The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

I picked up this book by Rebecca Skloot knowing little more than that it had won a number of prizes and that she was an accomplished science writer.  As a result, I expected it to have a lot more, you know, science writing.  I can't really say I'm disappointed though, because the story is so complex, so well-told, and so deeply human.

If you haven't already heard the quick version, let me explain that Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951.  She was 26 years old.  During her brief treatment for this very aggressive cancer, doctors at Johns Hopkins took samples of her tumors.  These cells turned out to be incredibly hardy.  They multiplied fast and were easy to culture.  As a result, they were widely shared and became the research tool of choice for a generation of doctors and biologists studying cancer or genetics or the effects of radiation or anything else that required a living human cell to tinker with in the lab.  Her cells became a scientific (and hence monetary) goldmine. Unfortunately, nobody told Henrietta, her husband, or her 5 surviving children about what science had done with her insides.  The fact that all of those people were black and poor is definitely not incidental to the story.

There's no sense telling the story in any more detail than that.  Skloot does a great job of covering its many facets in less time than it takes to fly to Texas and back.  Perhaps somewhere over Wichita you will learn some intriguing scientific history that you wish could be explored more thoroughly.  By the time you get to Tulsa you'll have forgotten all about that though, because the star of the story is not really science, but history.  Ultimately it's a book that explores how we deal with the long shadow of the past in our country, our science, and our personal lives.  How do we live this past in our present?  How do we actually sort through it, without minimizing it and without becoming a prisoner of it?  How can the past be empowering?  The fact that the book poses this question on so many levels makes it way more valuable than whatever I was expecting.

Lucid Dreaming

I must have mentioned to my friend that lately I'm remembering a lot more of my dreams, because she recently gave me a copy of Charlie Morley's Lucid Dreaming: A Beginner's Guide to Becoming Conscious in Your Dreams.  Appropriately enough (since I think this increase in dream frequency or intensity or maybe just recall is related to my meditation practice) Morley turns out to be a practitioner of  Tibetan dream yoga.  The whole subtext of this pop introduction to lucid dreaming is his buddhist commitment to awakening, and the book often reads like a trailer for his, I guess less popular, Dreams of Awakening, where he apparently goes more deeply into lucid dreaming as a spiritual practice.  The current book is more non-denominational generalized new age spirituality type of stuff.  It's also written in the blandly approachable, appeal-to-the-least-common denominator, style of that genre.  So it assumes any discussion must begin and end with a pithy and inspiring first person anecdote, that your attention wilts after exposure to anything more than a three sentence paragraph, and that you will retain nothing that is not encapsulated in bullet-pointed-checklist-numbered-inset-box form.  

Which is to say that it's more or less a piece of junk as a book.  Or more generously, that it is an appetite whetter for his first book or his classes on the topic.

However, I did get something useful out of it.  First, there's information about how to try to become lucid in your dreams.  It's a bit vague and general, but it's a starting point.  I can summarize it fairly quickly in the aforementioned style:

1. Start by just trying to remember your dreams.  Write them down. This is especially easy with the ones that happen just before you wake up because, well, you're waking up for the day, but also because the last sleep cycle of the night is apparently dominated by the REM sleep that produces our dreams.
2. Try to naturally become lucid in your dreams by getting in the habit of asking "Am I dreaming?" anytime something weird happens in life.  Hopefully, one of those times you really will be dreaming!  You'll know it because stuff will be weird!  Like you're hand won't look the same on one side versus the other, or when you look carefully at some object for a while it will start to morph.   
3. Try to naturally become lucid in your dreams by just really really wanting to have a lucid dream.  Remind yourself that this is what you really really want before bed and when you wake up in the middle of the night.  In fact, set an alarm for when you'll probably already be dreaming and wake yourself up to remind yourself this.  
4. When none of that shit works, follow the time tested techniques of the various mystical traditions around the world that have been perfecting this for centuries. Try to actually stay conscious as you fall asleep.  Morley offers three versions of this technique.  You can meditate your way to sleep, surfing the edge of fading mindfulness.  You can feel your way to sleep as you continuously scan the sensations of your body (I was not clear how this is different than the first one).  Or you can think your way to sleep by counting the number of times you ask, "Am I dreaming?" as you drift off.

So, there you go.  If you're curious and you just want to try out whether you can induce a lucid dream, you no longer need to read the book; try those steps.  Of course, your mileage may vary.  I was already remembering my dreams more, considered steps 2 and 3 to be too vague to be useful, and skipped to the meditation version of step 4.  I'm sorry to report that I have yet to experience a lucid dream.  I did, however, ruin a perfectly good night's sleep by repeatedly waking myself up as I felt my mindfulness slip away.  It was actually an interesting, though tiring, experience.  I'd liken it to leaning back on two legs of your chair at the dinner table.  There's a wonderfully cool sense of balance just before you panic.

The Art of Learning

Josh Waitzkin's book The Art of Learning is obviously mis-titled.  It should have been called The Art of Learning ... To Win!  Because ultimately that's what Waitzkin is really into.  Of course, as you would expect given its subtitle: "An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance", it pays homage to the classic hero's journey, an epic spiritual quest for manhood.  Turns out that by winning, you can discover all kinds of deep things about yourself.  You can even discover things by losing.  So long as after that you start winning again, you maggots!

Not that Waitzkin isn't pretty good at both winning and learning.  He was the child chess prodigy star of Searching for Bobby Fischer, who apparently just cleaned up on the junior circuit before he melted down under the pressure of being ... the child chess prodigy star of ... And then he reinvented himself as a competitive martial artist and went on to nearly win the Tai Chi Push Hands world championship just a few year later.  In fact, you can even watch his finals match, the one against "The Buffalo", that he narrates at a length worthy of the screenplay for Searching for Rocky.  Truly, he is an impressive competitor.

What he's not, however, is a prize winning writer.  The book is mostly a long-winded and repetitive autobiography detailing Watizkin's Odyssean journey to being so great.  Every match, whether chess or Tai Chi, is a breathless epic.  Every new technique learned is mind blowing.  It's exhausting just listening to how exhausted he is after every manic training session in preparation for the next big match.  

But let's give the guy some credit where it's due.  He tries to avoid David Foster Wallace's Tracy Austin trap.  He tries to tell us how he learned to stay cool under pressure and become such a good competitor.   He doesn't want us to just believe that he's innately great because he was winning chess tournaments at age 6.  Unlike Tracy Austin, he really does try to explain to us what was going on in his mind in those big competitive moments.

To this end, he deploys didactic little mnemonic phrases like losing to win, and the soft zone, and making smaller circles, culminating in illusion of the mystical.  These are all fine as far as they go.  Unfortunately they mostly just dress up common sense thoughts that every sentient competitor has already had.  For example, losing to win, just means that if you can get over your emotions and review what happened to accurately assess why you lost, you can often learn more from that experience than if you had won.  Likewise, the soft zone means that it's important to be able to concentrate even when conditions are imperfect and you are in danger of getting distracted, and making smaller circles means that to be really great, you have to practice the basics till they become unconscious.  He repeats and refers back to these little phrases as pearls of wisdom throughout the book.  Consider your mind blown.

So if, like me, you're looking for a book about how to learn better or faster in general, The Art of Learning is probably not for you.  If you are looking for a book about sports psychology and learning how to be a better competitor, you can get something out of the book, but even then, it's a pretty thin gruel in my opinion.  But if you want to study the art of learning to be Josh Waitzkin, you've come to exactly the right place.

The Progress of Insight

You can read The Venerable Mahasi Sayadaw's The Progress of Insight right here online.  It's pretty short and very interesting if you are actively meditating.  It is not, however, an introductory meditation text.  For that, you should read his Practical Insight Meditation.  And if you don't meditate at all, then this is unlikely to be very interesting, since it would essentially be like reading a map of Mars.   Which maybe conversely suggests that if you're someone who gets into reading maps of Mars, you might also like meditating?

I got turned on to Sayadaw by reading Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha.  In fact, that book is mainly a much longer re-write of the stages of insight laid out in The Progress of Insight.  These books are two examples of what is apparently an ancient genre that maps the levels a meditator passes through on their path towards enlightenment.  

If that last sentence -- with its mention of "levels" of insight that implicitly ascend towards a peak called "enlightenment" -- bothers you as it did me, then you might not want to read either of these books.  Because the truth is that meditation maps can cause problems.  Even their proponents would agree to this.  Thinking in terms of levels and progress and what should happen as you meditate can lead you down a variety of dead ends.  I can relate to some of these problems because I have felt them myself.  You can start mis-shaping would should be a personal empirical exploration to fit someone else's normative experience of meditation.  You can get caught up in comparing your level to others'.  Even without this competition, you can get stuck desperately grasping at the experience that would signify your progress to the next level, which can backfire, blocking that very progress. 

And yes, I just used the word "progress" in a way nearly indistinguishable from the one I was moments ago critiquing.  Because the truth is that you will progress in meditation, just the way you can progressively improve any skill you consciously practice.  I have also seen this progress for myself.  It implies a clear comparison of levels -- I have no doubt that the level I was at when I started two years ago is "below" the level I'm at now.  With this comes a clear metric for speed as well -- I have no doubt that spending an hour a day practicing this skill improves it more "rapidly" than spending 15 minutes a day.  So, while I have a general mistrust of the word progress in connection with qualitative goals like enlightenment, I wouldn't want to deny the feeling that such a thing exists, even if I'm not at all sure where I'm progressing to.

But then, if you can see this progress for yourself as it gradually unfolds, and if knowing the hierarchy of this progress in advance may cause problems, why would anyone who has reached a point where they feel they can see the process in its totality think it helpful go back and write a complete description for those moving along the path they experienced?  

Ingram has a clear answer to this question.  He wrote his book partly because, working without a map, he himself became mired in some of the difficult stages along the path.  These are the stages he calls the "dark night of the soul" and which correspond to Chapter 6: Purification by Knowledge and Vision of the Course of Practice in Sayadaw's book.  These are, by all accounts, not fun.  Ingram, experiencing them as a fairly young guy, ended up having a lot of not fun for a fairly long time because he didn't understand that passing through these feelings can be a normal part of progressing.  So a lot of why he wrote the book was to normalize these potential feelings for others, by placing them in the context he could only discover for himself after the fact.  

Sayadaw also implicitly answers this question, though his answer is different.  Right at the outset he clarifies who his book is for.  Spoiler alert: I am not the intended audience.

It is meant for those who, by attending to these exercises, have gained progressive insight as well into the whole body-and-mind process arising at the six sense doors, and have finally come to see the Dhamma, to attain to the Dhamma, to understand the Dhamma, to penetrate the Dhamma, who have passed beyond doubt, freed themselves from uncertainty, obtained assurance, and achieved independence of others in the Master's dispensation.

There's a little footnote that clarifies this further.

The preceding sequence of terms is frequently used in the Discourses (Suttas) of the Buddha to refer to those individuals who have attained to the first supramundane stage on the road to arahantship, i.e., stream-entry (sotapatti), or the following ones. The term Dhamma refers here to Nibbana.

In other words, Sayadaw wrote the book for people who had already experienced everything in it once for themselves.  Many dangers of the map disappear in this context.  Instead, you're left wondering why anyone who already knew the terrain would need a map of it.  This too, Sayadaw clarifies, though implicitly, at the end of the book.

But although equanimity about formations has been attained, if the spiritual faculties have not yet reached full maturity, it just goes on repeating itself. Though he who has won (one of the lower) fruitions may be able to enter into it several times within one hour, yet if his spiritual faculties are immature, he cannot attain the next higher path within as much as one day, two, three, or more days. He abides merely in equanimity about formations. If, however, he then directs his mind to reach the fruition already attained, he will reach it perhaps in two or three minutes.

 

When, however, the spiritual faculties are mature, one who carries out the practice of insight for attaining to a higher path will find that immediately after equanimity about formations has reached its culmination, the higher path and fruition arise in the same way as before (i.e., as at the time of the first path and fruition), that is to say, it is preceded by the stages of adaptation and maturity. After the fruition, the stages of reviewing, etc., that follow are also the same as before.

 

Anything else concerning the method of practice for insight and the progress of knowledge right up to arahantship can be understood in precisely the same way as described. Hence there is no need to elaborate it any further.  

Arahantship, the final stop on the train, is the terminology for full enlightenment (though I gather there's some discussion of whether the Buddha himself was even more enlightened than this).  In Sayadaw's Theravadan tradition of buddhism, it would be the fourth path.  The first path, the first "supermundane stage on the road", is when you have completed the stages 1-18 one time.  To become an arahant, you have to do this three more times, but apparently each lap has the same structure as the first.  It makes perfect sense, then, for someone who knows the territory like the back of their hand to organize a map of it for someone who has only covered the ground just once, but who will need to traverse it again.

Since I have never experienced anything like the temporary cessation event of Nibbana that he describes in stage 12, I'm really not the target audience for Sayadaw's book.  I can relate reasonably well to the early stages.  Mind and Body.  Causation.  Arising.  Passing Away.  Even Dissolution, Fear, and Disgust.  These I have all experienced in varying degrees.  I can't say they've really been laid out in clear successive stages though, so I certainly couldn't tell you what level I think I'm at.  

Which begs the question of what I think of his map.  Since I'm not the target audience, it's probably not fair to judge whether the map is accurate.  In fact, since I can't even identify which stage I'm at, maybe I'm not on the map at all.  Maybe this is because the map is wrong, or just one possible map and not the map.  Or maybe it's because I haven't practiced enough to understand it.  I'll punt on judging the map and just tell you about the dangers and uses I've found for it so far.

I touched on some dangers earlier.  At first I was very resistant to this whole idea of Enlightenment as the endpoint of a series of stages.  The very first map I came across was the very different one in Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated.  While that book was actually very interesting, it also had a whiff of "Enlightenment in 10 easy steps!", free with your purchase of ginsu knives.  Having since strongly felt the progress of practicing a skill, I have softened on the idea that there can be levels.  I'm still wary of the implied endpoint though.  Maybe that could be reinterpreted as gradually rewiring the brain enough that you eventually do unconsciously whatever it is that you did consciously all those years as you sat on your cushion?  I don't know that this would qualify you as a religious guru, but it might at least define some sort of endpoint or plateau to the process.  Automatic meditation.  But mostly for me, the implied endpoint -- interpreted as constantly feeling anything like the highly altered state of minute 56 of my meditation -- feels so far away that the issue doesn't seem urgent.  

The other danger I mentioned was the tendency to grasp at the experience you've read signifies the next level.  This has a natural egotism to it.  I want to improve.  I want to feel like I'm better than I was.  So I want to have this particular experience, say, seeing a light, as proof that, yeah, I'm a meditative badass.  This can get in the way of just having the damn experience.  This is a little difficult to separate from another natural reaction, which is reflective of our fascination with novelty.  I in particular like to have new (for me) ideas.  To some extent in my meditation I'm always searching for a shiny new altered state.  This isn't to prove my level, but just because I enjoy the feeling of a new vista opening up.  Though I also feel smart in proportion to how often new vistas open up in my head, and I am very committed to feeling smart, so there's some ego to this aspect as well.  At any rate, I've noticed that my excitement on feeling some interesting new sensation can be multiplied by the possibility that this one marks a whole new level I've read about.  The two together can result in my being distracted by the feeling of excitement while the original sensation slips out the back door.  Once I've understood this danger of course, it becomes just one more feeling to be noted.  It comes and goes like every other, and isn't that dangerous.  

I've found the maps most useful when I dispense entirely with the idea of levels and progress, and think of the 'stages' as more literally features I might come across while wandering through my meditative landscape.  On your right, you can see the way your itch is shadowed by the intention to make the movement that scratches it.  To your left, if you squint, you can make out how there's a tiny feeling of fear as some new altered perception begins to form.  Sometimes these drugs are a bit too good.  If you go far enough down this valley, there's a spot where you can catch new experiences just as they hatch, at the singular inflection point where an inhale begins.  And if you go even further, you can follow it to where the river empties into the ocean and each sensation disappears.  There are obviously relationships amongst these various features of the landscape -- eg. it seems obvious to notice that sensations arise before you notice that they pass away -- but it seems secondary to arrange them in some overall order.  They are just things to look out for that you might miss on first glance.

For the moment, this is even how I would interpret stages that I have yet to experience.  I have been noticing a general lightening of my visual field as a meditation progresses, as if someone were turning up the dimmer switch.  At first, I thought this way simply the timing of the dawn as I faced out my window.  But the dawn changes time every day, often barely happens in Seattle at this time of year, and anyhow, I turned around to face inside -- this light is not the dawn.  And the weird purple spot that seems lately to appear just at the end of each meditation is also not from staring at the sun.  Without the maps getting me thinking about lights, I might have been slower to notice these, and I think there's little chance I'm inventing them just based on what I read.  So I count noticing these (relatively) quickly as a useful byproduct of my reading.

Likewise, is my recent experience of a sort of split in my consciousness between a bright, stable, empty expanse of light to my left and an ongoing stream on sensations to my right some pre-taste of cessation?  I've had some experience of "patchwork space" before, but not where there is qualitatively different stuff going on in each space.  I have no idea whether any of these experiences are the sign of anything.  But they are interesting in themselves, and I might have missed them if I hadn't already been primed to think about how odd it was that nothing was occurring in half my perceptual universe.

His consciousness, while carrying on the practice of bringing to mind (i.e. noticing), passes beyond the continuous occurrence of phenomena and alights upon non-occurrence. 

A Path With Heart

A Path With Heart: A guide through the perils and promises of spiritual life by Jack Kornfield.

I picked this up because Daniel Ingram made positive mention of it in his interesting Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha.  I'm on a kick to read a wide variety of buddhist and meditation literature recently, and since Kornfield is one of the pillars of Western Buddhism and co-founders of IMS, I figured I should give this one a shot.

The right adjective to describe this book is undoubtedly "wise".  For some reason that has become a bit of a strange term in our culture.  Smart. Efficient. Creative. Powerful. Maybe even Mindful, these days.  These are terms we seem more comfortable with.  But Wisdom?  The depth of experience and nuanced integration of many perspectives for which there is no substitute and no shortcut?  Dude, come on, I've got a 10am here.  Wisdom sounds to us like some cockamamie Greek idea.  Something from the vapid hippy past of the self-help genre, from before it was colonized by the 7 most highly effective colored parachutes you need to find your cheese.

Kornfield is unapologetically wise though, which does make this book read like a self-help manual.  It's filled with poems and aphorisms and stories drawn from his own life and the lives of other spiritual voyagers from many traditions (noumenauts?).  It aims to inspire you to start down a spiritual path, or to continue ever-deeper down one you've already embarked on.  Generally, I quite enjoyed all these inspirational aspects, though they do serve to make the book a bit long and sometimes repetitive.  I guess it just feels means to edit wisdom with ruthless red ink.

This means that the book is not really a good introductory guide to meditation per se.  He's not really focused on teaching you to meditate.  He does provide a number of different meditations that deal with loving-kindness, forgiveness, the separate compartments we create in our lives, etc ...  But these are really just meant to be food for thought to get us to reflect more deeply on these topics.  He basically presumes either that you already meditate or that his words will inspire you to go to a class and get some basic instruction.

Kornfield is really more focused on why we meditate than how.  What is it that we're looking to get out of mindfulness?  How do we integrate what we learn by sitting with our eyes closed into our daily lives?  How can we make sure that our technical development as meditators leads us down a path with heart, one that connects us to the world with a sense of sacredness.  All of his 'spiritual perils' crop up when our path (inevitably, in his view, but hopefully temporarily) loses this heartfelt orientation.  In fact, one of the nicest aspects of the book is the glimpse we get of the bumps along his own meditative path.  Jack Kornfield has lost his way many times on the path towards wisdom.  He speaks convincingly of the many cycles of deepening self-examination that constitute his vision of the spiritual life.  At its core, the book can be judged right from its cover; it is dedicated to admiring that great flower of the self-help genre -- walking the path is the destination

A New Axiomatic

Thus, in the morning, before the books piled high on my table, to the god of reading, I say my prayer of the devouring reader: ‘Give us this day our daily hunger . . .’ 

― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie