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

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

I enjoyed the Broken Earth Trilogy so much that I must have picked up any other N.K. Jemisin book that was on offer at the cat bookstore.  Unfortunately, as you would expect from someone's debut novel, this one isn't as polished as the later stuff.  Nevertheless, she's still a good storyteller and world builder, who can create complex characters you like enough to be invested in and frustrated by -- even if some of them are gods.

The Thin Man

This was the second novel included in the Dashiell Hammett twofer I picked up at the cat bookstore.  It was less interesting and less satisfyingly constructed than The Maltese Falcon, but there was still enough classy Nick and Nora (and Mimi and Dorothy) patter to be thoroughly entertaining.  How about a little drop to cut the phlegm, honey?  I'll be sure to watch the film version to see whether the ending is more obvious once you know it's coming.  Part of what made this one less effective was that its big sprawling plot, with so many tangentially related characters, made the ending appear as something of a Deus ex Machina.  When Nick explains the whole works in a concluding soliloquy, I didn't come away with that delicious impression that I should have seen it all coming (which I had at the end of The Maltese Falcon).  Though it's possible this was just a function of reading it mostly late at night.

The Screwtape Letters

I came upon C.S. Lewis' Christian classic in a way the author would certainly classify as an example of Grace -- through the recommendation of my Buddhist meditation teacher.  As my esteemed colleague at FPiPE has made pretty clear, I'm just about the opposite a Christian.  So it was extremely surprising to find that this strange articulation of the spiritual significance of Christ's life made me feel right at home.  Naturally, a lot of this effect is due to the perverse manner in which Lewis elaborates what is, from an intellectual perspective, pretty standard Christian dogma.  The letters of the title are the missives sent from an older and more experienced devil (Screwtape) to a much younger "tempter" (Wormwood) on the occasion of the latter beginning his training in the art of corrupting human souls.  They describe all the psychological tricks that Hell possesses in its quest to separate us from "the Enemy".  Combined with Lewis' dry wit, the infernal epistolary structure makes a brilliantly amusing device.  

But what's most notable from my perspective is how frequently the devil's strategy overlaps with the precise psychological tricks Buddhism suggest we play on ourselves.  We congratulate ourselves for abstract virtues like "saving the world", but treat the concrete people around us with indifference.  We escape into the future or past as a way of cultivating an ignorance of the beauty and terror of the present.  We let ourselves be captivated by worldly values to the point of excluding all things spiritual as intangible sentiment.  And we simply and constantly forget the impermanence of our mind state and time here.  These observations overlap so thoroughly with my (more or less) Buddhist viewpoint that it's enough to make me believe in a core set of 'spiritual' teachings shared by every religious tradition.  Naturally, there are still many differences.  While I think Grace fits smoothly into my views, I find the concept of Sin, and particularly Original Sin, downright pernicious.  Nor is a battle between Heaven and Hell the metaphor I would chose in describing the plight of my soul.  And yet, as Lewis describes this battle, I hear something terribly familiar.  His devil is not very concerned with cultivating some intrinsic capacity for evil embedded in our souls.  Instead, the road to Hell is paved with the idea of good intentions that obscure a practice of everyday ignorance and petty malice.  Meanwhile, redemption is made possible not by overcoming our sinful essence, but through surrender and self-forgetfulness.  May we all find it.  

#reread