A Guide to the Good Life

Allow no one to convince you that I'm not up on the latest social media trends.  Every month I read a new post.  Last month, someone on my exercise network asked people about their favorite books, and William Irvine's book on "the ancient art of stoic joy" came up.  Now, long ago, I read some Epictetus; I paged through some Marcus Aurelius.  And while these gave me some idea of what Stoicism is all about, I figured it was an occasion to revisit the topic.  Irvine's book does a reasonable and accessible job of fleshing out the history of stoicism and massaging what is a rather diffuse school of philosophy into more doctrinaire, and thus more readily applicable, form.  His main goal in the book is to convince you that you should join him in practicing Stoicism.  If you're curious about the philosophy, and this is the sort of practical overview you're looking for, then I think the book can be very useful.  Unfortunately, while very clear, both the writing and thinking peak at drab, so it's hard to urgently recommend the book to a wider audience.

Irvine begins by trying to convince us that we should all adopt a "philosophy of life".  By this he means that we should examine our values and make sure that our goals and actions are commensurate with them.  That way we won't sit bolt upright on our deathbed and lament the fact that we didn't watch The Big Lebowski more often.  I'm tempted to call this advice common sense even though it's uncommon to find anyone -- and especially any professor of philosophy-- following it.  I mean, how would one purport to live well without pondering the meaning of "well"?  In a way, this question is perhaps Irvine's most valuable insight.  Our Western culture seems to have completely lost sight of the ancient root of philosophy as a way of life.  So it's refreshing to see someone remind us that the discipline began as an ethical or spiritual practice, and not merely the logical analysis of beliefs or language that it has devolved into.

Of course, the Stoics didn't merely ponder the question of what makes for a good life, they answered it.  For a Stoic, the goal is to live a "tranquil" life.  This is how Irvine translates ἀπάθεια, which he claims is the highest good of stoic philosophy.  Irvine doesn't go into the history of this word, though he is careful to distinguish it from the modern connotation of "apathy".  The goal of Stoicism is not to do or feel nothing at all, but to avoid being moved by "passions".  Instead, the Stoics would like to train themselves to follow the dictates of reason, because they ultimately see this as the essence or nature of humans.  Irvine is at pains to convince us that following our reason we can not only escape our negative passions but have a full, positive, active, and even joyous life.

There's a lot to recommend Stoicism and Irvine succinctly summarizes most of it's practices in his section of Stoic psychological techniques.  These include praiseworthy ways of approaching life such as: 

• practicing negative visualization so as to better appreciate what you already have by considering the possibility of losing it
• pondering which things you can control and which things you cannot in order to avoid wasting time worrying about the latter
• accepting that, since the past is fixed and the future unknown, your life should be focused in the present moment
• breaking your addiction to pleasure/pain avoidance by sometimes voluntarily remaining in discomfort
• carefully watching how you react to various situations in life and considering how you would like to react and why you often don't react as you would prefer.

These all seem like very valuable thoughts to me.  In fact, I'd say that I practice thinking these things many times a day, though certainly not continuously.  These general habits of thinking, together with specific advice the Stoics gave about dealing with envy, anger, insults, etc ... together constitute the stoic "philosophy of life".  Irvine claims that in his personal experience, practicing these thoughts has helped him to lead a lot more tranquil life, more focused on the things he believes are important and less disturbed by the things he has decided are unimportant.

I too find Stoicism appealing in many ways.  In fact, I don't think there's a single thought in the book I'd disagree with.  But this is actually weaker praise than it sounds.  The problem with Stoic thought is that it is just that -- at least as Irvine describes it, almost the entire practice of Stoicism entails entertaining certain prescribed thoughts.  This is great as far as it goes.  I would certainly agree that our thoughts have a major impact on our lives and vice-versa, creating the possibility of a feedback loop.  And we can systematically alter that impact through becoming more aware of what we're already thinking, and using that mindfulness to weed out certain thoughts and cultivate others.  As far as I can tell, this is pretty much what cognitive based therapy is all about, and while I haven't tried that modality myself, I know people who have found it very useful.  However, we should notice that the only non-cognitive practice Irvine describes is under-dressing for the weather so that we get used to handling the discomfort of feeling cold. 

But I know from my own experience that practice can go much deeper than merely manipulating thoughts.  Irvine mentions on several occasions that Stoicism has a lot of similarities to Buddhism.  He even confesses that before he became a practicing Stoic, back in his shopping-for-a-philosophy-of-life days, he considered devoting himself to Zen.  But he seems to have gotten the impression that Zen is all about sitting around not-thinking, emptying the mind in the sense of stopping thought.  This would understandably be a threatening practice for a philosophy professor.  Once you start actually practicing Buddhism, however, you quickly learn that it has very little to do with thoughts at all.  You're certainly not encouraged to stop thinking. For the most part you're encouraged to simply let thoughts come and go.  And while you might consider the cultivation of the brahmaviharas -- as antidotes for thoughts of hatred, anger, envy, and anxiety -- a type of cognitive based therapy, I've found that these practices become potent precisely when they transcend thinking and become somatic, emotional, and energetic practices.  In short, Buddhism isn't asking you to practice thinking a certain way, but to practice actually being a certain way.  The practice is mainly concrete and embodied, not abstract and 'rational', emotional and perceptual, not cognitive.  Or rather, its positive cognitive aspects are effects, byproducts, and not causes or the main goal of practice.  Changing the contents of your thoughts can change you a lot.  But changing your moment to moment embodied experience of life can completely transform what it's like to be a thinker. 

This comparison between Stoicism and Buddhism brings up the fascinating question of their historical relation.  Irvine talks a bit about Stoicism's Greek beginnings, and even gives us an overview its relation to its philosophical contemporaries Pyrrhonism and Epicureanism.  But he doesn't dive very deep on the evolutionary thread you can see running through these schools.  Each of them cultivated what you might call "tranquility", or what the Buddhists would refer to as equanimity, but it turns out that the original words involved here are not the same.  

As we saw, the Stoics aimed for ἀπάθεια, a-pathy, a-pathos or a-passion.  In his modern retelling, Irvine considers this state of mind as the goal in itself and even tells us that if we don't value tranquility highly, we probably shouldn't become Stoics.  Historically though, the highest goal of Stoicism was living a virtuous life in accords with our inherent human nature, which the Stoics took to be our Reason.  So a-pathy was in fact a nice byproduct but not itself the main goal.  

Irvine actually doesn't share this view that Reason is the essence of human nature.  Instead he adopts the viewpoint of evolutionary psychology and suggests that human nature is all about a drive for biological reproduction which gives no fucks for our individual happiness and is by definition 'irrational' (since mechanical).  However, somehow evolution accidentally invented Reason, and now we can turn this remarkable faculty to our individual advantage by going against our evolutionary nature.  Irvine, then, recommends the same Stoic practices even though his view of 'human nature' is diametrically opposed to the Greek and Roman Stoics.  I think he sees this as a relatively small modification, but in fact it introduces a lose thread that threatens to unravel the whole logic that distinguishes Stoicism from others philosophies of life.  This is because it robs a-pathy itself of any reason.  For Irvine, it becomes a state that we value in itself, the valuation of which can thus not be rational or essential or natural.  Indeed, insofar as we adopt evolutionary psychology as our viewpoint, Reason is 'completely 'unnatural' (if it even exists, a possibility that Irvine does not contemplate).  This puts Reason in the uncomfortable position of being a sort of nature-against-nature, a twist which quickly denatures the whole concept of the natural.  Following Nietzsche, I tend to believe that Essence and Reason and Nature are all categories invented after the fact to put a stamp of legitimacy on what you already wanted to believe for other reasons.  And once we admit that we like tranquility because it feels good in itself and because ... well ... that's like ... our opinion man ... then we've actually departed from Stoicism as a philosophy and become Epicureans!

Because the Epicureans believed that pleasure was the highest and best good.  Of course, Epicurus was no rock-and-roll drummer; he had a pretty high minded idea of what was truly pleasurable.  Chief among these things was achieving a state of "tranquility" that he called ἀταραξία -- a-taraxia, un-perturbedness, un-troubledness.  I don't know enough about Epicureanism to say  whether a-pathia is a subset of a-taraxia (as wikipedia suggests) -- whether this un-troubledness was considered synonymous with true pleasure or whether it was more a tool in service of reaching other pleasures.  There's clearly some subtle questions about higher and lower, shorter and longer term pleasures that would need to be addressed here.  Nevertheless, it seems to me that we're moving in an interesting direction, and one that Irvine already instinctively moved in without quite seeing it.  All of these schools of philosophy pondered the fundamental question of how to live a good life.  I observed earlier that the Stoics definitively answered the question -- live in accordance with reason, which is the opposite of passion.  It's a plausible answer, but it's surely not the only one, nor even close to the most obvious one.  Isn't it simpler and more parsimonious to punt on the question of the content of the highest value, and instead simply observe that whatever it is will feel pretty good when we get it?  With even just a little modern skepticism about whether there can be a single correct contentful answer about how to live well, we naturally tumble back towards the Epicurean position, and this is what happens to Irvine without his realizing.  He thinks he's a Stoic, but once he removes the bedrock Stoic assumption that we are inherently reasonable, all he's really saying is that, for him, it feels liberating to adopt a 'rational' perspective.  He says as much without seeing that in a broader sense this actually converts him into a Epicurean.

I say that we "tumble back" towards Epicureanism because it's clear that this is less of an answer to the question of how to live a good life than the Stoics provide.  In fact, one might even claim with some legitimacy that Epicurus doesn't answer the question but dodges it.  The way to live a good life is to feel good about life?  Isn't that a tautology?  Perhaps we should look at this non-response as a feature rather than a bug though.  In fact, maybe the important thing is not answering the question, but posing it.  My idea that there is an "evolutionary thread" reaching back from Stoicism through Epicureanism towards Pyrrhonism and its common root with Buddhism is based on this idea.  The Epicureans don't firmly answer the question of what constitutes a good life, but while jettisoning the assumption that it must follow the dictates of Reason, they preserve the assumption that it will feel good, something they assume we all understand and inherently value.  

By contrast, Pyrrhonism calls even this assumption into question.  We can think of it as even less of an answer to the original question.  Pyrrho thought we should be completely skeptical and withhold judgement entirely.  By distrusting even our senses, he undermines our belief that we know what feels good to us.  The idea is that this radical suspension of our own first person judgement is going to be a 'better' way to live because it will leave us un-troubled (ἀταραξία) even by trying to decide whether this particular experience right now is good or bad.  Instead of answering the question of what is a good life, Pyrrho dives headfirst into an endless asking of the question, holding fast only to the lack of answer.  The good life is one un-troubled even by whether or not life feels good, un-troubled even by needing to know what life feels like at all.  Clearly, this position contravenes common sense because it stops us in our tracks.  It seems like our only response to this line of thought would be to just sit there and experience ... what it's like to experience stuff as good or bad, while withholding judgement on whether it is 'really' good or bad.  Nobody seems to know what the actual practice of Pyrrhonism was like, but from this description it seems safe to conclude that it could not have been exclusively cognitive.

It's at exactly this point that the connection to Buddhism becomes clear.  Now, I don't know enough about either Pyrrhonism or early Buddhism to have much opinion about debates regarding their interaction.  So I can't even tell whether it makes me a Pyrrhonist or a Buddhist to withhold judgement!  But I was very intrigued by Stephen Batchelor's interesting comments on the topic.  While he considers these distinct philosophies that perhaps had some long-distance interaction, he nevertheless points out their similarities in a passage I found particularly compelling.

What is immediately apparent on reading the Four Eights is that they are strikingly devoid of any classical Buddhist doctrines such as the Four Noble Truths, the links of dependent origination, the jhānas, nirvana etc. And let alone as part of a triad of 'characteristics', the individual terms anicca, dukkha and anattā do not occur even once. Instead, we have a series of verses that present a profoundly Pyrrhonian view of life and the world.  Here are some examples:

Wrong-minded people do voice opinions
as do truth-minded people too.
When an opinion is stated, the sage is not drawn in— 

there's nothing arid about the sage.
Nowhere does a lucid one
hold contrived views about is or is not.
how could he succumb to them,
having let go of illusions and conceit? he's uninvolved.

he does not take up or discard any view— he has shaken them all off, right here. 

Dropping one, you clutch the next— 

urged ahead by self concern
you reject and adopt opinions
as a monkey lets go of a branch and seizes another.
The priest without borders
doesn't seize on what he's known or beheld.
Not passionate, not dispassionate,
he doesn't posit anything as 'ultimate'.
he lets go of one position without taking another—
he's not defined by what he knows.
Nor does he join a dissenting faction—
he assumes no view at all.
he's not lured into the blind alleys
of is and is not, this world and the next—
for he lacks those commitments
that make people ponder and seize hold of teachings. (Sutta-Nipāta. 780, 786, 787, 791, 795, 800, 801)

The sage or priest mentioned in these verses could easily describe Pyrrho himself, who according to Diogenes Laertius,
seems to have practiced philosophy in a most noble way, introducing that form of it which consists in non-cognition and suspension of judgement.... 

For he would maintain that nothing is honorable or base, or just or unjust, and that likewise in all cases nothing exists in truth; and that convention and habit are the basis for everything that men do; for each thing is no more this than this...

The Mysticism of Sound and Music

I had high hopes for Hazrat Inayat Khan's "modern classic".  And it certainly had many inspiring ideas as well as interesting insights and beautiful passages.  But ultimately this book is neither one I will come back to nor especially recommend.  I think this disappointment mainly stems from the fact that I was looking for a book about music that happened to be written by a mystic, whereas Khan is a mystic who happens to write about music.  

As a musician and musicologist himself, music is of course central to Inayat Khan's Sufi mysticism.  This is, however, really only because music stands as the most obvious experience we have of the vibrations which are, for Inanyat Khan, the ultimate nature of the universe.  Rhythm and tone are thus simply the most abstract form of a cycle, a succession of opposites, which in the end always symbolizes the synthesis of these opposites into a harmonious unity.  Music expresses the divine harmony of the universe.  It's one of the great wonders of the world that the formless and abstract world of music holds such intense emotional power for us.  Here is a 'cosmic vibration' that we can feel directly, both in its intellectual and sensual beauty.  In fact, given the Islamic penchant for a purely geometric art, I think one would naturally expect a similar use of music.  After all, it's hard to think of a better or more moving metaphor for the non-idolatrous worship of the 'face' of God.  Indeed, this seems to be precisely the Sufi position on the matter, even though apparently this makes them quite the minority in the Islamic world. 

Now, I would hardly object either to mysticism or to the use of music as an analogy in a mystical context.  Unfortunately, lifting music up to this metaphysical plane can tend to rob it of its specificity.  This is one of the problems that besets any articulation of mysticism.  Since all things and all practices converge on the ineffable divine, the distinctions between them tend to dissolve and the starting points to become relatively meaningless.  This can be either feature or bug, depending on your perspective.  On the one hand, the divine is always only one step away.  On the other hand, every step we take becomes in some sense the same.  From the latter perspective, mystical thinking can become a bit repetitive, and that is certainly one of the things that made this book less enjoyable.  Part of this repetitiveness stems from the fact that it was not written as a book but is merely a collection of unrelated public lectures for general audiences that Inayat Khan gave in the mid 1920's.  But part of it is inherent to the nature of his mystical beliefs, which center on the omnipresent, unified, and unique nature of God.  Since all doors necessarily open to a single divinity, the particular resonance of music with that divine can fade into the background. 

The Ware Tetralogy

A while back, Rudy Rucker's massive four novel Ware series migrated out of the cat bookstore and onto my shelf, likely because I saw it had won the Philip K. Dick award.  Remind me that not all awards are created equal.  It's not that the first two novels in the series (Software and Wetware) aren't fairly entertaining sci-fi on the Philip K. Dick cyberpunk model -- but award winning?  They just didn't seem to me to have that much going for them either in the domain of unexpected ideas or in terms of writing craft.  I mean, our brains are just software, man!  Maybe kinda prescient in 1982?  But not an idea that's explored here from a philosophical angle.  And while the very PKD concept of describing futuristic drug highs is interesting in concept, it turns out that describing any drug high is actually kinda boring.  Just ask your stoner friends to tell you about their last epic trip.  Let me guess, it was crazy!  So crazy they spent the whole time giggling on the couch.  Getting high might be fun, but reading about it isn't.  More interesting would be the action of the second novel, where the 'bopper' robots are killed off by a strain of "chipmold" that decimates all silicon before creating a newly intelligent symbiotic fusion with a type of plastic called 'moldies'.  Wetware is surely the high point of the collection, and has the most interesting characters and twists and turns.  

After that, things go downhill in pretty much every way.  I have the impression that after his earlier success, Rucker decided he was 'a writer', and so when he returns ten years later to continue the saga, we find a less interesting story saddled with much more florid prose and a bunch of irrelevant gossip that I suppose one would file under 'character development'.  Rucker should have stuck with his hardboiled pulp fiction style all the way.  Judging from the first two books, the results might still have been of uneven quality, but at least this would have fit with the spirit of the award. 

Already Free

I don't remember how I heard about Bruce Tift, but I've long been interested in the intersection contained in his book's subtitle, "Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation".  Tift is both a practicing individual and couples therapist, as well as a long time student of Chögyam Trungpa's Vajrayna Buddhism, so I imagined he would be drawing parallels between the two approaches.  Since we've already seen a couple of books that discuss psychotherapy almost as if it were a spiritual path in its own right, one that the authors seem to take as almost perfectly parallel to Buddhism, I was a bit surprised when Tift began his discussion by suggesting that perhaps the two cannot be unified.  

While it sounds provocative at first, Tift hardly thinks that Buddhism and psychotherapy are incompatible.  What he wants to point out is that they have distinctly different aims.  Very roughly speaking, psychotherapy aims to give you a better, more adult, self, while Buddhism aims to let go of the self entirely.  Tift thinks that both the "developmental view" of psychotherapy and the "fruitional view" of Buddhism are valuable and can be effectively pursued in sequence or in alternation, but he wants to first emphasize how these different paths with different aims.  Rather than merging the two, his conception of their relationship actually reminded me more of Tucker's mantra "process when you can, content when you have to".  If we are able to step back and see the process by which our sense of self and its problems arise and pass away, then these phenomena suddenly become much less sticky and problematic just through the opening of this space of Awareness.  However, we are not always able to do this, and in these cases, we need to work directly with the problematic content to try and uncover exactly where the problem lies.  In the book, Tift mostly treats the relationship between the two approaches as a sequence of development.  He outlines a map that moves from a pre-personal phase through personal and interpersonal phases before culminating in the nonpersonal.  But it would probably be a mistake to interpret the map as exclusively linear, and if we recognize that we are all still in the pre-personal phase with some things some of the time, the whole schema may not different substantially from process when you can, content when you have to.

Naturally, the book contains much more than this simple thesis about the relationship between Buddhism and psychotherapy.  In truth, it's more of a dharma book that you value for its many little nuggets of insight than a traditional non-fiction book that you value for its information.  Which perhaps somewhat excuses the fact that it felt a bit repetitive and could have easily been half as long.  Some of the things that will most stick with me are simple but powerful ideas that Tift repeated many times -- don't be aggressive towards your experience, don't try to make it change, don't look for the source of problems outside yourself but try to uncover an internal fear or need that converts an experience into a problem.  All these fit well with my current practice of expanding the scope of receptive awareness to include and even love more and more unwanted and disturbing (in the sense of disequilibrating) content.  

The other bit of the book I found particularly useful were the two chapters devoted to Tift's reflections on how our intimate relationships can be powerful vehicles for waking up.  For a couples therapist, he presents a surprising view of relationships as fundamentally disturbing.  These are encounters where we find our buttons pushed hard and repeatedly, which, if we let go of the idea that the aim of intimacy is a harmonious calm, makes it the perfect place to apply our spiritual practices.  In fact, Tift almost treats being part of a couple as a form of exposure therapy -- through it we widen our tolerance for feeling anxious, misunderstood, suffocated, and alone (as well as sometimes delighted and comforted).  This seems like a powerful reorientation to what's 'problematic' in our lives.  Take my wife ... please.  If she doesn't kill me, she'll make me stronger!  Just kidding honey.

The Subtle Body

Let me keep this short.  Cyndi Dale's Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy is gobbledygook.  

I've been working with 'energy' in my meditation practice for a while now.  I can't tell you what energy is, but I can tell you that it is as real as any other phenomenon -- it has a repeatable structure independent of my whims that has a reciprocal impact on other structures I habitually take to be real like my thoughts and body.  To affect and be affected is pretty much the definition of reality as far as I'm concerned. So I don't think the book is bafflegab (op. cit.) because I think energy is bunk.  I picked it up in hopes of, well, better understanding my energetic anatomy. 

Instead, I got a rambling incoherent explanation of what energy is, filled with dubious metaphysical assumptions, junk science, and confused appeals to renegade 'authorities' (a contradiction in terms if ever there was one).  The most useful part of the book is the chapter entitled "Energy Practices", which lists out every different kind of 'new age' healing modality the author has ever heard of and provides a brief comment about each modality.  While I've only ever tried acupuncture, I'm quite sure that many of the other modalities listed here are very effective.  However, you certainly wouldn't be able to figure out which one is likely to be effective for you from this poorly organized and summary information.  This one is going straight into the cat bookstore pile. 

Underworld

I believe it was a recent NYT article that insisted Underworld was Don DeLillo's masterpiece.  Since I vaguely remembered enjoying White Noise, I thought I would give it a try.  Unfortunately, at 800 pages it felt to me too sprawling and overlong to really fall in love with.  However, there are lots of things to like about the novel.  The writing alone kept me from ever putting it down.  Mid-career DeLillo seems to be completely in command of his craft; at some points the writing is so dense with overlapping voices and textures that it feels almost woven.  The plot too has so many threads and characters that intersect in various ways that, when you don't feel smothered by attempting to reassemble the plan of all this complexity, you can always let yourself drift from one splendidly drawn detail to the next.  There are even certain moments of sublime beauty that will stick with me -- the painting on the B-52s, the climax with George the waiter.  But in many ways I thought the book was a bit ... indulgent, a bit nostalgic and autobiographical in a way reminiscent of Ada.  After a while it becomes like eating too much candy at once.  Or like idly reflecting on the unity, or lack thereof, in our our own lives.  Certainly, there are worse things that indulging the nostalgic daydreams of an aging great writer.  But, then again, perhaps there are better things. 

A Canticle For Leibowitz

Walter M. Miller's retro sci-fi apocalypse arrived in the mail as a birthday gift apparently designed to remind me of my mortality (thanks EA!).  While I don't want to spoil it by giving too much away, I think it's fine to say that it tells the story of how all things pass away from a deeply Catholic perspective -- roughly speaking, the endless cyclic instability of the world is laid at the doorstep of original sin.  That said, one hardly needs to be a Catholic to read or enjoy the book (though some knowledge of Latin would have helped).  It's a well told story with a number of surprising twists that, despite its clear message, does not browbeat the reader like a pedantic allegory.  In fact, in the end, there is even a profoundly weird and rather subversive ray of hope for 'humanity'.  Just don't pick it up with the expectation of feeling comforted about turning 50.

Heartwood of the Bodhi Tree

Ajahn Buddhadasa was a pretty prolific writer, so if you hang around dharma circles long enough, you almost can't avoid hearing about his books.  This one came particularly recommended because it dealt with the always slippery concept of emptiness, or as the translator perfers, voidness.  In fact, though, Buddhadasa has not written a book on suññatā in order to treat some sort of special topic -- in his view emptiness is the very heart of the Buddha's teaching, and the only practice that really matters.  At first, coming from a Theravadan, this sounds surprising.  But as I've gradually learned more about the Thai Forest tradition, I've realized that the common denominator for this school is an emphasis on very open approach to the concept of 'direct experience'.  Unlike the much more systematic Burmese approach which gave us the now popular notion of 'mindfulness', the Thai Forest teachers I've encountered so far seem to be much less obsessed with maps of progress, and much less prescriptive of what you should find when you look at experience.  

Indeed, Buddhadasa's whole book is devoted to what you will not find in experience -- a solid and separate essential self.  For him, emptiness always means emptiness of self, though he makes clear that everything (including objects we don't normally think of as having selves) is empty of self.  The book then gradually unfolds level after level of how we can let go of the craving for "I" and "mine", the craving for self, that causes so much of our suffering.  It's really a wonderful simplification of the Buddha's method, and Buddhadasa's writing has a sort of renegade 'cutting though' edge to it that befits a guy who headed off into the forest to escape the bullshit of monastic politics.  So it's a straightforward book that you can hand to a beginner as a guide to making sense of all this emptiness nonsense.  But at the same time, the topic is so deep that I'll probably end up coming back to this one again for further inspiration.

The Lord of the Rings

I hadn't read Tolkien's epic adventure since I was 14, and as a result kind of thought of it as a kids book.  So I was a bit surprised when Ursula Le Guin waxed poetic about the quality of the writing.  And it turns out that while the Hobbit perhaps falls slightly on the young adult side, the remainder of the trilogy is not children's fare at all -- I simply happened to read it when I was a child.  Of course it's a fantasy action adventure novel with wizards and magical swords and whatnot.   But the writing is superb and sophisticated.  Tolkien is quite simply a master storyteller.  Le Guin remarked particularly on the rhythm of his prose at the level of the sentence and passage.  And there is something very pleasing about the lilt of the language that almost cries out to be read aloud.  But I was more struck by how well he manages the pacing and rhythm of the story overall.  These days, we expect that anything one might call a page-turner is apt to be just one long car chase scene.  Indeed, the films condense the novels in precisely this way.  Tolkien, however, really lets the plot breathe.  There are plenty of action-adventure scenes, but they are interspersed with long periods where the reader gets to rest and reflect alongside the characters.  The tension builds and releases, ebbs and flows on a variety of scales.  Even within the build-up to a dramatic battle, there are brief interludes of respite that heighten the contrast of the blow when it is finally struck.  The result is something that holds our attention in a much deeper way than just remaining at the edge of our seat. 

Losing Ourselves

 Knowing my interest in all things philosophical and Buddhist, my esteemed colleague and fellow former Target Ranger JW recently suggested that I might appreciate Sam Harris' interview of Jay Garfield.  In fact, I enjoyed the interview so much that I've now read the book that they discussed, and listened to a number of other Sam Harris podcasts (or at least the parts he makes available for free).  Garfield, a professor of philosophy and Buddhist studies at Harvard has written a lovely and accessible explanation of what the idea of non-self means, as well as what's at stake in the debate about whether we have a self.  About half the book is devoted to philosophical arguments against the existence of a self, and the other half to elaborating what Garfield thinks we gain in affirming that we are persons, not selves.  While this question of identity is the deepest philosophical water I know of, Garfield does an admirable job of presenting everything in terms that anyone can understand and appreciate.  In terms of writing, there's really only one slightly dense chapter when Garfield confronts various advocates for a "minimal self"; the rest of the book is a breeze to read.  So let's hope his little book brings the idea of non-self to a much bigger audience. 

Before we discuss the details, I want to mention some of the background that makes Garfield's approach uniquely valuable.  First, while we generally think of anatta as a Buddhist idea, aimed specifically at the Hindu concept of atman, Garfield is not himself a Buddhist.  Or at least, while I don't know how (or if) he self-identifies spiritually, he does not write from the perspective of a practicing Buddhist, and the podcast revealed that he is not even a meditator.  This is a book of philosophy that argues, like all good philosophy, that we should change the way we think about ourselves.  Because it's not a practical guide to seeing non-self, written from the perspective that, should you look long enough, this is what you will necessarily see or at least should see, it's much more useful in letting someone with a critical mindset approach this concept on their own.  The closest thing to this that I've found within Buddhism would be the simplicity of Tejaniya's teaching -- just try to be aware, and find out whatever you find there.  While just thinking that you are not a self may not change your experience as quickly or as deeply as seeing it 'firsthand', so to speak, this approach has the potential to reach a much broader audience (though maybe these days there are more meditators than students of philosophy).  Second, Garfield's definition of what counts as philosophy is refreshingly broad.  He's as happy to cite Chandrakirti as Hume.  Nagarjuna and Heidegger comfortably inhabit the same paragraph.  He clearly doesn't subscribe to our sad, modern, Western assumption that we should, in the name of 'science' and 'progress', ignore most of the philosophy done in most of the world throughout most of time.  Non-Western philosophy is about as enlightening a term as non-linear science and non-elephant zoology.  While for years I was certainly guilty of tacitly making this assumption, I have several shelves to prove that I've worked on rectifying the problem over the past 5 years.

Garfield centers the book on the distinction between a self and a person.  A self is the imaginary inner substance or individual soul that we often identify with.  It's the homunculus-like inner witness who watches the projection screen of the Cartesian Theater.  It's the thing that supposedly stands behind and possesses our mind and body and experience, while remaining separate from any of these.  We often pack all of our subjectivity, interiority, and identity into this fixed dimensionless point outside of time and space, separated from everything but itself.  By contrast, a person is a real entity constituted through interaction with the world.  Though Garfield doesn't put it quite like this, a person arises in the manner of a vortex -- it doesn't preexist its instantiation in some realm of Platonic forms, but is constructed and changeable.  While it doesn't possess the (putative) reality of a metaphysical substance, a person still has the ability to affect and be affected by the world because it is embodied in an organism, embedded in a world, and enacted in a society.  In fact, affection (otherwise known as power) is the only definition of reality that makes sense.

From the outset of the book Garfield draws the distinction between persons and selves, explains how no matter what terms we use this is not a merely linguistic distinction, and demonstrates how we often take ourselves to be selves instead of people.  Then he  spends most of the first half of the book critiquing the many philosophical arguments explaining why we must have a self.  It's a terrific survey of a perennial philosophical issue.  I found his arguments against the self to be cogent and convincing, but then again he's preaching to the choir in my case; it has been a long time since I (intellectually) believed that anything had an essence.  His takeaway image is that belief in the self is a cognitive illusion just like to the Müller-Lyer illusion -- even when we know it is illusory, we can't help seeing it this way.  

While this analogy provides a memorable shorthand, I don't think the word "illusion" is appropriate here, given its implication of a contrast between appearance and reality.  It may sound like splitting hairs, but I'd prefer to think of the self as an effect, like a 'special effect' in the movies, or an 'optical effect' like a rainbow.  These effects are as real and objective as anything can be, it's just that following the rainbow does not take you to a pot of gold.  As Nietzsche explained, the word "illusion" should simply be banned from metaphysical discussion.  Nothing is an illusion.  Or everything is.  But the middle position is an incoherent conflation of what we were hoping to get from the truth with 'the truth itself'.  Everything, including the claim I am making right now, has to be evaluated based on whether it is useful, or perhaps more accurately said, based on which one, which type of life, it is useful for.  Naturally, this is also how we should judge the question of whether we 'really' have a self or not.  While I think that it's fine to argue against the existence of the self on rational, logical, and empirical grounds, the idea that we're ever going to 'prove' something one way or the other here strikes me as faintly comic.  

So while I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of the book, I think it's actually the second half -- where Garfield begins to discuss what kind of world we create when we think we have a self, and what new kind we might create if we discarded this notion -- that provides the stronger 'argument' against the existence of a self.  Because when you start to think about it, you realize that it actually sucks to be a self.  The life of a self is completely cut off from everything else. It exists only as a pure subjective interior, endlessly beset by Cartesian doubt about whether its experiences reflect real objects, and endlessly questioning whether there is even any subject other than itself in this lonely universe.  Life with a self is life post the zombie-apocalypse.  It is another example what Nietzsche called the belief in an ascetic ideal --  a mode of living that preserves a 'pure' life only at the cost of diminishing it as far as possible.  To be a self is to shrink life to the transcendental vanishing point, which then suddenly acquires the delusion of grandeur we call 'free will' -- a will completely separated from its power of acting.  By contrast, life is a whole lot better as a person.  A person isn't isolated from the world and others but only constituted in its connection to them.  Like Simondon's individual, the person always has a milieu, a context.  Garfield points out how we often feel our best when we are immersed in this context during a flow state.  And he has an interesting chapter inspired by Vasudevi Reddy's account of the way persons are co-created through the reciprocity of second-person perspective dialog (as opposed to the solipsistic first-person perspective of the self).  His point is to show us that giving up on the idea of the self is not an impoverishment of our existence but a jailbreak -- we lose nothing but our chains.  

But perhaps his most persuasive reason for changing our perspective on how we are constructed -- admitting that we are constructed -- is that it has major positive ethical implications.  A self is, of course, out for its self.  It is exclusively, 'naturally', and pretty much by definition, egotistical.  A person, however, actually can't be completely egotistical, since it cannot exist alone.  People co-construct one another in a way that Garfield compares to actors in a larger drama.  While this does not guarantee the harmony the beautiful soul dreams of -- we are perfectly capable of constructing our self as the enemy of someone -- it does also open the door to the possibility of a kindness and compassion that are not based on 'enlightened' self interest.  Thus Garfield connects the idea of non-self to the virtues of the brahmaviharas.  If we accept that we are all together constructing the world as we construct ourselves, then we are apt to start wanting the same thing for all the 'other' non-selves that we want for our 'own' non-self.  This is not because we think they are just like us in being little copies of the universal transcendental Subject, but because we have ceased to be sure exactly where we stop and they begin.  Instead of desperately holding on to our little life, we find that if we give it away, we get a much larger life in return.  Nihilism overcomes itself.

Tao Te Ching

I first read Lao Tzu's classic about four years ago, but, like a stone falling into the sea, it only made a tiny splash.  So I was surprised to find how much difference Stephen Mitchell's more sympathetic version made.  Though he doesn't speak any Chinese and calls his book a version of the Tao, as opposed to a translation, Mitchell, as a long time Zen practitioner, is able to make the spiritual advice of the epigrams shine through much more clearly.  Naturally, this approach risks projecting developments in 7th century CE China back into 5th BCD China.  But if this is what it takes to make the text speak to us, then I am all for it.  This perspective was cemented for me by some of Mitchell's comments in the brief interview printed at the back of this edition.

One other example: All these translations described the Master as a proto-fascist leader.  Chapter 3 reads: "The Master rules by emptying people's minds and filling their bellies, weakening their will and strengthening their bones.  He sees to it that they lack knowledge and desire and makes sure that those with knowledge don't dare to act."  I knew that couldn't be correct.  Lao-Tzu had to be talking about showing people what my old Zen master called "don't-know mind" -- the empty, luminous, infinitely open mind of realization.  Anyone who has had even a glimpse of that would understand what this "not-knowing" refers to.  So in my version that passage reads: 

The Master leads
by emptying people's minds
and filling their cores,
by weakening their ambition
and toughening their resolve.
He helps people lose everything
they know, everything they desire,
and creates confusion
in those who think that they know.

Ada

Lolita was lovely and Pale Fire transcendent, so when our platinum guest room customer revealed that she liked Ada so much she named her daughter after it, I figured it needed to get bumped up to the top of the list.  However, while I now better appreciate the kinkiness unexpectedly hidden beneath CV's demure exterior, I can't say that I'm especially grateful for the suggestion.  For me at least, Ada was simply too much.  I don't mean this in a moral sense of course.  I'm a goer.  Reading about a trio of insatiablly incestuous 13 year olds is all in a day's work around here.  No, I mean that the 600 page torrent of esoteric vocabulary, recondite allusions, puns in 3 different languages, fractured narration, etc ... was simply too much for me.  I sorta enjoyed the novel as an interestingly perverse love story and an examination of the rememberance, and restructuring, of things past.  But at some point I gave up hope of really understanding whatever it was that Nabakov wanted to accomplish here.  Hopefully he at least made himself smile and reminisce ...

The Experience of No-Self

A friend in my meditation group recommended this interesting spiritual autobiography by the one time Carmelite nun Bernadette Roberts.  While obviously written from a Christian perspective, it's clearly a member of the 'dharma autobiography' book club (cf. Henry Shukman, Adyashanti).  Interestingly, despite the differing religious background, it has the same fundamental structure -- an initial awakening turns out in retrospect to be a stage in a longer journey to what feels like a final (non)-destination.  And perhaps even more interesting is all these authors' agreement on what is fast becoming a profound truism for me -- progress on the path is not measured by what you get but by what you lose.

Since there's little point in detailing the itinerary of a journey that already borders on indescribable, I will simply observe that the trip Roberts documents delivers on the title -- she loses her self.  While it seems to me that this makes it a pretty standard voyage in Buddhist terms, it apparently makes it a total outlier for Christians.  

Her spiritual trajectory had two stages.  The first was a loss of the small egoic self through immersion in the greater divine self.  Roberts has already written about this stage of union with the divine, which in her case lasted 20 years, and she considers her experience of it to be very similar to what other mystics like St. John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila have described.  So here she begins her story with stage 2, which is the loss of union with this 'true' divine self and the beginning of a path to having no self at all.  From a Christian perspective, this ends up sounding like a heresy that Torquemada would have had himself a little bonfire over.  As Nietzsche could have told you, losing all sense of personal self actually entails losing all sense of personal God as well.  

Presumably, this context explains why Roberts makes such a big deal about how she thinks the second part of this journey has been totally undocumented by any other spiritual practitioner, ever.  The feeling that she's had a unique (or almost unique, as we'll discuss momentarily) experience is of course what motivates her to write the book.  Because while she finds no similar account in 3,000 years of spiritual literature, she feels oddly sure that others after her may follow in her footsteps.  Other Christian mystics either did not experience, or perhaps were understandably loath to describe, this second stage.  She claims her only point of reference are some of Meister Eckhardt's writings.  She really feels she's describing uncharted territory.

While assessing whether Roberts' experience of stage 2 is unique among Christian mystical accounts remains above my pay grade, it seems rather bizarre to me to insist that no one in any tradition has experienced or described this falling away of self.  I mean, you can almost pick up any of the Buddha's discourses and find him talking about anatta.  Despite her claim to have searched spiritual literature "East and West" for a similar account to help her understand her journey, it seems more likely that she was put off by the failed communication she recounts with a single Zen monk and left her exploration of non-Christian traditions before they began.  Because what she describes is so similar to so many of the descriptions of seeing the non-dual unity of subject and object or form and emptiness that we find in Zen or Dzogchen or even Kashmiri Shaivist accounts.  In short, what she calls stage 2 seems to be exactly what every Buddhist simply calls Awakening.  And while she writes a fine description of her personal journey to Nirvana, it didn't seem to me to contribute that much to the many other accounts of the process and 'destination' that I've read in the past few years.  I enjoyed the book, but unless something changes dramatically, it's not where I'd return for guidance on how to walk this path.

Of course, if you're Christian, your mileage may vary.  Maybe the idea that there could be no self at all, not even a soul or divine  true self will seem phenomenally new and liberating.  I certainly agree it's a pretty profound idea.  In this case, you may appreciate Roberts' reframing of what seems a very Buddhist experience in very Christian theological terms.  Because her idea is that Christ's life is a parable for the pathway to no-self.  That is, Christ was the only other mystic who not only had but described her experience.  The journey to no-self gives meaning to his doubt (Psalms 22:1) as well as to his death, resurrection, and identity with God.  Roberts includes a long chapter towards the end of the book that reinterprets her experience several years after the process of awakening she describes.  This recasts her fresh and direct account in the first part of the book (which makes little mention of God and none of Christ) in terms more compatible with Christian theology.  While this is an interesting exercise that might help us reappraise the story of Christ's life, it felt rather like an act of intellectual contortionism given how Buddhism provides such a parsimonious paradigm for explaining her experience. 

Overcoming Poor Posture

The physical therapist partner over at GMB teamed up with the author of Overcoming Gravity (which I haven't read yet but which I've frequently heard reckoned a classic) to write this brief guide to improving your posture.  While these guys are not going to win any literary prizes, and the book reads a bit like a long blog post, I found the information pretty useful.  An early chapter on the relationship between pain and posture was particularly interesting, since it argues that pain is only a protective mechanism, rather than a sign of damage.  This suggests an approach to pain that involves desensitizing the nervous system to positions it finds threatening.  Hence the importance of both mobility/stretching and strength training in letting the mind know that certain positions of the body might be less dangerous than it thinks.  The bulk of the book is a description of various exercises that you can combine to improve your posture, as well as a set of program recommendations.  Many of these are of course exercises I was already familiar with, but there were several that I wasn't aware of, some of which feel pretty awesome.  For example, I had never done a reverse hyperextension, or any segmental rolling, both of which feel pretty awesome.  The biggest benefit though, seems to be in simply going through all the exercises and paying attention to how the body feels in different positions.  Even without spending lots of time following their program, this has made me more aware of my tendency to round my thoracic spine forward, and the effect this can have on the lumbar.

Notes on Complexity

An esteemed colleague (Hobitronix 2023, personal communication) recently suggested Niel Theise's Notes on Complexity.  While Theise is an MD who made a career of specializing almost exclusively in liver pathology, his book is about the most sprawling and ambitious theory of everything you could imagine.  He'd like to link quantum physics, biological life, social organization, and non-dual spiritual awareness into a single framework.

However, since this is a priori a ridiculously ambitious project that is bound to fail, Theise tries to sneak up on us by first talking about complexity theory.  Perhaps because this is meant to be an accessible book for the general reader, Theise never really makes clear exactly what body of research he's talking about when he references "complexity theory" (check out this entry on the variety of things one might mean).  He seems to be referring to non-linear dynamics and chaos, and perhaps more generally to the type of thinking about emergence and self-organization that we associate with the Sante Fe Institute.   So we hear a bit about fractals, Conway's Game of Life, Wolfram's simple algorithms, Stuart Kauffmann's adjacent possible, Maturana and Varela, etc ... In other words, all the usual suspects are mentioned in passing.  His real definition of complexity seems to be just systems with many locally interacting parts that can display emergent behavior.  These systems can contain enough homeostatic feedback loops to support the emergence of stable "things", but have enough randomness and uncertainty for the things to do interesting stuff (he refers to this as "quenched disorder", a term I was unfamiliar with).  In other words, he's interested in the exact same types of cybernetic systems our colleagues over at FPiPE have been rambling on about for ages.  It's interesting stuff, and the writing is engaging and clear, but his discussion of it is pretty superficial and redundant if you've spent much time thinking about these things.

Despite the title, complexity theory is just a pretext.  Theise simply uses it to introduce the idea that things arise from the interaction of smaller things, and that, therefore, what we call things are better understood as patterns.  Cue the water and the wave analogy.  This view leads naturally into the idea that things don't have fixed and immutable boundaries but constantly changing ones that depend on their manner of arising.  After all, where does the wave stop and the moving water start?  Again, this fluid dynamic view of reality is, I think, fascinating and profound.  In an attempt to illustrate that this idea applies at any level of scale, there's some interesting discussion of research on the importance of random thermal motion in an actin-myosin contraction, followed by some vague gesturing at the Gaia theory, and the obligatory comments on the double-slit experiment and Schrodinger's cat.  Aside from the first, I can't say the Theise advanced my understanding of this viewpoint at all.  His point is just to argue that each level of the 'holarchy' (see ENDNOTE) arises through the self-organizing fluid dynamics of the level below.   This goes all the way down to the level of the quantum foam where virtual particles are created out of the, "seething energies contained within the space-time fabric of the universe" (end of chapter 8).  Since we can look at reality on any of these levels, we discover that, "everything only looks like a thing".  In fact, everywhere there is only the reality of pattern and process.  Theise concludes that we are one with the universe.  Which strikes me as an odd conclusion to jump to when discussing a universe capable of producing an endless and ever-changing variety of distinct forms. 

In the end though, this mystical conclusion is the core of Theise's book.  He waits until halfway through to spring it on us so that we're nodding along when the acid hits.  Turns out the Theise is a long term meditator (he does not specify exactly what flavor).  So he would like to jump from the general observation that things emerge from not-things (aka emptiness) straight to the idea that a spiritual Awareness is the fundamental nature of the universe.  The bridge between these seemingly only vaguely related ideas is meant to be the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which requires Consciousness to collapse the wave function into a determinate state.  In other words, our consciousness measurements of quantum phenomena correspond to the fluid universe of Consciousness self-organizing into a a particular form.  Now, while I sympathize with the desire to develop the philosophical implications of a scientific understanding of self-organization, I think this is where the book starts to go off the rails.  

First, we get a undergrad level survey of philosophical responses to the "hard problem".  These sort of whirlwind tours have started to bother me more the more philosophy I read because they just kinda mulch everything together into labels like materialist, panpsychist, monist, etc ... They never seem to involve a real encounter with the philosopher's they mention, so, for example Theise files Whitehead, Spinoza, and Kant together in the "idealism" section.  Broad brushstrokes like this never seem useful to me.  Second, we are abruptly told that anyhow, neither science nor philosophy can provide a way to understand the Consciousness or Awareness that constitutes the universe.  Instead, we have to appeal to the contemplative metaphysics.  Which begs the question of why we just took that sophomore survey course.  

The justification for this rather curt dismissal of pretty much the entire history of thought is meant to be the way quantum mechanics and Gödel's theorem ruined the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle.   So we get quite long, not especially insightful, overviews of these topics, which, if you are not already familiar with them makes them appear to "prove" things that they just don't prove.  In fact, his explanations of these two areas might even give you the impression that scientists and mathematicians simply threw their hands up and quit once Bohr and Gödel got finished demolishing everything.  While I would hardly pretend that we understand all the implications of these ideas even today, Theise would like us to think that the counterintuitive complications they point to license our "metaphysical intuition" to make the mental money printer go brrrrr.  In particular, he'd like Gödel to have proven that there are true and real things which we can only have access to through intuition.  Which, regardless of what Gödel himself may have thought, he did not prove.  After all, if intuition is so great, then why doesn't our original "intuition" that set theory should be both complete and consistent hold?  Indeed, both quantum mechanics and incompleteness seem to affirm that there are counter-intuitive things that nevertheless appear to be "true" in some sense (even if specifying this sense leads us down a bit of a rabbit hole).  So to conclude that, "... quantum mechanics and our encounter with Gödel show that metaphysical speculation is necessary for a complete understanding of the true nature of reality" (end of chapter 11) is akin to concluding that, since we'll never really figure it out, we'll have to just make it up.

Which of course is exactly what Theise proceeds to do.  The final chapter of the book is devoted to a very broad overview of the theory of everything you can find discussed in more detail here.  In fact, this overview is so broad that I don't even consider it fair to criticize the theory; I can't even tell you exactly how it works. [Note: after reading their paper I remain in the same position].  The basic idea seems to be that everything is "Fundamental Awareness".  This ur-state somehow splits into separated subject and object by creating space-time.  From that point we've already seen the rest of the chain, which progresses from space-time to quantum foam, to atoms, molecules, life, consciounsess, the universe and everything.  It's truly a theory of everything.  And the success of its all embracing agenda clearly revolves around what we mean by Fundamental Awareness.

Fundamental Awareness here seems to be defined as whatever it is Theise experiences when he meditates.  Obviously, the presumption is that if you meditate, you'll experience the same thing, and anybody else who has ever meditated has likewise experienced this same thing.  Or at least, the specific claim here is that Buddhists (which ones are not specified in the book, but the paper discusses Dzogchen), practitioners of Lurianic Kabbala,  Advaita Vedantists, and Kashmiri Saivists have all experienced the same thing, even though they have pointed to different aspects of it.  Since I'm actually a little familiar with three of these four, I can definitely agree that they share a family resemblance we might simply call non-dualism.  But to claim that they all share "the same" vision is going to lead us precisely nowhere, since whatever definition of sameness we might come up with would depend on some notion of identity equally anathema to all of them.  In a meditative context, this problem doesn't matter.  You experience whatever it is you experience when you meditate.   You associate with people who talk about it and incorporate it into their lives in a way you can understand.  You find teachers who open up more of that experience.  Insofar as you continue connecting with others regarding this experience, you might say that you have all had "the same" experience of this mysterious and intuitive realm.  This label is entirely redundant though; feeling connected is all that counts.  But as soon as we try to collect these perspectives into a single objective theory of everything, we have to leave behind this realm where every experience is equally valid, and start separating one theory from another, starting comparing them according to some criteria.  Unfortunately, Theise's whole argument has made it entirely unclear what sort of criterion would apply here.  He's literally just making stuff up.  He's explicitly discarded the rules of science and logic as a means of adjudication, but he hasn't replaced them with anything except meditative introspection.  So how can you engage with his theory at all?  It either feels right or it doesn't.  I kinda like it.  Reminds me of the pre-individual.  But, as they say, your mileage may vary. 

The Lady in the Lake

Chandler novels are the perfect thing to read on a plane.  They're pulpy enough to breeze through, yet interesting enough to hold your attention for hours trying to guess the next twist in the plot.  This one was perhaps my favorite.  While it might not have quite as much bizarre and hilarious patter as usual, it actually had a much tighter plot than the others I've read.  I found it particularly satisfying to almost figure out the twist, or, better said, to figure it out but incorrectly -- even the twist has a twist.

Invisible Cities

I've been meaning to read some Italo Calvino for a long time, but it was Ursula LeGuin's mention of Invisible Cities in The Wave in the Mind that got me off the couch.  It's a brilliant, slim little volume carved into bite sized experiments in paradox worthy of Borges, Lem, and Chiang.  Just the intermittent frame story itself, based on the conciet of Marco Polo regaling Kublai Khan with stories of each of the cities he might well have visited, is worth the price of admission.  But beyond the sheer conceptual joy of watching a multi-headed hydra swallow each of its many tails is the beautiful craft of Calvino's writing.  The cover blurb is spot on when it alludes to what is possible on the edge between poetry and prose.  This is definitely on that will go on the #reread list that I have just now invented.

Nietzsche Project

I recently realized that there is a drawback to having two blogs.  Since this one is not a complete record, I never know where to search for a particular book I've read.  This is easy to rectify though with a short bibliography for each of various projects in which our esteemed colleague over at FPiPE has gotten enmeshed.  Since the Difference and Repetition liveblog project predates the 2020 reboot of The Capitalist Axiomatic, I'll skip that one.  And since the Plato project consisted of a single book Plato: Complete Works, it doesn't bear annotating.  The Nietzsche Project was a little more sprawling though. 

Friedrich Nietzsche -- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals

Carl Jung -- Nietzsche's Zarathustra (only Volume 1)

Martin Heidegger -- Nietzsche, Volumes 1, 2, 3, 4

Pierre Klossowski -- Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle

Kathleen Marie Higgins -- Nietzsche's Zarathustra

Lawrence Lampert -- Nietzsche's Teaching

Gilles Deleuze -- Nietzsche and Philosophy

Lectures on Shin Buddhism

This collection of lectures by Takashi Hirose was one of Irene's old books that migrated to our shelf in recent years.  One of the nice things about them is the way they dispense with almost all of the religious aspect of Buddhism.  With a different title, they could almost be passed off as existentialism.  Hirose, it seems, is most concerned with sparking any sort of religious feeling in modern man, and so the lectures center on the simplest sort of reflections on our life.  Who are we?  What are we doing here?  What should we be devoted to?  Given that these are introductory lectures intended for the general public, it's not surprising that Hirose's answers to these questions are neither terribly deep nor very specific.  In fact, the important thing to him is simply asking the question at all.  If that sounds both thoughtful and platitudinously true, then you're having the same reaction I did.  The only thing that will stick with me from the book is the introduction to the life of Gutoku Shinran, the 11th century Japanese monk who defrocked and got married as a demonstration that the Buddha's message applied to laypeople as well as monk's.  This "foolish baldheaded Shinran" went on to found a Pure Land sect that remains the most widely practiced branch of Buddhism in Japan.

The Body

This  collection was another of the assigned books in my MahaSati course.  These Dharma Reflections on Ageing, Sickness and Death by the Nuns of the Theravada Community were originally talks given at various meditation retreats.  While the talks do repeatedly reflect on sickness, old age, and death, they're mostly just standard Theravada dharma talks -- sutta heavy and focused on the four noble truths.  Since it seems that every time I come back to 'standard' material like this I always find something new, I hardly mean this observation as a criticism, and I quite enjoyed most of the talks.  I simply mean to observe that the subjects are treated more or less how they are always treated within Buddhism -- as the three divine messengers that help us turn towards our suffering.  So if you're looking for some way of transcending these conditions here, you are definitely barking up the wrong tree.  In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the talks encourage us to descend into these conditions, to really inhabit the suffering they create, and to gradually become attentive to, present in, patient with, and ultimately accepting of, whatever is happening right now. 

The Wave in the Mind

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favorite science fiction writers, so it's probably no surprise that I also really enjoy her non-fiction.  I read No Time to Spare, her reflections on aging, apropos of her death in 2018.  This collection of essays focuses mainly on the mystery and craft of writing.  The title comes from a letter that Virginia Wolf wrote to a friend when she was suffering from "writer's block".  She felt the characters and story were like an onrushing wave in her mind that was unable to break into words for lack of an appropriate rhythm.  It's an appropriate title since quite a number of the essays are concerned with rhythm in both poetry and prose.  From the perspective of someone who writes a lot, these are pretty fascinating.  They're complemented by several related paeans to reading aloud that are enough to make one want to press a street urchin into service just to have an excuse to recite The Lord of The Rings.  While there are plenty of opinions and ideas that would interest a general audience in this collection, I would say that it's squarely aimed at those of us who are both familiar with her work and writer's in our own right.  Even within that Venn diagram, the real focus of the book is on the process of writing fiction, and even the particular story and character driven sort of fiction Le Guin usually writes.  So while her descriptions of how to "pull a story from the air" are inspiring, I wonder whether they apply equally well to the type of more abstract short fiction, inspired by Chiang and Lem and Borges, that I'm most interested in writing.

The Master and His Emissary

A while back I heard interesting things about Ian McGilchrist's massive tome, so I picked up a copy at the cat bookstore just in case I someday managed to get around to it.  Gradually, as my readings in the philosophy of technology began to coalesce around the idea that technical objects nicely illustrate a fundamental dualism in approaching the world, I began to wonder if the book could shed some light on the problem.  On one side we find teleology.  Machines execute fixed goals.  It doesn't matter how complex the goal is, or how sophisticated or flexible the machines' approach to achieving it.  Even the perfect automata still does a particular thing 'automatically'; even self-driving cars still just drive, and the most sophisticated AI chat bot ... chats.  On the other side, we find exploration.  Life establishes new goals.  Which is in a sense to say that it has no true purpose, unless this would be to avoid getting permanently trapped by some impermanent goal.  When we talk about freedom and self-determination we are inherently talking about the living.  The automatic machine is the furthest thing from the self-determining organism.  But the conflation of these two ideas seems to be at the core of many perennial philosophical debates -- there's constantly confusion between determining a self and a self which determines.

Now, when I first heard it, I was intrigued but skeptical of McGilchrist's claim that there is a clear consistent difference between the workings of the right and the left hemispheres of the brain.  Wasn't this sort of facile opposition debunked years ago?  After glancing at his "Preface to the New Expanded Edition" however, in which he speaks convincingly of his more nuanced and updated take on hemispheric difference, I decided to take the plunge.  My thought was to add a different take on the same dualism between means and end, technology and life, matter and spirit.  And McGilchrist definitely develops a dualism related to what we've been talking about, and in this sense the book was relevant to my purposes.  In short, he identifies the Left side of the brain as the part that grasps and manipulates through analysis and abstraction (technology), while the Right side lives the particularity of our emotions and body in the context of a broader world (life). 

Unfortunately, while it certainly reiterates it, McGilchrist doesn't do much to help us further explore this dualism.  This is largely because his book sucks.  I rarely quit reading something halfway through, but there are exceptions, and this is one of them.  This has nothing to do with thinking that McGilchrist is wrong in any factual or philosophical sense.  The problem is that he's ultimately a pretty simplistic thinker who imagines himself as a profound philosopher.  As a result, he wastes an enormous amount of ink cramming his superficial understanding of anything and everything into the same repetitive left-brain-bad-right-brain-good box.  His wild welter of disorganized ideas only acquires a profound gloss though sheer force of reductive repetition; the divided brain is only 'profound' because McGilchrist sees it everywhere.  In this way he succeeds only in reproducing the same long list of antonyms he ridicules in his preface (xii).  Of course, lining up various dualisms in two columns is a temptingly way of making sense of the world because it feels so complete and satisfying.  However, no matter which terms figure in your lists, this style of thinking never even reaches the non-dual depths of understanding why the Force is like duct tape. 

Reading the blurbs and hearing the interviews, one imagines that The Master and His Emissary will be focused mainly on brain science.  After all, the supposed point of the book is the profound importance of the different ways the left and right hemispheres of the brain see the world.  Unfortunately, McGilchrist is no scientist.  And if you read the bio carefully, you discover it carefully skirts the question of whether he's even a medical doctor (look like a BM is the equivalent).  In fact, this is a just a philosophy book with a chapter devoted to summarizing some of the science related to hemispheric differences.  And what a poor summary indeed!  To begin with, despite studying literature, McGilchrist is a terrible writer.  Many many sentences are so bad that I can only imagine the (lack of) grammar results from dictating them.  The editing is atrocious both at the level of the text, and the level of the coherence of the ideas.  The whole thing reads like someone's first draft or working blog, with almost no thought spared for how it (doesn't) carry the reader along.  

Take, for example, this early chapter on the science behind the divided brain.  Now, I've studied some science, in fact even some neuroscience.  I'm also receptive to his overall idea.  And yet McGilchrist doesn't even come close to convincing me that there is coherent pattern to the differences between the left and right hemispheres.  We are told again and again that the difference lies in how they operate, not in what they do.  It's all meticulously footnoted.  But almost none of the studies that demonstrate this difference are explained. McGilchrist simply asserts that this is what the mountain of research tells us.  Trust him, he's cutting through all the inevitable controversy and subtlety that attends interpreting experiments like this and just giving us the overall picture.  For anyone even a little familiar with this area, it beggars belief that his level of generalization is justified by the specific research he summarizes.  But who knows?  Since we don't hear much about the research itself and about how it convinced McGilchrist, how would we ever judge how far he jumped to reach his sweeping conclusions?  We'd have to go read the whole bibliography ourselves and form our own opinions.  This is just terrible writing pure and simple.  It's no way to even talk about science, much less do it.  No, without and argument, there is no science.  That's what science is.  Those are the fucking rules.  So while I can't pass any judgement on whether McGilchrist is right about how the left and right brain work, I can certainly claim that in a hundred pages he said almost nothing to make me believe he was right.

However, as I mentioned, The Master and His Emissary is really a philosophy book masquerading as a book about the brain.  Less than a fifth of the text is devoted to neuroscience.  So perhaps it's not terribly important whether his story about the science is convincing or not.  Could we simply ignore the marketing and read it as philosophy, exactly as I proposed to approach it at the outset?  We were already exploring a dualism that has so many names we're not even sure it's a single dualism.  Maybe another name for the same split is Left and Right, even if these terms have no relation at all to the human brain.  Perhaps the brain is not the issue here dude.  If we read McGilchrist as a philosopher (which is how I imagine he sees himself) does his philosophy of left-right duality help to illuminate some of the deep issues that we've encountered in thinking about technology?

Nope.  McGilchrist is interested in some interesting stuff.  He has a long chapter on the origins of music and language.  He writes about the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and his hero Heidegger.  He tells us about the inadequacy of the materialist conception of the world and even outlines a theory of how our dualistic divide can be healed -- Right reabsorbs what it has given to Left in a moment of transcendent aufheben.  But none of his thoughts on these topics is of any more use than his approach to the science.  Everything is treated so breezily, from such a great altitude that it turns into an indistinct mish-mash.  He alludes to all these profound philosophical ideas, but then slurs together many that are so profoundly different.  I mean, do you really think those philosophers I named all shared the same core dualistic system?  Despite the density and range of his text, McGilchrist is incapable of leaving us with anything more than the impression that everything can somehow be reduced to the distinction between Left and Right, Part and Whole.  And of course, the holistic Right turns out to be primary and better in every sense -- ontologically, practically, ethically -- which begs the question of how on earth the Left triumphed in this Manichean struggle.  In the end, his entire thesis is encapsulated in the breathless praise of Hegel's Right-Left-Right pattern (pg 203).  We move from good unity to bad duality back to good unity.  Everything must be mapped onto a schema that doesn't even have four chords. Thus the whole book suffers from something similar to Hegel's encyclopedic obscurantism -- it tries to makes the same simple idea sound profound by endlessly repeating it in fancy language.  But we know there's nothing more boring and more faux profound than the dialectic; it presupposes everything that it pretends to explain and makes a mere illusion of real change.

So I'm going to quit halfway through.  The second half of the book promises to explain how the Left slyly triumphed over its better half.  It's certainly a glaring question given McGilchrist's account.  But at this point I can't imagine his answer would be at all interesting.  And I just can't abide another ramblingly dense yet intellectually insipid 250 pages.

Healing Trauma

The first book in the MahaSati reading list is Peter Levine's Healing Trauma.  Levine has worked extensively with people who suffer from PTSD or sexual trauma and has developed a set of exercises designed to help these folks.  I have to admit that I approached the book with a certain caution because, while trauma seems to have become trendy, I'm quite grateful that my life hasn't felt very traumatic.  Levine, however, insists that we almost all of us have some level of trauma stored in the body.  And in the context of MahaSati training, the point is simply to explore strategies for dealing with reactive patterns stored in the nervous system.  So if you too can find talk of trauma triggering, the ideas may make more sense if you recall that we all have bodies with nervous systems.   Over time these systems acquire many reactions that operate well below our consciousness, and only some of them are useful and adaptive in the present.  'Healing trauma' then could be thought of as nothing more than developing some intentional regulation of our nervous system. 

Levine's book is short, and mainly reads as an extended preface to the exercises he uses in a therapeutic context.  Which is perhaps what makes it a bit unsatisfying from an intellectual perspective.  It could be that he develops a more interesting theory of trauma somewhere else, but here at least there's no real explanation of why these exercises work.  Instead, we really just get a metaphor.  Trauma is what happens to the body of an animal when the natural stress-response mechanisms of flight, flight, or freeze are somehow interrupted in running their course.  Note that it's not these instinctive mechanisms themselves, nor even the life-threatening stress of feeling like prey that lead to trauma.  Trauma is fundamentally the 'stuckness' of being unable to respond to stress in a 'natural' way.  I think it's fair to object that this metaphor doesn't even really rise to the level of being an explanation.  But this objection carries less force when we see how adamant Levine is that trauma is not a psychological but a somatic problem.  If this is true -- if trauma doesn't have much to do with how objectively awful the stimulus was, or how subjectively intense our psychological response to it felt, but is simply a sort of somatic blockage that leads us to repeat fixed reaction patterns -- then it's actually hard to imagine what a better explanation would look like.  Why does the body get stuck?  What causes it to release?  We'd have to ask the body these questions directly, and ignore any psychological story that purports to articulate the body's response.  

It turns out that this is exactly how it feels to do the exercises.  There's a lot of physical shaking, discharge, and energetic flow.  And it doesn't seem to mean anything.  For me at least, this doesn't happen with every exercise, or even with most of them.  But in my experience the ones that do work, work repeatedly, and, as it were, randomly, without any clear sense of understanding why they work or where this energy is coming from.  There's no story, no images or words, there's just energy.  In fact, it's unexplainable enough to make one wonder whether any progress is actually being made.  It gives none of the satisfaction of 'figuring it out' that talk therapy can provide.  It's just ... tension and release.  I trust that over time this is doing something good for me?  At a minimum, these practices do seem to improve awareness of the body.

Just for future reference, here's the list of 12 exercises.

1) Feeling physical boundaries -- tapping, showering, string tracing, massaging

2) Grounding and centering -- feeling feet or sit bones, feeling a pet

3) Resourcing -- listing internal and external resources

4) Focus on positive -- find an object with positive valence and think of positive past moments and feel their effect on you

5) Tracking the effect of thoughts and images on the body (pendulating)

6) Tracking the sensations of guided imagery -- this one requires tracking sensations as you listen to a brief audio story

7) Discharging fight -- feel the desire to push back against and defend by pushing against a partner

8) Discharging flight -- feel yourself running away from a predator by making running in place motions

9) Discharging freeze -- let yourself feel completely slumped, overwhelmed, and in despair, then slowly straighten out of it

10) Feel into the physical sensation of immobility, and then let it pass -- a low level everyday version of 9

11) Orienting -- let yourself look slowly around the room as you find your place in it

12) Settling -- hugging yourself in a series of postures designed to finish discharging energy