragile early church to avoid radical opposition to the “existing social distinctions.” This included slavery, which was, in those times, the ubiquitous norm of all civilizations. Meacham seems unaware of the powerlessness of the early christians, despite having read this history. Their swift demise would have quickly followed any political stance against Roman power. This, after all, is precisely what happened to Jesus. A surviving movement was better than no movement at all.
Meacham also notes, approvingly, another MacCulloch opinion: “For most of its existence, christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competition, with Judaism a qualified exception”. Huh? Christianity has had its corruptions, and has been an instrument of political power, but what religion has built more hospitals, schools, and universities? What religion has most fostered the independence of learning and the pluralistic societies of our day?
https://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpg00Think Againhttps://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpgThink Again2010-07-21 17:01:442010-07-21 17:01:44History of Christianity
“Combat fog obscures your fate…and from that unknown is born a desperate bond between men”
In Sebastian Junger’s War, a bookabout a company of soldiers in the Korengal Valley of Eastern Afghanistan, we experience war conceptually, and devoid of the cynicism of most war commentary. Junger doesn’t speak to whether war is good or bad, but what it is. The book is a case study of men in combat, and it illuminates a wonderful aspect of our humanity.
Survival in combat depends on the precise coordination of individuals in a group. It is the group that moves, acts, responds, not the man. Alone in a firefight every man would die. And so, out of necessity men in combat become a network of acute mutual dependence. It is more powerful than any bond forged in peace. Like a parent to a child, a man knows that the group depends on him for its survival, and like a child to a parent, he depends on it for his own.
In war, every part of a man’s life becomes devoted to his participation in the network of dependence. All his decisions of personal organization and conduct affect the web of mutual protection. He makes sure his boots are laced, or else he is too slow to his gun. He monitors his supply of water and nutrients, or else he risks exhaustion while on patrol, slowing the group, exposing them to attack. Every daily act has a meaning as profound as life and death.
What is striking is how immediately men adopt the identity of the team: one gets the sense that we are evolved to coordinate and move as a pack. But men that experience combat invariably have difficulty adjusting to peaceful society. They struggle to leave the mindset of battle. Despite the terror, fear, and death, the men in Junger’s unit miss combat—they crave it. They have become adrenaline junkies (like the soldier that yells “better than crack!” over the roar of gunfire), but strangely, excitement alone fails to explain the feeling of loss felt by a soldier who leaves combat:
“In these hillsides of loose shale and holly trees are where the men feel not the most alive—that you can get skydiving—but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful.”
Junger observes that an act of courage in combat is indistinguishable from an act of love.
It seems we are not meant to live frivolously, leisurely, and lazily, as we do too often when our survival is not threatened. We have the capacity to live vividly, to experience each personal decision as profoundly important to our survival and the survival of our group. We seem to move closer to what we are meant to be, when we are forced with every step to consider the well-being of those on whom we mutually depend.
https://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpg00Think Againhttps://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpgThink Again2010-05-31 12:45:082010-05-31 12:45:08Men in Combat
“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Steven Weinberg.
Science seems to have the unspoken goal of finding explanations that have no arbitrary element. Nothing can be a certain way, when it could as well be another way. Why it isn’t always has to be explained. The result is that scientific explanations require that purely random elements somehow build the non-random world we know.
This is proving difficult. The great mathematician, Kurt Gødel, proved that all logical systems require a ‘given’, an assumption that is unprovable by the logical system itself. Reality seems so far to be the same.
Sean Carroll, in “From eternity to here“, 2010, tells us that the most important and baffling ‘given’ in our Universe is the unidirectional nature of time. He traces the irreversibility of time to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that entropy can only stay the same or increase. Entropy is the measure of disorder of a system. All of the other fundamental laws of physics seem to be time reversible. Somehow, time reversible processes create time that is irreversible. Carroll ventures to explain this.
Changing low entropy into higher entropy is the dynamic that creates our knowable world, the evolution of life, the existence of stars and planets, and galaxies, the unidirection of time. And so entropy must have started low, but this is very improbable and therefore it must be explained, why didn’t it start high?
“From eternity to here” gives us a wonderful tour of the advanced science that is grappling with this question. We are presented the concepts behind mathematical equations that have been found to predict the behavior of the universe. In something like a parlor trick, science theory tells that what exists is what is probable. Anything can exist, however, no matter how improbable, given the immense time and space of the universe. Infinity solves equations, Infinity has happened, yet the universe is only 14 billion years old. Empty space can have virtual particles that improbably, but actually, pop in and out of existence, and nothing can escape a black hole, except, improbably, something does. Probability helps explain reality, except when it doesn’t. Cause and effect exists, except when it doesn’t.
Mr. Carroll is left engagingly unable to explain how entropy started low, and time is irreversible. We seem to be left with a given.
Most people can accept many if not most scientific explanations, but most people, unlike Steven Weinberg, can’t really feel that it is all pointless. There just seems like there is something when there could have been something else.
https://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpg00Think Againhttps://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpgThink Again2010-05-09 20:54:042010-05-09 20:54:04Something or Something else
In the charming movie, Vitus, a young boy is a piano prodigy. This becomes very important to his parents, so much so that they seem to forget that he is still a young boy. Too young to understand his gift, he wants to be a young boy. His parents’ obsession becomes annoying, so he fakes a head injury to seem to lose his talent and free him to do fun things, like learn to fly airplanes with his grandfather. Eventually he takes flight in a real airplane, and flies to the villa of a famous piano virtuoso, whom he has met before. She has told him: “don’t play for them, don’t play for yourself, play for the music“. He is ready, and he does.
Golf is a ritualized hunt. The players rendevous with their weapons, then advance, spread out, approach the target, make the kill, and then re-group. And because success in hunting has been so vital and necessary in our history, hunting skill is highly valued and cultivated. Skill is doing something with precision, practiced technique, and intelligent efficiency. Doing more with less. And so it is also in golf. The best swing is the most graceful, the most rhythmic, the most simple. The best score is the least number of shots.
We talk about inclusion and equality, but we love competition. We are driven to seek, promote, and celebrate the best among us. We create competition to know who is best. We love sorting out winners and losers, as cruel as it can be for the losers, we are more than willing to tolerate the agony of loss for the losers. We gravitate to excellence, we give it special status, we dislike losers. We invite winners to feel superior, we encourage them to feel proud, we help them feel entitled.
And then, we call them on it. They walk the plank.
There is the Drama of the Gifted Child, (Alice Miller 1979). Over time the gifted are more and more loved for their gift, less and less for themselves as persons. Paradoxically, success becomes more and more diminishing. The Gift usurps the Self.
Tiger Woods is a prodigy, and a winner. He has great skill, developed with hard, diligent effort. Initially, he probably played for his parents, then he played for his fans, and then he played for himself. Whomever he may have betrayed, he did not betray excellence. That is a gift for us, and for that he deserves our admiration.
Play for the music.
https://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpg00Think Againhttps://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpgThink Again2010-04-07 17:37:232010-04-07 17:37:23The Drama of the Gifted
Modal Consciousness
/in All, Books, IdeasZen Mind is described as a state of egolessness, devoid of self consciousness. One can utilize this state of mind, Zen shows us, in archery, martial arts, and calligraphy. Zen and the Art of Archery, by Eugene Herrigel, is the short classic story of a westerner’s attempt to achieve Zen Mind and become a skilled archer. During the author’s eight years of training he is continuously redirected from trying to hit the target. The arrow should release itself, you see, like a tree branch that bends to release a load of snow. One doesn’t aim. Without ego the arrow finds the target. Zen Masters blow out candles with their arrows at 80 yards, blindfolded.
The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of LIfe, by Alison Gopnik, reviewed by Michael Greenbergin the New York Review of Books, March 10, 2010, describes what the author has discovered about human consciousness before age 6. Children this age, she reports, have “lantern” consciousness as opposed to “spotlight” consciousness, which develops soon thereafter. In “lantern” consciousness one does not have a sense of being a self observer as one is having experience, one is just “taking it all in”, with no intentionally focused attention. This is likened to what an adult experiences watching a movie, immersed in the unfolding visual and auditory experience, with a suspended sense of self.
In “spotlight” consciousness, after age six, we develop the focused intention of the self-conscious observing self. We direct our ‘show’. We have a sense of me looking to see what I seek to see. We have ego, filtering and directing our experience.
As adults we seem to be able to do both “lantern” and “spotlight” consciousness. This is empowering, and maddening. Zen shows us that suspending “spotlight” for “lantern” consciousness can take some effort and training – it doesn’t seem natural – but it can be quite beneficial for perceptual and motor tasks. Having unattached attention, any golf professional will tell you, refines skill and improves ability to perform body kinesthetic and hand-eye movements.
“Lantern” consciousness seems more like animal consciousness. “Spotlight” consciousness may be uniquely human. Why did it evolve? Perhaps “spotlight” consciousness is for social living. Having me at the center of my perception may be very important for negotiating the interpersonal landscape. The social environment is every bit as perilous for humans as the predator environment is for animals. Human survival depends on successful membership in groups.
“Lantern” consciousness may be more effective for acts in the natural world. Animals hunt, move, and fight very well.
This duality can be maddening. Our consciousness can shift. This is not fully manageable. We choke in sports, freeze on stage, lose our golf swing, suddenly forget what we were going to say.
History of Christianity
/in All, Books, PoliticsJon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, and author of American Lion, Andrew Jackson in the White House, reviews Christianity, the First Three Thousand Years, by Diamond MacCulloch, in the New York Times Book Review, April 4, 2010.
Meacham tells us he is officially sympathetic to christianity. ” I am an episcopalian who takes the faith of my fathers seriously“, but then, with qualification: “if unemotionally“. He notes, too, that MacCulloch is also sympathetic to christianity, but also with qualification: “I would now describe myself as a candid friend of christianity. I still appreciate the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human experience and I appreciate the solemnity of religious liturgy as a way of confronting these problems” . . yet, “I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species.”
So, Religion is OK, but only unemotionally, and don’t forget it is crazy.
Meacham seems to accept that religious faith is necessarily dogmatic, rigid, opposed to critical thinking, and intolerant. He doesn’t seem to know that what makes religious faith, faith, is that it is a decision held knowingly in the face of known doubt and uncertainty. And contrary to his concerns, the history of christianity is full of debate and philosophy and disagreement.
Meacham seems also to equate having religious faith with being ‘literalist’ – taking the words of the Bible as only factual, without metaphor. In this thinking, one is all or none – the Bible is all factual truth or all metaphor. Yet he very likely would not deny that the Bible is great literature, written over thousands of years by numerous authors mostly unknown to each other, truly an authentic compilation of human literary effort. And he would without doubt affirm that there is great truth in literature. Not one element of profound literary theme or structure is missing from the Bible.
To the religious, the question of the literal truth of the Bible is not a meaningful, or even valid question. It seems intended to diminish the sophistication of faith, and deserves no answer. Is not all knowing, all conceptualization, ultimately metaphorical? Is not story a powerful way to communicate profound truth?
Meacham approves of MacCulloch’s accusation that the Apostle Paul justified slavery. But this is a weak point. Paul wisely advised the very fragile early church to avoid radical opposition to the “existing social distinctions.” This included slavery, which was, in those times, the ubiquitous norm of all civilizations. Meacham seems unaware of the powerlessness of the early christians, despite having read this history. Their swift demise would have quickly followed any political stance against Roman power. This, after all, is precisely what happened to Jesus. A surviving movement was better than no movement at all.
Meacham also notes, approvingly, another MacCulloch opinion: “For most of its existence, christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competition, with Judaism a qualified exception”. Huh? Christianity has had its corruptions, and has been an instrument of political power, but what religion has built more hospitals, schools, and universities? What religion has most fostered the independence of learning and the pluralistic societies of our day?
Men in Combat
/in All, Books“Combat fog obscures your fate…and from that unknown is born a desperate bond between men”
In Sebastian Junger’s War, a book about a company of soldiers in the Korengal Valley of Eastern Afghanistan, we experience war conceptually, and devoid of the cynicism of most war commentary. Junger doesn’t speak to whether war is good or bad, but what it is. The book is a case study of men in combat, and it illuminates a wonderful aspect of our humanity.
Survival in combat depends on the precise coordination of individuals in a group. It is the group that moves, acts, responds, not the man. Alone in a firefight every man would die. And so, out of necessity men in combat become a network of acute mutual dependence. It is more powerful than any bond forged in peace. Like a parent to a child, a man knows that the group depends on him for its survival, and like a child to a parent, he depends on it for his own.
In war, every part of a man’s life becomes devoted to his participation in the network of dependence. All his decisions of personal organization and conduct affect the web of mutual protection. He makes sure his boots are laced, or else he is too slow to his gun. He monitors his supply of water and nutrients, or else he risks exhaustion while on patrol, slowing the group, exposing them to attack. Every daily act has a meaning as profound as life and death.
What is striking is how immediately men adopt the identity of the team: one gets the sense that we are evolved to coordinate and move as a pack. But men that experience combat invariably have difficulty adjusting to peaceful society. They struggle to leave the mindset of battle. Despite the terror, fear, and death, the men in Junger’s unit miss combat—they crave it. They have become adrenaline junkies (like the soldier that yells “better than crack!” over the roar of gunfire), but strangely, excitement alone fails to explain the feeling of loss felt by a soldier who leaves combat:
“In these hillsides of loose shale and holly trees are where the men feel not the most alive—that you can get skydiving—but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful.”
Junger observes that an act of courage in combat is indistinguishable from an act of love.
It seems we are not meant to live frivolously, leisurely, and lazily, as we do too often when our survival is not threatened. We have the capacity to live vividly, to experience each personal decision as profoundly important to our survival and the survival of our group. We seem to move closer to what we are meant to be, when we are forced with every step to consider the well-being of those on whom we mutually depend.
Something or Something else
/in All, Books, Ideas“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Steven Weinberg.
Science seems to have the unspoken goal of finding explanations that have no arbitrary element. Nothing can be a certain way, when it could as well be another way. Why it isn’t always has to be explained. The result is that scientific explanations require that purely random elements somehow build the non-random world we know.
This is proving difficult. The great mathematician, Kurt Gødel, proved that all logical systems require a ‘given’, an assumption that is unprovable by the logical system itself. Reality seems so far to be the same.
Sean Carroll, in “From eternity to here“, 2010, tells us that the most important and baffling ‘given’ in our Universe is the unidirectional nature of time. He traces the irreversibility of time to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that entropy can only stay the same or increase. Entropy is the measure of disorder of a system. All of the other fundamental laws of physics seem to be time reversible. Somehow, time reversible processes create time that is irreversible. Carroll ventures to explain this.
Changing low entropy into higher entropy is the dynamic that creates our knowable world, the evolution of life, the existence of stars and planets, and galaxies, the unidirection of time. And so entropy must have started low, but this is very improbable and therefore it must be explained, why didn’t it start high?
“From eternity to here” gives us a wonderful tour of the advanced science that is grappling with this question. We are presented the concepts behind mathematical equations that have been found to predict the behavior of the universe. In something like a parlor trick, science theory tells that what exists is what is probable. Anything can exist, however, no matter how improbable, given the immense time and space of the universe. Infinity solves equations, Infinity has happened, yet the universe is only 14 billion years old. Empty space can have virtual particles that improbably, but actually, pop in and out of existence, and nothing can escape a black hole, except, improbably, something does. Probability helps explain reality, except when it doesn’t. Cause and effect exists, except when it doesn’t.
Mr. Carroll is left engagingly unable to explain how entropy started low, and time is irreversible. We seem to be left with a given.
Most people can accept many if not most scientific explanations, but most people, unlike Steven Weinberg, can’t really feel that it is all pointless. There just seems like there is something when there could have been something else.
The Drama of the Gifted
/in All, MoviesIn the charming movie, Vitus, a young boy is a piano prodigy. This becomes very important to his parents, so much so that they seem to forget that he is still a young boy. Too young to understand his gift, he wants to be a young boy. His parents’ obsession becomes annoying, so he fakes a head injury to seem to lose his talent and free him to do fun things, like learn to fly airplanes with his grandfather. Eventually he takes flight in a real airplane, and flies to the villa of a famous piano virtuoso, whom he has met before. She has told him: “don’t play for them, don’t play for yourself, play for the music“. He is ready, and he does.
Golf is a ritualized hunt. The players rendevous with their weapons, then advance, spread out, approach the target, make the kill, and then re-group. And because success in hunting has been so vital and necessary in our history, hunting skill is highly valued and cultivated. Skill is doing something with precision, practiced technique, and intelligent efficiency. Doing more with less. And so it is also in golf. The best swing is the most graceful, the most rhythmic, the most simple. The best score is the least number of shots.
We talk about inclusion and equality, but we love competition. We are driven to seek, promote, and celebrate the best among us. We create competition to know who is best. We love sorting out winners and losers, as cruel as it can be for the losers, we are more than willing to tolerate the agony of loss for the losers. We gravitate to excellence, we give it special status, we dislike losers. We invite winners to feel superior, we encourage them to feel proud, we help them feel entitled.
And then, we call them on it. They walk the plank.
There is the Drama of the Gifted Child, (Alice Miller 1979). Over time the gifted are more and more loved for their gift, less and less for themselves as persons. Paradoxically, success becomes more and more diminishing. The Gift usurps the Self.
Tiger Woods is a prodigy, and a winner. He has great skill, developed with hard, diligent effort. Initially, he probably played for his parents, then he played for his fans, and then he played for himself. Whomever he may have betrayed, he did not betray excellence. That is a gift for us, and for that he deserves our admiration.
Play for the music.