Sir Benedict Sorellin-Lancaster, Knight of Albion, newly minted lieutenant of the Spirearch’s Guard, strode into the Spirearch’s garden and into a storm of olfactory sensation.
Sir Benedict Sorellin-Lancaster, Knight of Albion, newly minted lieutenant of the Spirearch’s Guard, strode into the Spirearch’s garden and into a storm of olfactory sensation.
I just closed the biggest deal of the year to date, earned one and a quarter million for my company and myself, and still had ninety seconds before the meeting with Carl. More than enough time to pee. When you’re good, you’re good.
It was raining when Amarelle Parathis went out just after sunset to find a drink, and there was strange magic in the rain.
But Chains could be disappointed. Oh, yes. On the steps of the temple he could marshal his mysterious powers to sway passersby, to plead logically or sermonize furiously until they parted with hard-earned coins, and in his tutelage he focused those same powers on Locke until it seemed that Chains’ disappointment was a rebuke worse than a beating.
"I don’t expect life to make sense," he said after a few moments, "but it would certainly be pleasant if it would stop kicking us in the balls."
That Love is all there is, Is all we know of Love; It is enough, the freight should be Proportioned to the groove. —emily dickinson
Before Mazer invented himself as Mazer, he was Samson Mazer, and before he was Samson Mazer, he was Samson Masur—a change of two letters that transformed him from a nice, ostensibly Jewish boy to a Professional Builder of Worlds—and for most of his youth, he was Sam, S.A.M. on the hall of fame of his grandfather’s Donkey Kong machine, but mainly Sam.
Marx saying, "Weren’t you even curious what it was? There’s a world of people and things, if you can manage to stop being a misanthrope for a second."
But there she was: Sadie Green, in the flesh. And to see her almost made him want to cry. It was as if she were a mathematical proof that had eluded him for many years, but all at once, with fresh, well-rested eyes, the proof had a completely obvious solution. There’s Sadie, he thought. Yes.
"You’re incredibly gifted, Sam. But it is worth noting that to be good at something is not quite the same as loving it."
Sadie liked the phrase "an abundance of caution." It reminded her of a murder of crows, a flock of seagulls, a pack of wolves. She imagined that "caution" was a creature of some kind—maybe, a cross between a Saint Bernard and an elephant. A large, intelligent, friendly animal that could be counted on to defend the Green sisters from threats, existential and otherwise.
Updated: Aug 02, 2023
At a certain age—in Sadie’s case, thirty-four—there comes a time when life largely consists of having meals with old friends who are passing through town.
Updated: Aug 02, 2023
To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love. Many years later, as Sam would controversially say in an interview with the gaming website Kotaku, "There is no more intimate act than play, even sex." The internet responded: no one who had had good sex would ever say that, and there must be something seriously wrong with Sam.
"Friendship is friendship, and charity is charity," Freda said. "You know very well that I was in Germany as a child, and you have heard the stories, so I won’t tell them to you again. But I can tell you that the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend."
And so it went. Marx helped Sam with everything while never appearing to be helping Sam at all. And so, coats miraculously materialized in plastic bags, just waiting for Sam to ask about them. And gift certificates for restaurants were always left before the holidays when Sam couldn’t travel home. And when it became clear that Sam struggled to take the stairs in the dormitory they’d been assigned to, and that the elevator was only intermittently functional, Marx announced his intention to live off campus.
Why did Marx do this for this strange boy, who most people found vaguely unpleasant? He liked Sam. He had spent his childhood among rich and supposedly interesting people, and he knew that truly unusual minds were rare. He felt that when Harvard had assigned them to be roommates, Sam had become his responsibility. So, he protected Sam, and he made the world a little easier for Sam, and it cost him next to nothing to do so.
"Promise me, we won’t ever do this again," Sadie said. "Promise me, that no matter what happens, no matter what dumb thing we supposedly perpetrate on each other, we won’t ever go six years without talking to each other. Promise me you’ll always forgive me, and I promise I’ll always forgive you." These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.
One of Sam’s eventual strengths as an artist and as a businessman was that he knew the importance of drama, of setting the scene. He wanted to ask her to work with him at a special place—the occasion of their prospective creative union should be memorable. Even then, he felt that if they made a game, and if the game became what he knew it could be, he would want there to be a story about the day Sam Masur and Sadie Green had decided to work together. He was already imagining Sam-and-Sadie lore, and he didn’t even have a definitive idea for a game yet. But this was classic Sam—he had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.
There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.
"If music be the food of love, play on."
Sadie knew that the key to making a video game on limited resources was to make the limitations part of the style.
And as they were coming up with the character design for their "child," they found themselves drawn to Japanese references over and over: the deceptively innocent paintings of Yoshitomo Nara; Miyazaki anime like Kiki’s Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke; other, more adult anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell, both of which Sam had loved; and of course, Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series, the first of which is The Great Wave.
mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you?
And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.
But for Marx, the world was like a breakfast at a five-star hotel in an Asian country—the abundance of it was almost overwhelming. Who wouldn’t want a pineapple smoothie, a roast pork bun, an omelet, pickled vegetables, sushi, and a green-tea-flavored croissant? They were all there for the taking and delicious, in their own way.
Marx was a prodigious reader, and he felt like Sadie might be the kind of book that one could read many times, and always come away with something new.
It made sense that Anders should find him. Anders, born in Sweden, was exactly the kind of decent, guileless person who did not look away when presented with the scourge of homelessness.
Marx usually enjoyed the experience of making love to an ex, and this evening was no exception. It was interesting to note the way your body had changed and how their body had changed in the time since you’d last been intimate. There was a pleasant Weltschmerz that came over him. It was the nostalgia one experienced when visiting an old school and finding that the desks were so much smaller than in one’s memory.
Zoe joked—or maybe it wasn’t a joke—that her first sexual experience had been with her cello. Before she’d become a composer, she’d been a child cello prodigy, and she’d loved nothing so much as going outside, stripping, and playing by herself. Her mother had once discovered her this way behind their house and had made Zoe see a therapist. (The therapist determined that Zoe had the healthiest body image of any teenage girl he’d ever met.)
Sam’s doctor said to him, "The good news is that the pain is in your head." But I am in my head, Sam thought.
Sadie and Marx would buy a house together, somewhere in Laurel Canyon or maybe Palisades. And they’d get a dog—a big, rangy, mixed-breed thing, or if not that, a Borzoi called Zelda or Rosella. They’d throw big dinner parties. The house would be the kind of place where everyone wanted to congregate because Sadie and Marx had great taste.
You thank the Worths for coming in and you tell them that you will discuss Our Infinite Days with Sadie and Sam when they’re back from New York. You promise they’ll hear from you no later than the end of next week. You look at Charlotte and Adam, and you see how much they need you to make this game with them. You see how many times they must have been told no, the wanting in their eyes. You wonder what they’re doing for day jobs and how long their relationship will survive if it isn’t bolstered by some success. (They say success kills relationships, but the lack of it will do it just as quickly.) One of the absolute best parts of your own job is being able to tell an artist, Yes. I see you. I get what you’re doing. Let’s do this thing. Even though it’s a breach of professional protocol, you contemplate telling them your company is going to make Our Infinite Days right now. You like these people; you want to play this game; it’s a no-brainer.
The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.
You are in the strawberry field. You are dead. A prompt comes up on the screen: Start game from the beginning? Yes, you think. Why not? If you play again, you might win. Suddenly, there you are, brand-new, feathers restored, bones unbroken, sanguine with fresh blood. You are flying more slowly than last time, because you don’t want to miss any of it. The cows. The lavender. The woman humming Beethoven. The distant bees. The sad-faced man and the couple in the pond. The beat of your heart before you go onstage. The feel of a lace sleeve against your skin. Your mother singing Beatles songs to you, trying to sound like she’s from Liverpool. The first playthrough of Ichigo. The rooftop on Abbot Kinney. The taste of Sadie mixed with Hefeweizen beer. Sam’s round head in your hands. A thousand paper cranes. Yellow-tinted sunglasses. A perfect peach. This world, you think. You are flying over the strawberry field, but you know it’s a trap. This time, you keep flying.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
A traveler disembarks from the train. The land is covered with a thin layer of frost, and the ground crunches beneath the traveler’s boot. Look closely: Is that grass pushing through the ice? Could it be the white head of a crocus? Yes, it is almost spring. A text box appears on the screen: Welcome, Stranger.
Great relationships are built, not discovered. A lasting relationship doesn’t just happen. It is the culmination of a series of decisions, including when to get out there, whom to date, how to end it with the wrong person, when to settle down with the right one, and everything in between. Make good decisions, and you propel yourself toward a great love story. Make bad ones, and you veer off course, doomed to repeat the same harmful patterns over and over.
Behavior change is a two-step process. First we’ll learn about the invisible forces driving your behavior, those errors in judgment that lead to costly mistakes. Mistakes like refusing to commit because you always wonder if there’s someone better out there (Chapter 4), pursuing the prom date instead of the life partner (Chapter 7), or staying in bad relationships after their expiration date (Chapter 14). But awareness on its own doesn’t lead to action. (Knowing you shouldn’t date "bad boys" or "manic pixie dream girls" doesn’t make them any less appealing.) You have to actually do something about it. That’s where the second part of behavioral science comes in. Tried-and-tested techniques can help you jump from knowing that information to doing something about it.
Today it represents one of the great human achievements where, despite nearly one hundred thousand flights taking off per day, U.S. airlines haven’t had a single fatal crash in more than a decade.
I didn’t have time to think through each option, so I fell back on the mantra, "There’s no problem so bad you can’t make it worse."
Though we have talented pilots, the mantra that we bet our lives on is that a good pilot uses superior judgment to avoid situations that require the use of superior skill. Clean and clear decision-making will nearly always beat talent alone. The ability to make a correct decision with incomplete information and a limited amount of time is not just for fighter pilots, though—it’s a universal skill.
The average person, despite physically generating only one hundred watts of electricity—about what a light bulb uses—now consumes over twelve thousand watts of energy. That energy powers the technology that amplifies our decisions.
The most important part is being deliberate in making decisions and then debriefing afterward on how to improve. It’s this iteration that over the last fifty years has developed United States fighter pilots into the most capable air force in the world—one that hasn’t lost a U.S. soldier to enemy aircraft since April 15, 1953, and hasn’t lost in an air-to-air engagement in over fifty years.
Next was analyzing the situation. Developing a proper understanding of the problem is the first step to solving it. Our instinct is often to bypass this critical step and begin acting. It’s a cognitive bias for many people and organizations, whereby we believe that the sooner we start fixing a problem, the sooner we’ll solve it.
Because power laws can have such an outsize effect on outcomes, it’s important to be able to quickly identify them and understand their implications. For a multitude of reasons, people consistently fail to account for them, which often leads to a skewed assessment of the problem they’re facing and results in a poor decision.
Today, Google—founded by the former Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin—is worth over $1.5 trillion. There’s no way to tell whether Excite would have gone on to be as successful as Google if George had bought the students’ algorithm that day. However, passing on it is now considered one of the worst business decisions in history, one that eventually contributed to the company’s collapse. The root cause is that George didn’t understand power laws on a deep enough level and how they related to the problems he was facing. He didn’t see how the exponential growth of the internet would radically alter the system within which he was working. Hiring teams of journalists to review websites was a linear solution.
Updated: Jul 31, 2023
Pioneered by Robert Metcalfe, one of the early inventors of the Ethernet, the power law, known as Metcalfe’s Law, states that the value of a network grows exponentially with the total number of users.
Updated: Aug 04, 2023
In biology, for instance, Kleiber’s law demonstrates that an animal’s metabolism doesn’t scale linearly with its size but rather adheres to a power law. For example, a cat, despite weighing over one hundred times more than a mouse, only requires thirty-two times the energy to sustain itself. It’s a form of economies of scale whereby a doubling of the size doesn’t require a doubling of the energy consumption. This law surprisingly holds true throughout much of the animal kingdom—the same is true for a cow, which is one hundred times heavier than a cat, and a whale, which is one hundred times heavier than a cow.
The long-tail power law forms the basis for the economist Vilfredo Pareto’s famous 80–20 rule, where he noticed that 20 percent of the people in Italy owned 80 percent of the land.
For example, named after George Zipf, Zipf’s law shows that the most frequent word used in a language will occur twice as often as the second-most-frequent word, three times as often as the third-most-frequent word, and so on. In the English language, the is the most frequent word used and accounts for nearly 5 percent of all words, followed by of, which accounts for just over 3.5 percent, and then and, which accounts for 2.4 percent. It’s a surprisingly consistent law that holds true throughout nearly all languages. The takeaway for a new speaker is that by just learning the top 135 words of a language, they can speak half of all the words used by a native speaker.
She was just so hopeful. Emotions flowed inside him like blood from wounds, warm and sharp. How long had it been since he’d felt needed, wanted? He didn’t mean to lie. He wasn’t really lying, was he? Her spirits had chosen him, brought him here, perhaps to paint them. In that moment, he wanted so badly to be the hero someone needed. To have a chance to make up for the mistakes of his past. To become something. It wasn’t arrogance, as some of you might assume. It was more desperation.
Perhaps nightmares are Cultivation’s method of giving us a way of surviving trauma in a strangely safe environment. (At least safe physically.) A way to put it behind us, forget the details, but retain the growth. Nightmares are vicarious living done in our own minds.
The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane. —Erich Fromm, The Sane Society
In the most health-obsessed society ever, all is not well. Health and wellness have become a modern fixation. Multibillion-dollar industries bank on people’s ongoing investment—mental and emotional, not to mention financial—in endless quests to eat better, look younger, live longer, or feel livelier, or simply to suffer fewer symptoms. We encounter would-be bombshells of "breaking health news" on magazine covers, in TV news stories, omnipresent advertising, and the daily deluge of viral online content, all pushing this or that mode of self-betterment. We do our best to keep up: we take supplements, join yoga studios, serially switch diets, shell out for genetic testing, strategize to prevent cancer or dementia, and seek medical advice or alternative therapies for maladies of the body, psyche, and soul. And yet our collective health is deteriorating.
Another way of saying it: chronic illness—mental or physical—is to a large extent a function or feature of the way things are and not a glitch; a consequence of how we live, not a mysterious aberration.
It is my contention that by its very nature our social and economic culture generates chronic stressors that undermine well-being in the most serious of ways, as they have done with increasing force over the past several decades.
Here’s an analogy I find helpful. In a laboratory, a culture is a biochemical broth custom-made to promote the development of this or that organism. Assuming the microbes in question start out with a clean bill of health and genetic fitness, a suitable and well-maintained culture should allow for their happy, healthy growth and proliferation. If the same organisms begin showing pathologies at unprecedented rates, or fail to thrive, it’s either because the culture has become contaminated or because it was the wrong mixture in the first place. Whichever the case, we could rightly call this a toxic culture—unsuitable for the creatures it is meant to support. Or worse: dangerous to their existence. It is the same with human societies.
In the United States, the richest country in history and the epicenter of the globalized economic system, 60 percent of adults have a chronic disorder such as high blood pressure or diabetes, and over 40 percent have two or more such conditions.[4] Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two.[5]
"Here’s the thing, Sorrengail. Hope is a fickle, dangerous thing. It steals your focus and aims it toward the possibilities instead of keeping it where it belongs—on the probabilities."
All misery comes from dependency. If you weren’t dependent on income, people, or technology, you would be truly free. The only way to be deeply happy is to break all dependencies.
Most problems are interpersonal. To be part of society is to lose a part of yourself. Cut ties with society. Don’t engage. Don’t even rebel, because that’s reacting. Instead, do what you’d do if you were the only person on Earth.
Updated: Jun 21, 2023
Rules and norms were created by the upper class to protect their privilege — to categorize people into high versus low society. None of it applies to you. Long ago, people had to follow norms to have high social status, otherwise they’d be ostracized and couldn’t survive. But now you can survive, mate, and thrive without social status. So it’s both irrational and unwise to follow those norms. Dogs bark. People speak. It doesn’t mean a thing. What they say and do has nothing to do with you, even if it seems directed your way.
Updated: Jun 07, 2023
My pattern was often the same: I’d date someone new, idealize them, keep parts of myself hidden, and perform the role of a woman more palatable than I believed myself to be. This woman never asked for anything.
When you are not being honest in a relationship – to another person or to yourself – it is a little like screwing on the top of a jam jar when the ridges are out of line. An onlooker might think you are screwing it on just fine, but you can feel a stiffness developing that warns you it’s not on properly, and you know then that, however hard you try to keep turning it, the lid will never tightly seal. In this way I could always feel something in these relationships was out of sync from the beginning. Moving through the motions of intimacy with this dread pulling at the back of my mind was an anxious state to exist in, always suspecting that a person did not want to be with me but being too afraid to ask.
I learnt that the loneliest place of all is lying in bed at night next to someone who makes you feel small, with your back to theirs, still hoping they will turn over and put their arms around you. At the time, I recognized this suppressing of the self as a private, graceless shame; only now do I understand it to be an unoriginal problem. I’ve spoken to countless people who – despite feeling confident at work, with family, with friends – have lost themselves in relationships. Have squashed their personalities into a different shape and forgotten their own needs and desires in an attempt to second-guess a partner’s. This shrinking of the self starts in small ways: pretending you want to see a horror film at the cinema; making Spotify playlists of songs that might impress them instead of the ones you really want to listen to; buying a dress you can’t afford just because you think they’ll like it.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give." ’ When I looked up the original Jane Eyre line I found the one that precedes Rich’s quote: ‘I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me to do so.’
I still believed the act of showing yourself fully to a new person was a risk, but somewhere inside me a fresh knowledge was unfolding: that the risk of not doing so – of never being seen, of never expressing needs, of never giving and accepting real love – was far greater. After years of feeling passive in love, I understood then that we do have a choice, even if it’s difficult to see. Mine was this: to stay in the fantasies inside my head, or to climb out and live.
When I was searching for love in my twenties, there seemed to be two types of people who were looking for romantic relationships: those who easily fell into them and were content in the spaces between when they were – albeit briefly – single. And those who found falling in love an impossible task, who couldn’t seem to find happiness on their own, but couldn’t get past the starting-block stage of a relationship either. I had always been in the latter camp.
Updated: Jun 11, 2023
And later from his book The Course of Love, I learnt about the challenges of intimacy long after the initial sheen of desire has worn off. Few people chronicle love with as much meticulous rigour and pragmatism as Alain.
It suggests that if the search for a partner didn’t work out then it would be a tragedy, that your life would essentially have been wasted. That sets up a frantic, unhelpful backdrop to the search for love. The best frame of mind to be in – for anything you want – is an ability to walk away from it, were it not to come right. Otherwise you put yourself at the mercy of chance and people abusing your desperation. So the capacity to say, ‘I could be alone,’ is strangely one of the most important guarantees of one day being with somebody else in a happy way.
Updated: Jul 02, 2023
When it comes to self-love it’s not so much about loving yourself, but accepting that all human beings have their less impressive sides, and so your less impressive sides don’t cut you off from the possibility of having a good relationship. They don’t mean that you’re a terrible person who doesn’t deserve love. They just mean you are part of the human family.
It sounds odd that you could lose touch with your own self. How could that be possible? You are you; how could you become less you by being in contact with somebody else? But we receive data from our senses and emotional selves, which can be overruled by data we get from other people. A classic example is if you say, ‘I’m a bit sad,’ and another person goes, ‘No, you’re not, you’re fine. You’re doing so well.’ You might then think, my point of view is not legitimate. They are right, I’m fine. When actually, it might be important for you to step back and acknowledge that things are difficult.
Because, frequently, anyone you’re in a relationship with has a view on what’s right for you, or what’s right or wrong in the world. And the capacity to say, ‘That’s interesting, but I’ve got my own reality, and I’m not sure that fits in,’ depends on whether that’s a muscle that’s been exercised in childhood. Often it hasn’t been, because many aspects of a child’s reality are overruled by parents.
"Nervousness means there’s a fear to be faced ahead, Diago. The man who is never nervous, never does anything hard. The man who is never nervous, never grows." He stroked my hair. "Do all you can to think of it as an opportunity. A blessing. No matter how it makes you feel in here."
Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.
Listening well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love keep asking them "Is there more?" until there is no more.
When you forgive others they may not notice but you will heal. Forgiveness is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves.
Taking a break is not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength.
Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.
Updated: May 14, 2023
If you are looking for something in your house and you finally find it when you’re done with it don’t put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first looked for it.
Movement plus variety equals health.
A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.
The advantage of a ridiculously ambitious goal is that it sets the bar very high so even if your effort falls short it may exceed an ordinary success.
Whenever you have a choice between being right or being kind be kind. No exceptions. Don’t confuse kindness with weakness.
We lack rites of passage. Create a memorable family ceremony when your child reaches legal adulthood between eighteen and twenty-one. This moment will become a significant touchstone in their life.
Recipe for greatness: Become just a teeny bit better than you were last year. Repeat every year.
Habit is far more dependable than inspiration. Make progress by making habits. Don’t focus on getting into shape. Focus on becoming the kind of person who never misses a workout.
Rule of 3 in conversation: To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they just said. Then again, and then once more. The third time’s answer is the one closest to the truth.
Pros make as many mistakes as amateurs; they’ve just learned how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.
Don’t be the best. Be the only.
Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them; they are waiting for you to send them an email; they are waiting for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.
The more you are interested in others the more interesting they’ll find you. To be interesting, be interested.
Updated: May 17, 2023
Don’t take it personally when someone turns you down. Assume they are like you: busy, occupied, distracted. Try again later. It’s amazing how often a second try works.
The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth to flossing.
When you are young, spend at least 6 months to 1 year living as cheaply as you can owning as little as you possibly can eating beans and rice in a tiny room or tent. That way any time you have to risk something in the future, you won’t be afraid of the "worst-case" scenario.
Trust me: There is no "them."
You lead by letting others know what you expect of them which may exceed what they themselves expect. Provide them a reputation that they can step up to.
If you ask for someone’s feedback you’ll get a critic. But if instead you ask for advice you’ll get a partner.
To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just redo it redo it, redo it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.
Shorten your to-do list by asking yourself "What is the worst that will happen if this does not get done?" Eliminate all but the disasters.
Nothing elevates a person higher than taking responsibility for their mistakes. If you mess up, fess up. It’s astounding how powerful this ownership is.
Separate the processes of creating from improving. You can’t write and edit or sculpt and polish or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgment.
If you are not falling down occasionally you are just coasting.
Updated: May 20, 2023
Perhaps the most counterintuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others the more you’ll get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.
Keep showing up. 99% of success is just showing up. In fact, most success is just persistence.
Before you are old attend as many funerals as you can bear and listen. Nobody talks about the departed’s achievements. The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving.
On vacation go to the most remote place on your itinerary first bypassing the cities and then return to the big city at the end. You’ll maximize the shock of otherness in the remote, and then later you’ll welcome the familiar conveniences of a busy city on the way back.
When you get invited to do something in the future ask yourself: Would I do this tomorrow? Not too many promises will pass that immediacy filter.
When someone is nasty, hateful, or mean toward you treat their behavior like an affliction or illness they have. That makes it easier to have empathy toward them which can soften the conflict.
That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult —if you don’t lose it.
Following your bliss is a recipe for paralysis if you don’t know what you are passionate about. A better path for most youth is "master something." Through mastery of one thing you’ll command a viewpoint to steadily find where your bliss is.
You are never too young to wonder "Why am I still doing this?" You need to have an excellent answer.
Investing small amounts of money over a long time works miracles but no one wants to get rich slow.
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
To build strong children reinforce their sense of belonging to a family by articulating exactly what is distinctive about your family. They should be able to say with pride "Our family does X."
If you are not embarrassed by your past self you have probably not grown up yet.
Outlaw the word "you" during domestic arguments.
Updated: May 20, 2023
On the way to a grand goal celebrate the smallest victories as if each one were the final goal. That way, no matter where it ends you are victorious.
Most overnight successes —in fact, any significant successes— take at least 5 years. Budget your life accordingly.
For marital bliss take turns allowing each partner to be always right.
Fear makes people do stupid things so don’t trust anything made in fear.
If you can avoid seeking the approval of others your power is limitless.
Ignore what others may be thinking of you because they aren’t thinking of you.
It is much easier to change how you think by changing your behavior than it is to change your behavior by changing how you think. Act out the change you seek.
Avoid hitting the snooze button. That’s just training you to oversleep.
Children totally accept —and crave—family rules. "In our family we have a rule for X" is the only excuse a parent needs for setting a family policy. In fact, "I have a rule for X" is the only excuse you need for your own personal policies.
Updated: May 31, 2023
If you are buying stock, the person selling it thinks it is worth less than you do. If you are selling, they think it is worth more than you do. Each time you are ready to buy or sell stock ask yourself "What do I know that they don’t?"
About 99% of the time the right time is right now.
Cultivate 12 people who love you because they are worth more than 12 million people who like you.
Always be quick to give credit and to take blame.
Be frugal in all things except in your passions. Select a few interests that you gleefully splurge on. In fact, be all-around thrifty so that you can splurge on your passions.
To manage yourself use your head; to manage others use your heart.
Dance with your hips.
Take one simple thing —almost anything— but take it extremely seriously as if it is the only thing in the world —or maybe the entire world is in it— and by taking it seriously you’ll light up the sky.
Don’t ever work for someone you don’t want to become.
Figure out what time of day you are most productive and protect that time period.
Experiences are fun and having influence is rewarding but only mattering makes us happy. Do stuff that matters.
Greatness is incompatible with optimizing in the short term. To achieve greatness requires a long view. Raise your time horizon to raise your goal.
You have to first follow the rules with diligence in order to break them productively.
Learning probability and statistics is far more useful than learning algebra and calculus.
If winning becomes too important in a game change the rules to make it more fun. Changing rules can become the new game.
The greatest teacher is called "doing."
Anything you say before the word "but" does not count.
The consistency of your endeavors (exercise, companionship, work) is more important than the quantity. Nothing beats small things done every day which is way more important than what you do occasionally.
When you lead your real job is to create more leaders not more followers.
Efficiency is highly overrated; goofing off is highly underrated. Regularly scheduled sabbaths, sabbaticals vacations, breaks, aimless walks and time off are essential for top performance of any kind. The best work ethic requires a good rest ethic.
Productivity is often a distraction. Don’t aim for better ways to get through your tasks as quickly as possible. Instead aim for better tasks that you never want to stop doing.
Your enjoyment of travel is inversely proportional to the size of your luggage. This is 100% true of backpacking. It is liberating to realize how little you really need.
The biggest lie we tell ourselves is "I don’t need to write this down because I will remember it."
Don’t keep making the same mistakes; try to make new mistakes.
Your growth as a mature being is measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations you are willing to have.
Immediately pay what you owe to vendors, workers, contractors. If you do, they will go out of their way to work with you first next time.
The four most powerful words in any negotiation should be uttered by you: "Can you do better?"
There is no such thing as being "on time." Either you are late or you are early. Your choice.
In a genuine survival situation, you can go 3 weeks without food and 3 days without water but only 3 hours without warmth or shade. So don’t worry about food. Focus on temperature and water.
When you feel like quitting just do five more: 5 more minutes, 5 more pages 5 more steps. Then repeat. Sometimes you can break through and keep going but even if you can’t, you ended five ahead. Tell yourself that you will quit tomorrow but not today.
Ask anyone you admire: Their lucky breaks happened on a detour from their main goal. So embrace detours. Life is not a straight line for anyone.
When speaking to an audience pause frequently. Pause before you say something in a new way pause after you have said something you believe is important and pause as a relief to let listeners absorb details.
You’ll get 10 times better results by elevating good behavior rather than punishing bad behavior especially in children and animals.
When you’re checking references for a job applicant, their employer may be prohibited from saying anything negative so leave or send a message that says "Get back to me if you highly recommend this applicant as super great." If they don’t reply, take that as a negative.
When you have some success, the feeling of being an imposter can be real. Who am I fooling? But when you create things that only you with your unique talents and experience can do then you are absolutely not an imposter. You are the ordained. It is your destiny to work on things that only you can do.
When you don’t know how much to pay someone for a particular task ask them, "What would be fair?" and their answer usually is.
The general strategy for real estate is to buy the worst property on the best street.
Constantly search for overlapping areas of agreement and dwell there. Disagreements will appear to be edge cases.
90% of everything is crap. If you think you don’t like opera, romance novels, TikTok, country music, vegan food NFTs, keep trying to see if you can find the 10% that is not crap.
Updated: Jun 02, 2023
Your best job will be one that you were unqualified for because it stretches you. In fact, only apply to jobs you are unqualified for.
A wise man said: Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates. At the first gate, ask yourself, "Is it true?" At the second gate ask, "Is it necessary?" At the third gate ask, "Is it kind?"
The best investing advice: Average returns, maintained for above-average periods of time will yield extraordinary results. Buy and hold.
Take the stairs.
Most articles and stories are improved significantly if you delete the first page of the manuscript. Start with the action.
Getting cheated occasionally is the small price for trusting the best of everyone because when you trust the best in others they generally treat you best.
It’s possible that a not-so-smart person who can communicate well can do much better than a super-smart person who can’t communicate well. That is good news because it is much easier to improve your communication skills than your intelligence.
For the best results with your children spend only half the money you think you should but double the time with them.
Updated: Jun 03, 2023
Art is whatever you can get away with.
When you are stuck explain your problem to others. Often simply laying out a problem will present a solution. Make "explaining the problem" part of your troubleshooting process.
When introduced to someone make eye contact and count to four or say to yourself, "I see you." You’ll both remember each other.
Your group can achieve great things way beyond your means simply by showing people that they are appreciated.
Be a pro. Back up your backup. Have at least one physical backup and one backup in the cloud. Have more than one of each. How much would you pay to retrieve all your data, photos, notes if you lost them? Backups are cheap compared to regrets.
Prescription for popular success: do something strange. Make a habit of your weird.
Your time and space are limited. Remove, give away, throw out anything that no longer gives you joy in order to make room for those that do.
To signal an emergency use the rule of 3: 3 shouts, 3 horn blasts, or 3 whistles.
Explore or optimize? Do you optimize what you know will sell or explore with something new? Do you order a restaurant dish you are sure is great (optimize) or do you try something new? Do you keep dating new folks (explore) or try to commit to someone you met? The ideal balance for exploring new things vs. optimizing those already found is ⅓. Spend ⅓ of your time on exploring and ⅔ on optimizing and deepening. As you mature it is harder to devote time to exploring because it seems unproductive but aim for ⅓.
Don’t bother fighting the old just build the new.
When negotiating don’t aim for a bigger piece of the pie; aim to create a bigger pie.
Do more of what looks like work to others but is play for you.
If you repeated what you did today 365 more times will you be where you want to be next year?
The best time to negotiate your salary for a new job is the moment after they say they want you and not before. Then it becomes a game of chicken for each side to name an amount first but it is to your advantage to get them to give a number before you do.
Reading to your children regularly is the best school they will ever get.
A superpower worth cultivating is learning from people you don’t like. It is called "humility." This is the courage to let dumb, stupid, hateful, crazy, mean people teach you something because despite their character flaws they each know something you don’t.
The trick to making wise decisions is to evaluate your choices as if you were looking back 25 years from today. What would your future self think?
To be interesting just tell your own story with uncommon honesty.
When speaking to an audience it’s better to fix your gaze on a few people than to "spray" your gaze across the room. Your eyes telegraph to others whether you really believe what you are saying.
The main reason to produce something every day is that you must throw away a lot of good work to reach the great stuff. To let it all go easily you need to be convinced that there is "more where that came from." You get that in steady production.
The real test of your character is not how you deal with adversity— although that will teach you much. The real test is how you deal with power. The only cure for power is humility and the admission that your power comes from luck. The small person believes they are superior; the superior person knows they are lucky.
It is easy to get trapped by your own success. Say no to tasks you probably won’t fail at and say yes to what you could fail at.
Unhappiness comes from wanting what others have. Happiness comes from wanting what you already have.
To get your message across follow this formula used by ad writers everywhere: simplify, simplify, simplify, then exaggerate.
The very best thing you can do for your kids is to love your spouse.
If we all threw our troubles into a big pile and we saw everyone else’s problems we would immediately grab ours back.
Your heart needs to be as educated as your mind.
Let your children choose their punishments. They’ll be tougher than you will.
Fully embrace "What is the worst that can happen?" at each juncture in life. Rehearsing your response to the "worst" can reveal it as an adventure and rob it of its power to stall you.
Updated: Jun 05, 2023
Make one to throw away. The only way to write a great book is to first write an awful book. Ditto for a movie, song, piece of furniture or anything.
Anger is not the proper response to anger. When you see someone angry you are seeing their pain. Compassion is the proper response to anger.
When you find something you really enjoy do it slowly.
Your flaws and your strengths are two poles of the same traits. For instance, there is only a tiny difference between stubbornness and perseverance or between courage and foolishness. The sole difference is in the goal. It’s stupid stubbornness and reckless foolishness if the goal does not matter, and relentless perseverance and courage if it does. To earn dignity with your flaws own up to them, and make sure you push on things that matter.
It is impossible for you to become poor by giving. It is impossible for you to become wealthy without giving.
Be extremely stingy in making promises because you must be generous in keeping them.
The best way to advise young people is to find out what they really want to do and then advise them to do it.
The big dirty secret is that everyone especially the famous are just making it up as they go along.
You choose to be lucky by believing that any setbacks are just temporary.
To lower tensions during a dispute, mirror the other person’s body language.
For a great payoff be especially curious about the things you are not interested in.
When you can’t decide ask yourself, "Which choice will pay off more later than now?" The easy choice pays off right away. The best choice will pay off at the end.
Measure your wealth not by the things you can buy but by the things that no money can buy.
To learn from your mistakes first laugh at your mistakes.
Your opinion on a contentious issue gains power when you can argue the opposite side as well as they can.
The purpose of listening is not to reply, but to hear what is not being said.
Spending as little as 15 minutes (1% of your day) on improving how you do your thing, is the most powerful way to amplify and advance your thing.
Instead of asking your child what they learned today, ask them who they helped today.
The greatest killer of happiness is comparison. If you must compare, compare yourself to you yesterday.
Your 20s are the perfect time to do a few things that are unusual, weird, bold, risky, unexplainable, crazy, unprofitable, and look nothing like "success." For the rest of your life these experiences will serve as your muse.
To succeed once focus on the outcome; to keep succeeding focus on the process that makes the outcome.
If you are stuck in life travel to a place you have never heard of.
Your best photo portrait will be taken not while you are smiling but when you are quiet a moment after you have been laughing. Use a photographer who makes you laugh.
When making plans you must allow yourself to get lost in order to find the thing you didn’t know you were looking for.
The natural state of all possessions is to need repair and maintenance. What you own will eventually own you. Choose selectively.
Commit to doing no work no business no income one day a week. Call it a sabbath (or not). Use that day for resting, recharging, and cultivating the most important things in life. Counterintuitively, this sabbath will prove to be your most productive act all week.
Embrace pronoia which is the opposite of paranoia. Choose to believe that the entire universe is conspiring behind your back to make you a success.
When you are stuck, make a long list of everything that cannot possibly work. On that list will be a seed that leads to a solution that will work.
Re-visioning the ordinary is what art, literature, and comedy do. You can elevate mundane details into magical wonders simply by noticing them.
Invent as many family rituals as you can handle with ease. Anything done on a schedule —large or small, significant or silly— can become a ritual. Repeated consistently small routines become legendary. Anticipation is key.
The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished.
Your goal is to be able to say on the day before you die that you have fully become yourself.
Revered in the tradition as the ‘crown jewels’ of the Dharma, the Buddha’s teachings on emptiness and dependent arising point and pave the way to the most beautiful possibilities for us as human beings.
Emptiness – in Pali, suññatā, in Sanskrit, śūnyatā,
To many people, and often even to meditators, the very word ‘emptiness’ can evoke emotional associations with a sense of barrenness, bleakness, meaninglessness, or even depression. But that is definitely not what Buddhist teachings mean by the word emptiness. On the contrary, they point to this realization as something wonderful, supremely joyful, and profoundly liberating. It might also be imagined that voidness is some kind of thing that can be obtained; but it is not a thing. Nor is it a state of mind or a state of consciousness.
Why do we crave? And the answer the Buddha gave and wanted us to understand is that craving is based on a fundamental mistake in the way we see and intuitively sense our selves and the whole world of inner and outer phenomena. We feel and take for granted that selves and things are as real as they seem to be, that they exist, as they appear to, in a substantial way, in and of themselves, ‘from their own side’, as it were. Their reality seems obvious. We assume, in a way that involves no thinking, that our bodies or this book, for instance, exist independently of other things and independently of the mind that knows them. We feel that a thing has an inherent existence – that its existence, its being, inheres in itself alone. Believing then that this real self can really gain or lose real things or experiences which have real qualities, grasping and aversion, and thus dukkha, arise inevitably.
We can, at least for now, define emptiness as the absence of this inherent existence that things appear to naturally and undeniably have.
To illustrate this and begin to get a hint of what it means we could consider a wooden chair thrown onto a big fire. The chair begins to burn, then gradually deform and fall apart, slowly turning to ashes. At what point exactly is it no longer a chair? Is it not the mind perceiving and conceiving of it one way or another that determines whether it is ‘a chair’ at a certain moment in time after catching fire? Its chair-ness is given by the mind, and does not reside in it independently of the mind.
Updated: Apr 26, 2023
Unquestioningly but mistakenly then, we intuitively sense and believe in this inherent existence of phenomena, in ‘real’ experiences of a ‘real’ self in a world of ‘real’ things. Now, in itself, this may strike some as a rather abstract or irrelevant piece of metaphysical philosophizing. But as alluded to earlier, the complete dissolution of this error in our sense and understanding of things is the primary thrust of the Buddha’s message of liberation. This mistaken seeing is the deepest level of what the Buddha calls the ignorance or fundamental delusion (Skt: avidya; Pali: avijjā) that we share as sentient beings. We cling, and so suffer, because of the way we see. Although it may not be obvious at first, any clinging whatsoever requires this mistaken intuitive sense – of the reality of what we are clinging to, and of the self as something real and so ‘invested in’ through clinging. But we do not cling to what we know is not real.
As the Buddha said, One who… knows with regard to the world that ‘all this is unreal’ abandons the near shore and the far, like a snake its worn-out old skin.5
To the degree, depth, and comprehensiveness that we can realize the emptiness, the illusory nature, of phenomena, to that degree, depth, and comprehensiveness is freedom then available to us. Thus in his Catuḥśataka, Āryadeva wrote, concerning this fact of the voidness of all things: When one sees reality one achieves the supreme abode. [But] even by seeing the slightest bit of it, one is better off. Therefore the wise should always cultivate such insight in contemplating phenomena.7 And thus the Buddha encouraged those who seek freedom to View the world as void.
Imagine that one day when out walking you turn a street corner and suddenly hear a loud and menacing growling nearby. A ferocious and hungry-looking tiger appears in front of you seemingly about to leap. The distress of a reaction of terror there would be quite understandable. But if you notice on closer inspection that this tiger is not real, that it is actually a holographic projection with accompanying sound recording from a nearby hologram projector, the fear and the problem simply dissolve. The release from the suffering of the situation here comes not from simply being mindful or accepting of the tiger so much as from the realization of its illusory nature. It is this that hopefully your mindfulness can reveal. And such an understanding will not seem abstract and irrelevant; it will matter. Sometimes it is assumed that realizations of voidness will create some kind of ‘disconnection from reality’ or ‘ungroundedness’ in a person. But here we can see that to realize that this tiger is illusory is, in fact, to be more ‘grounded in reality’ than otherwise; and that it will make a considerable difference to how you feel. We can even say that from the point of view of what brings release from dukkha, the most profoundly significant and fundamental thing to understand about this tiger is its emptiness.
As Nāgārjuna wrote: Whenever there is belief that things are real… desire and hatred are generated… Without that belief no defilements can occur… And when this is completely understood, all views and afflictions dissolve… [This] the supreme knower of truth [the Buddha] has taught.
To say that all things are void, however, is not to say that they don’t exist at all. Emptiness is not nihilism. Clearly and undeniably there are appearances of things and those appearances follow reliable laws and function in terms of predictable cause and effect. It turns out, rather, that to see that something is empty is to see that it is beyond the categories of ‘existing’ or ‘not existing’. Asked by the monk Kaccāyana about Right View, the Buddha answered: That things exist, O Kaccāyana, is one extreme [of view]. That they do not exist is another. Rejecting both these extremes, the Tathāgata points out the Dhamma via the middle.
The concern that emptiness implies a kind of moral nihilism, an attitude that ‘we can do whatever we want because everything is empty’, and that following this path we will not care for the plight of others and the world, we can also test through our own practice. But we will find that as insight into these teachings deepens, we become, as a matter of course, more easily moved to concern for the world, and more sensitive to ethics and the consequences of our actions. Opening to voidness should definitely not lead to a lack of care, to indifference, cold aloofness, or a closing of the heart. If I find that my practice is somehow making me less compassionate, less generous, less caring about ethics, then something is wrong in my understanding or at the very least out of balance in my approach, and I need to modify how I am practising. Generally speaking, and although it may at first seem paradoxical, as we travel this meditative journey into emptiness we find that the more we taste the voidness of all things, the more loving-kindness, compassion, generosity, and deep care for the world open naturally as a consequence in the heart.
And as we learn to deepen our understanding through meditation, we discover that not only does seeing into emptiness bring a rare and crucial freedom, sweet relief, joy, and love, there is in the seeing of it more and more a sense of beauty, of mystery. It becomes indeed a mystical understanding. We uncover a dimension of wonder in things that we hadn’t known before, because the voidness of things is something truly magical when experienced deeply.
As the Zen saying puts it: "True emptiness equals wondrous being."
Likewise, when we hear or read that what is meant by the voidness of a thing is simply the fact of its dependence on causes and conditions, the central import of this dependence on mind may go unrecognized. While at one level it is certainly an accurate statement to say that something is empty because it depends on various elements and conditions, it is vital to open out completely just what this means.
It is this dependence of all phenomena on the mind that is most significant and that needs to be understood. Teachings on voidness are offered in the service of liberation, yet it may be that an explanation of emptiness as meaning ‘dependence on causes and conditions’ is grasped in only a limited way, and so yields only very limited freedom, if any at all, and misses the profundity of what is being communicated. If, for example, I own an expensive china vase, my knowledge of the many and rare conditions which had to come together for its creation – the particular mix of clays sourced perhaps from various barely accessible mountains, all the conditions involved in the formation of those clays over time, the conditions for their extraction, all the conditions involved in the development and handing down of the techniques used by the artisan who crafted it, the conditions sustaining the life of that artisan, and so on – rather than leading to my letting go of attachment to the vase, might actually increase my attachment to it. Acknowledging dependency on causes and conditions merely at this level of materiality will only sometimes bring a release of clinging. It will often do little to undermine our sense of the reality of objects. And as we have explained, it is this belief in their reality which supports our clinging, and so our dukkha. A level of insight that sees the dependency of phenomena on the mind, however, will open an understanding of their being beyond existing and not existing, and so bring freedom much more powerfully.
Imagine that you enter a room that is dark except for a lamp in one corner. There you see your friend, huddled next to the lamp in a state of great anxiety and staring transfixed at the wall opposite. "A wolf! A wolf!", he is whimpering in fear. Turning to look at the wall, you see a large silhouette of a wolf but very quickly realize that it is just the shadow of your friend’s hands, cast by the lamplight on the wall. In his fear he is completely unaware of his hands or how he is holding them, or the fact that the wolf shape is merely their shadow. What will you say to him? The ramifications for freedom here are of course similar to those in the case of the holographic tiger. This illustration has the slight advantage, however, of implicating our involvement somehow in fabricating the illusion and the appearances of things. In this scenario, although your friend may have been trying to ‘be with’ the wolf, ‘accept’ its presence, even remind himself of the impermanence of all things, at the deepest and most significant level ‘insight’ and ‘wisdom’ here must mean seeing that the wolf is a fabrication that he himself has been fabricating. Pointing this out to him would also be the most compassionate response to his plight that you could offer him, if he was ready to hear it and to let go of the wolf.
If we are not careful, we may simply assume a common default position – happily admitting that some experiences and phenomena are somehow fabricated (illusory), while tacitly, or even more explicitly, presuming others to be true (not fabricated, not illusory).
It is not that while everything else is fabricated by the mind, the mind itself is somehow real, a really existing basis for the fabrication. The mind, whether conceived as mental processes or ‘Awareness’ – even the awareness that we can know as vast and unperturbed, that seems natural and effortless – is also fabricated in the process. We find, in the end, that there is no ‘ground’ to fabrication. And as if that were not cause enough for amazement, we eventually also recognize, taking this exploration of dependent arising deeper and deeper still, that even this profound realization of the fabricated nature of all phenomena is only a relative truth. Fabrication itself is empty too.
What we come to understand is that the way things truly are is beautifully beyond the capacities of our conception. Practising with dependent arising forms a thread, though, that can be followed to such great depths. For in doing so, insights of greater and greater profundity are progressively opened, until this thread ultimately dissolves even itself. It leads and opens beyond itself.
Updated: Apr 27, 2023
I have found, in my own practice and through teaching, that the realization of emptiness deepens and brings more felt fruits in life if it is approached not only gradually, but also primarily in relation to whatever is immediate in our experience, including, and even especially, any dukkha that may be present in the moment – these sensations, this emotion, these thoughts, and also this physical pain, this heartache, this contracted self-view – learning to see their emptiness, and then deepening and widening the range of experienced phenomena we can recognize to be empty. As we learn to let go of grosser dukkha and experiences through realizing their voidness, meditation naturally refines. Then we can work skilfully with more subtle dukkha and phenomena, and insight too becomes correspondingly subtle.
We might emphasize too the importance of kindness in meditation in general. And in particular, the gradually transformative and inexorable healing power that comes through devotion to regular loving-kindness (mettā) practice should not be underestimated. Here again, it is absolutely vital to find ways of cultivating mettā that work for you. There is no one ‘right’ way of doing that. Creativity, playfulness, and experimentation are indispensable. Often untapped, there is also an equally great power accessible in heartfully connecting with our own deepest aspirations. Self-criticism tends to squash these aspirations and obscure our connection with them. Conversely though, tuning into and sustaining a focus on the felt force of these aspirations within oneself – in ways that allow them to gather strength, and allow the being to open to that strength – can significantly undermine the dynamics of self-criticism.
As we begin to experience the liberating effects of insight and the heart is touched, the whole process starts to take on a momentum of its own. While at first these may have seemed such strange ways of looking at things, and still probably involve some effort, the mind begins to gravitate towards exposing the emptiness of this and that, of situations and perspectives that we would have solidified before. To the heart is revealed a sense of beauty in the open, space-like nature of things. More able to shift ways of looking, less locked into any perspective, it wants to see the emptiness.
For now, let us take as a loose definition of insight: any realization, understanding, or way of seeing things that brings, to any degree, a dissolution of, or a decrease in, dukkha.
Updated: Apr 28, 2023
Just knowing, for example, that dukkha, grasping, or reactivity is present is hardly ever enough to free us from it even in that moment. And it certainly will not be enough to exhaust or eradicate the latent tendencies of craving and aversion. What is needed is an understanding that cuts or melts something or other more fundamental on which that dukkha relies, thus eradicating, or at least diminishing, that dukkha.
Insight, then, may loosely be described as any ‘seeing’ that frees.
You ‘have’ or ‘get’ an insight. There is an ‘aha!’ moment: suddenly or gradually, you see something, you realize something, and it makes a difference to the dukkha. Such an insight arose as a result of mindfulness, or of qualities like calm or investigation. This mode of insight practice is in contrast to another mode in which we can also work at times, where insight itself is more a starting point, a cause, more itself the method. In this second mode of insight practice we more deliberately attempt to sustain a ‘way of looking’ at experience – a view of, or relationship with, experience – that is already informed by a certain insight or other. Here, rather than ‘getting’ (or hoping to ‘get’) an insight, we are using an insight. This does not mean merely to ‘think something insightful’, for instance that "all things are impermanent" – thinking may or may not be involved – but actually to shift into a mode where we are looking through the lens of a particular insight (looking deliberately for and at the impermanence and change in everything, for example).
Updated: May 03, 2023
Sooner or later we come to realize that perhaps the most fundamental, and most fundamentally important, fact about any experience is that it depends on the way of looking. That is to say, it is empty.4 Other than what we can perceive through different ways of looking, there is no ‘objective reality’ existing independently; and there is no way of looking that reveals some ‘objective reality’. And as we shall also see, in states of ‘just being’ which we might imagine are devoid of self, a subtle self is actually being constructed anyway.5 This fact too needs to be recognized. Generally speaking, a full conviction that all this is the case will only be available through the deepening realizations which come mostly as emptiness practices progress. It must be pointed out, however, that all that is needed right now is an acknowledgment that different ways of looking are, at least sometimes, possible. Together with a willingness to experiment with various ways of looking, and to notice their effects on dukkha and on appearances, this will be enough to gradually unfold more profound insights.
It may also be that in the past a meditator has tried at times to adopt an approach somewhat similar to what is being described here, but felt discouraged for some reason and discontinued it. Perhaps there was a feeling of quickly becoming a little tired of engaging ways of looking deliberately, and then wanting to revert to a practice of ‘just being with things as they appear’. Two things can be said about this here. First, as we shall explain, it is relatively easy to learn to minimize such fatigue – through learning the skills of subtle responsiveness to effort levels; and also through learning to include and enjoy the feelings such as release, freedom, and ease that insight ways of looking open. Second, in the context of this approach to insight, a temporary reversion to basic mindfulness practice is not necessarily a problem in itself. Significantly however, without conceiving of practice in terms of ways of looking, it will be very likely that this reversion becomes a default and de facto reversion back to the assumption of ‘being with things as they are’, without realizing it.
This mode of approach, of actively cultivating a range of skilful ways of looking, is premised, then, on the understanding that we are always and inevitably engaged in some way of looking at or relating to experience anyway. But we are not usually aware of this fact. Nor are we usually aware of how we are looking – what exactly the view is – at any time.
Now crucially, in any moment we are either engaging a way of looking at experience, self, and the world, that is creating, perpetuating, or compounding dukkha to some degree, or we are looking in a way that, to some degree, frees.
My experience in my own practice, in teaching, and in talking and listening to others, is that meditations using only the first mode of insight – that is, relying mostly on insight as a ‘result’ – will very probably not be enough on their own to overcome the force of deeply engrained habitual delusion that perceives and intuitively feels things to have inherent existence.
The overwhelming tendency is to unconsciously impute inherent existence to things, not to see emptiness. We need, therefore, to practise views that actually dissolve or remove this illusion of inherent existence.
1. A gradually deepening inquiry into fabrication – of the self and of all experience Here we are developing a certain kind of understanding of all experience, including meditation experiences. We begin by noticing the range of variability in our perceptions of self and the world. Sometimes I perceive myself or some thing one way, and at other times quite differently; and yet each time, what I perceive seems true, truly how I am, or how this thing is. What, though, is the ‘real’ way any thing is? I realize that how things appear always depends on how I look. And I realize too, moreover, that I cannot find or arrive at a way of looking that reveals how a thing really is in itself.
More than this though, as mentioned we can gradually develop ways of looking that fabricate, in this very moment, less and less dukkha. Clearly such skills will be helpful for us. The insights uncovered, however, are even more crucial. We realize, first, that dukkha depends on the way of looking. And, as briefly alluded to above, with deepening exploration we find we can discover and cultivate ways of looking that fabricate not only progressively less dukkha, but also less and less self, and eventually, as we shall explain, even less and less experience. Not to try and stay forever in some kind of unconstructed state, as if that were even possible, but to understand something wondrous about all experience in a way that fundamentally frees our whole sense of existence.
2. Realizing the impossibility of inherent existence Here we are engaging in a thorough search for the self or for the essence of any thing. Such a search in practice considers and exhausts all the possible places or ways that it might exist, and so reveals that it simply cannot exist in the way that we perceive and feel it to. We see for ourselves and our conviction grows: not only is it unfindable, but it is impossible for it to exist with inherent existence as it seems to. In these kinds of practices, the way of looking hunts for, and then exposes the lack of, inherent existence in one or all phenomena. It then works to sustain the view of that lack, that emptiness, as it continues to regard that phenomenon or all phenomena.
In addition to these two more formal groups of approaches, it is important to mention a third. For it is very possible at times that something in the heart and mind – we could call it intuitive wisdom – feels the intimations of a different sense of things, intuits somehow and to some degree the truth of emptiness. Sometimes the perspective opens up dramatically and very forcefully; at other times much more faintly – perhaps we feel a subtle quality that infuses appearances with a suggestion, a whisper, of their voidness, or even of a kind of silence, a transcendent and mystical dimension, that seems to lie ‘beyond’ those very appearances, yet that somehow ‘shines’ timelessly through them, changing our relationship with them, rendering them diaphanous, less substantial.
Vital to our path and of uncountable benefit is the quality of samādhi. This word samādhi is usually translated as ‘concentration’, but in many respects that does not convey the fullness, or the beauty, of what it really means. Therefore we shall keep it in the original language throughout this book. For samādhi involves more than just holding the attention fixed on an object with a minimum of wavering. And it certainly does not necessarily imply a spatially narrowed focus of the mind on a small area. Instead here we will emphasize that what characterizes states of samādhi is some degree of collectedness and unification of mind and body in a sense of well-being. Included in any such state will also be some degree of harmonization of the internal energies of the mind and body. Steadiness of mind, then, is only one part of that. Such a unification in well-being can come about in many ways. In this book we will embrace in our meaning of samādhi both states that have arisen through holding the attention on one object, as well as those that have arisen through insight ways of looking. And we will also include both states where the attention is more narrowly focused on one object, and those where the awareness is more open. This chapter, however, primarily explores some more general aspects of those practices that do involve holding the attention to one thing (for example, the breath, mettā, or body) as a way of developing samādhi.
And although, as the Buddha did, we can certainly delineate a range of discrete states of samādhi (the jhānas), in this present context let us rather view it mostly as a continuum: of depth of meditation, of well-being, of non-entanglement, and of refinement of consciousness. Among other benefits suitable to our purpose, there is also less chance then that the relationship with practice becomes fraught through wondering too much if one ‘has it’ or ‘doesn’t have it’, is ‘succeeding’ or ‘failing’, is ‘in’ or ‘out’. Instead of relating to samādhi practice in terms of measurement or achievement of some goal, it is usually much more helpful, more kind, and less self-alienating to conceive of it as a caring, both in the present and in the long term, for the heart and mind.
Among its many benefits, a dedication to samādhi can bring a certain ‘juiciness’ to practice and to life, and this can provide a vital resource of wholesome and profound nourishment. In particular, the well-being that it includes can be crucial. There may be times, for example, when we know it would be best to let go of an unhelpful attachment but somehow we just can’t. Perhaps at a certain level we feel somewhat desperate, and unable to imagine that we could be okay without this thing that we are clinging to. Perhaps even unconsciously we worry that letting it go would render us bereft of what we believe we need for our happiness or even our survival. If, however, we can have access to, and develop, a reservoir of profound inner well-being, it makes letting go of what is not so helpful much easier. We feel that we have enough, so letting go is not so scary. Over the long term, repeated and regular immersion in such well-being supports the emergence of a steadiness of genuine confidence. We come to know, beyond doubt, that happiness is possible for us in this life. And because this deep happiness we are experiencing is originating from within us, we begin to feel less vulnerable to and dependent on the uncertainties of changing external conditions. We may also find that a relatively frequent taste of some degree of samādhi helps our confidence in the path to become much more firmly established. Gaining confidence in these ways will have a profound effect on the sense we have of our own lives and their potential, without making us aloof.
We could in fact list a whole host of potential blessings that samādhi can bring which likewise overflow from practice well beyond the meditation session or retreat. Deep rest and rejuvenation of the whole being, emotional (and, at times, physical) healing, vitality, openings of the intuition, emotional strength that is yet pliable, increase in the heart’s capacity and in our availabilities to others, steadiness of energy and of commitment in creative and service work – these, and more, are part of the broad range of long-term benefits that samādhi can make available to the whole of one’s life. In general, to the degree that we can find ways to nourish this quality of samādhi, we will find that it nourishes us profoundly and widely in turn.
Updated: May 12, 2023
For even before the arising of any well-being or much steadiness of attention, beautiful and always helpful qualities are being strengthened and developed: patience, perseverance, and mindfulness, for example, as well as the kind of ‘muscle’ or power of mind that gradually accrues on returning over and over to our meditation theme. Hopefully too we are cultivating kindness in our attitude to our mind, and also gently erasing the habit of judging ourselves. These seeds too are being sown, and it may be that all these qualities are just as significant in the big picture of our practice as any others we have discussed. Consciously acknowledging and reminding yourself of this bigger picture of what is being nourished before a formal meditation session, and as you work on samādhi, can be very helpful in keeping the citta buoyant and inspired, and in preventing the tightness or dryness that comes when the view of practice is contracted in any way.
But it is important to recognize too that, to a certain extent, samādhi is itself also dependent on happiness. Except in rare instances, and then usually not for very long, we cannot force the mind into stilling. The process is aided more by our taking care of a certain degree of well-being that can then serve as a foundation for samādhi to develop. Thus, whether on or off retreat, it can be immensely helpful to give some attention to nurturing, just as much as possible, the kinds of elements that contribute to a climate supportive for the ongoing deepening of samādhi practice. Qualities such as: • inner and outer kindness • some simplicity • a degree of receptivity, connection, and openness to beauty and also to nature • a love of the Dharma • appreciation and gratitude for whatever and whoever is around you and supporting your practice – these may not seem relevant at first glance, but they all nourish the citta profoundly. Caring for and supporting these qualities and attitudes should not be overlooked then, for they are indispensable to the cultivation of samādhi. It is definitely not simply a matter of ‘trying harder’.
Allowing and encouraging a quality of play and experimentation in practice is vital, and vitalizing. I can’t emphasize this enough. Usually that’s how we learn best as human beings, and it keeps things from getting rigid and feeling heavy.
Central to the progress of practice, and particularly of samādhi, is our whole relationship with ‘the five hindrances’ – sense desire, ill-will or aversion, dullness and drowsiness, restlessness and worry, and doubt.
Further, if care is not taken, the habit for most is that the mind gets swept up by the perspectives of a hindrance when it is present. We believe what they say, their ‘take’ on our selves and the world. It is as if a hindrance is like a seed that has tiny hooks, and these hooks are looking for something, anything, to sink into, to suck sustenance from. When they find something, then they can grow and the whole complex of the hindrance and the thing they have hooked into grows too.
Over time though, we learn to recognize the wily ways of the hindrances and need not be taken for a ride to such an extent. We understand what is happening, and buy into their perspectives much less.
It is crucial to realize that a dedication to cultivating samādhi necessarily involves working with the hindrances.
And if we can maintain a stance that, no matter what the conditions, asks always, "What can I learn here?", the times of hindrances in samādhi practice can be as genuinely valuable as the times that feel good. As we shall shortly see, even the hindrances are useful for insight into emptiness.
A state of samādhi is essentially a state of energized calm.
Although it might feel relatively pleasant, too much calmness without enough energy is a kind of subtly dull state, sometimes referred to as ‘sinking’. The mind and the body can feel slightly heavy when this is the case and the quality of brightness is not so manifest in the mind. On the other hand, too much energy without the calm to balance it can create a subtle form of restlessness, often referred to as ‘drifting’. Here, the body does not feel so settled, the attention may skit off the object more frequently, and there seem to be more thoughts or images being thrown up by the mind. Noticing these subtler manifestations of the hindrances, and playing and experimenting to discover some of the many possible ways to energize or to calm the energy body in meditation are important strands in enabling practice to deepen.
For practitioners who already have a little experience in meditation, probably the most common difficulty and the biggest hurdle encountered in trying to develop samādhi is the feeling of tightness that can arise at times, both emotionally and physically. Indeed it is often a recurring experience of tightness that causes a person to despair and give up samādhi practice in favour of another kind of approach – usually of ‘just letting things be’.
First: Tightness is a state of contraction of the mind and body energy. So too, in fact, is any restlessness – gross or subtle (as in drifting) – and any dullness or drowsiness (including sinking). It can be very helpful, therefore, when any of these are present in samādhi practice, to find ways of opening up more space for the awareness, without abandoning the primary object. Awareness of the whole body is one way this can be effected. Even if you are working with a method of breath meditation, for example, that involves a spatially narrow focus of attention as ‘foreground’, it is often beneficial to lightly maintain, as the ‘background’ to this ‘foreground’, a global awareness permeating fully and ‘filling out’ the whole body in an alive way. Among other advantages, this will automatically introduce more of a sense of space into the meditation, which can help to ease the contraction of tightness when it arises.
Second: Tightness is usually a result of, and indicates, slightly too much effort in the concentration at that time. Similarly, a slight over-efforting can underlie both sinking and drifting. There, however, the situation can be a little more complex, because both sinking and drifting may arise at any time as a result of marginally too much effort and also of too little effort. It can be difficult to tell, for instance, whether this drifting state that is present right now is caused by ‘squeezing’ the mind slightly too hard, so that, like a gas under pressure, it actually becomes more agitated and generates even more random thoughts and images; or whether the object in our attention needs to be held a little more firmly, and with more intimacy, to prevent its wandering. Again, we need a willingness to experiment, to play and respond.
In any case, it is necessary to gradually learn to include in our awareness a sensitivity to our moment-to-moment level and quality of effort. This is part of the art of samādhi practice. Such sensitivity and responsiveness to the effort level is not something we ‘grow beyond’ and then forget about. In fact, it only gets more subtle. Nor should we expect to find, in any one meditation session, a balanced quality and level of effort and hope to keep it statically there, on ‘cruise control’, with the ‘effort dial’ set at ‘5’. Part of the refinement, and beauty too, of this art of samādhi practice is the moment-to-moment play of sensitivity and responsiveness…
What can help greatly in developing this subtler sensitivity to effort levels is, again, an awareness of the whole body and how it feels. Even a slight over-efforting the body will reveal, through tension or tightness somewhere in particular, or through a subtle sense of contraction of the space of the whole body. Relaxing the body in those moments can be helpful, helping organically to relax the effort in turn. More ease is opened in the practice in that moment, and this supports the samādhi. Additionally though, since tightness is often an indicator of a degree of over-effort, we need not view its presence only as a difficulty. We can actually use the feeling of tightness when it appears somewhere in the body as a helpful signal to slightly back off the effort in…
Updated: May 15, 2023
A light feather faintly brushing, touching so delicately the sensations of the breath or the body can take the meditation deeper at times than a laser beam of probing. Sometimes ‘less is more’.
In contrast to a concentration of the attention on a small area, another way of working is to focus primarily on the wider field of feeling of the whole body – the felt sense, the ‘texture’, ‘tone’, vibration, and energy of the whole space of the body – and to fill that space with an aliveness of awareness, of presence, that permeates the entire body. • This feeling of the energy of the whole body space can be made the sole focus of attention. • Alternatively, it may be mixed with the awareness of another object such as the breath or mettā – by paying attention to the changing effects of the breath or the mettā on the body’s energy field. • Either way, there will be a tendency for the attention thus deployed to keep shrinking to a smaller area. It will therefore be necessary to keep stretching the field of awareness out, expanding it so that attention pervades and encompasses the whole field of the body. • Oftentimes just remaining lightly, delicately open and sensitive to the whole body in this way begins to reveal a subtle pleasantness to the way the space of the body feels. It can be extremely helpful to learn to ‘tune into’ this, and to enjoy it. • Of course, many times we will find on inspection that there is a mixture of both pleasant and unpleasant ‘frequencies’, or a range of qualities, coexisting in the tone and vibration of the body space. With practice we can learn, if we wish, to tune into whichever of these frequencies we choose. Attuning to and enjoying the more pleasant frequencies in the mix is an immensely helpful skill to learn and very valuable in fostering samādhi.
Updated: May 20, 2023
And when there is a state of agitation or anxiety, we can play with ways of breathing or practising the mettā, and also ways of sensing the breath or mettā, that feel as if they soothe the subtle body and smooth out its energies. Delicately tuning into the felt experience of these qualities of soothing or smoothing-out will help them to gradually gain strength, and help the agitated energies to slowly subside.
The imagination, too, can be skilfully employed in order to gently encourage this sense of pleasure or well-being in the subtle body. While simultaneously pervading the whole body space with an awareness sensitive to the texture and tone of the energy of that whole field, it is possible, for example, to imagine the subtle body as a body of radiant light; then to open to and explore what that feels like. Any image formed in this way does not necessarily need to appear in precise detail, or even completely distinctly. It is, rather, the energetic sense of pleasure or well-being which it supports that is primary, since this is what primarily supports the samādhi.
Likewise, one may experiment with imagining various luminous lines of energy in the body – for example, between the perineum and the crown of the head, or from the lower belly out through the legs – and sense how any such line of energy supports the whole body to feel upright, open, and energized. The imagination here may be visual or kinaesthetic, or a combination of the two. And it need not always follow exactly the anatomical contours of the physical body or its posture. For instance, if sitting or kneeling with the legs crossed or bent, the luminous lines of energy imagined radiating from the lower belly or base of the spine need not bend…
If there is tension, or even pain, in one area of the body, rather than always conceiving of it in anatomical or physiological terms, it can sometimes be more helpful to conceive of and perceive that area in energetic terms, and to play with the perception of…
There are many ways we may discover to bring about some sense of energetic openness and well-being in the subtle body. And as it is accessed more and more, this altered body feeling is one that eventually we can ‘remember’ and learn to deliberately recall – to summon by a gentle intention. We can then move, usually gradually, into the focused steadiness of samādhi from that…
Whether it has arisen through being deliberately recalled, or through focusing on the breath or mettā, there are again a number of possible ways of using the sense of pleasure or comfort to help guide the citta into the unification of samādhi. • Once it is easily sustaining for some minutes, we can gently begin to take that bodily feeling of well-being as the primary object of our focus. It is important not to ‘snatch at it’, but rather to ease the attention toward it gracefully, and gradually…
• The attention can at times probe it, burrowing into one area of the pleasure, perhaps where it feels strongest. • Or, at other times, a mode of ‘receiving’ it, really trying to open up to it, can be employed. • Either way, one attempts all the while to remain intimate with its texture, and actually to relish the pleasure as much as possible. In these ways (and in others that can be discovered) we can delicately work to gently sustain the bodily feeling of well-being, and to absorb the attention more fully into it. • Alternatively, it is…
Along with the steadiness of the feelings of well-being, and of the attention on those feelings, we are also gently aiming at eventually having the whole space of the body suffused by and saturated with the feeling of well-being or pleasure. Sometimes this happens by itself.
Having said that, it is in fact also possible at times to gently encourage the feeling of pleasure or well-being to spread – for instance by simply opening up the space of the awareness to embrace a larger area of the body. Sometimes then the pleasant feeling will automatically start to expand to fill that space.
Alternatively, the breath may be used to gently ‘massage’ the sense of well-being into other areas of the body. Although there is not space to enter into a full description of possibilities here, with practice the breath energy may be felt and perceived throughout the body, entering and flowing in all kinds of ways beyond the strictly anatomical movement of air into the wind-pipe and lungs. We can learn to sense the breath energy in and through the whole body. And as alluded to earlier, the breath energy can be mixed with the pleasure, so that the perceived movements of breath in the whole body space move and spread the perception of the pleasure. • There is also, again, no reason why one cannot just imagine the feeling of well-being permeating the body space more fully. The perception then often begins to follow the image.
Mindful observation will reveal that any craving or clinging is always accompanied by, and reflected in, blocks and knots in the subtle body. Now, insight, we have said, cuts that on which dukkha depends. And dukkha depends on craving. Thus, according to our definition, insight is any way of looking that releases craving.
Updated: May 23, 2023
that I see. Attachment to the pleasure of samādhi usually only occurs if experiences of samādhi are rare. A meditator may then hanker after it unskilfully because, even if they are told they shouldn’t, and even if they know it is impermanent, they do not have the confidence that such pleasure, though not permanent, is regularly accessible. When we know we can fairly readily experience that kind of pleasure again, we naturally relax our clinging, letting it go when it dissolves.
that I see. Attachment to the pleasure of samādhi usually only occurs if experiences of samādhi are rare. A meditator may then hanker after it unskilfully because, even if they are told they shouldn’t, and even if they know it is impermanent, they do not have the confidence that such pleasure, though not permanent, is regularly accessible. When we know we can fairly readily experience that kind of pleasure again, we naturally relax our clinging, letting it go when it dissolves.
A second possible way of becoming attached to samādhi is through pride – believing that we are somehow special because we can experience, even at will, such states of bliss and peace. But this kind of pride usually does not last very long at all. With dedicated practice and a minimum of intelligent attention, a meditator sees fairly quickly that samādhi is essentially dependent on the right conditions coming together in the mind and body.
A second possible way of becoming attached to samādhi is through pride – believing that we are somehow special because we can experience, even at will, such states of bliss and peace. But this kind of pride usually does not last very long at all. With dedicated practice and a minimum of intelligent attention, a meditator sees fairly quickly that samādhi is essentially dependent on the right conditions coming together in the mind and body.
The third and, as mentioned, most insidious way that meditation can provide an object of attachment pertains as much to states of insight meditation as it does to states of samādhi. For there can easily arise attachment to the view opened up or implied through any state or insight.
The third and, as mentioned, most insidious way that meditation can provide an object of attachment pertains as much to states of insight meditation as it does to states of samādhi. For there can easily arise attachment to the view opened up or implied through any state or insight.
None of the views that are implied or impressed upon us through any of these states, however, (and certainly none of those states themselves), is complete in the depth and comprehensiveness of its insight. None is the final truth. Though necessarily relying on these awesome perceptions and openings and the partial understandings they bring, we will still need to understand just how exactly they are fabricated. It is this that will deliver for us the fuller understanding of the emptiness of all things. And it is to the very beginning practices of this journey of understanding that we now turn.
None of the views that are implied or impressed upon us through any of these states, however, (and certainly none of those states themselves), is complete in the depth and comprehensiveness of its insight. None is the final truth. Though necessarily relying on these awesome perceptions and openings and the partial understandings they bring, we will still need to understand just how exactly they are fabricated. It is this that will deliver for us the fuller understanding of the emptiness of all things. And it is to the very beginning practices of this journey of understanding that we now turn.
Especially when supported by a devotion to cultivating samādhi, the meditation practices that reveal just how experience is fabricated are immensely powerful. So too are those practices that expose the impossibility of any thing’s inherent existence. When developed, such practices are capable of cutting through the reifications of avijjā at the deepest levels and with respect to all things. All possible notions of self and all phenomena can thus be seen to be empty, including even those which seem to be the most fundamental givens of existence – awareness, space, time and the present moment, for instance – where subtle reification is usually unrecognized and unquestioningly entrenched.
Especially when supported by a devotion to cultivating samādhi, the meditation practices that reveal just how experience is fabricated are immensely powerful. So too are those practices that expose the impossibility of any thing’s inherent existence. When developed, such practices are capable of cutting through the reifications of avijjā at the deepest levels and with respect to all things. All possible notions of self and all phenomena can thus be seen to be empty, including even those which seem to be the most fundamental givens of existence – awareness, space, time and the present moment, for instance – where subtle reification is usually unrecognized and unquestioningly entrenched.
But there are many situations in life where a significant degree of dukkha can be released through recognizing voidnesses that are not so hard to see at all. Through just a small shift in, or refinement of, our way of looking we realize that some element or other involved is a fabrication, and that it has no inherent existence.
But there are many situations in life where a significant degree of dukkha can be released through recognizing voidnesses that are not so hard to see at all. Through just a small shift in, or refinement of, our way of looking we realize that some element or other involved is a fabrication, and that it has no inherent existence.
The whole area of social conventions is one in which we can experience all kinds of suffering. Yet often with just a little reflection we can recognize the emptiness of some convention that we have reified, and this realization can bring some freedom.
The whole area of social conventions is one in which we can experience all kinds of suffering. Yet often with just a little reflection we can recognize the emptiness of some convention that we have reified, and this realization can bring some freedom.
It will probably be helpful in fact. But when the patently fabricated nature of countries is not recognized, the concept of ‘this country’, or ‘my country’, can gain an overwhelming force and solidity in human minds. The belief in the country as something real can give rise to a strength and rigidity of feeling beyond even the biological impulse for survival. How much violence and suffering in human history has there been with roots in this reification? How much willingness to kill and to die dependent on such a belief?
It will probably be helpful in fact. But when the patently fabricated nature of countries is not recognized, the concept of ‘this country’, or ‘my country’, can gain an overwhelming force and solidity in human minds. The belief in the country as something real can give rise to a strength and rigidity of feeling beyond even the biological impulse for survival. How much violence and suffering in human history has there been with roots in this reification? How much willingness to kill and to die dependent on such a belief?
Although not always easy to recognize, it is important to acknowledge too how often our opinions and our feelings about many things are conditioned by the views prevalent in the society we live in. Particularly significant in this regard is the conditioning of our sense of values, and thus also of our sense of what is valuable. In itself, cultural conditioning is not necessarily wrong. But it matters what we are ‘taught’ in this way. We are exposed to almost incessant messages from our society about what is of value, and much of this, while actually not serving our genuine happiness, is also more insidiously powerful than we might assume. The endless tidal-wave of advertising that manipulates values and desires, and thus culture, in consumerist economies is only one, glaringly obvious, example.
Although not always easy to recognize, it is important to acknowledge too how often our opinions and our feelings about many things are conditioned by the views prevalent in the society we live in. Particularly significant in this regard is the conditioning of our sense of values, and thus also of our sense of what is valuable. In itself, cultural conditioning is not necessarily wrong. But it matters what we are ‘taught’ in this way. We are exposed to almost incessant messages from our society about what is of value, and much of this, while actually not serving our genuine happiness, is also more insidiously powerful than we might assume. The endless tidal-wave of advertising that manipulates values and desires, and thus culture, in consumerist economies is only one, glaringly obvious, example.
Fifteen thousand years ago, my prowess as a hunter of woolly mammoths would probably have accorded me more status in the culture than my ability to handle the kinds of abstract mathematical concepts involved, for example, in twelfth grade differential calculus. I need to see: one is not inherently more valuable than another; I am not inherently worth more or less dependent on these abilities. If I can see this, I open a door to a more natural sense of self-worth, and to a degree of freedom.
Fifteen thousand years ago, my prowess as a hunter of woolly mammoths would probably have accorded me more status in the culture than my ability to handle the kinds of abstract mathematical concepts involved, for example, in twelfth grade differential calculus. I need to see: one is not inherently more valuable than another; I am not inherently worth more or less dependent on these abilities. If I can see this, I open a door to a more natural sense of self-worth, and to a degree of freedom.
There are probably countless examples, large and small, where it is possible to shake off the shackles of the dominant view and expose a lack of intrinsic truth to some assumption or ideology that may be widely agreed on in our social world. Sometimes the belief in a value system is shattered in an instant of penetrating insight. Other times it is melted away more gradually. Either way, although undoubtedly we do not need meditation to reflect in the kinds of ways described, it does take a certain boldness to trust in one’s own capacity to question views and to think for oneself. And while these qualities of boldness and trust are dependent on and empowered by many factors, let us mention a couple which may actually be supported by a more meditative approach. The first is including in one’s awareness the sense of strength as it manifests in the body. This sense can often be neglected, especially if we are not accustomed to having faith in ourselves in this way. But noticing, allowing, inhabiting, and even enjoying the bodily feelings that accompany the sense of confidence in our own seeing will greatly help that conviction, self-trust, and strength to take root and flourish in the being. Even if these bodily feelings are only fleeting at first, it can be a significant step in their consolidation to learn to open to them in this way. Then as our sense of strength and independence grows, it becomes easier for us to see that, just because most people around us believe it, we don’t have to fall for any view that has solidified and raised what is only a convention to the status of an objective truth. Connected to this, the second helpful element is a skilful awareness, and holding, of any difficult emotions that are evoked by what is being considered. In order for freedom to be possible, it is vital not to ignore feelings such as anger, hurt, or powerlessness that may be associated with an issue being reflected on. Such emotions may well need caring for, in various ways, as part of the process of liberating the mind. Equally though, it is important not to sink in feelings like these, or to be consistently overwhelmed by them, or pulled down into a state where there is no space or opportunity for creative responses and movements of mind.
There are probably countless examples, large and small, where it is possible to shake off the shackles of the dominant view and expose a lack of intrinsic truth to some assumption or ideology that may be widely agreed on in our social world. Sometimes the belief in a value system is shattered in an instant of penetrating insight. Other times it is melted away more gradually. Either way, although undoubtedly we do not need meditation to reflect in the kinds of ways described, it does take a certain boldness to trust in one’s own capacity to question views and to think for oneself. And while these qualities of boldness and trust are dependent on and empowered by many factors, let us mention a couple which may actually be supported by a more meditative approach. The first is including in one’s awareness the sense of strength as it manifests in the body. This sense can often be neglected, especially if we are not accustomed to having faith in ourselves in this way. But noticing, allowing, inhabiting, and even enjoying the bodily feelings that accompany the sense of confidence in our own seeing will greatly help that conviction, self-trust, and strength to take root and flourish in the being. Even if these bodily feelings are only fleeting at first, it can be a significant step in their consolidation to learn to open to them in this way. Then as our sense of strength and independence grows, it becomes easier for us to see that, just because most people around us believe it, we don’t have to fall for any view that has solidified and raised what is only a convention to the status of an objective truth. Connected to this, the second helpful element is a skilful awareness, and holding, of any difficult emotions that are evoked by what is being considered. In order for freedom to be possible, it is vital not to ignore feelings such as anger, hurt, or powerlessness that may be associated with an issue being reflected on. Such emotions may well need caring for, in various ways, as part of the process of liberating the mind. Equally though, it is important not to sink in feelings like these, or to be consistently overwhelmed by them, or pulled down into a state where there is no space or opportunity for creative responses and movements of mind.
Practice: Opening to freedom and strength through reflection Take a little time to settle in meditation. Then see if it is possible to allow, and to tune into, a sense of energetic alignment along the central axis of the body. Feel the strength that comes from this alignment of energy, including the body as a whole in your awareness. (Alternatively, you could think of something which stimulates a sense of strength in you, then tune into the feeling of energy in the body that is present, and allow that to align the body sense.) Let yourself enjoy it for some time if you like. Trying to stay connected to, and supported by, this sense of strength and alignment in the body as much as you are able, begin to reflect on your life and your social environment, asking yourself if there are any values or beliefs that you have absorbed from the culture and from your social environment that are contributing to suffering of some sort and that might be questionable. Notice, allow, and feel as fully as you can any emotional and energetic responses to what you see, and notice also the mental responses. If it seems that something arises emotionally that needs holding and attention before continuing, take time to do that now. When you feel ready, see if it is possible to reflect in a way that challenges this belief, or that recognizes it is not inherently true. Perhaps you can uncover the assumptions it rests on, or expose it as merely an agreed-upon conventionality. Again, as you do this, notice, allow, and feel as fully as you can any emotional, energetic, and mental responses. Especially with regard to any sense of strength that may surface, it might be important to try to let go of any preconceptions about what it should feel like. Strength can have a softness and pliancy to it; it need not feel brittle at all. Then if any feeling of strength and/or freedom arises, see if you can allow that to fill out in the body, and enjoy it. (It can be particularly helpful to feel the quality of strength filling the lower belly and the legs.) Let yourself linger in any feelings of strength or freedom that emerge. If strong anger arises, is it possible to find the quality of strength within the anger, and to tune into that, thus helping it to become a more wholesome emotion? If grief or sadness arise, what does it feel like they need right now?…
Practice: Opening to freedom and strength through reflection Take a little time to settle in meditation. Then see if it is possible to allow, and to tune into, a sense of energetic alignment along the central axis of the body. Feel the strength that comes from this alignment of energy, including the body as a whole in your awareness. (Alternatively, you could think of something which stimulates a sense of strength in you, then tune into the feeling of energy in the body that is present, and allow that to align the body sense.) Let yourself enjoy it for some time if you like. Trying to stay connected to, and supported by, this sense of strength and alignment in the body as much as you are able, begin to reflect on your life and your social environment, asking yourself if there are any values or beliefs that you have absorbed from the culture and from your social environment that are contributing to suffering of some sort and that might be questionable. Notice, allow, and feel as fully as you can any emotional and energetic responses to what you see, and notice also the mental responses. If it seems that something arises emotionally that needs holding and attention before continuing, take time to do that now. When you feel ready, see if it is possible to reflect in a way that challenges this belief, or that recognizes it is not inherently true. Perhaps you can uncover the assumptions it rests on, or expose it as merely an agreed-upon conventionality. Again, as you do this, notice, allow, and feel as fully as you can any emotional, energetic, and mental responses. Especially with regard to any sense of strength that may surface, it might be important to try to let go of any preconceptions about what it should feel like. Strength can have a softness and pliancy to it; it need not feel brittle at all. Then if any feeling of strength and/or freedom arises, see if you can allow that to fill out in the body, and enjoy it. (It can be particularly helpful to feel the quality of strength filling the lower belly and the legs.) Let yourself linger in any feelings of strength or freedom that emerge. If strong anger arises, is it possible to find the quality of strength within the anger, and to tune into that, thus helping it to become a more wholesome emotion? If grief or sadness arise, what does it feel like they need right now?…
And although I could, I need not conceive of myself as ‘The Resident Teacher’ as I am simply walking down the corridor, or reading a book, or sitting on the toilet. Even if I tried, I would probably forget at times! If I pay attention, I see there are countless such ‘holes’ – moments and stretches in any day when I am not, and do not have to be, ‘The Resident Teacher’. And I can also see that this role is actually only one of the various roles I have in my life at present. I am at times a friend to friends who have nothing to do with Gaia House, or even the Dharma; at other times I am a musician, a poet, a writer, a citizen, a neighbour, a brother, a son, an uncle, a room cleaner, an activist, a cook… So easily one role gets over-emphasized in an unwise way and we contract around it in identification. It becomes charged for us then, and it may begin to feel like a painful weight. Opening out the seeing to recognize the wider context can open out the contraction, so that vitality, interest, and creativity can flow more freely and widely. The psychology involved here is not often simple, but in addition to acknowledging the life in other roles, this seeing of the ‘holes’ in any role can be immensely helpful in exposing its lack of solidity. By seeing these gaps, we burst a bubble we’ve believed in and felt constricted by, and reveal a spaciousness in which we can then move more freely. We find that it is very possible to be fully committed to the responsibilities a role entails, and to feel profoundly the sense of meaningfulness it may have for us, without solidifying or over-identifying with that role.
And although I could, I need not conceive of myself as ‘The Resident Teacher’ as I am simply walking down the corridor, or reading a book, or sitting on the toilet. Even if I tried, I would probably forget at times! If I pay attention, I see there are countless such ‘holes’ – moments and stretches in any day when I am not, and do not have to be, ‘The Resident Teacher’. And I can also see that this role is actually only one of the various roles I have in my life at present. I am at times a friend to friends who have nothing to do with Gaia House, or even the Dharma; at other times I am a musician, a poet, a writer, a citizen, a neighbour, a brother, a son, an uncle, a room cleaner, an activist, a cook… So easily one role gets over-emphasized in an unwise way and we contract around it in identification. It becomes charged for us then, and it may begin to feel like a painful weight. Opening out the seeing to recognize the wider context can open out the contraction, so that vitality, interest, and creativity can flow more freely and widely. The psychology involved here is not often simple, but in addition to acknowledging the life in other roles, this seeing of the ‘holes’ in any role can be immensely helpful in exposing its lack of solidity. By seeing these gaps, we burst a bubble we’ve believed in and felt constricted by, and reveal a spaciousness in which we can then move more freely. We find that it is very possible to be fully committed to the responsibilities a role entails, and to feel profoundly the sense of meaningfulness it may have for us, without solidifying or over-identifying with that role.
There were more than a few scientists who knew one little thing, and then thought that knowledge was universally applicable to every other problem, to the point of excluding or discounting information from people whose specialty was that other problem.
"It’s this: Confidence isn’t about knowing you’re right. Confidence is about knowing you can make it right. You have doubts because it makes sense for you to have doubts. Just like it made sense for me to have doubts. But remember the plan is not the goal. What is your goal?" "To save as many lives as possible, through every means possible." "Be confident in that, and everything else will follow."
Reculer pour mieux sauter, as the French say: to retreat in order to leap better. And sometimes we’ll find what we’re looking for only when we stop looking. If what we’re looking for lies outside of imagination or calculation, we can’t know what it is until it hits us.
In our quest for efficiency, the old ways of proceeding through a slow, patient training over many years under an experienced guide may go the way of the dinosaurs, replaced entirely by short-term methods, even surgery or new, as yet unknown neurological interventions. Will something be lost? Is meditation merely an instrument to induce desired changes? For one thing, in its paradoxical way, it tends not to work so well if we are too directly seeking its benefits. For another, the chance to apprentice with a teacher, to entrust ourselves to an authentic guide, is a privilege like no other. And if the modern approaches end up supplanting the ancient, transformative insights into what it means to be human, they will have lost their true power to help our world.
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT HOW I found a path when I didn’t even know I was looking for one. For a long time I didn’t know where I wanted to be; I just knew I wasn’t there. I tell this story not because it holds any special interest. Far from it; my challenges have been unremarkable. It’s a tale of everyday desperation, such as many know, that healed through meditation practice. That’s why I hope it may be helpful: to show that the practice can steer and jolt even a common dolt into kinder, better ways of living, without divine intervention though with moments of grace. For those who feel, as I once did, like giving up on life, perhaps this little narrative may incline them to think again.
ONE NIGHT AT THE TAIL end of summer, when I was twelve years old, there was a thudding on the back door of our family home, a dilapidated cottage up the Cherwell Valley. Our mother opened up, and we heard her cry out in surprise and delight. It was a rainy night, and we gathered round to see what was going on. "Come in, come in," Mum called, and out of the weather stepped a windswept heap of a man wrapped in a damp, hairy overcoat, with two dogs at his heels. I guessed it must be Speedy. We’d all heard of Speedy, and even caught glimpses of him on the far sides of fields, in his shaggy greatcoat, the same color as his spreading ginger beard. Staff in hand, he’d be pressing along, his two dogs weaving in and out of hedgerows in his wake. But I’d never seen him up close before, face-to-face.
This was the mid-1970s, when there were still bona fide tramps stalking the byways of England, old-school "men of the road" such as had been beating the footpaths for at least a century, or maybe much longer. We’d heard of tramps, with a mixture of fear and fascination. The autumn evening Speedy rapped on our door, rain was lashing down. He stood under the little porch, his hairy coat dripping. He brushed himself down, opened up his front, and pulled out a little puppy.
While she was gone, Speedy looked down at us kids. We’d never seen a face like it. First off, hidden between his beard, hat, and hair, it was hard even to see his cheeks. Then when you realized you were looking at them, it was a shock to see skin so brown and ruddy. It looked more like animal hide. Then you landed on the eyes, shimmering, alive. They shocked you when you stole a glance at them, there was so much life and light in them. It was like having a wild animal in the room. Only when I did did I realize he was smiling.
BY THE TIME SPEEDY WALKED away that night, I realized there was another way of being human. It was unlike anything I’d known. It was as if the room itself had just been shocked, and a stunned peace fizzed among the furniture. An aliveness that was new, and not my own, welled up inside me.
It was also the summer we got to know Speedy for real. He befriended us, and taught us some of his tricks. How to make a rabbit snare out of garden twine and set it on secret rabbit paths. How to catch and smoke fish. He told us of his winters on the south coast, his life on the open road. Roped in his hairy overcoat, stringed into his boots, he liked to sit still and watch things, he said. You could learn a lot if only you just sat yerself still. Everybody else, the whole world, is rushing about all day long, they don’t have time to learn nothing, if they just stopped still a moment they’d be amazed what they’d learn.
The young dog would always come with us when we slept out. She couldn’t resist the pull of the old fields she’d known as a puppy. She would disappear into reeds by the riverbanks. We’d hear her thrash through them, then burst out in excitement. She came alive on the land. This was the life she had been made for: tramping the fields, rivers, and woods of her native territory. She didn’t have to think why. She was made for it, and it for her. At the end of a day she would sit at the foot of my sleeping bag, a pale triangle, looking out across the dark land into the night, and not curl up until everyone else was asleep.
Had we ever hated? he wanted to know. He said how hate could be strong—like love in some ways. It made you think about the person all the time.
Meanwhile the simple food, the fitness, the hard work, the trekking, the mental work of recording it all changed me. It was all so different in South America. To be among people who had grown up in close contact with the mountains, streams, llamas, potato fields, and earthen homes where they lived—it seemed to make them more at peace with themselves. The infants were constantly on someone’s back, whether an older sibling, aunt, or mother—a bundle in a blanket, eyes gleaming at you from over a shoulder. What would it do to a child to live unseparated from a human body the first year or two of its life? What kind of security in its own being would a child imbibe, growing like a tree in the mulch cultivated by generations of its own kind? Was that the difference? These people had less irritability and anxiety. They were calm. They had a depth you could feel. They were friendly and hospitable.
He had the little beach all to himself. It felt like he’d put down a burden he didn’t know he had been carrying. Something in him rose by itself as your arms do when you set down a heavy weight. All his life he had been trammeling his mind, he realized, keeping it in channels so it could communicate with others. Now he didn’t have to. He was free, totally free, in a way that felt so good he wanted it always. A large old fishing boat was anchored off shore. As he stared into the blinding light on the sea the boat vanished, swallowed by the brilliance. Then it reappeared for an instant, a black shape, then disappeared, a ghost-hull flickering on and off like a stain on the retina. It seemed so beautiful he could hardly comprehend it. And suddenly all the past months of travel seemed like nothing more than a dream-like series of images that had passed before his eyes. A young man, a beach, a boat on the water: there was nothing to tell him what year it was. He could have been any young man in any century, gazing over any water. And the water was fascinating, blindingly white yet completely dark. Scales of brilliance slid over darkness, so it alternated between thick matt black and blinding light. But water was transparent, so was air, yet there the surface was, the sea’s skin, thick as elephant hide. What was he actually seeing?
Back in my cabana, I lay on my bunk in the gloom with the wooden ceiling just overhead while a flame burned in my chest like the flame of my kerosene camping stove, which was fierce but ghostly. It was a fire of love, and it kept pouring out of me. I’d never known anything like it. Yet somehow it was familiar, as if it had been with me all my life, just unnoticed. The walls of weathered plywood gleamed in the dark. I lay listening to the rustle and murmur of water outside. Previously there had always been a limit to beauty, but now it was everywhere. Nothing was left out. All I had to do was lie here, with love pouring out of my breast in a swift, silent stream, like a Roman candle. I felt like I’d been claimed by immemorial love. That night I lay awake a long time, the watch fire in the heart burning long into the night. It seemed I would never need to sleep again. I’d found something larger than the world, and didn’t need to.
Sometimes a kind old friend from school days would drag me out of my lairs into his network of conviviality, where I would skulk and long for the events to be over. Or else quaff potations and think I was the soul of the party. In time, alongside Mr. Morbid I evolved another personality: Mr. Fun, who was flirtatious and gregarious, but brittle and oversensitive, and emerged during bouts of drinking, arranging his clothing and hair to hide any ailing skin to the point where he could banish it from consciousness, and despise it almost as someone else’s blight. My friend introduced me to a series of achingly desirable young women, reared at expensive schools, after whom I’d hanker. But in spite of Mr. Fun’s bonhomie, they picked up an untrustworthy shadow of oddness on their radar. They could tell something was off, they just weren’t sure what.
These days psychologists say a traumatic event can trigger not only the fight-or-flight response but also a freeze. We go into lockdown, all the more likely in the case of a nervous system already debilitated by an ongoing stressor, such as a chronic ailment.
THE BEACH: BY NOW I knew others had been there, too. In Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, for example, I had been astonished to come across this passage: Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!
Thirty years later, when he came to compose his great play, O’Neill was still writing about it. It still tugged at him. Well, why wouldn’t it? What could matter more?
At the time it happened to O’Neill, once his ship docked he went straight to the nearest dive and drank himself nearly to death. The experience had not delivered him from despair. Like me, he had had no way to deepen or stabilize it or make it intelligible, or link it to his life. For me, too, it had been a random windfall, a sudden, marvelous rend in the fabric of life. Then it blew on and left the tear behind, flapping in the breeze.
Only the odd twinkle of sun to guide you. I remembered what it was like to figure out where a stream was, and to find it after pushing through dark undergrowth—a babble of clear light in the gloom of bushes. Days turned into weeks, following the footpaths, pounding out twenty-five-mile days that had me laying my exhausted limbs on the hard ground each night. I kept going, and picked up the Pembrokeshire Coast Path. Poems started to creep up from the ground, and a flicker of life rekindled somewhere near the heart. I remembered what Speedy had said about "old roads" you couldn’t see but which were there, spanning great distances across the land, and now and then I wondered if I wasn’t catching a glimpse of one.
After a week in the refugee camps, then another driving around in the back of a stripped-down Land Rover with a squad of guerrillas, sleeping under the stars, spying on enemy positions with binoculars, drinking tiny glasses of strong tea, smoking fierce tobacco out of small bronze pipes, eating strange stews cooked over open fires, and coming under occasional artillery fire—we’d hear a pair of thuds somewhere in the distance, followed a few seconds later by two crashes or booms, depending on how far away the shells landed—I came back to life.
The strange thing wasn’t just that the sleep debt came in with such force, but that it cleared just as suddenly. On the seventh morning, I woke up, made breakfast, and had coffee, fully expecting to need to stagger straight back to bed, but instead I felt clear, luminous, refreshed in a way I couldn’t remember feeling since being a boy—actually, since I couldn’t remember when.
Often while meditating, after a few minutes of restlessness a sense of soothing would come on, as if I were being salved inside and out. In neurophysiological terms, this was the parasympathetic nervous system engaging, turning down the dial on the stress response. I had lived with a dysregulated nervous system for so long that I hadn’t considered the possibility that maybe the anxiety I ordinarily felt wasn’t 100 percent necessary.
He sabotaged himself: that was the diagnosis. Deep down he felt he didn’t deserve to win. There is a legendary moment in the show. During a therapy session, the racer, quietly goaded by Harvey, leaps off the couch, flies across the room, and pulls Harvey to the floor. The producer jumps into the frame and tugs him off, you can hear the cameraman shouting in the background, and the sound guy leaps in, too, and it was all on film. That was the turning point in the young man’s therapy. The moment he let his rage out, he could no longer deny his pain. On-screen he collapsed, sobbing, while Harvey straightened his glasses and put his hand on the client’s shaking back. The driver went on to become British GT champion. One day I tore Harvey’s door off its hinges. Instead of trying to stop me, he sat and watched. He was very pleased. He had been goading me. "You’re basically a piece of shit," he kept murmuring in his mellow Californian tones.
I was white-hot inside. I could barely walk. I was a two-year-old. I pushed against the door, I hit it, pummeled it, then fell, got up again, shaky on my legs, and beat harder, rattled the handle, tugged it, fell again. Then up and at it, then down on the floor in a raging, hopeless heap. This went on for a while. Harvey said nothing. He wanted to see what would happen. In the end I pulled the door down, then tore it to pieces. "Good therapy," Harvey said, and he got out his Polaroid camera to commemorate the two of us standing on top of the heap, me holding the remains of the door handle like a trophy.
The incident with the door became my doorway. I could no longer pretend. Whatever my parents had done or not done, it had hurt. Dad was an amazing man, but not an amazing dad. He was half right about being a bastard. He hadn’t provided all a boy needed by way of love. Mum had done her best, but her own early history cast its shadow, and the marital circumstances had been so hard.
The change of location, the new job, the therapy, the publishers, quitting the PhD: they had all happened once I took up meditation. Was it possible that just sitting still twice a day could bring order to a disordered psychophysiology, and regulate a dysregulated life? On top of that, in fits and starts, my skin was getting better.
I had a diagnosis now: dysthymia. Persistent, low-grade, shame-based depression. It was tricky, because one of its symptoms was a denial of symptoms prompted by shame at the symptoms—the shame itself being one of the symptoms. Cleverly circular. But the new cognitive-behavioral approach was actually helping. I never knew what diabolical habits of mind I’d had. It turned out that as long as I could remember, I’d been thinking myself into misery. I beat myself up, put myself down, shoulded myself to death, catastrophized and awfulized. I was an inveterate musturbator: I must do this, that must work out, et cetera. As I exposed and gave up these habitual cognitions, to be alive became stranger and more interesting.
It reminded me of Derek Walcott’s poem where he meets himself in the mirror: You will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome … You will love again the stranger who was your self.
In fact, the reason I was a travel writer myself was that I had read Lawrence in my teens, and his writing about place had burned a hole in my imagination. When I went abroad at eighteen, it was his writing that inspired me to try my hand at it.
Her approach came from Zen. She called it "writing practice." Zen was popular in American letters. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Peter Matthiessen—many writers made no secret of their affiliation with Zen. Natalie was another. "First thought, best thought" was the maxim. Get the page covered, outrun the internal censor. There was something about her—a stillness, a quiet radiance. I’d never known anything exactly like it. As if some kind of jewel shone inside her.
ONE DAY NATALIE AND I were sitting on the porch overlooking her small lawn, enclosed by an adobe wall that was just beginning to glow as the New Mexico afternoon thickened toward evening. Cottonwood trees with long silvery leaves overhung the neighborhood like willows, silent in the late air. A cat sprang onto the broad, rounded top of the wall and sat down to lick its paws. I watched the cat. The trees, the shadows, the waning light, the quiet sounds of a neighborhood concluding its day, and the cat fluffing itself up and resting—all caught me with their beauty. Things seemed to go slower when you were around Natalie. They took the time to show themselves to you. It reminded me of how in my teen years, as an aspiring poet, I’d learned to see beauty in ordinary things. A white cat sheltering from rain under a dark bush. A streetlamp illuminating stucco at night. The hiss of traffic on a wet street heard from a second-floor window.
Natalie opened up a book on Zen and read aloud from it. It was a passage by Dogen Zenji, a Japanese Zen master from the thirteenth century.* In her slow, Jewish New Yorkese (a "Lorne Guyland" accent, as Martin Amis called it), she read: Mountains do not lack the qualities of mountains. Therefore they always abide in ease and always walk. You should examine in detail this quality of the mountains walking. Mountains’ walking is just like human walking. Accordingly, do not doubt mountains’ walking even though it does not look the same as human walking. She put the book down and looked around, a little dazed, and said, "Wow," shaking her head. "Isn’t he mind-blowing?" I hummed noncommittally. I couldn’t make head or tail of what I’d just heard. Was it supposed to be nonsense, like Edward Lear or something? Mountains walking? I asked her for the book and took a look myself. The chapter was called "The Mountains and Rivers Sutra." Whatever that meant. I reread the paragraph to myself. Then she asked me to read it out loud, so I did. I couldn’t understand it at all, and said so. She said she couldn’t, either, but loved it anyway.
As soon as I thought of it, I felt it had to be right. What else could make sense of Dogen’s apparent nonsense? But the beach moment would make complete sense of it. Not that I could exactly explain why. But everything had been there, all at once, in the empty fire I had seen, that single seething, ghostly reality in which all time and space were present. Anything was possible there—everything was possible. How could it not be, if the universe were one single fabric and one was made of that fabric oneself?
It was a nice room. It hit you immediately: a peace about it. It was pretty much square, made out of thick adobe, like most of Santa Fe, and was cool and quiet. There was no furniture, the whole space bare except for a row of black mats lined up around the walls, about a dozen of them, each with a small black cushion in the middle. The room ought to have felt spartan. Instead it felt thick with peace, with restfulness. A small Buddha made of wood sat on an altar with a candle. As Robert lit the candle and made a bow to the altar, I noticed a shaving nick on the back of his scalp. Then he pulled out two of the black cushions. There wasn’t much to zazen. He showed me different possible positions for the legs, and I settled on what he called "quarter lotus." He taught me the correct alignment of the spine, and the way to hold my hands in my lap, and told me to start counting my breaths in sequences of ten. And that was it. "Nothing else?" I asked. "Not really," he said. "That’s about it."
As I walked away down the path into the trees and down a drop into the little gulch of the stream along which ran the track where I had left my bike, it came to me that what I had just tasted was the reality of being alive. It was frightening, as it should be. Normally, I realized, I pulled away from the bare fact of being alive. I didn’t know how not to. But now I did. It was zazen. Meditation in the Zen style. It somehow was no surprise that the other form of meditation I had been doing did not offer this kind of taste. The TM was restorative, ameliorative, medicinal almost. It helped you relax and sleep and restore. But this zazen—it didn’t seem to be interested in those things. Instead, without any deliberation on its part, it simply let you know what it was to be alive.
I began to do zazen daily. Over the weeks I grew to love it: a sense of clarity, a watery quality to everything, would come on. Zen was done with the eyes open, which made one’s sense of the world while meditating more vivid. I’d feel a warmth, a pressure in my chest. Sometimes, for no reason, I’d start crying. Sometimes a strange wind seemed to riffle through me and through the surroundings as I sat, reminding me of Sappho’s famous line about love shaking her the way the wind shakes the oak trees on the mountainside.
I fell in love with the hills around Santa Fe, hills of chunky red earth, fragrant with small pines and juniper. I fell in love with the town too, its ocher mud buildings sitting squat and hunched under the sky, fragrant with the woodsmoke that began to be burned as autumn rolled in, overseen every day by sunsets that were apocalyptic, with pillars of cloud smoking over the city, and late sunlight flooding the streets. Thick as concentrated orange juice, it was light you could have scooped up in your fingers. It was palpable, you could feel it in your chest, it enveloped you.
Eventually I fell in love for real, with a woman from Wisconsin, a singer-songwriter recovering from the recent cancer deaths of both her parents. She was the kind of woman I could never have imagined being with, a sensitive, wheat-haired, long-limbed goddess from the album covers of my youth, when American country rock took over the English airwaves for a few summers in the mid-seventies. Andi was a little older than me. It was a relief. She had been through more, she was ahead of me in care of the soul. I trusted her. I didn’t have to prove anything. She showed me it was okay to be open to one’s wounds. One didn’t constantly have to be outrunning them.
He told me about the discipline of living as an artist, the need to practice your art every day without fail, how you should get up early each morning to work before you did anything else. You needed to trust your instincts and cultivate wonder.
"It’s okay to take care of yourself, you know." Frankly, I didn’t. I lived in fear of being self-indulgent, and was confused about where to draw the line between that and self-care.
I had heard that sesshin retreats were the heart of Zen training. The word—ses-shin—literally meant "encountering or touching the heart." Natalie explained that in Japanese the word shin meant both "heart" and "mind." That right there was the difference between East and West, she said. We cut off the heart from the mind. Not so the East. And according to Zen, our true heart-mind was infinite, knowing no bounds or limits, and included everything.
The Japanese word zen derived from the Chinese ch’an, which in turn came from the Sanskrit dhyana and meant "meditative absorption." But unlike other kinds of meditation, it was short on detailed instructions. The advice Robert the Zen priest had first given me—to count breaths in sets of ten—was about as elaborate as it got. Zen had "lineages" of masters who had "confirmed" one another down through the ages. What they had confirmed was that the student had had the same insights into the nature of consciousness or reality that the master had, and had learned to live by them in daily life. It was weird: it was about some kind of radical experience that shifted one’s view of things, yet it was also about absolute ordinariness. If you saw reality more clearly, ordinary things became miraculous.
ZEN IS NOT EASY. ZEN is baffling. Zen is impossible to pin down. On the one hand, it’s easy to pin down: it’s about sitting on a cushion every day. You try to be aware of what is going on. Breathing, mostly, and thoughts that come and, you hope, go. It’s nice when they go. You can find yourself in a state of exhilarating peace. Zen is a journey back to radical simplicity. No mantras, no "sacred syllables," no sacred anything.
The emperor asked Bodhidharma how much merit he had acquired through his support for Buddhism. Bodhidharma said, "No merit whatsoever." Not a reply the emperor had been expecting. According to George, Zen didn’t believe in reincarnation, let alone a cosmic moral bank account. Then he asked the holy man to expound his highest, holiest teaching. Bodhidharma answered, "No holiness. Vast and void." In Zen there was no such thing as holy. It didn’t separate sacred and profane at all. This was more like it. I found myself starting to like Zen again, and Bodhidharma. In frustration, the emperor then asked Bodhidharma who on earth he was, this man standing before him. To which Bodhidharma answered, "I don’t know."
ZEN CALLED ITSELF THE "SUDDEN school," George explained. You didn’t have to go through a gradual process, through stages of practice. Instead, in one sudden leap, you could find all you were looking for. Bodhidharma said the practice wasn’t based on scripture or words, but rather "directly pointed to the human mind." "Sudden teaching." You didn’t have to travel by stages. Some how, in spite of the torment, I recognized that too. The answer to life was right here already.
THE FOURTH DAY WAS WARM, and in the afternoon George decided to have us sit outside in the long grass. "Let the wind give us a dharma talk," he said.
On the other hand, a principle of Zen, George had told us, was the discovery that we had been wrong about everything. There was great relief in that, he assured us.
According to George, Zen’s view was that we were busy being wrong all the time in ways we didn’t realize. "Awakening" was nothing other than to see this.
I had found the answer to the teacher’s question. Who was I? I was no one. I had made myself up.
Not only that, but without me, there was no past or future. Every phenomenon that arose was happening for the first and only time, and filled all awareness entirely. That made it an absolute treasure. The rest of that day I was in bliss. Peace suffused everything. A love burned in my chest like a watch fire. I could hear the grass growing, a faint high singing sound, like the sibilance of a new snowfall coming down. I remembered the Jewish saying: "No blade of grass but has an angel bending over it, whispering, ‘Grow, grow.’" Every blade of grass deserved that. Each blade was an angel. I cried. My heart was mush. Somehow it felt as though the grass were growing in my own chest. Every object contained an inner lamp, and now I could see it.
But I was doing the same thing with Zen. I thought the point was to get cooked by it so you no longer needed it. The plan was to do it, "get" it, and discard it. I had trouble getting my head around the maintenance model: that you might keep doing things for their own sake.
"What was your original face before your parents were born?" This is a famous "barrier" koan in Zen, the teacher explained: a question given to novices that may help precipitate a breakthrough.
Imagine a pane of opaque glass. A hole is driven through it, and suddenly we see that there’s a world on the other side of the glass: that’s kensho. Koan study seeks to enlarge the hole, and create new holes, until over time the whole pane becomes riddled with holes, small and large, loses its structural integrity, and collapses. Then the separation between that world and this world is gone. John gave me my first koan there and then, the original ur-koan described by Zen master Mumon in the thirteenth century as "the Gateless Barrier of the Zen sect": A monk asked Joshu* in all earnestness: "Does a dog have Buddha-nature?" Joshu answered, "Mu." I’d heard about this koan in talks given by various teachers in other centers. Literally, mu means "not." But the real meaning of the koan is something else, something unspeakable.
Mu is traditionally the first koan. The student uses mu as a kind of mantra. On every out-breath, while sitting, they silently voice the sound mu. The student is encouraged not to think about its meaning. The koan has work to do. Its work cannot be done by the conscious mind. Only mu itself can work on the practitioner, releasing them from a kind of prison they didn’t realize they had been caught in. While the conscious mind is kept busy attending to the sound "mu," the "real" mu can slip in unnoticed through the back door.
But a few things had to be in place: a steady daily practice, a life sufficiently in order not to create constant demands on our nerves, a reasonably stable psychology (though the practice itself should help with that), and two final pieces: a community of practitioners and a guide. I used to think I shouldn’t need a teacher. I should be able to handle things myself. Wasn’t that the measure of a competent, responsible adult? To the extent you didn’t handle it, life would knock you around until you did. It would teach you the lessons you needed to learn. But it was between you and life. It was a long time before it occurred to me that one of the lessons life had been trying to teach me was that sometimes you needed a teacher.
Zen’s demands were few: daily sitting, occasional retreats, being open to what life brought in each moment. It had benefits for others: It made me more attentive, less fretful. It opened up more love, and I’d return from the retreats with vivid eagerness to be with the family.
The room is suffused with the last of the sunlight. I bend down to give her a plate, fork balanced on the rim. "Thank you," she says. I stand up straight for a moment, my own plate in hand. I’m about to sit down but get arrested by a scene in the movie where Roger Rabbit’s tail is singed on a stove, and he proceeds to accelerate faster and faster round a kitchen, trying to outrun his flaming rear, turning the kitchen cabinets into a centrifuge, like a biker on the Wall of Death. I remember loving this scene years ago when the movie first came out. I start laughing. Something happens. A tingling, a whirring inside me. I notice how malleable the apparently solid surfaces in the cartoon are. The tingle becomes a flywheel in my belly, spinning faster and faster, until it is almost unbearable, a sweet agony. It’s in my chest now, and at once my heart just about breaks and the sensation whips itself into a cyclone, a dust devil, a whirlwind, and spins up the throat into the skull. My head explodes. A thunderbolt hits the room. I black out—except I don’t; I’m still standing. Everything else blacks out. All the circuitry that keeps the world going snaps off. A fuse blows. I find I’m not standing on anything. Below, a chasm; above, a void; all around, in every direction, nothing. Dark, radiant nothing. I let out a whoop and start laughing. Clare looks up from the bed. "Oh, God," she groans, "it’s not that Zen again."
"Not one speck of cloud to mar the view," an old Zen saying has it. Not one thought in the whole universe. Nothing exists! All this earnest training of the mind that we did in Zen—or thought we did—and there was no mind!
IN THE ROOM, EVERYTHING IS bathed in rich light, a dark, lucent limpidity drenching the bed, the window, the TV, the three other people sprawled on it. Giddy, dizzy, I totter downstairs with my untouched plate, delirious with joy, feeling like any moment I might topple into the abyss and not caring. How is it even possible to take a step, to be suspended on this imaginary surface called the floor? It’s all a dream, a floating illusion, a mirage-like reflection, a ghost of something on nothing. The food looks magnificent on my plate, like a still life from a seventeenth-century master. I can’t imagine what to do except admire it. I can’t imagine what to do at all. Everything is one glorious abyss of peace that fizzes with energy. I pull a cushion off the sofa, fold it in half, and sit down in zazen. I can’t think what else to do. At the end of twenty minutes, the carpet, sofa, and cushions are all still alive with energy. A flicker of alarm: Am I going mad? Will this never end? I let myself out and go for a walk around the dusky neighborhood. Billows of smoky energy seethe everywhere. The houses hang still and quiet in the gray-blue dusk. They, too, are smoky and alive, poised between being there and not being there. The mind is a wisp of smoke, the remains of a blown-out candle. Not just the houses but the seeing of the houses is the same: there and not there. I could go up and knock on their doors, tap on their windows, but "being there" isn’t what it seems. The world "out there" is a reflection quivering on nothing, even when you rap on a door.
ONCE AGAIN, EVERYTHING ANSWERED AND fulfilled. I still can’t put into words what it was—indeed, words were one of the principal devices for screening this reality—but when you saw it, when it appeared, it folded up everyday reality like a piece of paper and dropped it in a furnace. This reality, unbearably real, loved us fiercely, it loved all things—it was like discovering that the whole world was one heart. Yet at the same time it wasn’t anything.
I had no answers. Only what I felt. Which was that, by some miraculous power, I had just been granted a glimpse into reality, into the true fabric of the universe—into its DNA, as it were, and what I had seen there implicated me too, so that it was clear that, like everything else, I was a child of the universe. I wasn’t separate from it.
Then he started plying me with odd questions about the koan mu. They seemed like nonsense, yet I found responses stirring in me, and when I let them out, John would smile at my ridiculousness and agree, and tell me that I had just given one of the traditional answers.
THERE WERE SEVERAL "FIRST KOANS" to work through. One of them was about a "distant temple bell." I don’t want to give too much away—koan training is an intimate thing, not to be bandied about in loose talk—but I can say a little. The koan about the distant bell is pivotal, in that it’s the first of the major "presentation" koans, meaning a koan where no amount of discussion will help. The student has to come up with a wordless "presentation" of the koan, to show it, embody it, be it. It’s no use talking about it. The whole thrust of koan study is away from language into liberation from language. The great silence of all things opens up, where words are just flotsam and jetsam. I sat with the koan about the bell for quite a few weeks. Already the recent experience was turning itself into a metaphysical understanding in my mind, and that held me up with the new koan. Had John not been there, had he not known so instinctively how to work with me, it would probably have gone the way of the other experiences and become a troubling memory. But here he was, and he’d given me the strange koan about the bell. "Stop the sound of the distant temple bell," it runs. How on earth do you do that? "There’s no place for discussion," John kept telling me. "We have to do it. Trust the experience you had. Let it show you how." After several dokusan, with John probing and prodding me, finally one evening in the dokusan room, after I thought I’d exhausted every imaginable possibility, an urge came and I randomly trusted it. As soon as I did, I fell into a groove of centuries of practice worn smooth by others. I no longer cared if I was making the "right" presentation. The koan disappeared, a great expansiveness opened up, as I did what I did.
Dad was not just a bright-burning intelligence, as well as a warm and sometimes quite lazy man whose laziness did not trouble him, but he was domestic: he loved being at home. He was solid. A mensch. His priorities were straight. He loved people—people were his great pleasure. He would be fast friends with new people so quickly I used to wonder if he already knew them, and ponder how he possibly could.
Dad and I had had our ups and downs. But one way or another, through therapy and Zen, through being partnered with a clear-eyed woman, things had changed for me. Perhaps I had finally done enough of what Harvey had said: "give yourself the parenting you didn’t get as a child." I’d have the odd flare-up of rage or sunburst of shame, but I had learned to meet him as he was, and on those terms we enjoyed ourselves together. After all, we were still two literary-minded Jews who enjoyed a good bit of argumentation and debate together.
In other zendos where I had sat, I had sometimes sensed a chilly trace of fear discernible in the room. But in this humble house in Oxford, although the sitting was the deepest and stillest I had yet encountered, I felt a warm responsiveness. The teacher conveyed the teachings in such a human way, not as a cold formality to be enforced but as a way of living to be shared.
JOHN WAS A DILIGENT, LOVING teacher. It was unlike any relationship I’d had before. He was unlike anyone I’d known. No sense of being exceptional, no claims to anything remarkable: just an ex-lawyer with a deep devotion to the dharma and a clear conviction that, while it was nothing special, while it was here all the time and was the intrinsic nature of life, Zen was also precious.
I understood more clearly why Zen had its historical affinity for poetry. It accentuated the senses, it opened up a capacity for cherishing the things of the world—a curtain stirring in a breeze, an unpeeled potato waiting patiently on a counter, a bar of soap in a beam of sun. The part of us that loved things Zen revived. It also helped with our manifest inadequacies. Or mine, anyway. Since Zen accepted everything as it was, it accepted us, too, as we were. Procrastinating, letting the bills pile up, drinking too much coffee, acting selfishly, stubbornly—whatever our shortcomings, Zen liked us just the same, and enabled us not to mind ourselves so much, and because of that, it made it easier to roll up the sleeves and work on what needed working on. One old master, when asked what Zen really was, thought for a while and said, "Zen is doing what needs to be done."
In kensho, consciousness is plunged into a bath of formless, nameless love. That we afterwards fall short of what we "realize" can be an incentive to train with our teachers until we do find durable peace. At least we know that it might be possible now. Kensho is the inverse of trauma. Here, unlike in trauma, the shock is of love and belonging, not pain and hurt. Researchers in psychology are now finding that a true epiphany can leave a beneficent shadow on the psyche, a positive counterpart to PTSD.
It’s a famous koan of Master Unmon. "I don’t ask about before the fifteenth day; bring me a phrase about after the fifteenth day," he says. None of the monks can respond, so he answers for them: "Every day is a good day."
Nevertheless, having had at least a few upheavals in my sense of reality by now, I wonder why I’m still as prone as I am to unease, still a bit dysthymic, and I can’t honestly say that every day is a good day. Often, in fact, I think just the opposite. Sometimes I’ll catch myself thinking not just that a day is anything but good but that it’s positively bad, even that a whole week is bad, even a month. Even a year. Yet I’m a moderately "advanced" Zen student.
Joan has given hundreds of talks over the years. Maybe thousands. She is formidable. Quiet, slight, silver-haired, gentle, tender, but made of iron. She is a powerhouse, a treasure house, a storehouse of human energy and clarity. Yet modest, unassuming, outwardly unremarkable. This is how mature Zen practitioners should be, they say: indistinguishable from an ordinary person.
Both Joan and John are manifestly at peace. Both are ready to give up inordinate amounts of time to help others in this strange training, with minimal ostensible reward except for the joy of sharing it, and both seem to have given up their own agenda in favor of others’. And they enjoy their lives more than anyone else I know. You feel it when you’re with them. You see it in their eyes. They’re at peace, free, full of quiet energy, acutely intelligent, and loving. That’s another thing. This dharma training seemed to make people uncommonly articulate, engaging, sensitive, intuitive.
WOULD GET THIS FEELING around Joan, that everything near her flourished. Her world was one of gentle well-being. It was one of the happiest things I’d ever known. At first I’d feel it in her house, then it would spread to the garden outside, then the neighborhood.
Dogen said that ordinary beings have no illumination in their consciousness, but Buddhas have no consciousness in their illumination. Awareness has to be extinguished, all trace of a witness gone, for the path of Zen to flourish.
By chance I had recently met a maverick dreamworker from Vermont, brilliant, controversial, confrontational. A former mailman with an MA in philosophy, Marc Bregman had stumbled into a workshop led by the Jungian James Hillman long ago and never looked back. He had developed his own potent form of dream therapy. Dreams were guiding us. We had to surrender to them and receive their guidance: that was the basic message. Nine times out of ten, they wanted us to open to our long-buried wounds. That was the way to healing of the soul.
I had learned that the secret to a happy relationship was not believing that it must be with the right person, but that your partner was the right person.
Then, hard on the heels of the first two days, this morning, the third, you wake up so clearheaded, so fresh, awake, and lively to the new sensations of the day—the soft dawn filtering under your curtain, the rich shush when you turn on the basin tap, the delicious creaking outside your room as someone walks down the corridor—that you forgo even your morning cup of tea. You don’t want to disturb the sumptuous peace with anything, not even tea. The zendo seems so beautiful your heart almost breaks—the black cushions, the gray twilight, the single star of a candle on the altar. When the bell rings for the first period, its note is as clear-throated as a nightingale’s. The faint dawn breeze from an open window brushes over your bare hands. You taste it in your skin, sweet as ice cream.
Then things get weird. You’re in Egypt, in an ancient temple. There’s some kind of stone plinth, and the foot of a giant statue. You’re in the statue’s shadow, there’s sandy desert all around, dry air, the scent of dust. Then you’re in a theater. Paris or London in the 1890s. A gold proscenium arch rises high overhead, with the shaded stage pit before you, the glow of footlights. You sense the quiet expectancy of an audience. A slow joy rises like yeast in dough. It’s wonderful to be sitting in the glow of past centuries. Then you become superconscious of your breathing, but it’s no longer yours. It’s like watching an animal breathe, as if through a lens. You ask, Who is it breathing? There’s the rustle of inhalation followed by exhalation. Whose breath is it? You switch your attention to your sight. The question spontaneously arises: Whose sight is it? And there’s hearing: some kind of faint hiss in the room, and a soft rumble perhaps of a boiler in the basement, deep under the floor. Again: Who is hearing? It’s as if some unknown being has usurped your senses. As you receive these sense experiences—breathing, seeing, hearing—you try to find out who it really is sitting in the middle of them. What is there, in the space between hearing, seeing, breathing? There must be something there, because that’s where you are. But the more deeply you examine this space in the middle, the harder it is to identify who’s in there. Suddenly it’s clear: there’s no one there. Just empty space. Breathing is happening, but there’s no one breathing. Where there ought to be a breather, only space. There’s hearing, but no one hearing. Where there should be a hearer, just space. It’s this again: no one. Like on the mountain in New Mexico. Except it’s not the same. This time it’s a flattening. Breathing, hearing, seeing: they flatten against one another, two-dimensional. Whatever was in the middle is squeezed out. Somehow, as a result of that, where "I" should be, there is nothing but space. A rush of joy. Why joy? Because it’s like putting down the heaviest burden, a weight as absolute and dreadful as Jehovah. It was a lie all along. One tweak in the angle of vision and it’s gone. No me.
This is what the famous "just" of Zen means. Zen often says: Just sit. Just walk. Just eat. But "just walking" doesn’t mean: keep your mind only on walking and don’t think about anything else. It means: there is no mind to put on walking. There is only walking. There truly is just walking. Right now, it’s just seeing, just breathing, just hearing.
Everything gone. All the hard work of holding together the world as Henry knew it—gone. No more Henry, no more world. Nothing. No more Zen. Truly, nothing. True nothing. Everything annihilated. Nothing left. Nothing at all. It’s hard to know what exactly happened, but when I look back on it, there’s simply nothing. Not even awareness of nothing. A gap. But not even a gap. Blackness. But not even that. It’s hard to know what to call it. Death, perhaps. "Death" seems the aptest term. One impossible fact: nothing at all. Not emptiness, which might still suggest space with nothing in it, but nothing. Nothing to see, no one to see, no seeing. It was like a boot kicking out the lamp that had illuminated all things. Not vast space: that was still something. Not everything being one: that was still something. Not no-self: somehow there was still an awareness of that. This was reality at last. Nothing. Not even a witness. The ultimate joke.
I WALKED ABOUT IN A daze of gratitude for days, weeks, months. At first I assumed it would all wear off. But gradually it dawned on me that it was never going to. This last shift hadn’t been so much an "experience" as just that—a real shift. Years on, it still hasn’t really faded. Zen had actually done the impossible: it had changed me. Over time, I stopped being able to tell whether it had "worn off" or not. It no longer mattered.
In Japanese they say: mu ichi motsu—mu ju zo. "Not one single thing—an inexhaustible treasury." They also say: shin ku—myo u. "True goneness—wondrous being."
I had found what seekers through the ages had sought. There was a resolution to human life. It wasn’t easy to find, even if we had the good fortune to stumble across teachers who could point us down a path to it. But it existed, and it was true. All it took was to give ourselves up. Previously, the teaching of the various kensho experiences hadn’t penetrated deep enough. Now it was as if the very I who experienced them had been dug out at the root.
Gradually it became clearer how this reality got obscured: it was through thinking and then believing the thoughts. It was a subtle process, but ubiquitous. But once this dark, radiant fact opened up, we had an alternative. It was possible to see the obscuring process in action, and cherish it without being caught by it. It, too, was empty, after all.
I DON’T MEAN TO BRAG about any of this. A real danger in practice is to seek, then become proud of, our "awakenings." The Tibetan master Chogyam Trungpa dubbed it "spiritual materialism," and it’s just another form of self-serving egotism.
"Kick out the bottom of the black lacquer bucket," goes an ancient Zen saying. Lose every last bit of consciousness.
No need to achieve: all was achieved already. The great project of this life had been to realize that. Dogen said, "The great Way is intrinsically accomplished; the principle of Zen is complete freedom." All that came next was service, love, trying to be helpful and open. I sat a lot each morning and evening. It was like walking through a pine forest, the earth soft underfoot, the canopy high overhead, and a quietness, a limitless twilight among the trees that went on forever: neither light nor dark, both light and dark. Time, day, night, and epochs opened like petals, and the "mind-flower" bloomed.
I MADE A HABIT OF sitting through the night, usually on the last night of a retreat, not as a feat of endurance but because it was easy. Something was alive in me, and when I sat it could fulfill itself and grow stronger.
Somehow, with seemingly inexhaustible energy, Ruben would find time between other commitments for one or two or sometimes more long dokusan per day, unleashing his passionate Zen wisdom from a multitude of angles, firing koans at me, expecting instant mind-free responses, wearing down any lingering "stickiness" of mind, again and again blowing away the dust, as he put it, quickening my sluggish Zen activity, battering the encrustations of self-clinging, opening new vistas of unencumbered dharma. He once called it "romping through the universe together."
At the annual teacher training retreats there would be awe-inspiring seminars where powerful masters did "dharma combat" over a koan, until gradually the circle settled down to the most salient truth the koan opened up.
One reason for writing it was that I was concerned it would soon all be gone. "I was here—once and no more." Before the land disappeared entirely, I wanted to make a record of the old road I’d found and followed, in case it might help anyone else searching for a path like this.
Zen opened an unknown wellspring that gushed like the watch fire of love, the Roman candle in the heart I first tasted many years ago on the beach in South America: a fount of love that never ceased welling up. As Juan de la Cruz said in the sixteenth century: How well I know that fountain which gushes and flows though it be in the dark of night. After which there is nothing to do but share and serve. In the end it’s all a fairy tale. In the end, all Zen saves us from is ourselves. It may be a little inaccurate but not unreasonable to say that in the end, all Zen is is love.
SO IS "ENLIGHTENMENT" REAL? I’VE no idea, but: Experiences wherein space and time disappear and all is revealed as one infinite consciousness; or as utterly without form and void; or where we ourselves vanish into empty sky; or where no trace of anything, including any witness, remains—real. Experiences that leave indelible, beneficent changes in the psyche—real. Becoming more filled with love, more concerned for others—real. Lasting, positive character change, meaning less aversion and anger, less craving and clinging, more ease with the arising and passing of things as we live with less domination by self-centeredness—real. Perhaps we can claim the personality can get just a little bit better through practice, that’s all: small improvements, but they’re enough.
Second, some of us are going to need other kinds of help, along with meditation: dream therapy, cognitive therapy, somatic work, yoga, whatever it may be. The more the different approaches understand and respect one another, the better. Third, one common misunderstanding of meditation in the West is that it’s an individual undertaking. I fell for that, and fell foul of it. In fact it’s collaborative and relational, at least if you want to make real progress.
Updated: Jan 10, 2024
He had the little beach all to himself. It felt like he’d put down a burden he didn’t know he had been carrying. Something in him rose by itself as your arms do when you set down a heavy weight. All his life he had been trammeling his mind, he realized, keeping it in channels so it could communicate with others. Now he didn’t have to. He was free, totally free, in a way that felt so good he wanted it always. A large old fishing boat was anchored off shore. As he stared into the blinding light on the sea the boat vanished, swallowed by the brilliance. Then it reappeared for an instant, a black shape, then disappeared, a ghost-hull flickering on and off like a stain on the retina. It seemed so beautiful he could hardly comprehend it. And suddenly all the past months of travel seemed like nothing more than a dream-like series of images that had passed before his eyes. A young man, a beach, a boat on the water: there was nothing to tell him what year it was. He could have been any young man in any century, gazing over any water. And the water was fascinating, blindingly white yet completely dark. Scales of brilliance slid over darkness, so it alternated between thick matt black and blinding light. But water was transparent, so was air, yet there the surface was, the sea’s skin, thick as elephant hide. What was he actually seeing? As he pondered this question, suddenly the sight was no longer in front of him. It was inside him. Or he was inside it, as if he’d stepped into the scene and become part of it. He could no longer tell inside from outside. At the same instant the whole world, around, above, below—the sand, the sea, the light on the water—turned into a single field of sparks. A fire kindled in his chest, his fingers tingled, in fact everything tingled. The fire was not just in his chest but everywhere. Everything was made of drifting sparks. The whole universe turned to fire. He was made of one and the same fabric as the whole universe. It wasn’t enough to say he belonged in it. It was him. He was it. The beginning and end of time were right here, so close his nose seemed to press against them. Suddenly he knew why he had been born: it was to find this. This reality. His life was resolved, the purpose of his birth fulfilled, and now he could die happy. He could die that very night and all would be well. Two arms of black lava enclosed the little beach. They lay like lazy iguanas with their noses to the water, and they too were implicit in this truth. That it was true he knew beyond doubt. It was more true than anything else. This was the way things always had been and always would be.
Each of the seven chakras has also come to represent a major area of human psychological health, which can be briefly summarized as follows: (1) survival, (2) sexuality, (3) power, (4) love, (5) communication, (6) intuition, and (7) consciousness itself (see Figure 0.2). Metaphorically, the chakras relate to the following archetypal elements: (1) earth, (2) water, (3) fire, (4) air, (5) sound, (6) light, and (7) thought.
In this analogy the body is the hardware, our programming is the software, and the Self is the user. However, we did not write all of these programs, and some of their language is so archaic it is unintelligible. It is a heroic challenge, indeed, to identify our programs and rewrite them all while continuing to live our lives, yet this is the task of healing. It becomes even more difficult when we realize that each of our personal programs is part of a larger cultural system over which we have had little or no control. The chakra system is an evolutionary program and can be used to reprogram our lives. If we can learn this on an individual level, perhaps we can apply the same methods to our culture and environment.
"And thousands of smaller ones," I said. "One city in my world probably covers more land than we’ve traveled since leaving Stenford." At least, if you included the suburbs, the nuances of which I didn’t want to explain at the moment. "Gods…" Sefawynn said. "It’s so…" "Crowded?" I asked. "Peaceful." Peaceful? I hadn’t been expecting that. "So many people living together," she said, "but not fighting. You only learned to fight as a contest, for others to watch. There might be people among you who…who have never seen someone die…"
I can trace the original idea back to a story I told myself at night sometime in 2019. You see, as I’m going to bed each night, I tend to imagine a story. Like telling myself a bedtime story. This is how my brain works. If I close my eyes, movies start playing.
For us, attention primarily has to do with caring. If you attend to something, you care for it and give time to it. To give time and attention is to give caring. To pay attention to the mundane, simple, small details of everyday life is to live in the world with a spirit of caring, as if each and every thing were in your stewardship, as if you have a responsibility to care for every moment and each thing.
A monk said to Zen Master Ching-ch’ing (Kyosei; Gyeong Cheong), "Master, I’m pecking out. You, please, peck in." That offers an image of student and teacher in accord with each other: I’m trying to break out. You, please, break in, so the two of us together can connect, mind to mind. Ching-ch’ing shouted at the monk, "Are you alive or not?" That was his pecking in.
But essentially, if you are going to practice the Zen way, you have to lose all your hopes and all your expectations.
meditation seat three times, hit his staff, and stood there motionless.
Updated: Apr 15, 2023
When Yao-shan arrived at Ma-tsu’s temple, he asked Ma-tsu the same question: "I understand the canonical teaching of Buddhism, but I hear that in Zen you teach looking into the essence of mind, realizing true nature, and becoming buddha. This I don’t understand. Can you please explain it to me?" Ma-tsu immediately said, "Sometimes I make him raise his eyebrows and blink his eyes. Sometimes I don’t make him raise his eyebrows and blink his eyes. Sometimes raising his eyebrows and blinking his eyes is correct. And sometimes raising his eyebrows and blinking his eyes is not correct. How about you?" At that moment—ptchh—Yao-shan had an awakening experience.
Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails.
Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers. At eleven, I could say "I am sodium" (element 11), and now at seventy-nine, I am gold. A few years ago, when I gave a friend a bottle of mercury for his eightieth birthday—a special bottle that could neither leak nor break—he gave me a peculiar look, but later sent me a charming letter in which he joked, "I take a little every morning for my health."
Eighty! I can hardly believe it. I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over. My mother was the sixteenth of eighteen children; I was the youngest of her four sons, and almost the youngest of the vast cousinhood on her side of the family. I was always the youngest boy in my class at high school. I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know.
I am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am sorry to be as agonizingly shy at eighty as I was at twenty; I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not traveled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done.
Perhaps, with luck, I will make it, more or less intact, for another few years and be granted the liberty to continue to love and work, the two most important things, Freud insisted, in life.
When my time comes, I hope I can die in harness, as Francis Crick did. When he was told that his colon cancer had returned, at first he said nothing; he simply looked into the distance for a minute and then resumed his previous train of thought. When pressed about his diagnosis a few weeks later, he said, "Whatever has a beginning must have an ending." When he died, at eighty-eight, he was still fully engaged in his most creative work.
My father, who lived to ninety-four, often said that the eighties had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’ too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At eighty, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was forty or sixty. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together. I am looking forward to being eighty.
At eighty-one, I still swim a mile a day.
I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends. I shall no longer look at the NewsHour every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
A FEW WEEKS AGO, in the country, far from the lights of the city, I saw the entire sky "powdered with stars" (in Milton’s words); such a sky, I imagined, could be seen only on high, dry plateaus like that of Atacama in Chile (where some of the world’s most powerful telescopes are). It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience—and death. I told my friends Kate and Allen, "I would like to see such a sky again when I am dying." "We’ll wheel you outside," they said. I have been comforted, since I wrote in February about having metastatic cancer, by the hundreds of letters I have received, the expressions of love and appreciation, and the sense that (despite everything) I may have lived a good and useful life. I remain very glad and grateful for all this—yet none of it hits me as did that night sky full of stars.
I started a new sort of treatment—immunotherapy—last week. It is not without its hazards, but I hope it will give me a few more good months. But before beginning this, I wanted to have a little fun: a trip to North Carolina to see the wonderful lemur research center at Duke University. Lemurs are close to the ancestral stock from which all primates arose, and I am happy to think that one of my own ancestors, fifty million years ago, was a little tree-dwelling creature not so dissimilar to the lemurs of today. I love their leaping vitality, their inquisitive nature.
Mat Feltner was my grandfather on my mother’s side. Saying it thus, I force myself to reckon again with the strangeness of that verb was. The man of whom I once was pleased to say, "He is my grandfather," has become the dead man who was my grandfather. He was, and is no more. And this is a part of the great mystery we call time. But the past is present also. And this, I think, is a part of the greater mystery we call eternity. Though Mat Feltner has been dead for twenty-five years, and I am now older than he was when I was born and have grandchildren of my own, I know his hands, their way of holding a hammer or a hoe or a set of checklines, as well as I know my own. I know his way of talking, his way of cocking his head when he began a story, the smoking pipe stem held an inch from his lips. I have in my mind, not just as a memory but as a consolation, his welcome to me when I returned home from the university and, later, from jobs in distant cities. When I sat down beside him, his hand would clap lightly onto my leg above the knee; my absence might have lasted many months, but he would say as though we had been together the day before, "Hello, Andy." The shape of his hand is printed on the flesh of my thigh as vividly as a birthmark. This man who was my grandfather is present in me, as I felt always his father to be present in him.
When I stand in the road that passes through Port William, I am standing on the strata of my history that go down through the known past into the unknown: the blacktop rests on state gravel, which rests on county gravel, which rests on the creek rock and cinders laid down by the town when it was still mostly beyond the reach of the county; and under the creek rock and cinders is the dirt track of the town’s beginning, the buffalo trace that was the way we came.
Ben Feltner never had believed in working on Sunday, and he did not believe in not working on workdays. Those two principles had shaped all his weeks. He liked to make his hay cuttings and begin other large, urgent jobs as early in the week as possible in order to have them finished before Sunday.
Updated: Mar 17, 2023
"That mule could kick the lard out of a biscuit."
For what seemed a long time Mat knelt there with his father’s dead wrist in his hand, while his mind arrived and arrived and yet arrived at that place and time and that body lying still on the soiled and bloodied stones. When he looked up again, he did not look like the man they had known at all.
She was already wearing black. She had borne four children and raised one. Two of her children she had buried in the same week of a diphtheria epidemic, of which she had nearly died herself. After the third child had died, she never wore colors again. It was not that she chose to be ostentatiously bereaved. She could not have chosen to be ostentatious about anything. She was, in fact, a woman possessed of a strong native cheerfulness. And yet she had accepted a certain darkness that she had lived in too intimately to deny.
Her face, it seemed, had been made to smile. It was a face that assented wholly to the being of whatever and whomever she looked at.
"People sometimes talk of God’s love as if it’s a pleasant thing. But it is terrible, in a way. Think of all it includes. It included Thad Coulter, drunk and mean and foolish, before he killed Mr. Feltner, and it included him afterwards."
Mat Feltner dealt with Ben’s murder by not talking about it and thus keeping it in the past. In his last years, I liked to get him to tell me about the violent old times of the town, the hard drinking and the fighting. And he would oblige me up to a point, enjoying the outrageous old stories himself, I think. But always there would come a time in the midst of the telling when he would become silent, shake his head, lift one hand and let it fall; and I would know—I know better now than I did then—that he had remembered his father’s death.
As soon as the porch was cleared, he retrieved his hat from the hall tree and walked quietly out across the yard under the maples and the descending night. So as not to be waylaid by talk, he walked rapidly down the middle of the road to where he had tied his horse. Lamps had now been lighted in the stores and the houses. As he approached, his horse nickered to him. "I know it," Jack said. As soon as the horse felt the rider’s weight in the stirrup, he started. Soon the lights and noises of the town were behind them, and there were only a few stars, a low red streak in the west, and the horse’s eager footfalls on the road.
Updated: Apr 10, 2023
He put sugar and cream in his coffee and stirred rapidly with the spoon. Now he lingered a little. He did not indulge himself often, but this was one of his moments of leisure. He gave himself to his pleasures as concentratedly as to his work. He was never partial about anything; he never felt two ways at the same time. It was, she thought, a kind of childishness in him. When he was happy, he was entirely happy, and he could be as entirely sad or angry.
His glooms were the darkest she had ever seen. He worked as a hungry dog ate, and yet he could play at croquet or cards with the self-forgetful exuberance of a little boy. It was for his concentratedness, she supposed, if such a thing could be supposed about, that she loved him. That and her yen just to look at him, for it was wonderful to her the way he was himself in his slightest look or gesture.
Though he might loiter a moment over his coffee, the day, she knew, had already possessed him; its momentum was on him. When he rose from bed in the morning, he stepped into the day’s work, impelled into it by the tension, never apart from him, between what he wanted to do and what he could do.
This morning, delaying his own plowing, he was going to help Walter Cotman plow his corn ground. She could feel the knowledge of what he had to do tightening in him like a spring.
She had never seen anybody like him. He had a wild way of rejoicing, like a healthy child, singing songs, joking, driving his old car as if he were drunk and the road not wide enough. He could make her weak with laughing at him. And yet he was already a man as few men were. He had been making his own living since he was fourteen, when he had quit school. His father had been dead by then for five years. He had hated his stepfather. When a neighbor had offered him crop ground, room, and wages, he had taken charge of himself and, though he was still a boy, he had become a man. He wanted, he said, to have to say thank you to nobody. Or to nobody but her. He would be glad, he said with a large grin, to say thank you to her.
She knew he would rather die than be beaten. It was maybe not the best way to be, she thought, but it was the way he was, and she loved him. It was both a trouble and a comfort to her to know that he would always require the most of himself. And he was beautiful, the way he moved in his work. It stirred her. She could feel ambition constantly pressing in him. He could do more than he had done, and he was always looking for the way. He was like an axman at work in a tangled thicket, cutting and cutting at the brush and the vines and the low limbs, trying to make room for a full swing.
She had learned that she could do, and do well and gladly enough, whatever she would have to do. She had no fear.
Her parents’ pride was social, belonging, even in its extremity, to their kind and time. But Elton’s pride was merely creaturely, albeit that of an extraordinary creature; it was a creature’s naked claim on the right to respect itself, a claim that no creature’s life, of itself, could invariably support.
At his best, Elton was a man in love—with her but not just with her. He was in love too with the world, with their place in the world, with that scanty farm, with his own life, with farming. At those times she lived in his love as in a spacious house.
Updated: Apr 15, 2023
And then he heard his father’s voice riding up in his throat as he had never heard it, and he saw that his father had turned to the boy and was speaking to him: "Honey, run yonder to the house. Tell your granny to set on another plate. For we have our own that was gone and has come again."
Even the meaning of his name is uncertain (the most likely interpretations: "the Old Master" or, more picturesquely, "the Old Boy").
wei wu wei, literally "doing not-doing,"
The teaching of the Tao Te Ching is moral in the deepest sense. Unencumbered by any concept of sin, the Master doesn’t see evil as a force to resist, but simply as an opaqueness, a state of self-absorption which is in disharmony with the universal process, so that, as with a dirty window, the light can’t shine through.
The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnamable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
Updated: Mar 16, 2023
When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad. Being and non-being create each other. Difficult and easy support each other. Long and short define each other. High and low depend on each other. Before and after follow each other. Therefore the Master acts without doing anything and teaches without saying anything. Things arise and she lets them come; things disappear and she lets them go. She has but doesn’t possess, acts but doesn’t expect. When her work is done, she forgets it. That is why it lasts forever.
Practice not-doing, and everything will fall into place.
The Tao is like a well: used but never used up. It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities. It is hidden but always present. I don’t know who gave birth to it. It is older than God.
The Master stays behind; that is why she is ahead. She is detached from all things; that is why she is one with them. Because she has let go of herself, she is perfectly fulfilled.
When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.
Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.
The Master observes the world but trusts his inner vision. He allows things to come and go. His heart is open as the sky.
Stop thinking, and end your problems. What difference between yes and no? What difference between success and failure? Must you value what others value, avoid what others avoid? How ridiculous! Other people are excited, as though they were at a parade. I alone don’t care, I alone am expressionless, like an infant before it can smile. Other people have what they need; I alone possess nothing. I alone drift about, like someone without a home. I am like an idiot, my mind is so empty. Other people are bright; I alone am dark. Other people are sharp; I alone am dull. Other people have a purpose; I alone don’t know. I drift like a wave on the ocean, I blow as aimless as the wind.
When the ancient Masters said, "If you want to be given everything, give everything up," they weren’t using empty phrases. Only in being lived by the Tao can you be truly yourself.
Updated: Apr 11, 2023
If you receive the world, the Tao will never leave you and you will be like a little child.
If you are a pattern for the world, the Tao will be strong inside you and there will be nothing you can’t do. Know the personal, yet keep to the impersonal: accept the world as it is. If you accept the world, the Tao will be luminous inside you and you will return to your primal self.
The Master sees things as they are, without trying to control them. She lets them go their own way, and resides at the center of the circle.
Because he believes in himself, he doesn’t try to convince others. Because he is content with himself, he doesn’t need others’ approval. Because he accepts himself, the whole world accepts him.
If powerful men and women could remain centered in the Tao, all things would be in harmony. The world would become a paradise. All people would be at peace, and the law would be written in their hearts.
The Master doesn’t try to be powerful; thus he is truly powerful. The ordinary man keeps reaching for power; thus he never has enough. The Master does nothing, yet he leaves nothing undone. The ordinary man is always doing things, yet many more are left to be done.
When the Tao is lost, there is goodness. When goodness is lost, there is morality. When morality is lost, there is ritual.
When a superior man hears of the Tao, he immediately begins to embody it. When an average man hears of the Tao, he half believes it, half doubts it. When a foolish man hears of the Tao, he laughs out loud. If he didn’t laugh, it wouldn’t be the Tao. Thus it is said: The path into the light seems dark, the path forward seems to go back, the direct path seems long, true power seems weak, true purity seems tarnished, true steadfastness seems changeable, true clarity seems obscure, the greatest art seems unsophisticated, the greatest love seems indifferent, the greatest wisdom seems childish.
Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.
There is no greater illusion than fear, no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself, no greater misfortune than having an enemy. Whoever can see through all fear will always be safe.
In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Tao, every day something is dropped. Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action.
Updated: Apr 15, 2023
The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings. He knows that he is going to die, and he has nothing left to hold on to: no illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body. He doesn’t think about his actions; they flow from the core of his being. He holds nothing back from life; therefore he is ready for death, as a man is ready for sleep after a good day’s work.
He lets all things come and go effortlessly, without desire. He never expects results; thus he is never disappointed. He is never disappointed; thus his spirit never grows old.
If you want to be a great leader, you must learn to follow the Tao. Stop trying to control. Let go of fixed plans and concepts, and the world will govern itself. The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. The more weapons you have, the less secure people will be. The more subsidies you have, the less self-reliant people will be.
When the will to power is in charge, the higher the ideals, the lower the results. Try to make people happy, and you lay the groundwork for misery. Try to make people moral, and you lay the groundwork for vice. Thus the Master is content to serve as an example and not to impose her will. She is pointed, but doesn’t pierce. Straightforward, but supple. Radiant, but easy on the eyes.
Act without doing; work without effort. Think of the small as large and the few as many. Confront the difficult while it is still easy; accomplish the great task by a series of small acts. The Master never reaches for the great; thus she achieves greatness. When she runs into a difficulty, she stops and gives herself to it. She doesn’t cling to her own comfort; thus problems are no problem for her.
Therefore the Master takes action by letting things take their course. He remains as calm at the end as at the beginning. He has nothing, thus has nothing to lose. What he desires is non-desire; what he learns is to unlearn.
I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. Simple in actions and in thoughts, you return to the source of being. Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.
My teachings are easy to understand and easy to put into practice. Yet your intellect will never grasp them, and if you try to practice them, you’ll fail. My teachings are older than the world. How can you grasp their meaning? If you want to know me, look inside your heart.
If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you aren’t afraid of dying, there is nothing you can’t achieve. Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place. When you handle the master carpenter’s tools, chances are that you’ll cut yourself.
Act for the people’s benefit. Trust them; leave them alone.
Jayata said to Vasubandu, "If you have nothing to ask for in your mind, that state of mind is called the Tao."
Philo said, "Today means boundless and inexhaustible eternity. Months and years and all periods of time are concepts of men, who gauge everything by number; but the true name of eternity is Today."
If you want to become whole, etc.: Unless you accept yourself, you can’t let go of yourself.
Wanting to reform the world without discovering one’s true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.
Honoring the Tao means respecting the way things are. There is a wonderful Japanese story (adapted here from Zenkei Shibayama Roshi’s A Flower Does Not Talk) which portrays this attitude: A hundred and fifty years ago there lived a woman named Sono, whose devotion and purity of heart were respected far and wide. One day a fellow Buddhist, having made a long trip to see her, asked, "What can I do to put my heart at rest?" She said, "Every morning and every evening, and whenever anything happens to you, keep on saying, ‘Thanks for everything. I have no complaint whatsoever.’" The man did as he was instructed, for a whole year, but his heart was still not at peace. He returned to Sono, crestfallen. "I’ve said your prayer over and over, and yet nothing in my life has changed; I’m still the same selfish person as before. What should I do now?" Sono immediately said, "‘Thanks for everything. I have no complaint whatsoever.’" On hearing these words, the man was able to open his spiritual eye, and returned home with a great joy.
The great Way is easy: Zen Master Seng-ts’an said, The great Way is not difficult if you don’t cling to good and bad. Just let go of your preferences: and everything will be perfectly clear.
no one can compete with her: She sees everyone as her equal.
"William expressed himself and his environment to perfection when he replied to my question about his house at Chocorua, ‘Oh, it’s the most delightful house you ever saw; has 14 doors all opening outside.’ His brain isn’t limited to 14, perhaps unfortunately." It is quite like James, perhaps the most humane and welcoming philosopher, to celebrate a wealth of doors, so many standing invitations for guests to come and go as they like, for light and fresh air to flow freely.
"Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day," James advised in the Principles, "That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test."
My beloved old Tom,
Take for granted that you’ve got a temperament from which you must make up your mind to expect twenty times as much anguish as other people need to get along with. Regard it as something as external to you as possible, like the curl of your hair. Remember when old December’s darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached.
It has become the most studied single gene in the history of molecular biology, generating over 70,000 research papers
Vogelstein, who was born and brought up in the shadow of Johns Hopkins in the 1940s and went to medical school there, has been involved with p53 since its earliest days. His lab, housed today in a tall modern building of glass and light which looks out over Baltimore and down onto the warm red bricks of the old hospital, has provided some of the most important insights into the workings of the gene. ‘I think you could safely say that it’s impossible – or very difficult – to get a malignant tumour without the activity of p53 being disrupted.’
the role of p53 in nailing the tobacco industry by furnishing unequivocal proof that smoking is a direct cause of cancer.
‘The question that’s obsessed me for the whole of my career is: why is cancer so rare?’ Gerard Evan,
the ‘last universal common ancestor’ of all life on earth (often referred to by the acronym LUCA), whose existence was first proposed by Charles Darwin in his book On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. In other words, some of our genes are more than 3.5 million years old and have been passed down faithfully from one generation to the next over unimaginable eons of time.
The great majority of cancers – well over 80 per cent – are carcinomas, which means they are in the epithelial cells that form the outer membranes of all the organs, tubes and cavities in our bodies, and include our skin. The connective tissue, which provides the structural framework for our bodies, and support and packaging for the other tissues and organs – it includes, for example, bone, cartilage, fibrous tissue such as tendons and ligaments, collagen and fatty tissue – appears extremely resistant to turning malignant. Sarcomas, which are cancers of the connective tissue, account for only about one in a hundred cases.
The growing tumour is parasitic: it competes with the normal cells around it for nutrients and oxygen, and it can’t grow much beyond 1–2mm (1/25th–1/12th of an inch) in diameter unless it develops its own blood supply. What distinguishes a malignant tumour from a benign one is the former’s ability to spread – to send out microscopic shoots that penetrate the walls and invade neighbouring tissue, and to seed itself in distant sites from breakaway cells carried in the bloodstream or lymph system. Blood-borne dissemination is particularly efficient at spreading cancer, with the blood depositing its cargo of delinquent cells along natural drainage sites, most commonly the liver and lungs.
‘The Hallmarks of Cancer’ was published in 2000 and far from disappearing ‘like a stone thrown into a quiet pond’, as Hanahan and Weinberg had predicted, knowing how quickly most journal articles are read and forgotten, their paper has become the descriptive cornerstone of cancer biology
The six characteristics they identified as being common to virtually every cancerous cell are that, in lay terms: • the forces pushing them to grow and divide come from within the corrupted cell itself, rather than being signals from outside; • cancer cells are insensitive to forces that normally stop cell division at appropriate times; • they are resistant to being killed by the mechanisms that normally remove corrupted cells; • they are immortal, meaning they can divide indefinitely, whereas normal cells have a finite number of divisions controlled by an internal ‘clock’ before they stop dividing, become senescent and eventually die off; • they develop and maintain their own blood supply; • they can spread to other organs and tissues and set up satellite colonies, or metastases. In 2011 the two scientists updated and refined their ‘Hallmarks’ paper, adding further general principles, including the fact that the metabolism in cancer cells – particularly the way they use glucose to provide energy – tends to be abnormal; and that they are able to evade detection and destruction by the body’s immune system.
‘There are many genes that have a mechanistic role in one hallmark trait or another, and this will spill over to two or three hallmarks. But p53 is the one that links all the hallmarks together. This means that from a molecular viewpoint there is one basic condition to get a cancer: p53 must be switched off. If p53 is on, and hence functioning properly, cancer will not develop.’
In 2003 a team from Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, led by radiologist Bruce Rothschild, travelled around the museums of North America scanning the bones of 700 dinosaur exhibits. They found evidence of tumours in 29 bone samples from duck-billed dinosaurs called hadrosaurs from the Cretaceous period some 70 million years ago. And evidence of tumours has been found also in the bones of dinosaurs from the Jurassic period between 199 and 145 million years ago.
Hippocrates, living in ancient Greece around 460 BC, was the first person to recognise the difference between benign tumours that don’t invade surrounding tissue or spread to other parts of the body, and malignant tumours that do. The blood vessels branching out from the fleshy growths he found in his patients so reminded him of the claws of a crab that he gave this mysterious disease the name karkinos, the Greek word for crab, which has translated into English as carcinoma.
And in 1775 an English surgeon, Percivall Pott,
The man who is content to live alone is either a beast or a god. —ARISTOTLE
"You cannot give up and die," Karris said angrily. "You’re the best there is. No one can replace you." Unexpectedly, the White chuckled. "Words every megalomaniac longs to hear. But true only of the truly bad and the monumentally great. I am neither, Karris. I am merely competent, my failures significant and sadly frequent. That I am not bad perhaps makes me better than many a White before me, but the good and the great are two disparate camps that rarely overlap."
Updated: Feb 18, 2023
Kip quickly filled in the relevant blanks, and as Quentin watched him, perplexed, he walked over to Commander Ironfist. "Can you sign this for me, sir?" He handed him the quill, already dipped in ink. "Breaker, do you know how many ways I could disable you with this quill?" "No, sir." "Do you want to find out?" "Only if that knowledge is academic rather than experiential, sir." The corner of Ironfist’s mouth twitched, but it might have been Kip’s imagination.
Updated: Feb 18, 2023
"Unavailable. I may have missed things." But he was examining Kip sharply. "Boy, I am ferocious when crossed, I don’t deny it. I find being led by fools intolerable. But I am magnanimous in victory. I do what needs to be done to win and without putting on a false display of sorrow or reluctance; you think that makes me hideous? Others pay homage to common pieties with their lips but betray them by their actions. I am simply more forthright. Orholam needs even honest men, does he not?"
"Knowing I would die for you, how would you live if you were worthy of that sacrifice? Live that way," Cruxer said. "Simple, huh?" Kip asked sardonically. "Simple. Not easy."
Updated: Feb 18, 2023
"Well, not personally. Brandy?" "No, I don’t want your damn brandy!" "That’s too bad." Andross poured two glasses anyway, and put one in front of Kip. He sat in his chair and gestured for Kip to sit across from him. "Knowledge of fine alcohols is mostly an affectation, but an important one. Men respect those who have greater knowledge of the trivial than they do, when that trivia is costly. Nothing more so than spirits."
"My dear," Lightsong said, glancing backward. "I at least have to chat with her. Nothing would be more intolerable than being overthrown by a person with whom I’d never even had a nice conversation."
Among the many paradoxes of human life, this is perhaps the most peculiar and consequential: We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy. Many of us spend our lives marching with open eyes toward remorse, regret, guilt, and disappointment.And nowhere do our injuries seem more casually self-inflicted, or the suffering we create more disproportionate to the needs of the moment, than in the lies we tell to other human beings. Lying is the royal road to chaos.
I do not remember what I thought about lying before I took "The Ethical Analyst," but the course accomplished as close to a firmware upgrade of my brain as I have ever experienced. I came away convinced that lying, even about the smallest matters, needlessly damages personal relationships and public trust.
The opportunity to deceive others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance casts us onto some of the steepest ethical terrain we ever cross. Few of us are murderers or thieves, but we have all been liars. And many of us will be unable to get safely into our beds tonight without having told several lies over the course of the day. What does this say about us and about the life we are making with one another?
At least one study suggests that 10 percent of communication between spouses is deceptive.[4] Another has found that 38 percent of encounters among college students contain lies.[5] However, researchers have discovered that even liars rate their deceptive interactions as less pleasant than truthful ones. This is not terribly surprising: We know that trust is deeply rewarding and that deception and suspicion are two sides of the same coin. Research suggests that all forms of lying—including white lies meant to spare the feelings of others—are associated with poorer-quality relationships.[6]
Once one commits to telling the truth, one begins to notice how unusual it is to meet someone who shares this commitment. Honest people are a refuge: You know they mean what they say; you know they will not say one thing to your face and another behind your back; you know they will tell you when they think you have failed—and for this reason their praise cannot be mistaken for mere flattery. Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity. Knowing that we will attempt to tell the truth, whatever the circumstances, leaves us with little to prepare for. We can simply be ourselves.
Telling the truth can also reveal ways in which we want to grow, but haven’t. I remember learning that I was to be the class valedictorian at my high school. I declined the honor, saying that I felt that someone who had been at the school longer should give the graduation speech. But that was a lie. The truth was that I was terrified of public speaking and would do almost anything to avoid it. Apparently, I wasn’t ready to confront this fact about myself—and my willingness to lie at that moment allowed me to avoid doing so for many years. Had I been forced to tell my high school principal the truth, he might have begun a conversation with me that would have been well worth having.
There have been moments in my life when I was devoted to a project that was simply doomed, in which I had months—in one case, years—invested, and where honest feedback could have spared me an immense amount of wasted effort. At other times, I received frank criticism just when I needed it and was able to change course quickly, knowing that I had avoided a lot of painful and unnecessary work. The difference between these two fates is hard to exaggerate. Yes, it can be unpleasant to be told that we have wasted time, or that we are not performing as well as we imagined, but if the criticism is valid, it is precisely what we most need to hear to find our way in the world. And yet we are often tempted to encourage others with insincere praise.
I have a friend who is a very successful writer. Early in his career, he wrote a script that I thought was terrible, and I told him so. That was not easy to do, because he had spent the better part of a year working on it—but it happened to be the truth. Now, when I tell him that I love something he has written, he knows that I love it. He also knows that I respect his talent enough to tell him when I don’t. I am sure there are people in his life he can’t say that about. Why would I want to be one of them?
One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts one at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of having unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless.
As it was in Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and Othello, so it is in life. Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled and sustained by lies. Acts of adultery and other personal betrayals, financial fraud, government corruption—even murder and genocide—generally require an additional moral defect: a willingness to lie. Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship. By lying, we deny others a view of the world as it is. Our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choices they can make—and in ways we cannot always predict. Every lie is a direct assault upon the autonomy of those we lie to.
How would your relationships change if you resolved never to lie again? What truths might suddenly come into view in your life? What kind of person would you become? And how might you change the people around you? It is worth finding out.
The foremost requirement for potent leadership is humility, so that leaders can fully understand and appreciate their own shortfalls.
After many a vicious gunfight in Ramadi, "stand by to get some" was a running joke that eased the tension right when we knew trouble was coming. The more nonchalantly it could be said under the direst of circumstances, the funnier it was.
"It’s not your fault; it’s no one’s fault, Love Dad." - Beverly Lorne Germa, January 12, 1987
So here it goes. Are you ready for a consistent and predictable definition? Please stay with me, as your quality of life depends on it. Anxiety is a thinking process of the mind. That’s it. Ready for another revelation? Anxiety is not painful. This may surprise you and may even cause you to doubt my credibility. If you feel resistance to this concept of anxiety being a painless thought process, let me assure you making this distinction has allowed me (and many others) to heal from chronic, relentless, persistent worrisome—or fear-inducing—thoughts. Quite simply, anxiety itself doesn’t hurt. The painful part comes from anxiety’s evil twin: alarm. And I would tell you that you are confusing anxiety (the process that produces potentially fearful thoughts in your mind) with a painful feeling in your body. The thoughts themselves are not painful.
"All anxiety is separation anxiety." That, along with many other things Dr. Neufeld said, has stuck with me to this day. Anxiety and alarm almost always result from a break in attachment during childhood—in other words, an experience of separation. When we are separated from our attachment figures, either physically or emotionally, our bodies go into a state of alarm. This is an activated state, a fight-or-flight type reaction the body mounts automatically when we sense real or perceived separation. However, instead of fighting or fleeing, that activated response is initially not about fighting or fleeing at all. It is an activated reaction to mobilize us to pursue a lost connection. That’s right, the reason for our fight-or-flight reactions is usually not about a threat to our physical safety. In our modern world, it is much more often about a threat to our emotional safety.
If you struggle with chronic anxious thoughts, it is highly probable you have a version of this state of alarm in your system, likely from a time in your life where you felt separated from your attachment figures and you were unable to close the gap.
What we call anxiety is a combination of an alarm state in the body and anxious thoughts in the mind. I have found immeasurable relief in addressing the alarm of the body separately from the anxious thoughts of the mind. A considerable part of my healing was due to using the term anxiety simply to refer to the anxious thoughts of the mind. In this way, I divorced anxiety of the mind from the alarm state in the body. In distilling alarm and anxiety down to their essence, I was able to break the cycle by showing the component parts were separate and therefore separable. I will continue to use the term anxiety in this book only to refer to the machinations and worrisome thoughts of the mind.
The reason you became anxious is that once upon a time you left yourself, often to look after a parent or it was just too unbearable to be in your body. As a result, you learned to judge, abandon, blame, and shame yourself (in short, take JABS at yourself). Those JABS insidiously set traps or blocks to self-compassion and self-care—blocks that prevent you from having a mind and body that are in sync. As a result, you are blocked from becoming securely attached to yourself, and this separation energy creates what you have called "anxiety." To heal, you need to reestablish this secure attachment to yourself so your mind and body get back in sync.
Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself. Publilius Syrus
Freedom, as Eisenhower famously said, is actually only the "opportunity for self-discipline."
Emerging from the war, he was a victor of victors, having achieved conquest at a level no man-at-arms ever has or hopefully will ever again. Then, as president, overseeing a newfound arsenal of nuclear weapons, he was literally the most powerful human being in the world. There was almost no one or nothing that could tell him what to do, nothing that could stop him, no one who did not look up at him in admiration or away from him in fear. Yet his presidency involved no new wars, no use of those horrible weapons, no escalation of conflict, and he left office with prescient warnings about the machinery that creates war, the so-called military-industrial complex. Indeed, Eisenhower’s most notable use of force in office came when he sent the 101st Airborne Division to protect a group of black children on their way to school for the first time. And where were the scandals? Public enrichment? Broken promises? There weren’t any. His greatness, like all true greatness, was not rooted in aggression or ego or his appetites or a vast fortune, but in simplicity and restraint—in how he commanded himself, which in turn made him worthy of commanding others. Contrast him with the conquerors of his time: Hitler. Mussolini. Stalin. Contrast him even with his contemporaries: MacArthur. Patton. Montgomery. Contrast him with his peers of the past: Alexander the Great. Xerxes. Napoleon. In the end, what endures, what we truly marvel at, is not the ambition but the self-mastery. The self-awareness. The temperance.
As a young man, Eisenhower’s mother had quoted him a verse from the Book of Proverbs, "He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty," she had told him, "and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city." She taught him the same lesson that Seneca himself tried to instill in the rulers he advised, that "Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power." And so it goes that Eisenhower quite literally conquered the world by conquering himself first.
It is through discipline that not only are all things possible, but also that all things are enhanced. Name someone truly great without self-discipline. Name one calamitous undoing that was not, at least in part, rooted in a lack of self-discipline. More than talent, life is about temperament. And temperance.
Not because he was never injured or sick, but because he was an Iron Horse of a man who refused to quit, who pushed through pain and physical limits that others would have used as an excuse. At some point, Gehrig’s hands were X-rayed, and stunned doctors found at least seventeen healed fractures. Over the course of his career, he’d broken nearly every one of his fingers—and it not only hadn’t slowed him down, but he’d failed to say a word about it.
He worked harder than anyone. "Fitness was almost a religion to him," one teammate would say of him. "I am a slave to baseball," Gehrig said. A willing slave, a slave who loved the job and remained forever grateful at just the opportunity to play.
As a rookie, Joe DiMaggio once asked Gehrig who he thought was going to pitch for the opposing team, hoping perhaps, to hear it was someone easy to hit. "Never worry about that, Joe," Gehrig explained. "Just remember they always save the best for the Yankees." And by extension, he expected every member of the Yankees to bring their best with them too. That was the deal: To whom much is given, much is expected. The obligation of a champion is to act like a champion . . . while working as hard as somebody with something to prove.
"I guess the streak’s over," a pitcher joked after knocking Gehrig unconscious with a pitch in June 1934. For five terrible minutes, he lay there, unmoving, dead to the world—death being a real possibility in the era before helmets. He was rushed to the hospital, and most expected he’d be out for two weeks even if the X-ray for a skull fracture came back negative. Again, he was back in the batter’s box the next day. Still, you might have expected a hesitation, a flinch when the next ball came hurtling toward him. That’s why pitchers will bean a batter from time to time—because it makes them cautious, the batter’s instinct for self-preservation causes them to step back, in a game where a millimeter may make all the difference. Instead, Gehrig leaned in . . . and hit a triple. A few innings later, he hit another. And before the game was rained out, he hit his third . . . while recovering from a nearly fatal blow to the brain. "A thing like that can’t stop us Dutchmen," was his only postgame comment.
Just a sample of Gehrig’s schedule in August 1938: The Yankees played thirty-six games in thirty-five days. Ten games were doubleheaders; in one case, there were five consecutive days of them. He traveled to five cities, covering thousands of miles by train. He hit .329 with nine home runs and thirty-eight RBIs. For an athlete to do this without missing a game, without missing an inning, in their midthirties, is impressive. But Lou Gehrig did it as the early stages of ALS ravaged his body, slowing his motor skills, weakening his muscles, and cramping his hands and feet.
It was Churchill who told the young boys at Harrow School to "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty . . . Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."
The funeral lasted just eight minutes. Looking out over the man’s friends and teammates, the priest found a flowery eulogy unnecessary. "We need none," the preacher said of the man, "because you all knew him." No tribute was needed, his life, his example, spoke for itself.
Updated: Dec 30, 2022
"Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact," she’d later reflect, "where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense."
There she was, starting her first novel in 1965, freshly divorced, thirty-four years old and struggling as one of the few black women in an incredibly white, male industry. Yet in her mind, this was "the height of life." She was no longer a child, and yet for all her responsibilities, everything was quite simple: Her kids needed her to be an adult. So did her unfinished novel. Wake up. Show up. Be present. Give it everything you’ve got. Which she did. Even after The Bluest Eye was published to rave reviews in 1970. She followed it with ten more novels, nine nonfiction works, five children’s books, two plays, and short stories. And she earned herself a National Book Award, a Nobel Prize, and a Presidential Medal. Yet for all the plaudits, she must have been most proud of having done it while being a great mother, a great working mother.
"Few figures in public life have had Dwight D. Eisenhower’s willpower," the biographer Jean Edward Smith wrote. "A lifetime smoker of three to four packs of cigarettes a day, Eisenhower quit cold turkey . . . and never touched a cigarette again." "The only way to stop is to stop," he would tell an aide, "and I stopped." No one "made him,"—no one could have—but he saw it as his duty to enforce it on himself. It would add years to his life. And by protecting and mastering his body, it allowed him to be of service to the world, first leading NATO and then assuming the American presidency, in a fraught and tense period. But what about you? What are you hooked on? What do you have trouble doing without?
As the novelist Gustave Flaubert commands: Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. Clean up your desk. Make your bed. Get your things in order. Now get after it.
Because it was in accordance with his favorite saying, festina lente. That is, to make haste slowly. As we learn from the historian Suetonius, "He thought nothing less becoming in a well-trained leader than haste and rashness," Suetonius wrote. "And, accordingly, favorite sayings of his were: ‘More haste, less speed’; ‘Better a safe commander than a bold’; and ‘That is done quickly enough which is done well enough.’ "
"Slowly," the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez would say, "you do everything correctly." That’s true with leadership as well as lifting weights, running as well as writing. Hustle isn’t always about hurrying. It is about getting things done, properly. It’s okay to move slowly . . . provided that you never stop.
Joyce Carol Oates worked and taught. Taught and worked. She published. "I come from a part of the world where people did work rather than just talk about it," she said. "And so if you feel that you just can’t write, or you’re too tired, or this, that, and the other, just stop thinking about it and go and work."
Updated: Jan 05, 2023
Yet every so often, for a few days, he would eat only the scantest fare and wear his coarsest clothing. He would actively seek out discomfort, mimicking abject poverty and harsher life conditions. He slept on the ground and deprived himself of everything but bread and water. Now, you might think that this is just a precious, even condescending hobby for privileged people, like ice baths or camping. But it was a lot more than that. First off, Seneca took pains to make sure the struggle was serious. "The pallet must be a real one," he wrote to a friend advising him to try this voluntary discomfort, "and the same applies to your smock, and your bread must be hard and grimy. Endure all this for three or four days at a time, sometimes more, so it is a genuine trial and not an amusement."
To last, to be great, you have to understand how to rest. Not just rest, but relax, too, have fun too. (After all, what kind of success is it if you can never lay it down?) The most surefire way to make yourself more fragile, to cut your career short, is to be undisciplined about rest and recovery, to push yourself too hard, too fast, to overtrain and to pursue the false economy of overwork.
How did he do it? How did he not only survive but emerge unbroken, undaunted, from this experience? His family motto tells us: Fortitudine vincimus. By endurance we conquer. Fittingly, this was the name of his ship as well: the Endurance.
Updated: Jan 08, 2023
An observer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt once quipped that the man had a "second-class intellect and a first-class temperament." Given what disease took from Roosevelt’s body, the truth of the remark is all the more illustrative: Temperament is everything. Our head and our heart combine to form a kind of command system that rules our lives.
An observer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt once quipped that the man had a "second-class intellect and a first-class temperament." Given what disease took from Roosevelt’s body, the truth of the remark is all the more illustrative: Temperament is everything. Our head and our heart combine to form a kind of command system that rules our lives.
Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child suggests that "the single most common factor for children who develop resilience is at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive parent, caregiver, or other adult"
Safety and security are the underpinnings of resilience and are key in supporting the capacity for self-regulation.
When I discovered The Work—when it discovered me—I realized that reality is always good, whatever form it appears in. Every experience is supplied by a friendly universe. Every experience is a gift. It’s falling down; it’s getting up; it’s your everyday chores; it’s the smell of fresh strawberries, the smell of a dead mouse; it’s the death of a loved one; it’s your husband falling in love with another woman; it’s everything that happens in your life, whether you believe that it’s good or bad. People with questioned minds see the apparently bad as good, because they no longer live in the world of opposites, the world in which there is any thought powerful enough to override the true nature of things. They have realized this goodness so deeply that they can live it every moment of their lives.
Updated: Mar 13, 2023
I experience reality as something so benevolent, so beautiful, so pure, that there is no word for it.
Everything is fair, everything is right, everything is beautiful, and if you see anything in your life as unfair, you realize that it’s your next opportunity to question what you’re believing and remove yourself from ignorance. Anything that would darken your awareness is simply the next thing to question.
Francesca said, "Don’t you ever want to give thanks to God, when things are going well for you? Don’t you ever want to ask God for strength, when you need it?" "No." "Well, I do. Even though I know God makes no difference. And if God is the reason for everything, then God includes the urge to use the word God. So whenever I gain some strength, or comfort, or meaning, from that urge, then God is the source of that strength, that comfort, that meaning.
"What difference? We perceive – we inhabit – one arrangement of the set of events. But why should that arrangement be unique? There’s no reason to believe that the pattern we’ve found is the only coherent way of ordering the dust. There must be billions of other universes coexisting with us, made of the very same stuff – just differently arranged. If I can perceive events thousands of kilometers and hundreds of seconds apart to be side-by-side and simultaneous, there could be worlds, and creatures, built up from what we’d think of as points in space-time scattered all over the galaxy, all over the universe. We’re one possible solution to a giant cosmic anagram … but it would be ludicrous to believe that we’re the only one."
This is not a self-help book. Nobody needs another sermon about the ten steps or seven stages or sixteen hours a week that will deliver them from their stalled or fucked-up life. Hit the local bookstore or surf Amazon and you will slip into a bottomless pit of self-help hype. Must feel good to consume because it sure does sell. Too bad most of it won’t work.
I love this experiment, but hope isn’t what got into those rats. How long does hope really last? It may have triggered something initially, but no creature is going to swim for their life for sixty hours straight, without food, powered by hope alone. They needed something a lot stronger to keep them breathing, kicking, and fighting.
There are two levels to belief. There’s the surface level, which our coaches, teachers, therapists, and parents love to preach. "Believe in yourself," they all say, as if the thought alone can keep us afloat when the odds are against us in the battle of our lives. But once exhaustion sets in, doubt and insecurity tend to penetrate and dissipate that flimsy brand of belief. Then there’s the belief born in resilience. It comes from working your way through layers of pain, fatigue, and reason, and ignoring the ever-present temptation to quit until you strike a source of fuel you didn’t even know existed. One that eliminates all doubt, makes you certain of your strength and the fact that eventually, you will prevail, so long as you keep moving forward. That is the level of belief that can defy the expectations of scientists and change everything. It’s not an emotion to be shared or an intellectual concept, and nobody else can give it to you. It must bubble up from within.
Social media has compounded and spread this virus of dissatisfaction, which is why the world is now populated by damaged people consuming airy gratification, hunting an immediate dopamine fix with no substance at all behind it. Instead of staying focused on growth, millions of minds have been infected with lack, leaving them feeling even lesser than. Their internal dialogue becomes that much more toxic, as this population of weak-ass, entitled victims of life itself multiplies.
Rise up, motherfuckers. Let’s work!
I was twenty-four years old when I realized I was broken inside. Something had gone numb in my soul, and that numbness, that lack of deep feeling, dictated what my life had become. It’s why I quit going after my goals, my biggest dreams, whenever things got hard. Quitting was just another detour. It never bothered me much because when you’re numb, you can’t process what’s happening to you or within you.
Once I’d liberated myself and begun to evolve, I learned that it is the rare warrior who embraces the adversity of being born into hell and then, with their own free will, chooses to add as much suck as they can find to turn each day into a boot camp of resiliency.
When that happens, a lot of motherfuckers look for a cozy place to hunker down and hide out until the storm passes. "I’m only human," they say. When holy hell rains down upon them and they feel drained and powerless, they cannot conceive of a way to keep going. I understand that impulse, but if I had succumbed to the "I’m only human" mentality, I never would have dug myself out of the deep hole I was in at twenty-four years old. Because the second you utter those words, the white towel is fluttering in the air, and your mind stops looking for more fuel. I didn’t know for sure if I’d ever find my way out of the darkness. I just knew that I could not throw in the towel, and neither can you.
Updated: Dec 12, 2022
Everything must be utilized. Especially the energy in volatile, potentially damaging emotions like fear and hate. You have to learn how to handle them—how to mine them—and once you master that craft, any negative emotion or event that bubbles up in your brain or gets lobbed your way, like a grenade, can be used as fuel to make you better. But to get there, you must literally listen to yourself.
Updated: Dec 29, 2022
Many people wake up with dread or doubt day after day. They dread their workouts, their class load, or their job. Maybe they have a test or presentation that makes them nervous, or they know that the day’s workout will hurt. While they linger in bed, they tune into their soft, forgiving self-talk, which doesn’t make it any easier to get up and moving. Most people rise up eventually, but they remain in a daze for hours because they aren’t fully engaged with their lives. Their self-talk has made them numb to the moment, and they sleepwalk through half the day before they finally perk the fuck up. The way we speak to ourselves in moments of doubt is crucial, whether or not the stakes are high. Because our words become actions, and our actions build habits that can coat our minds and bodies with the plaque of ambivalence, hesitancy, and passivity and separate us from our own lives. If any of this sounds familiar, grab your phone and record your inner dialogue as soon as you wake up. Don’t hold back. Spill all your dread, laziness, and stress into the mic. Now listen to it. Nine times out of ten, you won’t like what you hear. It will make you cringe. You wouldn’t want your girlfriend or boyfriend, your boss, or your kids to hear your unfiltered weakness. But you should.
Do it again the next morning, but this time, once you get through listening to all your whining about the shit you don’t want to do, sit up in bed and lay down a second take. Pretend you’re motivating a friend or loved one who is going through challenges. Be respectful of the issues they face, but be positive, forceful, and realistic too. This is a skill that demands repetition, and if you do it regularly, you’ll find that it won’t take long for your self-talk to flip from doubt and dread to optimism and empowerment.
I’d always felt most at home in the margins. During my military career, I’d go on my longest runs and rucks before anyone else woke up. While others were relaxing or partying after a hard day or week of work, I stayed in to study my dive tables, pack and repack my parachute, or run and grind in the gym deep into the night. Everything I did on my own time was for my own personal fulfillment and growth.
In my Lab, each physical workout became a test of my mental fortitude. I stopped caring about how my body looked. You don’t need six-pack abs when your mind is steel-plated. From that point on, each run, every hour on the pull-up bar, and all my late-night study sessions became experiments conducted to see how long my mind would hold out when I continued to apply more and more pressure.
Those same experiments continued for the next twenty years, and through all my countless trials, tumbles, and failures, I cultivated an alter-ego—a savage who refused to quit under almost any circumstance. Someone capable of overcoming any and all obstacles.
If you don’t feel like you’re good enough, if your life lacks meaning and time feels like it’s slipping through your fingers, there is only one option. Recreate yourself in your own Mental Lab. Somewhere you can be alone with your thoughts and wrestle with the substance of what and who you want to be in your one short life on earth. If it feels right, create an alter ego to access some of that dark matter in your own mind. That’s what I did. In my mind, David Goggins wasn’t the savage motherfucker who accomplished all the hard shit. It was Goggins who did that.
When a half-assed job doesn’t bother you, it speaks volumes about the kind of person you are. And until you start feeling a sense of pride and self-respect in the work you do, no matter how small or overlooked those jobs might be, you will continue to half-ass your life.
Once, those task lists were a burden. Today, I burn with an inner drive shaped by doing the shit I didn’t want to do over and over again. And it won’t let me relax until I’ve done what needs to be done every damn day.
Said another leader in the field, "If you are like most people, you feel convinced that because you have emotions, you know a lot about what emotions are, and how they work…you are almost certainly wrong."
"You are unfinished. They are discerning Patrons, but not, I think, impossible to please. The Bastard said to me, from His own lips—" Dy Cabon’s breath drew in. "—that the gods did not desire flawless souls, but great ones. I think that very darkness is where the greatness grows from, as flowers from the soil. I am not sure, in fact, if greatness can bloom without it.
For anybody who could use a break.
Sometimes, a person reaches a point in their life when it becomes absolutely essential to get the fuck out of the city.
The City was beautiful, it really was. A towering architectural celebration of curves and polish and colored light, laced with the connective threads of elevated rail lines and smooth footpaths, flocked with leaves that spilled lushly from every balcony and center divider, each inhaled breath perfumed with cooking spice, fresh nectar, laundry drying in the pristine air. The City was a healthy place, a thriving place. A never-ending harmony of making, doing, growing, trying, laughing, running, living. Sibling Dex was so tired of it. The urge to leave began with the idea of cricket song.
Everybody knew what a tea monk did, and so Dex wasn’t too worried about getting started. Tea service wasn’t anything arcane. People came to the wagon with their problems and left with a fresh-brewed cup. Dex had taken respite in tea parlors plenty of times, as everyone did, and they’d read plenty of books about the particulars of the practice. Endless electronic ink had been spilled over the old tradition, but all of it could be boiled down to listen to people, give tea.
"What’s the purpose of a robot, Sibling Dex?" Mosscap tapped its chest; the sound echoed lightly. "What’s the purpose of me?" "You’re here to learn about people." "That’s something I’m doing. That’s not my reason for being. When I am done with this, I will do other things. I do not have a purpose any more than a mouse or a slug or a thornbush does. Why do you have to have one in order to feel content?" "Because…" Dex itched at where this conversation had gone. "Because we’re different." "Are you," Mosscap said flatly. "And here I thought things had changed since the Factory Age. You keep telling me how humans understand their place in things now." "We do!" "You don’t, if you believe that. You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do."
Dex turned the mug over and over in their hands. "It doesn’t bother you?" Dex said. "The thought that your life might mean nothing in the end?" "That’s true for all life I’ve observed. Why would it bother me?" Mosscap’s eyes glowed brightly. "Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?"
"I didn’t choose impermanence," Mosscap said. "The originals did, but I did not. I had to learn my circumstances just as you did." "Then how," Dex said, "how does the idea of maybe being meaningless sit well with you?" Mosscap considered. "Because I know that no matter what, I’m wonderful," it said. There was nothing arrogant about the statement, nothing flippant or brash. It was merely an acknowledgment, a simple truth shared.
To put it simply, learning how to run a company while running a company is extremely hard. It always seemed like there was just no time.
So in 2015 I became the "one-day-a-week shadow CEO" at a company called NeoReach. During that one day each week, I held all the company’s internal meetings (one-on-ones with each executive, and the executive team meeting). I ran those meetings and was able to show the founding CEO my method. After only a few months, the knowledge transfer was complete. The founding CEO was able to run the meetings (and the system) as well as I could and so took back over. I have since served as a one-day-a-week shadow CEO at other companies—Brex, OpenAI, Clearbit, Bolt, and AngelList—and will likely continue to do so at others.
In my coaching, I found several things: I repeatedly see the same core issues in nearly every company, and I work with my mentees to address them. While there are many books out there with excellent and relevant knowledge for founding CEOs, there is no single book that is a compendium of all the things CEOs need to learn. Becoming a great CEO requires training. For a founding CEO, there is precious little time to get that training, especially if the company is succeeding.
There are many reasons to create a company, but only one good one: to deeply understand real customers (living humans!) and their problem, and then solve that problem.
Solo founders have high rates of burnout. The emotional burden is just too high. As with any trend, there are exceptions. But the rule generally holds. Y Combinator has a strong bias toward accepting co-founder teams (versus solo founders) for this reason. Owning much of something is better than owning 100 percent of nothing. Find a partner, someone who has complementary skills to yours. Share the emotional burden with them. That will ease the load significantly. Give up a large percentage of the company. It’s worth it.
Y Combinator has another strong belief: founding teams should never grow beyond six until there is true product-market fit. Product-market fit (PMF) is the milestone of having created a product that customers are finding so much value in that they are willing to both buy it (after their test phase) and recommend it.
Combinator has another strong belief: founding teams should never grow beyond six until there is true product-market fit. Product-market fit (PMF) is the milestone of having created a product that customers are finding so much value in that they are willing to both buy it (after their test phase) and recommend it.
The first goal of the company should be to achieve real PMF, not vanity metrics that fool people inside and outside the company that PMF has been achieved.
Updated: Dec 12, 2022
Tasks should be written as single actions (as opposed to broad goals). The key is to not have to think about what needs to be done again once the next action has been written down. The next action should be written so clearly that all you need to do is follow its direction when you read it next.
In startups, fires never cease to burn. One of the most common complaints I hear from CEOs is that on a day-to-day basis, they seem to have infinite things to do, yet weeks will go by and they don’t feel like they have accomplished anything. This is the result of getting bogged down with the small, immediate things and losing track of the important, long-term ones. The top goal framework will help you fix this. Greg McKeown, who wrote a phenomenal book on productivity called Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, boils this down to one key concept: Schedule two hours each day (i.e., put an event in your calendar) to work on your top goal only. And do this every single workday. Period. The earlier in the day you schedule this top goal time, the better, so as to avoid other issues (and people) from pressing for your attention. Research shows that we have more decision-making and thought-processing energy early in the day when our brain is freshly rested. Take advantage of this high-quality brain functioning by doing the important stuff first. During this top goal time, do not respond to emails, texts, calls, and messages. Only work on your top priority (your top goal for the current quarter) during these two hours. If you follow this pattern each workday, you will achieve amazing things.
When in meetings, I often see CEOs making the mistake of constantly checking their messages. They cannot get away from being "on," if even for a second. This is not only disrespectful but also defeats the purpose of the meeting, which is collaboration with the attendees present. It sends a message that the meeting’s content is relatively unimportant. Furthermore, it also breeds a bad habit for the entire company—one that will be hard, if not impossible, to break down the line.
Whenever you find yourself saying something for a second time (to a second audience or in a second situation), it is highly likely that you will end up saying it again and again in the future. To vastly improve the quality of the communication and reduce the amount of time that you spend communicating the information, write it down.
Updated: Mar 24, 2023
It turns out that we perform our best when we are having fun and feeling good about ourselves.
The easiest trigger, in this case, is a piece of paper with the word gratitude printed on it and taped to your night table, the wall by your bed, or the mirror in your bathroom. When you see it each morning, you say the phrase "I am grateful for ________" five times with a different ending each time. (You don’t have to say it out loud; you can say it silently to yourself.) The key is to be as specific as possible when you declare what you are grateful for.
Life and company building don’t have to be hard or painful. Daily gratitude helps us realize that. Appreciation is simply an outward extension of gratitude. In gratitude, you speak to yourself. In appreciation, you speak to others. The content is the same. When you catch yourself feeling grateful about someone or something that they have done, let them know. When you hear something nice said about someone, let them know.
In a First Round Review article titled "How to Become Insanely Well-Connected," Chris Fralic of First Round Capital says that he reserves one hour each week for follow-ups and outreach, most of which include appreciations. I recommend that you do the same.
Get two highlighters, pens, or pencils of different colors (red and green are ideal, but any will do). Print out the last week of your calendar when you were working. Go through each workday hour by hour and ask yourself, "Did that activity give me energy or drain my energy?" Highlight in green those that gave you energy, and highlight in red those that drained your energy. There are no neutrals; every hour must be marked one color or the other. When finished, look for patterns of where and how your energy is drained. Now think of ways to outsource or eliminate those activities. Keep doing this energy audit each month until 75 percent or more of your time is spent doing things that give you energy. If you do, you will be able to achieve far more in less time because you will perform far better. You will be in your Zone of Genius.
What is the Zone of Genius? Well, there are four zones: Zone of Incompetence Zone of Competence Zone of Excellence Zone of Genius Tasks in the Zone of Incompetence are the things that other people probably do better than you (e.g., fix your car), and therefore you should outsource if they don’t give you joy. Tasks in the Zone of Competence are the things that you do just fine, but others are as good as you (e.g., clean your bathroom), and therefore you should outsource if they don’t give you joy. Tasks in the Zone of Excellence are the things that you are excellent at (i.e., better than others) but don’t love doing. This is the danger zone. Many people will want you to keep doing these things (because they gain significant value from you doing them), but this is the area that you should also look to move away from. This is the hard one! Finally, tasks in the Zone of Genius are the things that you are uniquely good at in the world and that you love to do (so much so that time and space seem to disappear when you do them). This is where you can add most value to the world and yourself. This is where you should be driving toward spending most, if not all, of your time.
Leaving Engineering I almost think that it’s easier for founders with less technical ability to become great CEOs. They build version one of the product, hire engineers, realize they are quickly out of their depth technically, and focus on acquiring the skills needed to become a great CEO. On the other hand, founders with a deep love of programming often struggle to focus on other areas of the business.
Many CEOs that I coach find that they sleep far less now than they did before they were running a company. For some, that means waking up in the middle of the night thinking about an issue or a to-do. For others, that means going to sleep late (to finish emails, etc.) and then being woken up by the alarm clock to make it to their first meeting.
Updated: Mar 25, 2023
Instead, know that there are two absolute numbers that are significant: $10 million and $100 million. Most people at $10 million of liquid net worth have the feeling of safety. They breathe a sigh of relief. They are no longer at risk. However, once they sit with that number for a while (and start to raise a family), their mind begins to play through disaster scenarios of how that net worth could disappear completely. Once their liquid net worth grows past $100 million, the catastrophe scenarios dry up and a sense of abundance follows. This is what you are driving for. The reality is that $10 million is more than enough to live a wonderful life. But give the mind what it wants. After $100 million, each additional dollar will likely not add in any way to your life but may well create a burden (if you buy assets that need to be maintained and supervised). Therefore, as soon as your company’s equity begins to have significant value, start to sell secondary shares until you have sold $10–100 million.
So start by placing your liquid assets in a brokerage firm. Then invest all the cash into US Treasuries while you decide on your investment strategy.
David F. Swensen is the chief investment officer for the Yale University Endowment. He is considered the grandfather of portfolio management. He wrote a book specifically for the individual investor titled Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment. I consider it the bible for individual asset management. In it, he convincingly describes how professional money managers’ ability to create alpha is exceedingly rare, and what few of these managers there are, you likely will never meet them, as they will choose to raise capital only from the most desirable LPs (e.g., Yale University). The money managers you do encounter will likely never create positive net returns for you (after they siphon off their fees and carried interest) when compared to the public equity markets. Therefore, the best approach is for you to simply invest in low-cost index funds (e.g., Vanguard) according to a specific allocation (he recommends about 30 percent US equities, 25 percent non-US equities, 15 percent real estate, and 30 percent US Treasuries) and then rebalance as often as possible. Unfortunately, rebalancing means putting in lots of trades, and that is painful. Luckily, someone built a tool to solve that problem. Wealthfront (wealthfront.com) is the leading auto-rebalancing investment engine. Many others have copied it, but as of this writing, it is still my preferred vehicle.
The methods to making a decision are as follows: • Method 1: The manager makes the decision, announces it to the team, and answers questions. ○ Pro: Takes very little time. ○ Cons: Creates very little buy-in from the team. Gets no benefit from the team’s collective knowledge and experience. • Method 2: The manager creates (or assigns someone to create) a written straw man (a hypothetical answer designed to inspire discussion), shares it with the team, invites the team to give feedback (written and verbal), facilitates group discussion, and determines the final answer. ○ Pros: Creates more buy-in. Gets some minimal benefit from the collective wisdom of the team. ○ Con: Takes more time. • Method 3: The manager invites the team to a meeting where the dilemma is discussed from scratch with no straw man. The manager and the team equally share ideas. The manager acknowledges each idea before making a final decision. ○ Pros: Creates the most buy-in. Gets a lot of benefit from the collective wisdom of the team. ○ Cons: Takes the most time.
Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, requires that anyone who wants to bring up an issue or proposal must write up the item fully before the decision meeting (with someone else writing up a counterproposal if necessary). The meeting is then spent reading the write-ups. Once the decision-making team has read them all, a decision is made.
Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-founder of Segment, says, "Apparently at Amazon they require the most junior people to speak and ask questions first. [This] also becomes a great way to show off junior talent, give more senior folks a chance to observe and give feedback, etc."
A very common cause of inefficiency in startups is sloppy agreements. People don’t show up to meetings on time, and they don’t complete the goals that they declare (or they don’t declare goals at all). The result is a spreading virus of unproductiveness and decreased morale. The antidote for this is simple: impeccable agreements. These are (a) precisely defined and (b) fully agreed to (which almost always means written) by all relevant people.
Your team members are smart. When there are problems, they know it. Hiding negative information from them does not make them feel better. If anything, it makes them more anxious. Just as you don’t know if your team members will share negative information with you until they do so for the first time, your team members don’t know if you are willing to share negative information with them until you do. Our imaginations are much more powerful than reality.
Updated: Apr 15, 2023
At any point, a leader is either above the line or below the line. If you are above it, you are leading consciously, and if you are below it, you are not. Above the line, one is open, curious, and committed to learning. Below the line, one is closed, defensive, and committed to being right. Many people lead from below the line—it’s a common state stemming from millions of years of evolution. As soon as we sense the first whiff of conflict, our lizard brain kicks in. Fear and anger rise up, then we get defensive and double down on being right. At this point we’re firmly below the line. Knowing that you’re below the line is more important than being below the line. The first mark of conscious leadership is self-awareness and the search for truth. The second is pausing, taking a second, shifting yourself into an open and curious state, and rising above the line.
I commit to taking full responsibility for the circumstances of my life and for my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. I commit to supporting others to take full responsibility for their lives.
I commit to growing in self-awareness. I commit to regarding every interaction as an opportunity to learn. I commit to curiosity as a path to rapid learning.
Most leaders resist play because they think they will fall behind if they aren’t seriously working hard. Organizations that take breaks to rest and play are actually more productive and creative. Energy is maximized when rest, renewal, and personal rhythms are honored.
Spiritual teacher and author David Deida goes one step beyond recognizing and releasing negative feelings and teaches that empathy is the key to success. To truly feel the feelings of those around you—customers, investors, and team members alike—you must get very curious about their situations and then really imagine yourself in their shoes. If you do this, people will sense it and immediately trust and like you, because they will feel that you care about them and understand their circumstances. They’ll trust you to lead them because they know you’ll truly consider their interests in your guidance.
When people start diving into the conscious leadership work, they quickly lose their fear. And just as quickly, they realize that fear was their primary motivator—fear of failure, fear of letting people down. Once fear is gone, their life becomes much better, but their business suffers. If you find yourself in this situation, keep pushing forward with the conscious leadership work quickly to get to a place where you are motivated by joy. Then you will have the best of all worlds. Joy is an even better motivator than fear, so your business will thrive. And your life will be amazing!
The first: Have each person imagine that they are the CEO and ask themselves the question, "What are the most important issues (maximum three) for me to solve in the next ninety days?" Allowing people to put themselves in the CEO role gives them permission to think like an owner.
At every quarterly off-site meeting that I facilitate for team bonding, we do the following exercise: 1. I ask all team members to open a document that only they have access to and write down their thoughts about the company when they source their joy, excitement, sadness, anger, and fear. 2. For their thoughts of anger and fear, each person writes: a. Fact. This is what a video camera captured. There is no judgment or opinion here, only physical actions that have occurred that no one would dispute. Keep this short. b. Story. These are all the thoughts, opinions, and judgments that you have on the facts above. c. Proposed solution. These should be very specific action items with DRIs and due dates. 3. While they are doing that, I create a document with those headings and give access to all. 4. Then I ask everyone to copy and paste their writings (with no attribution) under the correct heading in the group document. 5. We all read the document. a. The writings of joy and excitement make us all feel inspired and renew our feeling of group success. b. The writings of sadness allow us to feel bonded over shared loss. c. The issues and solutions posed in anger and fear give us an issues roadmap to be unpacked and resolved one by one in the weekly leadership meetings over the course of the upcoming quarter.
If you start sharing your perspective, I will be uncompelled and unwilling to truly listen, because you haven’t been willing to consider mine. And the cycle spirals downward to distrust and dislike. There is a simple fix. I only need to prove to you that I have "heard" you. And to do that, I only need to repeat back what you’ve said in summary form (by saying, "I think I heard you say…") until you say, "That’s right!" Then you will feel heard. You will now be open to hearing what I have to say. Here is an experiment that proves this principle. The next time you encounter a person who is repeating themselves, stop them and ask if you can state back what they’ve already said. They will say yes. You then summarize what they’ve said and ask if you got it right. If they say yes again, then watch to see if they continue to repeat themselves. They will not.
For you, as a company leader, to resolve conflict, you only need to get each person to state their deepest, darkest thoughts, and then prove that each has heard what the other has said. This can be done verbally or in writing. I prefer the written method, as it takes about a third of the time, requires almost no facilitation (i.e., it’s easy to stay on script), and the action items that come out of it are impeccable agreements.
If you are the facilitator, here’s how the written method works. First, get both people in the same room. Have them bring their laptops so they can share their documents with each other at the appropriate times. Then go through the following steps: Step 1: Ask each person to write down their deepest work-related thoughts about the other person. You say: 1. Open up a document. Please give me (the facilitator) access, but do not give access to the other person yet. On the document, write five categories: a. Anger (present) b. Fear (future) c. Sadness (past) d. Joy (present and past) e. Excitement (future) 2. In every major relationship that we have, we have feelings of anger, fear, sadness, joy, and excitement. When you think about the other person and you focus on the anger that you feel, what thoughts come to mind? Please state those thoughts in the following way: a. Feeling: Anger b. Fact: You did or said… (This should be only what a video camera would have seen; no opinion, thought, or judgment.) c. Story: The thought that I had was… d. Request: You do or say… (This should be an action that the other person can take to fully address this situation.) Here is an example: a. Feeling: Anger b. Fact: You walked by me the other day and I didn’t hear you say hello. c. Story: The thought that I had was that you purposely ignored me and thus were really saying "screw you!" to me. d. Request: From now on, when you walk by me, please say hello. As the facilitator, look at both documents and make sure that they are filled out correctly. Encourage the separation of fact and judgment as much as possible. Make sure they are as specific as possible about the actions the other person did and how it made them feel. Realize that any conclusions drawn from the other person’s actions are simply stories in their head, only the feelings one has, and any specific actions are facts. If one or both are reluctant to say anything, which is often the case, you supply the thoughts that you might have if you were in their shoes. Be dramatic. Become an actor. Get into the role. State the thoughts as explicitly as they would appear in your own mind. Use swear words. The participants will start to guide you. They are likely to say, "That’s close but not quite it. The thoughts I have are more like…" When they slow down or don’t seem willing to go further, again state the thoughts for…
When creating company culture, do not underestimate the value of fun. If people are having fun, they spend more time, energy, and awareness at the company. This leads to better problem-solving and collaboration, which leads to a stronger company that creates more value. Host events that you enjoy, and then invite (but don’t require) your team members to join you. Your litmus test is whether your team members are hanging out with you and one another outside of work. If yes, you are likely creating good culture. If not, increase your efforts to practice conscious leadership (chapter 15) and keep working to create buy-in for your values.
Remember to always lead by example. Be the first one to show up each day. Be the last one to leave. Once you have department heads, they should also set this example for their departments. Do not hire department heads who are unwilling to do so.
It often begins very innocently: "Excuse me, can I please talk to you about a raise? I have been at this company for a year now and have shown utter dedication by doing such-and-such, and I believe that I now deserve a raise…" This sounds compelling, and you, of course, want to reward dedication. But if you give a raise based on this conversation, then the whole company will learn that the way to get a raise is to simply ask you for it. Suddenly everyone will be trying to curry your favor. Be very careful here. You may enjoy this behavior, but it is toxic for the company. The only way to prevent politics is to never allow lobbying to be successful, and the only way to do this is to have a written policy about as many situations as possible, particularly around compensation, raises, and promotions. Apply this policy to all team members, all the time.
The most successful method I know of is called grade level planning (GLP)—at least, that’s what Tesla calls it (another common term is "Levels and Ladders"). It calls for a very detailed definition of every position in the company and every seniority level, along with specific compensation metrics for each position and level. This is then shared throughout the company. Team members can then clearly see what they need to do to receive the next compensation and title level. Managers must not deviate from this written schema.
Whenever two people form an agreement, it should be recorded in the task-tracking system and have an owner, a comprehensive description, and a due date.
Create a document that lists all of the company’s functions and, for each, the directly responsible individual. This is the AOR list. It serves as a routing layer for any questions and ensures that no functions fall through the cracks.
A well-run company has no single point of failure. To create a team with no single points of failure, do two things: Write down all processes. As soon as you or your team members find yourselves doing something for the second time (see chapters 7 and 19), you should write down the steps of that process exactly. Place these written processes in a company-wide wiki. Cross-train a second person for each role. Map each function in the company (from the AORs) to a backup person. Have the backup person co-work with the primary until the backup knows how to perform the role. (Of course, having all the processes already written down will vastly improve this training process. So have your team write down all the processes first.) It’s a good standard practice for at least two people to know how to do any given task in the company so that if the lead person is too busy, is sick, or leaves the company, they can request that the secondary person assume the responsibility.
Determine the company’s five or six most significant KPIs, then track them religiously and make them available for the entire company to easily see on a daily basis. Post the metrics on a TV screen in a central place in the office, using a tool such as Geckoboard. As we learned from Andy Grove, former Intel CEO and author of the book High Output Management, it is also important to define and track countermetrics to provide necessary context, because metrics are sometimes optimized to a fault. For example, engineering tickets will vary in importance, so if your engineers have closed the critical tickets, they’re doing better than if they close most tickets but only the easiest ones. Similarly, if half of candidates who accept your job offers are less skilled than the half who decline, then you’re doing worse than the raw percentage indicates.
In a First Round Review article titled "Why You Need Two Chiefs in the Executive Office," Mark Organ, CEO of Influitive, gives a thorough description of COS best practices. To me, the two priorities in creating a great COS are (1) their background and (2) how you train them. When it comes to background, the best chiefs of staff that I have seen are highly organized, are excellent communicators (both written and oral), and have broad strategic business knowledge.
Most senior candidates are not attracted to the COS role because they view it as an assistant role (and in many companies it is). When you’re recruiting, dispel this concern by showing the candidate that they will have full access to all the information that you do. Being a COS in this capacity is the single best training for becoming a CEO (or head of any department) that exists.
I am part of all that I have met." —TENNYSON To all of you, whoever you are, I humbly dedicate this book.
My life has been a series of wonderful experiences. It’s a pity I wasn’t there for most of them.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS Chapter One I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost …. I am helpless. It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out. Chapter Two I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I am in this same place. But, it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out. Chapter Three I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in … it’s a habit … but, my eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately. Chapter Four I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it. Chapter Five I walk down another street.
I don’t know what I want sometimes, But I know that I want to know what I want. I know that once I know what I want I will be able to get it. Of course, I may not want what I get when I get it …. But, at least I’ll know I don’t want that! Then, I can move on to something else I don’t know if I want. That’s progress!
I know why we are friends. It’s because I don’t always approve of you. You don’t think you deserve approval. So … if I gave it to you, you would not approve of me and I would lose your trust. Friendship is based on trust and I want you to trust me because I need your approval. However, if I get your approval, I will not trust you because I don’t think I deserve approval either. I know why we are friends.
You have made a fool of me! I know that I am not the most beautiful, the most talented, the most intelligent person in the world … but I liked you … and I wanted you to think I was. So … I tried to be beautiful talented and intelligent for you. However, since I succeeded in making you believe it, naturally, I immediately lost respect for you for not seeing that I had fooled you. Now … I am intelligent enough, beautiful enough and talented enough not to be associated with fools … and I am incensed that I didn’t see how foolish you were at once. But … I liked you then … and … it drove me to make you believe what I wanted you to believe …. Except … I was so convincing, I began to believe it myself! Now … anybody who believes things like that about me is a fool. That makes me a fool! And if it weren’t for you believing what I wanted you to believe, I wouldn’t know that. I hate you for making a fool of me!
Will you please stop trying to finish my sentences before I do? It’s humiliating! After all … it’s my sentence! Let me show it off! I know you are really trying to let me know how sensitive and smart you are … and how deeply you understand me …. But … if you are that smart … please let me think that I am smarter than you by not impressing me with how smart you are in the middle of my sentences! Of course, if I am smart enough to be aware of what you are up to … Then, I should be smart enough to know it doesn’t matter what you do in the middle of my sentences. Maybe I’m not so smart! Now, that is humiliating!
How wise of you to wait … to fill the shy, awkward spaces with white wine and cushioned conversation. I am aware that you are allowing me time to become accustomed to the cities of your smile … and to window shop your eyes … until, at last, I am so full of you, that I no longer blush on my way into your arms.
It’s a dreary day …. Let’s just stay inside. We can pretend that Kisses are brushes and that we are each other’s canvases. We won’t need a northern light … or any light at all, for that matter …. And who cares if we ever finish the picture, anyway.
I would give you everything … if I could … but, the only gift worth giving is freedom … the freedom to grow … away from me if necessary. Of course, one can’t give freedom, but, at least I know that. Maybe that’s the gift then … the knowing …. And I couldn’t tie a ribbon around it even if I wanted to.
Updated: Nov 29, 2022
The softer I walk The louder I hear.
The real growth is in recognizing that we do always get what we want in life … one way or another.
Listen to what you criticize most severely And you will hear what you most fear you are.
The nicest thing about my life, now, is that I am here with me most of the time.
To live happily with a pet, one must first accept the responsibility of disciplining it consistently and firmly with much love! To live happily with ourselves … it is the same.
I can tell how secure I am now. I no longer clean the house the day before the maid comes!
In youth … man seems to satisfy loneliness with passion …. And in maturity … aloneness … with compassion. What a pity the difference is most often discovered after muscle and bone can no longer climb to the top of the mountain.
I have come to regard unrequited love like a hole in a sock. Mend it, or discard it! Don’t just stand there with cold feet!
Disciplining one’s self can be carried too far. It is alright to relax part of the time. Even the soils is richer when it rests every seven years.
I walk down another street.
‘But that’s the beauty of learning a new language. It should feel like an enormous undertaking. It ought to intimidate you. It makes you appreciate the complexity of the ones you know already.’
But this shall never be: to us remains One city that has nothing of the beast, That was not built for gross, material gains, Sharp, wolfish power or empire’s glutted feast.
‘Oh, they’re easy enough,’ said Ramy. ‘To Pendennis, Esq., Infernal beast, I will give you lashings of booze tonight. Confound you, your enemy, Mirza. No?’
Sitzfleisch,’ Professor Playfair said pleasantly when Ramy protested that they had over forty hours of reading a week. ‘Translated literally, it means "sitting meat". Which all goes to say, sometimes you need simply to sit on your bottom and get things done.’
The five key factors could have been taken right out of Bill Campbell’s playbook. Excellent teams at Google had psychological safety (people knew that if they took risks, their manager would have their back). The teams had clear goals, each role was meaningful, and members were reliable and confident that the team’s mission would make a difference. You’ll see that Bill was a master at establishing those conditions: he went to extraordinary lengths to build safety, clarity, meaning, dependability, and impact into each team he coached.
Sheryl Sandberg and I have often lamented that every bookstore has a self-help section, but there isn’t a help-others section. Trillion Dollar Coach belongs in the help-others section:
There is another, equally critical, factor for success in companies: teams that act as communities, integrating interests and putting aside differences to be individually and collectively obsessed with what’s good for the company. Research shows that when people feel like they are part of a supportive community at work, they are more engaged with their jobs and more productive.
To balance the tension and mold a team into a community, you need a coach, someone who works not only with individuals but also with the team as a whole to smooth out the constant tension, continuously nurture the community, and make sure it is aligned around a common vision and set of goals. Sometimes this coach may just work with the team leader, the executive in charge. But to be most effective—and this was Bill’s model—the coach works with the entire team. At Google, Bill didn’t just meet with Eric. He worked with Jonathan and several other people, and he attended Eric’s staff meetings on a regular basis. This can be a hard thing for an executive to accept—having a "coach" getting involved in staff meetings and other things can seem like a sign of lack of confidence.
Or, as Bill liked to say: "If you’re a great manager, your people will make you a leader. They acclaim that, not you."
"Bill, your title makes you a manager; your people make you a leader."* Bill took that to heart. He once sent a note to a valuable manager who was struggling, counseling him that "you have demanded respect, rather than having it accrue to you. You need to project humility, a selflessness, that projects that you care about the company and about people."
IT’S THE PEOPLE People are the foundation of any company’s success. The primary job of each manager is to help people be more effective in their job and to grow and develop. We have great people who want to do well, are capable of doing great things, and come to work fired up to do them. Great people flourish in an environment that liberates and amplifies that energy. Managers create this environment through support, respect, and trust. Support means giving people the tools, information, training, and coaching they need to succeed. It means continuous effort to develop people’s skills. Great managers help people excel and grow. Respect means understanding people’s unique career goals and being sensitive to their life choices. It means helping people achieve these career goals in a way that’s consistent with the needs of the company. Trust means freeing people to do their jobs and to make decisions. It means knowing people want to do well and believing that they will.
Bill Walsh and Bill Campbell: "Great coaches lie awake at night thinking about how to make you better.
In teaching his management seminar at Google, Bill advocated that each person should put his or her list on the board—a simultaneous reveal. That way everyone could see where there was overlap and make sure to cover those topics. He felt that the process of merging the two agendas could serve as a lesson in prioritization.
From the (not so) small talk, Bill moved to performance: What are you working on? How is it going? How could he help? Then, we would always get to peer relationships, which Bill thought were more important than relationships with your manager and other higher-ups.
From peer relationships, Bill would move on to teams. He always wanted to know, were we setting a clear direction for them, and constantly reinforcing it? Did we understand what they were doing? If they were off on something, we would discuss how we could course correct them and get them back on track.
"These seven years," Armal said. "Have you used them? Have you appreciated them? I spent them wishing I could have even one more day of my old life. That I could show my children a world of lights and life, instead of stone and shadow. Please. Tell me you lived those years of freedom." "I…" Marasi said. Had she? She had spent much of that time with Allik, and that had been wonderful. And she’d accomplished much in her career. But was it what she wanted, ultimately?
I am not against self-esteem, but I believe that self-esteem is just a meter that reads out the state of the system. It is not an end in itself. When you are doing well in school or work, when you are doing well with the people you love, when you are doing well in play, the meter will register high. When you are doing badly, it will register low. I have scoured the self-esteem literature looking for the causality as opposed to correlation, looking for any evidence that high self-esteem among youngsters causes better grades, more popularity, less teenage pregnancy, less dependence on welfare, as the California report contends.
Until January 1996, I believed that self-esteem was merely a meter with little, if any, causal efficacy. The lead article in the Psychological Review convinced me that I was wrong, and that self-esteem is causal: Roy Baumeister and his colleagues (1996)3 reviewed the literature on genocidal killers, on hit men, on gang leaders, and on violent criminals. They argued that these perpetrators have high self-esteem, and that their unwarranted self-esteem causes violence. Baumeister’s work suggests that if you teach unwarrantedly high self-esteem to children, problems will ensue. A sub-group of these children will also have a mean streak in them. When these children confront the real world, and it tells them they are not as great as they have been taught, they will lash out with violence.
As you read this book, you will see that there is an epidemic of depression among adults and among children in the United States today. As Chapters 6–10 document, depression is not just about mental suffering; it is also about lowered productivity and worsened physical health. If this epidemic continues, I believe that America’s place in the world will be in jeopardy. America will lose its economic place to less pessimistic nations than ours, and this pessimism will sap our will to bring about social justice in our own country.
yes is a world & in this world of yes live (skilfully curled) all worlds
Later in this book we will see that judiciously employed, mild pessimism has its uses. But twenty-five years of study has convinced me that if we habitually believe, as does the pessimist, that misfortune is our fault, is enduring, and will undermine everything we do, more of it will befall us than if we believe otherwise. I am also convinced that if we are in the grip of this view, we will get depressed easily, we will accomplish less than our potential, and we will even get physically sick more often. Pessimistic prophecies are self-fulfilling.
Worst of all, the biomedical approach makes patients out of essentially normal people and makes them dependent on outside forces—pills dispensed by a benevolent physician. Antidepressant drugs are not addicting in the usual sense; the patient does not crave them when they are withdrawn. Rather, when the successfully treated patient stops taking his drugs, the depression often returns. The effectively drugged patient cannot credit himself for carving out his happiness and his ability to function with a semblance of normality; he must credit the pills.
What if depression is not something you are motivated to bring upon yourself but something that just descends upon you? What if depression is not an illness but a severe low mood? What if you are not a prisoner of past conflicts in the way you react? What if depression is in fact set off by present troubles? What if you are not a prisoner of your genes or your brain chemistry, either? What if depression arises from mistaken inferences we make from the tragedies and setbacks we all experience over the course of a life? What if depression occurs merely when we harbor pessimistic beliefs about the causes of our setbacks? What if we can unlearn pessimism and acquire the skills of looking at setbacks optimistically?
What if there is a third factor—optimism or pessimism—that matters as much as talent or desire? What if you can have all the talent and desire necessary—yet, if you are a pessimist, still fail? What if optimists do better at school, at work, and on the playing field? What if optimism is a learned skill, one that can be permanently acquired? What if we can instill this skill in our children?
Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter. Explanatory style is the manner in which you habitually explain to yourself why events happen. It is the great modulator of learned helplessness. An optimistic explanatory style stops helplessness, whereas a pessimistic explanatory style spreads helplessness. Your way of explaining events to yourself determines how helpless you can become, or how energized, when you encounter the everyday setbacks as well as momentous defeats. I think of your explanatory style as reflecting "the word in your heart."
Each of us carries a word in his heart, a "no" or a "yes."
The phrase "adding epicycles" came to be applied to scientists in any field who, having trouble defending a tottering thesis, desperately postulate unlikely subtheses in hopes of buttressing it.
Updated: Nov 18, 2022
This view ran against the existing belief about achievement, the classic demonstration of which was called PREE—the partial reinforcement extinction effect. PREE is an old chestnut of learning theory. If you give a rat a food pellet every time he presses a bar, this is called "continuous reinforcement"; the ratio of reward to effort is one-to-one, one pellet for one bar-press. If you then stop giving him food for pressing the bar ("extinction"), he’ll press the bar three or four times and then quit completely, because he can see he’s never getting fed anymore, since the contrast is so great. If, on the other hand, instead of one-for-one reinforcement, you give the rat "partial" reinforcement—say, an average of only one pellet for every five or ten times he presses—and then start extinction, he’ll press the bar a hundred times before he gives up.
It was the explanations people made, and not the schedule of reinforcement they’d been on, which determined their susceptibility to PREE.
Throughout my career, I’ve never had much use for the tendency among psychologists to shun criticism. It’s a longstanding tradition acquired from the field of psychiatry, with its medical authoritarianism and its reluctance to admit error. Going back at least to Freud, the world of the research psychiatrists has been dominated by a handful of despots who treat dissenters like invading barbarians usurping their domain. One critical word from a young disciple and he was banished. I’ve preferred the humanistic tradition. To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality.
I had always stressed to my students the importance of welcoming criticism. "I want to be told," I had always said. "In this lab, the payoff is for originality, not toadyism."
HOW DO you think about the causes of the misfortunes, small and large, that befall you? Some people, the ones who give up easily, habitually say of their misfortunes: "It’s me, it’s going to last forever, it’s going to undermine everything I do." Others, those who resist giving in to misfortune, say: "It was just circumstances, it’s going away quickly anyway, and, besides, there’s much more in life." Your habitual way of explaining bad events, your explanatory style, is more than just the words you mouth when you fail. It is a habit of thought, learned in childhood and adolescence. Your explanatory style stems directly from your view of your place in the world—whether you think you are valuable and deserving, or worthless and hopeless. It is the hallmark of whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.
THERE ARE three crucial dimensions to your explanatory style: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization.
PEOPLE WHO give up easily believe the causes of the bad events that happen to them are permanent: The bad events will persist, will always be there to affect their lives. People who resist helplessness believe the causes of bad events are temporary.
If you think about bad things in always’s and never’s and abiding traits, you have a permanent, pessimistic style. If you think in sometimes’s and lately’s, if you use qualifiers and blame bad events on transient conditions, you have an optimistic style.
THE optimistic style of explaining good events is just the opposite of the optimistic style of explaining bad events. People who believe good events have permanent causes are more optimistic than people who believe they have temporary causes.
Optimistic people explain good events to themselves in terms of permanent causes: traits, abilities, always’s. Pessimists name transient causes: moods, effort, sometimes’s.
PERMANENCE is about time. Pervasiveness is about space.
Some people can put their troubles neatly into a box and go about their lives even when one important aspect of it—their job, for example, or their love life—is suffering. Others bleed all over everything. They catastrophize. When one thread of their lives snaps, the whole fabric unravels. It comes down to this: People who make universal explanations for their failures give up on everything when a failure strikes in one area. People who make specific explanations may become helpless in that one part of their lives yet march stalwartly on in the others.
Now for the converse. The optimistic explanatory style for good events is opposite that for bad events. The optimist believes that bad events have specific causes, while good events will enhance everything he does; the pessimist believes that bad events have universal causes and that good events are caused by specific factors. When Nora was offered temporary work back at the company, she thought: "They finally realized they can’t get along without me." When Kevin got the same offer he thought: "They must really be shorthanded."
Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style: pervasiveness and permanence. Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation. On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors. Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair.
People who make permanent and universal explanations for their troubles tend to collapse under pressure, both for a long time and across situations. No other single score is as important as your hope score.
Updated: Nov 19, 2022
When bad things happen, we can blame ourselves (internalize) or we can blame other people or circumstances (externalize). People who blame themselves when they fail have low self-esteem as a consequence. They think they are worthless, talentless, and unlovable. People who blame external events do not lose self-esteem when bad events strike. On the whole, they like themselves better than people who blame themselves do. Low self-esteem usually comes from an internal style for bad events.
Of the three dimensions of explanatory style, personalization is the easiest to understand. After all, one of the first things a child learns to say is "He did it, not me!" Personalization is also the easiest dimension to overrate. It controls only how you feel about yourself, but pervasiveness and permanence—the more important dimensions—control what you do: how long you are helpless and across how many situations.
Here’s one last piece of information for you, before you get your totals: The optimistic style of explaining good events is the opposite of that used for bad events: It’s internal rather than external. People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.
There is a deeper matter to deal with here: the question of why people should own up to their failures in the first place. The answer, I believe, is that we want people to change, and we know they will not change if they do not assume responsibility. If we want people to change, internality is not as crucial as the permanence dimension is. If you believe the cause of your mess is permanent—stupidity, lack of talent, ugliness—you will not act to change it. You will not act to improve yourself. If, however, you believe the cause is temporary—a bad mood, too little effort, overweight—you can act to change it. If we want people to be responsible for what they do, then yes, we want them to have an internal style. More important, people must have a temporary style for bad events—they must believe that whatever the cause of the bad event, it can be changed.
IT MATTERS a great deal if your explanatory style is pessimistic. If you scored poorly, there are four areas where you will encounter (and probably already have encountered) trouble. First, as we will see in the next chapter, you are likely to get depressed easily. Second, you are probably achieving less at work than your talents warrant. Third, your physical health—and your immune function—are probably not what they should be, and this may get even worse as you get older. Finally, life is not as pleasurable as it should be. Pessimistic explanatory style is a misery.
When you’re depressed, small obstacles seem like insurmountable barriers. You believe everything you touch turns to ashes. You have an endless supply of reasons why each of your successes is really a failure.
We knew the cause of learned helplessness, and now we could see it as the cause of depression: the belief that your actions will be futile.
Ellis was as outrageous in his new field as he’d been in the old. Gaunt and angular, always in motion, he sounded like a (very effective) vacuum-cleaner salesman. With patients, he pushed and pushed until he had persuaded them to give up the irrational beliefs that sustained their depression. "What do you mean you can’t live without love?" he would cry. "Utter nonsense. Love comes rarely in life, and if you waste your life mooning over its all too ordinary absence, you are bringing on your own depression. You are living under a tyranny of should’s. Stop ‘should-ing’ on yourself!" Ellis believed that what others thought of as deep neurotic conflict was simply bad thinking—"stupid behavior on the part of nonstupid people," he called it—and in a loud, propagandistic way (he called himself a counterpropagandist) he would demand that his patients stop thinking wrong and start thinking right. Surprisingly, most of his patients got better. Ellis successfully challenged the hallowed belief that mental illness is an enormously intricate, even mysterious phenomenon, curable only when deep unconscious conflicts are brought to light or a medical illness is rooted out. In the complexified world of psychology, this stripped-down approach came off as revolutionary.
Depressives think awful things about themselves and their future. Maybe that’s all there is to depression, Tim reasoned. Maybe what looks like a symptom of depression—negative thinking—is the disease.
Depression is nothing more than its symptoms. It is caused by conscious negative thoughts. There is no deep underlying disorder to be rooted out: not unresolved childhood conflicts, not our unconscious anger, and not even our brain chemistry. Emotion comes directly from what we think: Think "I am in danger" and you feel anxiety. Think "I am being trespassed against" and you feel anger. Think "Loss" and you feel sadness.
Rumination combined with pessimistic explanatory style is the recipe for severe depression. This ends the bad news. The good news is that both pessimistic explanatory style and rumination can be changed, and changed permanently.
Thirty percent of the people who (by their own definition of failure) failed the midterm got very depressed. And 30 percent of the people who were pessimists in September did, too. But 70 percent of the people who both were pessimists in September and failed the exam got depressed. So a recipe for severe depression is preexisting pessimism encountering failure.
We found that the children who started out as pessimists were the ones most likely, over the four years, to get depressed and stay depressed.
The same pattern held in a diary study in which men and women wrote down everything they did as bad moods struck: Women thought and analyzed their mood; men distracted themselves. In a study of couples in conflict, each person dictated into a tape recorder what he or she did every time there was marital trouble. In overwhelming proportions the women focused on and expressed their emotion, and the men distracted themselves or decided not to be concerned with their mood. Finally, in a laboratory study, men and women were offered a choice of two tasks when they were sad. They could choose to list the words that best described their mood (a task focusing on the depression) or rank a list of nations in order of their wealth (a distracting task). Seventy percent of the women chose the emotion-focused task, listing the words that described their mood. With men, however, the percentages were reversed.
So analyzing and wallowing in emotion when distressed seems a likely explanation for why women are more depressed than men. This implies that men and women experience mild depression at the same rate, but in women, who dwell on the state, the mild depression escalates; men, on the other hand, dissolve the state by distracting themselves, by action or perhaps by drinking it away. We are left with two plausible views that have some support. One is that women learn more helplessness and pessimism, and the second is that women’s likelier first reaction to trouble—rumination—leads right into depression.
Cognitive therapy uses five tactics. First, you learn to recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst.
Second, you learn to dispute the automatic thoughts by marshaling contrary evidence.
Third, you learn to make different explanations, called reattributions, and use them to dispute your automatic thoughts.
Fourth, you learn how to distract yourself from depressing thoughts. The mother learns that thinking these negative things now is not inevitable. Rumination, particularly when one is under pressure to perform well, makes the situation even worse. Often it is better to put off thinking, in order to do your best. You can learn to control not only what you think but when you think it. Fifth, you learn to recognize and question the depression-sowing assumptions governing so much of what you do:
Leslie was persistent, a full-blown optimist who seemed to have no doubt that I would be enthralled by his words of wisdom. And in fact, as the plane neared Nevada, with the snowcapped Sierras beneath us, I found myself being drawn in. "My people," he announced, "developed the video recorder for Ampex. That was the most creative group I ever led." "What separates your creative groups from your turkeys?" I asked. "Each person," he said, "every one of them, believes he can walk on water."
‘One thing bothers me still,’ John said. "Every business is stuck with some pessimists. Some are entrenched by seniority, others are around because they’re good at what they do. As I’ve gotten older," he continued, "I find the pessimists weigh on me more and more. They always tell me what I can’t do. They only tell me what’s wrong. I know it’s not their intention, but they curdle action, imagination, and initiative. I believe that most of them—and certainly the company—would be better off if they were more optimistic.
These have been the consistent findings over the last decade. Depressed people—most of whom turn out to be pessimists—accurately judge how much control they have. Nondepressed people—optimists, for the most part—believe they have much more control over things than they actually do, particularly when they are helpless and have no control at all.
As judged by a panel of observers, depressed patients weren’t very persuasive or likable; poor social skills are a symptom of depression. Depressed patients judged their lack of skill accurately. The surprising finding was from the nondepressed group. They markedly overestimated their skills, judging themselves as much more persuasive and appealing than the judges thought they were.
Pessimism promotes depression. Pessimism produces inertia rather than activity in the face of setbacks. Pessimism feels bad subjectively—blue, down, worried, anxious. Pessimism is self-fulfilling. Pessimists don’t persist in the face of challenges, and therefore fail more frequently—even when success is attainable. Pessimism is associated with poor physical health (see chapter ten). Pessimists are defeated when they try for high office (see chapter eleven). Even when pessimists are right and things turn out badly, they still feel worse. Their explanatory style now converts the predicted setback into a disaster, a disaster into a catastrophe.
CHILDREN’S ATTRIBUTIONAL STYLE QUESTIONNAIRE (CASQ)
Updated: Nov 20, 2022
SO WE HAVE evidence for three kinds of influences on your child’s explanatory style. First, the form of the everyday causal analyses he hears from you—especially if you are his mother: If yours are optimistic, his will be too. Second, the form of the criticisms he hears when he fails: If they are permanent and pervasive, his view of himself will turn toward pessimism. Third, the reality of his early losses and traumas: If they remit, he will develop the theory that bad events can be changed and conquered. But if they are, in fact, permanent and pervasive, the seeds of hopelessness have been deeply planted.
Updated: Nov 21, 2022
We hypothesized that there are two major risk factors for depression and poor achievement among children: • Pessimistic explanatory style. Children who see bad events as permanent, pervasive, and personal will over time get depressed and do badly in school. • Bad life events. Children who suffer the most bad events—parents separating, family deaths, family job loss—will do worst.
Bertrand Russell said that the mark of a civilized human being is the ability to read a column of numbers and then weep. Is the American public as "uncivilized" as the news producers think? Are we incapable of understanding statistical arguments or do we only understand anecdotes? You only have to spend an afternoon in any baseball park in America to know how badly the general public’s capacity to appreciate and enjoy statistics has been underestimated by our tastemakers. Every child over six in the park knows what a .300 hitter is and knows Tony Gwynn is more likely to get a hit than Juan Samuel is.
Within a month, 50 percent of the rats not shocked had died, and the other 50 percent of the no-shock rats had rejected the tumor; this was the normal ratio. As for the rats that mastered shock by pressing a bar to turn it off, 70 percent rejected the tumor. But only 27 percent of the helpless rats, the rats that had experienced uncontrollable shock, rejected the tumor. Madelon Visintainer thus became the first person to demonstrate that a psychological state—learned helplessness—could cause cancer.
A third way in which optimism should matter for health concerns the sheer number of bad life events encountered. It has been shown statistically that the more bad events a person encounters in any given time period, the more illness he will have. People who in the same six months move, get fired, and get divorced are at greater risk for infectious illness—and even for heart attacks and cancer—than are people who lead uneventful lives. This is why when major change occurs in your life, it is important to have physical checkups more frequently than usual. Even if you are feeling fine, it is particularly important to watch your health carefully when you change jobs, leave a relationship, or retire, or when someone you love dies.
Other studies looked at breast cancer. In a pioneering British study, sixty-nine women with breast cancer were followed for five years. Women who did not suffer a recurrence tended to be those who responded to cancer with a "fighting spirit," whereas those who died or who suffered a recurrence tended to respond to their initial diagnosis with helplessness and stoic acceptance.
I do not believe that when a patient has such a lethal load of cancer as to be deemed "terminal," psychological processes can do much good. At the margin, however, when tumor load is small, when illness is beginning to progress, optimism might spell the difference between life and death.
What we saw was that health at age sixty was strongly related to optimism at age twenty-five. The pessimistic men had started to come down with the diseases of middle age earlier and more severely than the optimistic men, and the differences in health by age forty-five were already large. Before age forty-five optimism has no effect on health. Until that age the men remained in the same state of health as at age twenty-five. But at age forty-five the male body starts its decline. How fast and how severely it does so is well predicted by pessimism twenty-five years earlier.
The fundamental guideline for not deploying optimism is to ask what the cost of failure is in the particular situation. If the cost of failure is high, optimism is the wrong strategy. The pilot in the cockpit deciding whether to de-ice the plane one more time, the partygoer deciding whether to drive home after drinking, the frustrated spouse deciding whether to start an affair that, should it come to light, would break up the marriage should not use optimism.
On the other hand, if the cost of failure is low, use optimism. The sales agent deciding whether to make one more call loses only his time if he fails. The shy person deciding whether to attempt to open a conversation risks only rejection. The teenager contemplating learning a new sport risks only frustration. The disgruntled executive, passed over for promotion, risks only some refusals if he quietly puts out feelers for a new position. All should use optimism.
The first step is to see the connection between adversity, belief, and consequence.
THERE ARE TWO general ways for you to deal with your pessimistic beliefs once you are aware of them. The first is simply to distract yourself when they occur—try to think of something else. The second is to dispute them. Disputing is more effective in the long run, because successfully disputed beliefs are less likely to recur when the same situation presents itself again.
You probably find that you have almost no capacity to refrain from thinking about the pie. But you do have the capacity to redeploy your attention. Think about the pie again. Got it. Mouth-watering? Now stand up and slam the palm of your hand against the wall and shout "STOP!" The image of the pie disappeared, didn’t it? This is one of several simple but highly effective thought-stopping techniques used by people who are trying to interrupt habitual thought patterns. Some people ring a loud bell, others carry a three-by-five card with the word STOP in enormous red letters. Many people find it works well to wear a rubber band around their wrists and snap it hard to stop their ruminating. If you combine one of these physical techniques with a technique called attention shifting, you will get longer-lasting results. To keep your thoughts from returning to a negative belief after interruption (by snapping a rubber band or whatever), now direct your attention elsewhere.
Finally, you can undercut ruminations by taking advantage of their very nature. Their nature is to circle around in your mind, so that you will not forget them, so that you will act on them. When adversity strikes, schedule some time—later—for thinking things over … say, this evening at six P.M. Now, when something disturbing happens and you find the thoughts hard to stop, you can say to yourself, "Stop. I’ll think this over later … at [such and such a time]."
One does not have to be a combat soldier, or visit a refugee camp in Syria or the Congo to encounter trauma. Trauma happens to us, our friends, our families, and our neighbors. Research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown that one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit.1
Maybe even worse for Tom than the recurrent flashbacks of the ambush was the memory of what happened afterward. I could easily imagine how Tom’s rage about his friend’s death had led to the calamity that followed. It took him months of dealing with his paralyzing shame before he could tell me about it. Since time immemorial veterans, like Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, have responded to the death of their comrades with unspeakable acts of revenge. The day after the ambush Tom went into a frenzy to a neighboring village, killing children, shooting an innocent farmer, and raping a Vietnamese woman. After that it became truly impossible for him to go home again in any meaningful way. How can you face your sweetheart and tell her that you brutally raped a woman just like her, or watch your son take his first step when you are reminded of the child you murdered? Tom experienced the death of Alex as if part of himself had been forever destroyed—the part that was good and honorable and trustworthy. Trauma, whether it is the result of something done to you or something you yourself have done, almost always makes it difficult to engage in intimate relationships.
Antipsychotic drugs were a major factor in reducing the number of people living in mental hospitals in the United States, from over 500,000 in 1955 to fewer than 100,000 in 1996.7 For people today who did not know the world before the advent of these treatments, the change is almost unimaginable. As a first-year medical student I visited Kankakee State Hospital in Illinois and saw a burly ward attendant hose down dozens of filthy, naked, incoherent patients in an unfurnished dayroom supplied with gutters for the runoff water. This memory now seems more like a nightmare than like something I witnessed with my own eyes.
After administering several courses of electric shock, the researchers opened the doors of the cages and then shocked the dogs again. A group of control dogs who had never been shocked before immediately ran away, but the dogs who had earlier been subjected to inescapable shock made no attempt to flee, even when the door was wide open—they just lay there, whimpering and defecating. The mere opportunity to escape does not necessarily make traumatized animals, or people, take the road to freedom. Like Maier and Seligman’s dogs, many traumatized people simply give up. Rather than risk experimenting with new options they stay stuck in the fear they know. I was riveted by Maier’s account. What they had done to these poor dogs was exactly what had happened to my traumatized human patients.
Freud had a term for such traumatic reenactments: "the compulsion to repeat." He and many of his followers believed that reenactments were an unconscious attempt to get control over a painful situation and that they eventually could lead to mastery and resolution. There is no evidence for that theory—repetition leads only to further pain and self-hatred. In fact, even reliving the trauma repeatedly in therapy may reinforce preoccupation and fixation.
After conducting numerous studies of medications for PTSD, I have come to realize that psychiatric medications have a serious downside, as they may deflect attention from dealing with the underlying issues.
Consider the case of antidepressants. If they were indeed as effective as we have been led to believe, depression should by now have become a minor issue in our society. Instead, even as antidepressant use continues to increase, it has not made a dent in hospital admissions for depression. The number of people treated for depression has tripled over the past two decades, and one in ten Americans now take antidepressants.24
Updated: Nov 17, 2022
The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is responsible for arousal, including the fight-or-flight response (Darwin’s "escape or avoidance behavior"). Almost two thousand years ago the Roman physician Galen gave it the name "sympathetic" because he observed that it functioned with the emotions (sym pathos).
The second branch of the ANS is the parasympathetic ("against emotions") nervous system (PNS), which promotes self-preservative functions like digestion and wound healing. It triggers the release of acetylcholine to put a brake on arousal, slowing the heart down, relaxing muscles, and returning breathing to normal. As Darwin pointed out, "feeding, shelter, and mating activities" depend on the PNS.
Updated: Dec 12, 2022
If we look beyond the list of specific symptoms that entail formal psychiatric diagnoses, we find that almost all mental suffering involves either trouble in creating workable and satisfying relationships or difficulties in regulating arousal (as in the case of habitually becoming enraged, shut down, overexcited, or disorganized). Usually it’s a combination of both.
Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives. Numerous studies of disaster response around the globe have shown that social support is the most powerful protection against becoming overwhelmed by stress and trauma.
Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety.
Updated: Jan 10, 2023
Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. . . . It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it. —Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror
Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.
For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present.
The greater the doubt, the greater the awakening; the smaller the doubt, the smaller the awakening. No doubt, no awakening. —C.-C. Chang, The Practice of Zen
Semrad taught us that most human suffering is related to love and loss and that the job of therapists is to help people "acknowledge, experience, and bear" the reality of life—with all its pleasures and heartbreak. "The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves," he’d say, urging us to be honest with ourselves about every facet of our experience. He often said that people can never get better without knowing what they know and feeling what they feel. I remember being surprised to hear this distinguished old Harvard professor confess how comforted he was to feel his wife’s bum against him as he fell asleep at night. By disclosing such simple human needs in himself he helped us recognize how basic they were to our lives. Failure to attend to them results in a stunted existence, no matter how lofty our thoughts and worldly accomplishments. Healing, he told us, depends on experiential knowledge: You can be fully in charge of your life only if you can acknowledge the reality of your body, in all its visceral dimensions.
After administering several courses of electric shock, the researchers opened the doors of the cages and then shocked the dogs again. A group of control dogs who had never been shocked before immediately ran away, but the dogs who had earlier been subjected to inescapable shock made no attempt to flee, even when the door was wide open—they just lay there, whimpering and defecating. The mere opportunity to escape does not necessarily make traumatized animals, or people, take the road to freedom. Like Maier and Seligman’s dogs, many traumatized people simply give up. Rather than risk experimenting with new options they stay stuck in the fear they know. I was riveted by Maier’s account. What they had done to these poor dogs was exactly what had happened to my traumatized human patients. They, too, had been exposed to somebody (or something) who had inflicted terrible harm on them—harm they had no way of escaping. I made a rapid mental review of the patients I had treated. Almost all had in some way been trapped or immobilized, unable to take action to stave off the inevitable. Their fight/flight response had been thwarted, and the result was either extreme agitation or collapse.
We concluded that Beecher’s speculation that "strong emotions can block pain" was the result of the release of morphinelike substances manufactured in the brain. This suggested that for many traumatized people, reexposure to stress might provide a similar relief from anxiety.17 It was an interesting experiment, but it did not fully explain why Julia kept going back to her violent pimp.
Gray’s data showed that the sensitivity of the amygdala depended, at least in part, on the amount of the neurotransmitter serotonin in that part of the brain. Animals with low serotonin levels were hyperreactive to stressful stimuli (like loud sounds), while higher levels of serotonin dampened their fear system, making them less likely to become aggressive or frozen in response to potential threats.18
Other researchers had shown that dominant male monkeys had much higher levels of brain serotonin than lower-ranking animals but that their serotonin levels dropped when they were prevented from maintaining eye contact with the monkeys they had once lorded over. In contrast, low-ranking monkeys who were given serotonin supplements emerged from the pack to assume leadership.
On Monday, February 8, 1988, Prozac was released by the drug company Eli Lilly. The first patient I saw that day was a young woman with a horrendous history of childhood abuse who was now struggling with bulimia—she basically spent much of her life bingeing and purging. I gave her a prescription for this brand-new drug, and when she returned on Thursday she said, "I’ve had a very different last few days: I ate when I was hungry, and the rest of the time I did my schoolwork." This was one of the most dramatic statements I had ever heard in my office.
Half a million children in the United States currently take antipsychotic drugs. Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines. These medications often are used to make abused and neglected children more tractable.
Broca’s area is one of the speech centers of the brain, which is often affected in stroke patients when the blood supply to that region is cut off. Without a functioning Broca’s area, you cannot put your thoughts and feelings into words. Our scans showed that Broca’s area went offline whenever a flashback was triggered.
Even years later traumatized people often have enormous difficulty telling other people what has happened to them. Their bodies reexperience terror, rage, and helplessness, as well as the impulse to fight or flee, but these feelings are almost impossible to articulate. Trauma by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past.
However, our scans clearly showed that images of past trauma activate the right hemisphere of the brain and deactivate the left. We now know that the two halves of the brain do speak different languages. The right is intuitive, emotional, visual, spatial, and tactual, and the left is linguistic, sequential, and analytical.
The stress hormones of traumatized people, in contrast, take much longer to return to baseline and spike quickly and disproportionately in response to mildly stressful stimuli. The insidious effects of constantly elevated stress hormones include memory and attention problems, irritability, and sleep disorders. They also contribute to many long-term health issues, depending on which body system is most vulnerable in a particular individual.
For a hundred years or more, every textbook of psychology and psychotherapy has advised that some method of talking about distressing feelings can resolve them. However, as we’ve seen, the experience of trauma itself gets in the way of being able to do that. No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.
At the time the disaster occurred, he was able to take an active role by running away from it, thus becoming an agent in his own rescue. And once he had reached the safety of home, the alarm bells in his brain and body quieted. This freed his mind to make some sense of what had happened and even to imagine a creative alternative to what he had seen—a lifesaving trampoline. In contrast to Noam, traumatized people become stuck, stopped in their growth because they can’t integrate new experiences into their lives.
Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on—unchanged and immutable—as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.
Being able to move and do something to protect oneself is a critical factor in determining whether or not a horrible experience will leave long-lasting scars.
Life is about rhythm. We vibrate, our hearts are pumping blood. We are a rhythm machine, that’s what we are. —Mickey Hart
My deep dive into psychology taught me that we human beings have a major habit of taking unconscious pleasure in the "bad stuff" in our lives. This was well-known to the founding giants of psychology like Freud, Jung, and Lacan. Freud called it "psychic masochism," Jung recognized it as "the Shadow," and Lacan called it jouissance—pleasure that's so intense we repress it. All of these psychologists recognized that a major component of helping people involved getting them to acknowledge and "own" this kind of weird underlying desire for and pleasure in stuff that they ostensibly hate and feel very frustrated by. It's strange, but it's true. Jung said—and I'll repeat it a few times throughout this book—"Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate."
I learned first-hand that by embracing my "psychic masochism," by recognizing and empowering the darkness of my "shadow," and in the end taking "pleasure" in my yucky stuff that I could do something amazing. I could completely integrate my "good" self with my "bad" self and become a whole person. Healed.
This is an insight that can be very, very offensive to our egos: the idea that on some level we could want or enjoy "awful" things in our lives is scary and troubling to most people. We tend to think we only want or enjoy "good" things, or that we should only want "good" things. But acknowledging our secret bliss in "the bad stuff" doesn't have to be a troubling recognition; it's just a normal part of human nature. We all do it, and there doesn't need to be any shame or blame in it at all. In fact, setting aside shame and blame is what allows us to make the enjoyment conscious, and thereby lets us remove its power to sneakily control us.
The very good news is, the minute that we're willing to make that previously unconscious pleasure a conscious one—-the minute we're willing to deliberately celebrate it and savor it—we create a massive pattern interrupt. We allow ourselves to finally receive the "dark secret joy" we've been (unbeknownst to ourselves!) seeking. We let the desire that motivated the negative pattern be fully known and satisfied, and then we're free to move beyond it and create something new.
As Milton said, "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."
Updated: Nov 02, 2022
What if, deep within you, you had a never-ending reservoir of wrongness? Like, what if deep down inside, everything about you was totally detestable, dangerous, a source of pain to yourself and other people? And what if that was absolutely great?
I've noticed that pretty much all of us human beings who aren't completely enlightened (so: the population of earth minus Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, the Dalai Lama, and some humble shamans who lack PR agents), all of us feel, at some level, that there's something unbearably deficient, horrible, ugly, and lacking about ourselves that we need to cover over (to hide, to bury, to run from) and we cover it over with accomplishment, with the approval of others, or with black tar heroin.
Even those in the "functional adult" camp with relatively mild addictive tendencies often find that despite their best efforts and intentions, dark patterns repeat in their lives. And repeat.
Somehow, one way or another, for the majority of us humans—whether it's through our addictions or through our lousy patterns, our hidden sense of wrongness makes itself felt. So a question arises: what the fuck are we gonna do about this? I say: let's transmute that feeling of "wrongness" into raw, hot, glorious power.
God is one kinky-ass motherfucker. God—the divine—whatever He/She/IT is—creates this world, and this world is a gonzo horror show of war and rape and abuse and addiction and disaster. If God is running the show, God must like it this way! Now, you might guess that a thought like that would lead to some kind of terrible nihilistic breakdown. But for me . . . actually, it didn't. Instead, it made me smile—perversely—and gave me a feeling of lightness, play, and possibility. Because I had also stumbled upon this further thought: maybe I'm one freaky-ass motherfucker too! What if—seriously what if—all the bad stuff had manifested in my life because I like it that way?
Then he'd come back, there'd be some nice kissing, and within minutes we'd be back to yelling and he'd be throwing things at me (coffee mugs, books, etc.). I hated how controlling and violent my partner was. And yet, after much inquiry and reflection, I realized I actually loved how controlling and violent he was. Loved, loved, loved it. I adored the feeling of being important that came from having this guy treat me like I was a supply of heroin that he had to manage in order to have it available at all times. In other words, my existence had meaning. Just as in the tale of Persephone and Pluto, I could use him to keep me contained, so that I didn't have to risk exploring myself or the world without him. Part of what kept me hooked into the relationship was the joy of resenting him and his controlling violence. Another part of what kept me hooked in was the feeling that I could only have this terrible relationship because I was terrible, and if I could just become un-terrible, then I could leave him.
I allowed myself to consciously feel the previously unconscious pleasure I felt in being violently controlled. It was in fact a previously unconscious turn-on. My "aha" moment. Turn-on is magnetic. Now I was faced with the stark realization that I had been unconsciously magnetizing abuse and scarcity and rejection to myself all my life. It occurred to me that I had been unconsciously enjoying and magnetizing self-devaluation for years, but I had never before let myself know it because it's a shameful, freaky, weird thing to be turned on by devaluation and scarcity in real life. I mean, in sophisticated circles it's totally cool to be turned on by devaluation in some spicy S&M bedroom scene—but in real life? That's just fucked up. And then it dawned on me: Shit, I don't just have bedroom kink, I have existential kink. I have perverse desires for pain and bondage in my daily existence.
Well if God is a kinky freak and I'm a part of God like all these "spiritual" people say, maybe deep down I'm a kinky freak too. And maybe I can get more in touch with my divine nature by giving myself permission to like all the scary stuff in life, instead of just resenting it.
You see, what I'll be sharing with you here is Existential Kink, a radical, somatic, hot, and eminently practical & quick method of coming to love the previously hidden and shamed parts of your own self, so that your old negative patterns dissolve. Those hidden and shamed parts? That's your shadow. And in the course of this book, you'll meet your shadow and learn how to dance with it.
As Jung emphasized: "Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate." But Jung also pointed out: "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."
Updated: Jan 22, 2023
Jung's observation that "Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate" means that your unconscious desires and curiosities have great power to shape your experience.
Updated: Jan 23, 2023
What this book proposes is a different method—the "EK" method—a method for rapidly making the unconscious, conscious—so that your unconscious desires and curiosities no longer rule you. When that happens, a huge vista of possibility opens up in your life. This method of integration works within days, weeks, and months rather than within years and decades. Why? Because Existential Kink doesn't just identify your shadow self. Existential Kink teaches you to embrace and love your shadow self.
Updated: Jan 24, 2023
To his unconscious, this is a giant victory and a great fulfillment of the deep underlying desire—his desire to want to be taken care of. Unconsciously, Alex is enjoying living with his parents and being taken care of. The ironic thing is: as long as Alex resists allowing himself to consciously experience his job loss and his being "taken care of" by his parents as a great victory and fulfillment (in other words, as long as he resists consenting to experience it as kinkily awesome the very same way his unconscious experiences it), then the more he will feel out-of-control and cursed by Fate. As long as Alex refuses to consciously enjoy his circumstance, he'll be inclined to see himself as a loser and a failure, he'll lose confidence, and he'll stay stuck. Paradoxically, the moment Alex becomes willing to "get on the side" of his taboo unconscious desire for dependence and goes ahead and deeply savors its victory—at that moment he can feel empowered again. He can realize that his taboo wish to be dependent has been fulfilled, and let himself receive the hot weird pleasure of that. Then, rather than being a loser, Alex is actually a massively fulfilled person. From this vantage point of deciding to consciously allow himself to enjoy and be satisfied by his previously unconscious pleasure, it's then much easier for him to go ahead and make his way in the world. In essence, he's no longer guilty; he's not beating himself up anymore. He's no longer resisting his situation, so it doesn't need to persist.
Dissolving unconscious patterns by making them conscious (and thereby integrating your being, your will) allows you to wake up out of this powerlessness and become the captain of the ship of your own life.
Through consciously enjoying and giving approval to these previously unconscious "guilty pleasures," we interrupt and end the stuck patterns so that we can get what we really want in our lives.
Let's return to a point mentioned in the Introduction: if the ancient wisdom of Vedas are correct and the whole universe is just God playing elaborate rounds of hide'n'seek with Godself, then God is a super-freak. We need only look around our planet to see that God's idea of a fun time includes some seriously edgy, ultra-taboo, hard-core stuff—including war and poverty and pain and ravaging and abuse and atrocities of all variety. That's a whole lot of sadism and masochism, dominance and submission, bondage and torture—in both extreme and subtle forms—that God enjoys playing out with Godself. I propose that all our suffering and stuckness in life comes from forgetting that we're divine sparks playing a wild kinky game and that great miracles can come forth in our lives when we reverse the process of forgetting by deliberately reclaiming the pleasure of the game—not just in our minds, but in our hearts and genitals.
Updated: Jan 26, 2023
And contrary to some airy Law of Attraction notions, we rarely get what we consciously want (unless we do the kind of deep solve work addressed in this book), but we always get what we unconsciously want. And if you're curious as to what you unconsciously want, you don't need thirty years of psychoanalysis to figure it out: you can just take a look at what you currently have in your life and know that that's exactly what your unconscious wants, because what your unconscious wants, it gets
And contrary to some airy Law of Attraction notions, we rarely get what we consciously want (unless we do the kind of deep solve work addressed in this book), but we always get what we unconsciously want. And if you're curious as to what you unconsciously want, you don't need thirty years of psychoanalysis to figure it out: you can just take a look at what you currently have in your life and know that that's exactly what your unconscious wants, because what your unconscious wants, it gets
Updated: Feb 05, 2023
The unio mentalis is a being that is not in conflict with itself; it's undivided and thus is extremely powerful.
"Until you make your unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate." In other words, the emotions and desires and positions that our ego disowns inevitably haunt us (personally and collectively) by generating painful synchronous experiences that urge us to confront and reintegrate the disdained side of a polarity. This is what Jung's predecessor, Sigmund Freud, called "the return of the repressed." Polarities include all sets of "opposites"—masculine and feminine, fire and ice, night and day, violence and healing, creation and destruction, good and evil, fulfillment and deprivation, power and powerlessness, etc. Let me give you an example: most of us have grown up in a society that exalts wealth, and we have disowned and denied the other side of the polarity: a love of scarcity. In doing so we make our love of scarcity unconscious, and thus scarcity synchronously shows up in our lives, until we agree to consciously, deliberately, "insanely," shamelessly love it. The Great Work involves making the unconscious, conscious and thus changing the locus of our agency and taking charge of our own fate. To change the locus of your agency means to stop aligning yourself with your ego's one-sided choices (the ego tends to want only what it labels "the good stuff") and to instead align yourself with the kinkier, more adventurous choices of the underlying total divine presence that we all are: the strange, vast Self which enjoys and is very curious about absolutely everything. To do this, we have to greatly humble our ego's denial and fictional (if we were feeling feisty we might even say delusional) sorting of all experience into "good" (what appears to benefit me) and "bad" (what appears to not benefit me). When we succeed in this, the ego loses layers of its absorption in the fiction of separation, and comes more and more to see itself as just a particular (rather funny) expression of a much larger divine whole, the Self.
In waking up out of our absorbing fiction of separation, we link up the gigantic sexual, taboo, electrical energy (the shakti, the turn-on) in our bodies with our most inspired ideals and intentions. Then our ideals and our intentions gain the high-voltage electric "oomph" that they've been previously missing.
The Basque word for witch, sorginak, means "one who makes her own fate." What I'm presenting to you here is a way to make your own fate: a witchy, tricksy, feminine path to enlightenment that's quite a bit different than the more publicly vaunted, masculine routes of asceticism, contemplation, and yogic saintliness. The witchy path of the Great Work involves learning to get off on (and thus to tangibly, viscerally reintegrate) the darkest, scariest dimensions of ourselves and our existence. It's a sexual, worldly, orgasmic, ecstatic path which bears a good deal in common with Hindu and Buddhist tantric traditions. To be completely blunt, this Existential Kink work is the left-hand path. The left-hand path is also…
If you want to know who you unconsciously believe you are, just take a look at your life, your surroundings, your relationship. Your life mirrors those deep beliefs.
I'm going to make explicit a concept that I will probably repeat many times, because it's key to this work. Please learn it. The concept is this: You are not who you think you are. Whoever you happen to think you are, I assure you, you are not that. I suggest that you remind yourself of this often, because it makes this work easier. When you brush your teeth in the morning, think to yourself, "I'm not at all who I imagine myself to be. I'm something entirely different and far more vast and strange. Hmmmm. I wonder what I really am?" Who you think you are is largely a societally constructed fiction held together by some compulsively repetitive thoughts and stories, and it bears little or no resemblance to the being that you actually are. As the wise and pithy magician Mr. Lon Milo Duquette says: "Magic is indeed all in your head, but your head is a hell of a lot bigger than you think it is."
You see, the super-power of the spirit is total approval, total embrace, total celebration, the total perception of the already-existing perfection of life. When the spirit exclaims "perfect!" the conscious mind/the ego tends to hear that as "make things more perfect! They suck now!"—but actually what the spirit is saying is "everything is perfect right now!" Yes, everything. The world and our selves in all their fucked-up glory. That experience of total approval and total embrace, total absence of shame or aversion, is what the spirit is always trying to teach us about and it's ironically what our conscious mind mistranslates as all those "shoulds" and judgments.
Existential Kink is a potent form of magic (also known as: "psychological integration") in which the receptive feminine—the unconscious, the disowned and denied, the soul—becomes pregnant with the perfection-vision of our spirit—the masculine, projective part of our being, and eventually gives birth to positive synchronous manifestations in our lives.
What that means is you're going to take all the embracing-approval-seeking-inherent-perfection-perceiving power of your spirit, tell your ego "thanks but you can shut the fuck up for a while," and send all that embracing-approval-seeking-inherent-perfection-perceiving down to your actual life, body, emotions, and present situation. In the process of Existential Kink you invite your spirit to have the realization that your life on earth—right now, right here, in this animal, human body—is actually exactly what it has always wanted to celebrate with its exultant songs of perfection. Another way of saying that is that the practice of Existential Kink is the work of becoming attuned to practical magic; you decide to fully incarnate, to agree fully to be who you already are, however messy or stinky that may be—with no reservation, no hold-back, no "if-only," no judgment, no shame.
The paradox is that once you fully commit to being who you already are, having what you already have, and hugely celebrating it, you become a masterful practical magician, a force of nature capable of shifting circumstances very easily.
Updated: Feb 06, 2023
And contrary to some airy Law of Attraction notions, we rarely get what we consciously want (unless we do the kind of deep solve work addressed in this book), but we always get what we unconsciously want. And if you're curious as to what you unconsciously want, you don't need thirty years of psychoanalysis to figure it out: you can just take a look at what you currently have in your life and know that that's exactly what your unconscious wants, because what your unconscious wants, it gets.
And contrary to some airy Law of Attraction notions, we rarely get what we consciously want (unless we do the kind of deep solve work addressed in this book), but we always get what we unconsciously want. And if you're curious as to what you unconsciously want, you don't need thirty years of psychoanalysis to figure it out: you can just take a look at what you currently have in your life and know that that's exactly what your unconscious wants, because what your unconscious wants, it gets.
"Having is evidence of wanting" is another way of phrasing the pithy quote that we previously read from the old wizard Carl Jung: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it Fate."
Whatever desires are in your unconscious, will be "born," will happen, and the results of those desires will seem to be come toward you from some unfathomable outside agency—in other words, "fate." The good news is, when you do the uncomfortable work of making these strong, unconscious desire-curiosities conscious, by giving them a vast, taboo-level of approval, they lose their fateful power to fuck with you.
Updated: Feb 08, 2023
Here's a rule of thumb: If we're talking about an annoying pattern that seems to recur specifically for you, and you know a lot of other folks who are free of that particular pattern, chances are good that it's something that's being created specifically by your own personal unconscious. But if we're talking about endemic human problems like war or racism or child abuse, odds are it's more of a collective unconscious issue.
A more extreme example: childbirth is a notoriously painful process, often depicted in modern media as filled with screams and groans and facilitated by numbing drugs. And yet there's something called the Orgasmic Birth movement, which consists of women who train themselves to experience the intense sensations of child birth as pleasure, and many women are indeed able to experience their births as an orgasm instead of a horrible painful ordeal. That's not to say that it's easy to train oneself to experience the very intense sensations of childbirth as pleasurable, but just that it's possible. And the fact that it's possible points very directly to the immensely flexible capacity of the human organism to choose how it perceives sensation. Exercising choice over how you perceive the sensations of happenings in your life and psyche is a profound step in releasing attachment to being "helpless" and at the mercy of "cruel fate."
It was in reflecting on this phenomenon of sexual kink/BDSM especially that Existential Kink was born. I started to wonder why it is that we don't usually experience the painful parts of life as similar playful pleasure. I think it has to do with the matter of choice. People participating in BDSM consciously choose to be tied up and flogged, and that element of deliberate choice allows them to experience that pain and bondage as a kind of play, as something fun. But usually when painful things happen in our lives, we don't feel that we have a "choice" whether or not to experience them as pain, so we don't find it very fun—instead we tend to experience it as very disempowering and defeating. So a big part of Existential Kink involves deciding to at least start by "pretending" (i.e., experimentally accepting the axiom "having is evidence of wanting") that some hitherto-unconscious part of you playfully, humorously, curiously chooses and desires a given painful situation, behavior, stream of thought, or mood. When you make a kinky game of it, you greatly expand your sense of agency, you unite your will, and you open up room for a sense of fun and playfulness to come into the scene.
The notion of "getting off on every stroke" is something I learned while in the Orgasmic Meditation movement. In Orgasmic Meditation, a "stroker" strokes a woman's clitoris very lightly for fifteen minutes, within a very specific container involving a timer, gloves, lube, and a "nest" of pillows and blankets. Orgasmic Meditation is a kind of very simplified, "Zen" sort of tantric practice (if you look up traditional Hindu or Buddhist Tantra you'll see they're quite complicated) where the goal is to focus on the sensation at the point of contact between finger and clitoris, much like the point of Vipassana meditation is to focus on the sensation at the point of the breath entering the nose. If you're a woman being stroked in Orgasmic Meditation, you soon notice that there are certain kinds of clitoral strokes that you automatically prefer and enjoy, and some that don't feel as good, or even that feel a little uncomfortable or painful. So an advanced challenge in the Orgasmic Meditation practice is to attempt to open oneself to enjoy, to be turned on by, and "get off on" strokes that are outside one's automatic range of preference. In this way, one learns to expand one's experience of orgasmic (i.e., pleasure) energy (in Orgasmic Meditation, as in Existential Kink, the definition of "orgasm" or "getting off" is not…
It's possible to experience exactly the same set of events in a way that's a turn-on, or in a way that's a turn-off and this includes the "internal events" of your emotions and thoughts. How turned on and approving you are tends to have a lot to do with whether you're willing to playfully perceive your life as a wild, kinky game or whether you're hell-bent on taking it seriously and believing that it "should" follow a certain ego-pleasing pattern. The more you allow yourself to be "turned on," the less resistance you offer to the positive, creative current that's always attempting to move through you into manifestation.
It's possible to be sad, angry, disappointed—in a turned-on way. It's just a matter of giving yourself permission to fully feel the raw sensation that those emotions present, to meet the sensation with your innocence rather than your cynical judgment and "stories" about what these emotional sensations mean. In other words, it's magically useful to take an aesthetic, imaginative, artistic approach to your life and feelings rather than a dire, moralizing approach.
Let's take the feeling of sadness as an example. An open, receptive approach to this emotion might be, "Ah, a deep heavy feeling of sadness, how exquisite. Hmm, let me feel into this, what is the texture, the sound? It's rather spongy, and when I pay close attention, I notice in my heart it sounds like a slow xylophone melody playing in a rainy alley." As opposed to, "Oh no, a deep heavy feeling of sadness. This must mean I'm a failure and my life sucks and I'm screwed.…
As Oscar Wilde once observed in a letter to a magazine in response to criticisms of The Picture of Dorian Gray, "If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will…
We have all these unconscious desire-curiosities, and many of them are quite taboo and "wrong" according to the standard of our conscious mind. Some of these include the desire for scarcity and limitation, the desire to feel wronged, the desire to feel rejected, the desire to feel not good enough, the desire to feel offended. Even though these unconscious desires are met in our lives by circumstances and events, we tend to miss a crucial step: celebration of fulfillment. We don't usually allow ourselves to consciously experience a turned-on sense of fulfillment and joy when these desires are met, because we habitually deny having them in the first place. The longer we deny the fact that these dark, "fucked-up" desire-curiosities are a part of us, and that we enjoy their fulfillment, the more they continue to shape our lives. When we deliberately allow ourselves to gratefully feel, celebrate, and receive the fulfillment of our previously denied and disowned desires, we give those desires freedom. We give them space and light in which to evolve and change. For example: once I've realized that I'm fulfilling my previously unconscious desire to feel "not…
can know right away that anything in my life, any attitude, any feeling, any situation I have shame about, that's an area of my life where I am accidentally suppressing my magic, and seeding the procreation of what we would call negative synchronicities—bad luck. The more you give yourself permission to be shameless, the more the channel of communication between your conscious and unconscious mind opens, and the more effectively you can…
1) Get yourself into a relaxed state. Do whatever it is that helps you to relax. You could simply sit or lie down and breathe deeply for some moments, or you could precede your EK work by taking a nice hot salt bath or doing your favorite yoga stretches. Be flexible and experimental in how you go about getting yourself relaxed. Relaxation is key. I recommend relaxing yourself as part of EK because the more relaxed your body is, the easier it is to feel subtle sensations flowing within it, and this practice is all about sensation.
2) Create a container for yourself by lighting a candle and some incense, and setting a timer for 15 minutes. Creating a container means setting up some basic bounds of space and time to contain your experience so that you can more deeply sink into it. When you have a container, you don't need to worry about getting "lost" in this far-out bizarro meditation, because you have set aside a special, finite time and place for it. I suggest that you create a spatial container for this work by going into a comfortable room where you can close the door and not be disturbed. I also suggest that you create a temporal container for this work by setting a timer for fifteen minutes and lighting a candle and/or burning some incense. If incense smoke doesn't agree with you, you could spray some rose water or Agua de Florida.
Lighting a candle and burning some incense also signal to your deep unconscious that you are doing important transformational work, something special and outside your ordinary activity. Sending this kind of signal to yourself can help you feel more grounded and centered in the process.
3) Identify a situation in your life that your conscious mind, your ego, does not like.
Also, EK is best applied to "don't like" situations that are repeating, persistent patterns in your life. If you've been fired from three jobs for the same reason, then yes, that would be something to work on after processing your grief. If it's a bit of a random happening that you've been let go from your job, then perhaps just grieve it and apply your EK work to things that are more recurrent issues in your life.
4) Identify exactly what feelings and emotions you associate with this situation. This is important because EK works best when we do it on the feelings, emotions, and sensations associated with a situation, and not on the fact of the situation itself.
Here's an example: one of my clients, Elsie, used to get tremendously anxious whenever she felt criticized or judged by someone in her social group. She practiced Existential Kink on the matter and discovered that the very same sensations that she had initially perceived as painful anxiety were actually kinky excitement. This reminded me of psychotherapist Fritz Perls' famous observation: "Fear is just excitement without breath." In other words, fear is just excitement without embrace and approval for the sensations. Through EK, Elsie discovered that she actually loved the intensity of attention and the feeling of theatrical momentousness that came with being criticized. Indeed, it turned her on immensely. It literally created arousal in her body: flushed cheeks, a faster heartbeat—the same physiological response that comes from being alone with a lover. When Elsie got very honest with herself and looked at her behavior, she noticed that she would unconsciously provoke people into confronting her with criticism because she got so much shadowy satisfaction out of it.
So to emphasize: focus on allowing yourself to take sadomasochistic pleasure in the sensations and emotions stirred up by your "don't like" situation. Don't put your energy into trying to get yourself to like the bare facts of what you "don't like."
5) Gently allow yourself to get in touch with the part of yourself that actually, passionately enjoys the feelings and emotions associated with your "don't like" situation. This step of the Existential Kink meditation process is to take some time to gently, vulnerably allow yourself to get in touch with the previously unconscious, kinky part of you that enjoys this "don't like" situation. Consider that fear or aversion and desire always go hand-in-hand.
Updated: Feb 12, 2023
Remember, "having is evidence of wanting"—if there's a situation or a feeling that's present in your life, no matter how awful it is, it's present with you not because it's "true" or "real" but because some part of the vast, strange, kinky Self that you are finds it fascinating, compelling, beautiful. And it's time to let that part of yourself and its taboo pleasures come to your conscious agreement and embrace. Softly, temporarily put aside your ego and your usual judgments about who you are and what you want. To increase your self-honesty here, it can help to strongly imagine that the "don't like" situation will be utterly and completely removed from your life in just one month from now, as if "by the hand of God." Since the "don't like" situation is going to be inevitably, totally removed anyway (you allow yourself to imagine), you can relax, open up, and allow yourself to feel just how very much a secret, taboo part of you enjoys it and cherishes it right now. That part of you has been silent up to now because your conscious mind has been shaming the enjoyment of the "bad" things in life, like scarcity, rejection, and self-hatred. So you need to carefully coax it out. Experiment with playfully saying the following EK statements to yourself: "I'm willing to stop pretending I don't enjoy XYZ tremendously." or "I'm willing to allow myself to know about my secret, weird pleasure in XYZ." or "It's okay for me to feel my forbidden,…
Alternatively, you can take a coy, indirect, teasing approach to help disarm the defenses of the conscious mind. So sometimes in EK I like to say things to myself with sexy sarcasm (as if begging a devastatingly hot Dom not to whip me): "Oh no no no, not feeling wrong & bad, anything but that! Please, please, no, I just can't stand feeling . . . mmmmm . . . wrong & bad!" It's a bit silly, I know, but it works. Often the enjoyment in Existential Kink can be felt as jolts of electricity or genital sensation. Just as often it can be felt as a movement of emotional energy. Sometimes it's felt as lightness and laughter, or just a soft sense of relief. That's "getting off" in Existential Kink. "Getting off" in…
Get on the side of your shadow (your previously unconscious sense of desire/curiosity/enjoyment) and deliberately, consciously, humbly allow yourself to receive, feel big gratitude for, and get off on the situation your unconscious so brilliantly created. This part of the Existential Kink process is crucial. Until you deliberately let your unconscious self fully receive and enjoy and delight in the situation and emotions she's creating (however "fucked up" it may be), that situation will just hang around and stay the same. The scarcity/romantic rejection/self-hatred will stay there, because your unconscious will keep just keep enjoying what she enjoys. Why? because you haven't consciously given her the freedom to shamelessly receive and experience the fulfillment of her desire, to receive and delight in all the bloody, operatic, nasty, spectacular fulfillment of her perfectly reasonable enjoyment of scarcity/romantic rejection/self-hatred, etc. It is through gratitude, deep receiving, and orgasmically enjoying the result you've already created (unconsciously) that you make space for your conscious and unconscious minds to sexually (magically) merge, fertilize each other, and eventually give birth to a new upward spiral of positive synchronicity in your life.
You can experiment with more EK statements like: "This unconscious enjoyment matters just as much as any other enjoyment in my life." "My enjoyment of this fucked-up stuff is just as worthwhile and important as my enjoyment of sunshine and roses." "I honor this desire. I respect it. I'm allowed to enjoy this as exactly much as I do." "I embrace and receive these sensations." "I'm willing to feel the depth of my love for this." "I open up to feeling wild, insane gratitude and excitement about these sensations and this situation." This is the "kink" part of Existential Kink. In BDSM kink, people get off on things that they normally don't like. Pain, flogging, being bossed around. Well, in life in general, we have the same opportunity to interact playfully with pain. All we need to do is shift the context in our imagination from one of "awful thing happening to me against my will" to "kinky fun thing happening that I fully consent to." Get off on this thing, this situation, this feeling that your ego thinks that you hate. Feel the freedom of that, the liberation of it. Allow yourself to be touched by the magnetism and electric spark of the "awful" thing that's present.
Like "Ooooooh, what if I somehow forget something totally important and then I just FAIL and everyone, the whole internet, just hates me, for good reason, because I completely suck. . . ." You get the idea. I was basically obsessed with how hot and vulnerable it would be if I totally screwed something up. So when I really let myself feel that, it helped make it clear to me that my anxiety is something I choose to do to myself instead of some horrible automatic fate I can't control. And then once I saw that, it was a lot easier to let it go. You can also do this kind of future-oriented EK on discomfort associated with completing tasks that you usually avoid, but that you know are good for you, like deep cleaning your home or cooking and eating lots of vegetables.
So, I practiced doing EK on the pain and awkwardness that I imagined I would feel in doing core exercises, taking perverse pleasure in it. I reminded myself that going right into my aversions is how magic happens. A part of me still hates core exercises (and what a joy it is to hate them!), but by perversely savoring my awkwardness and hatred, I've also gotten my core much stronger than it's ever been.
Probably the biggest barrier to "getting off" in Existential Kink is feeling so much guilt about an unconscious enjoyment that we tighten up and thus refuse to feel the enjoyment and make it conscious. With especially sticky unpleasant feelings, like guilt, it can be tough to feel the pure underlying, kinky desire for that feeling, but it can be simple to get in touch with the motivation for that feeling if only we're willing to investigate. And if you think about it, finding the motivation for something is quite similar to finding the desire for it. You see, every unpleasant feeling we have has an unconscious motivation. Some part of us believes that by feeling the yucky feeling, we'll "get" something that will enhance our survival.
Does this feeling of guilt come from a sense of wanting to control the situation? By feeling guilty, do I think I'll somehow change the situation, or at least get the approval of others? Am I willing to stop trying to use this feeling of guilt to get a sense of control? Am I willing to stop trying to use this feeling of guilt to manipulate others into approving of me? Would it be okay if the ability to use guilt to get approval or control just left me? What would it be like to live my life without ever using the feeling of guilt?
Here are some example answers to the prompt: As an all-powerful being, I currently find it richly entertaining to play a game wherein it seems my ultimate value and strength are dependent on what other people think of me. . . . so I need to meet certain qualifications to "prove" that I'm valuable and "win" the game. Other people and the judgments that they have are my adversaries in this game. I'm trying to be so perfect that "they" can't possibly negatively judge me. When I play this game, I work myself into a state of feeling anxious and spread-thin. Whenever I fail to meet "the qualifications," I get to feel guilty and afraid. The more I do this, the more separate and alienated I feel. It's amazing.
"Shame is the magic killer."
"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness visible." —CARL JUNG
Finding and healing the unconscious, lack-obsessed part of you with deep erotic love (not weak-sauce "acceptance") is the essence of Existential Kink.
Updated: Feb 15, 2023
Do Existential Kink on both the pain of pursuing your desire and the pain of not already having it, (i.e., the pain of your current "don't like" situation of not yet having the new boyfriend, or the completed novel, or the cash, or the liberation of all sentient beings). I really just dare you to cherish both kinds of pain, as they're equally wonderful. At the end of three months, if you've stayed focused on pursuing your reason-less desire, you will have your shit vastly more together than it is right now. At such a juncture, either decide to keep pursuing the same reason-less desire, or choose a new one.
The idea behind Deepest Fear Inventory comes from Marianne Williamson's famous, wise observation in her book A Return to Love, that "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond all measure." Many of us would do anything to avoid the intense sensations of having giant power.
Updated: Feb 20, 2023
Uncover your real values and commitments, the ones you actually already live by, the ones that actually govern your moment-to-moment actions and emotions, and fully, consciously embrace them, at least temporarily. To fully, consciously embrace your sadistic "operating instructions" is to stop shaming your villainous
Here's example "operating instructions" to get you started: I will guilt myself for at least three hours if I offend or disappoint anyone for any reason. Feeling supported and safe is utterly forbidden, no matter what. I must always find flaws with the people stupid enough to love me. I am totally, 100% committed to doubting my own value and worth. If I fail to meet any of my responsibilities, I will hate myself intensely. I am utterly not allowed to feel total self-forgiveness. Feeling a little bit of self-forgiveness is okay, but feeling total self-forgiveness is not allowed, ever. The more I reject my own work and being, the more I can get approval from authority figures. I completely agree that my value is fully dependent upon other people's perception of me. I decide to relentlessly shame and repress my aggressive and sexual feelings towards others so that I can only experience them as free-floating anxiety or depression. I am 1000% committed to insulting myself whenever I fail at anything. My deepest value is to feel bad about myself and to help my loved ones feel bad about themselves by relentlessly pointing out the ways they let me down.
Next, try treating your list like "reverse psychology affirmations." Read these affirmations in front of the mirror in the morning with great enthusiasm or with a Disney villain cackle every day for the next week and see what happens. Remember, the point of this exercise is never to bring yourself down. The point is to notice what inner sadistic prohibitions are already operating in you at a previously unconscious level and to make those prohibitions explicit and conscious by spelling them out, giving them your full conscious agreement, and savoring their extreme Villain-esque sadistic ridiculousness. When you make…
Take the sadistic operating instructions, "I am absolutely never allowed to feel good about . . . XYZ . . . (my worth, my body, my creativity, etc.)" Ridiculous, right? You are totally allowed to feel good and loving and fabulous all the time, about every part of you and your life. But if you don't already feel completely good about XYZ, then it's a guarantee that there is indeed some major part of you that unconsciously already agrees and believes in the sadistic prohibition to not feel good about it. So the trick is to make space and time to honor that sadistic part of you, to affirm the dictates of the Inner Villain in their full glory, to stop resisting them for a…
Updated: Feb 20, 2023
Be infinitely willing to feel and experience all the bad stuff endlessly because a part of you already is infinitely willing anyway. You don't have to "try" to love all the fucked-up stuff in your life: the simple fact is that you already do love it, immensely. All you need is honesty. Just be honest with yourself about the subtle erotic joy you get from dwelling on/fearing all the "bad things." Be honest about how exciting it is that you'll definitely die, and in dying, you will totally fail to keep your ego projects in motion. You're a complete failure no matter what. A dead failure.
The more I thought about other people absolutely refusing to highly value me and my work, the more aroused I got. Gradually it dawned on me: Well of course I don't make $1000 an hour; I am so turned on by being devalued and rejected! Turn-on enthusiasm is always magnetic, and now I was sitting with the stark realization that I had unconsciously been magnetizing scarcity and rejection to myself all along. It occurred to me that I had been unconsciously enjoying and magnetizing devaluation for years, but I had never before let myself know it because it's a shameful, freaky, weird thing to be turned on by devaluation and scarcity in real life.
Updated: Feb 25, 2023
Uncover your real values and commitments, the ones you actually already live by, the ones that actually govern your moment-to-moment actions and emotions, and fully, consciously embrace them, at least temporarily. To fully, consciously embrace your sadistic "operating instructions" is to stop shaming your villainous sadistic aggression and instead to celebrate it.
By imagining myself being paid "staggering sums" for my work, I practiced being willing to experience the sensations of being highly valued. And then I discovered something even more odd: as I consciously, deliberately got off on my scarcity kink and practiced growing my havingness level, I felt fulfilled and I simply lost my kinky hunger for scarcity, poverty, and humiliation. It just left. I lost my ability to take my empty bank account personally. My poverty no longer felt remotely relevant to me anymore, either as a kink or as a sorrow. Instead, I would think about being paid a staggering sum for my coaching, and it no longer felt impossible or intimidating; rather it felt hot. I started getting turned on by lots of money, rather than turned off by it. With this new kind of turn-on, I became willing to take mundane actions towards growing my business that in the past I had totally avoided, like building an email list. Suddenly, business-growth efforts that had sounded too scary or too intimidating to me in the past looked simple and obvious. I found I had huge creative energy to take these steps. I discovered that all along there were things I could do, that were not that difficult, to rapidly grow my business. I simply wasn't able to even see them until I changed my havingness level. It felt like having a veil lifted from my eyes.
Why? Because the Law of Attraction ideas always seemed a little—well, how to say this diplomatically?—extremely stupid to me, but I could never put my finger on exactly why. But now I could put my finger on precisely why: the usual Law of Attraction crowd strikes me as so dumb because they're only half-right, I realized. We do always get what we deeply desire, but most of us aren't that aware that much of what we deeply desire is some highly unpleasant, painful, secret, repressed, fucked-up shit. As it happens, the way to have profound success in altering your inner state and thereby altering your outer experience isn't through endless "positive thinking"—it's by being willing to look at the darkest, most twisted stuff in your experience and in your own heart and to feel great gratitude for it.
Imagine that you're a kind of cosmic masochistic slut (and I mean that in the nicest possible way—yay sluts!) who just beamed down into your life and body. She feels the heart-pounding panic of impending doom too, and she loves it. She feels the pressure of having to find a way to make ends meet again this month, and it turns her on. She feels the stretch and strain of having to prove herself worthy of support in this hard, cold world, and she trembles and moans and asks for more.
Both scarcity and bounty are highly sensational. The flavors of sensation that they carry are just a bit different. You can choose to have all the sensations that go along with wealth, but first you need to get crystal clear on your fondness for all the sensations that go along with scarcity. Why? Because if you keep truly believing that you "hate being broke" or "want to get rid of this anxiety about paying the bills"—you're likely to hold onto being broke and anxious about paying the bills, for the simple fact that the game is still totally absorbing you, because you won't let yourself realize it's a game. Once you accept how thoroughly you cherish being broke and having this anxiety about paying the bills, the entrancing spell of the game is broken, and you'll find yourself drawn into a new game, with new stakes that are more mesmerizing than the last ones.
Updated: Mar 03, 2023
Once, in the midst of a harrowing adventure, a dear friend said to me: "Carolyn, tell me something funny!" I looked at her, with her eyes squeezed shut, and said, "What, the fact that we're all gonna die isn't funny enough for you?" Her eyes opened with shock and then she doubled over with laughter. Mortality is tragic, but it's also hilarious because it's so common and inescapable. We habitually think that we're our personalities, our bodies, our histories, our thoughts, our feelings, but all of that is just content, and it will all dissolve when we die. Ultimately, what we all are is the context in which our lives happen. Even if people remember our life's story and accomplishments for thousands of years after our death, eventually, the last person who remembers us will die and then it will be as if we never existed at all. Vanity is called vanity because it's in vain.
Once, in the midst of a harrowing adventure, a dear friend said to me: "Carolyn, tell me something funny!" I looked at her, with her eyes squeezed shut, and said, "What, the fact that we're all gonna die isn't funny enough for you?" Her eyes opened with shock and then she doubled over with laughter. Mortality is tragic, but it's also hilarious because it's so common and inescapable. We habitually think that we're our personalities, our bodies, our histories, our thoughts, our feelings, but all of that is just content, and it will all dissolve when we die. Ultimately, what we all are is the context in which our lives happen. Even if people remember our life's story and accomplishments for thousands of years after our death, eventually, the last person who remembers us will die and then it will be as if we never existed at all. Vanity is called vanity because it's in vain.
After becoming proficient in that fundamental "move," of Existential Kink—of getting off on "the ugliness" in such a profound way that it no longer strikes you as ugly, but as an adorable, funny part of the whole—the next step is to practice allowing yourself to feel, receive, and truly get off on how wonderful your life already is. That's right. And I'm not talking about just some dusty old "gratitude" or "appreciation." I'm talking about soul-ripping, heart-pounding, genital-throbbing, gut-busting reception.
After becoming proficient in that fundamental "move," of Existential Kink—of getting off on "the ugliness" in such a profound way that it no longer strikes you as ugly, but as an adorable, funny part of the whole—the next step is to practice allowing yourself to feel, receive, and truly get off on how wonderful your life already is. That's right. And I'm not talking about just some dusty old "gratitude" or "appreciation." I'm talking about soul-ripping, heart-pounding, genital-throbbing, gut-busting reception.
You tell yourself you might get "it" if you just worked hard enough, improved yourself enough, figured out enough—if you got the right relationship, the right career, or the right level of fitness. But the real reason the big fulfillment still feels out of reach is not because you haven't gotten it yet. It feels out of reach because you already have it, but you're actively (unconsciously) avoiding it. Life, the universe, is already stroking you right on your most sensitive, hottest, most fulfilling spot with the situations and feelings present in your life right now. But you won't let yourself feel or receive or even consciously know that the Big Fulfillment is right here, right now—because to do so would make all of that worry, doubt, complaint, and resentment utterly ridiculous.
You tell yourself you might get "it" if you just worked hard enough, improved yourself enough, figured out enough—if you got the right relationship, the right career, or the right level of fitness. But the real reason the big fulfillment still feels out of reach is not because you haven't gotten it yet. It feels out of reach because you already have it, but you're actively (unconsciously) avoiding it. Life, the universe, is already stroking you right on your most sensitive, hottest, most fulfilling spot with the situations and feelings present in your life right now. But you won't let yourself feel or receive or even consciously know that the Big Fulfillment is right here, right now—because to do so would make all of that worry, doubt, complaint, and resentment utterly ridiculous.
Updated: Mar 04, 2023
A Simple Havingness Check-In Close your eyes for a moment and feel into your current state. Are you holding any resentments? Judgments of yourself or other people? Worries? Criticisms about the state of the world? Complaints about your body, your work, your life? Is it possible that these judgments, complaints, criticisms, resentments are mechanisms whose sole purpose is to help you avoid feeling tremendously good, loved, valued, inspired?
One way to do that is by closing your eyes, checking in with your state of being, and asking yourself, as we just did: "Is it possible that these judgments, complaints, criticisms, resentments are meaningless mechanisms whose sole purpose is to help me avoid feeling tremendously good, loved, valued, inspired?" When you're wrapped up in feeling miserable about something, it often seems that the content of what you're miserable about is very real and important. What if it's just not? What if it has no intrinsic meaning whatsoever? What if whatever "problem" you're hung up about is just a vehicle for numbing yourself to the massive turned-on joy and fulfillment you could otherwise be feeling?
If, as I do, you want to take seriously the experience of thousands of yogis throughout the millennia who emphasize that the fundamental nature of existence feels like bliss (i.e., Eros, pleasure, enjoyment), then it's worth getting really suspicious about your relationship with reality whenever you're not blissful. In other words, if the content of your experience feels awful, if your thoughts are grim, your energy leaden, your feelings flush with self-pity: I suggest getting very, very curious about what element of reality you're denying, repressing, and hiding from.
I want you to begin to get sensitive to your own habits of distortion. Specifically, I would like you to notice when you feel some flavor of "good"—close, connected, energized happy, hopeful, prosperous, etc., . . . . . . and then to also notice exactly how long you are willing to tolerate feeling good before you start to turn yourself off with worrying, doubting, getting offended.
Notice whenever you feel good and notice when you turn yourself off, and exactly how you turn yourself off. What's your favorite mode of turning yourself off? Is it worry about the future? Or maybe doubting your own value and capability? Regretting a past mistake? Or saying something snippy to your partner to start an argument? How exactly do you turn yourself off? How often? Your task is to become the world's foremost expert on this subject, and to record your thoughts and reflections on the subject in your Magical Diary.
To continue with our noticing—I would also like you to get curious: What if you just kept feeling really, really good for a whole week? Why not?
To be "turned on" about any feeling state, including feeling any variation of "turned off," just means to be in total, unreserved approval of that state. When you're in total, turned-on approval of your state, you're deciding to see that state as a way that you are "good for yourself" rather than as a way that you are "bad for yourself." So rather than resenting that something made you angry, try getting excited that you're angry. Rather than thinking you shouldn't be sad, try celebrating the tender exaltation of your sadness. Instead of being annoyed with yourself for being so self-pitying, give the most fan-girl level of approval you are capable of giving to your self-pity—the kind of approval that you might normally reserve only for your favorite musician or movie star. I'm saying: Adopt an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude to your feeling states. In doing this, you practice being the artist of your life rather than the judge of it. As an experiment, the next time you feel funky, rather than judging how you feel, just savor it as if it was a virtual reality experience crafted for you by the world's foremost artist.
Feeling tremendously guilty when you've disappointed someone (A way to cover up awareness of sadistic desire to inflict pain) Feeling very anxious in social situations (A way to cover up feelings of budding connection and intimacy, and also vicious aggression—usually both)
Updated: Mar 06, 2023
The most repressed item in your unconscious is your own total grace.
The thing about the ego is that it needs a sense of opposition, of refusal, of rejection in order to maintain itself. It has to say: "No! That is awful! I don't like that! No, that's not me!" to something in order to define itself as separate from the undulating whole of the weird fractal hologram of life.
In fact, according to some of the most touching myths we have, the divine often actively seeks out extreme experiences of pain in order to show off how divinely accepting it is. Odin, for example, put out his right eye and hung from a tree for nine days in order to gain knowledge of the mysteries.
The next time you notice yourself feeling guilty or resentful in the course of your day (hint: it's usually a sticky, stinky combination of both that's otherwise known as "feeling bad" or "feelin' some kinda way")—try this: Take a moment and imagine as strongly and as vividly that you can that there is a very loud, very colorful chorus of utterly fabulous, silly, adorable, over-the-top cheerleaders celebrating your guilty resentful yuck. They're dancing, they're shaking their butts, they're shaking their pom-poms, they're jumping up and down, trying to do splits and failing at it, jumping back up and grinning. They're splashing rainbow glitter paint around. Maybe they're all drag queens, maybe they're all roly-poly pink elephants, maybe they're all your best friends in super-goofy sequined outfits. They're chanting, "How do we want to feel? LACKING AND WRONG!" "When do we want to feel it? NOW!" "WOOOOOO-HOOOO! FUCK YEAH! Go Team Wrong and Bad! Go Go GO!" Just visualizing this can be great; it's even better if you also join in and start jumping up and down and shaking what your mama gave you along with your imaginary pom-poms. "We're injured! We're hurt! We're wounded!" "We suck! THEY SUCK! We suck so much! They suck worse!" "nah-NAH-nah-HEY-hey-HEY life SUCKS!" "YEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!"
The more you do this, the more you associate feeling bad / wrong/resentful with hilarious, sexy quirky silliness, which—wait for it—is its true nature. After practicing The Cheerleaders for a good while, you'll eventually feel the twitches of a guilt trip or a blame session coming on and you'll automatically find it funny. By the way, this is a very deep and super-serious mystical teaching.
Tonglen Meditation Notice the pain that you're feeling. It could be a specific pain somewhere in your body, or it could be an emotional pain that comes from judging your body as "not good enough" in some way. Take a moment to imagine all the millions of people in the world who are currently feeling exactly the same way that you are right now. There are millions of people with fibromyalgia, millions with acid reflux, or with an ache in their shoulders. Millions who feel shame and guilt about the shape and size of their bodies. Bring these people who share your particular affliction to mind. Decide that you're heroically willing to experience all the pain and suffering of these others. Decide that you're infinitely, courageously willing to experience the total sensation, without an ounce of reservation or holding back. Inhale slowly. Imagine that as you breathe in, you're breathing in a thick, cold, heavy smoke filled with all the pain of "this ache" or "this shame" that's experienced by millions of people around the world and down your block who are suffering with the same suffering that you have. You're breathing in the pain and experiencing it fully on their behalf, so they don't have to. You are dropping all your resistance, all your resentment, all your refusal of this pain and instead you are opening your heart fully to it. Hold your breath for a few moments. Imagine as you hold your breath that the cold, acrid smoke dissolves a brittle shell around your heart. Now, with its brittle shell dissolved by the pain of others, your heart is tender and exposed and shining a gold light. Imagine that the gold light transforms and purifies the cold black smoke of pain that you've just breathed in. Exhale slowly. As you exhale, imagine a warm golden healing light pouring out from your heart, riding your breath, and touching all the other people in the world who feel the same pain and suffering in their bodies that you do. Breathe normally for a few minutes while you visualize people in your neighborhood and around the world being healed, and warmed and made happy by the golden light emanating from your bare heart. After a few minutes of seeing everyone who shares your affliction freed of it, again take in a deep breath of thick cold black smoke, full of the pain that you feel and that others feel.
For a single session of Tonglen, aim to do ten taking-and-sending breaths, giving yourself ample time between taking-and-sending breaths to breathe normally while you visualize the healing of others.
When pain and suffering are thought of as universal, and not personal, they can no longer prove that you are uniquely deserving of them. In other words, you come to realize that you're not and you never have been uniquely terrible or wonderful. Instead, you're a "a garden variety human" just like "a garden variety cabbage."
Updated: Mar 07, 2023
It is a truth universally acknowledged that most of us suck at love, at least a little bit.
What is less universally acknowledged is that our partners (or lack of partners) are always exactly as we unconsciously wish them to be. You knew I was going to say that, didn't you?
Demartini's Breakthrough Experience process is very thorough. You take an influential person in your life (say, your mom or your husband) and make lists of every quality you enjoy and don't enjoy about them, then make a list of at least a handful of other people who would say that you have the exact same quality to the exact same degree. Then, you write about how the other person having the not-enjoyed qualities has actually benefitted you, and about how you having the same not-enjoyed qualities have benefitted others, then write about how the other person's enjoyed qualities have actually harmed you, and how your having the enjoyed qualities has harmed others. Whew. After doing work like that, it's miraculously impossible to maintain self-righteousness. In doing this kind of examination of how the other people in our lives reflect qualities in our own selves, we thereby take the unconscious creative power of our perception and belief, and begin to make it conscious.
Likewise, as long as you believe that only the deprivation of rich fulfillment that you perceive in your love life is real, you will continue to perceive only deprivation. You will experience your partner as "lacking" in some way. Or, you'll perceive yourself as "lacking" a partner altogether. But the minute the hungry ghost gains enough awareness to see that in truth, a mechanism of ever-present, seamless, circular, self-confirming fulfillment is at work, then he perceives that fulfillment is actually much more real than deprivation.
Updated: Mar 11, 2023
Here's a common example among spiritual, growth-oriented types: let's say you're always about a half an hour late to everything you commit to. Now obviously, this has negative effects for you—it's embarrassing; you might risk losing jobs or relationships due to this habit. But when you go to EK it, you start to notice that what lies underneath your compulsion to be late all the time is a shadowy desire to make other people wait, to put your needs ahead of theirs, to make yourself important.
Here's a common example among spiritual, growth-oriented types: let's say you're always about a half an hour late to everything you commit to. Now obviously, this has negative effects for you—it's embarrassing; you might risk losing jobs or relationships due to this habit. But when you go to EK it, you start to notice that what lies underneath your compulsion to be late all the time is a shadowy desire to make other people wait, to put your needs ahead of theirs, to make yourself important.
When you "get off" on patterns that unpleasantly impact others, you are allowing yourself to fully feel, with genuine shamelessness, the sensations and the underlying human desires of a situation. The desire to make others wait is a desire for power. Similarly (to mention some other common patterns you may have), the desire to pick fights with your partner to get attention, the desire to troll people on social media, the desire to bad-mouth colleagues as a way of gaining leverage at work, are all sideways manifestations of a desire for power. This desire for power, this desire to have an impact on the world around you and to be significant, is an immensely normal, lovely, garden-variety human desire. The fact that you have it doesn't make you uniquely evil; it makes you just like the rest of us. Folks who don't humble themselves enough to accept that their lust for power is both completely wonderful and utterly, unremarkably ordinary tend to either hide and suppress it into "nice" personas thoroughly laced with passive-aggressive behavior (like always being late) or, to mix this basic drive with grandiose resentment and to give it extraneous justifications like, "I must rise to power so I can eliminate all the evil-doers! I will implement THE FINAL SOLUTION!"
When you "get off" on patterns that unpleasantly impact others, you are allowing yourself to fully feel, with genuine shamelessness, the sensations and the underlying human desires of a situation. The desire to make others wait is a desire for power. Similarly (to mention some other common patterns you may have), the desire to pick fights with your partner to get attention, the desire to troll people on social media, the desire to bad-mouth colleagues as a way of gaining leverage at work, are all sideways manifestations of a desire for power. This desire for power, this desire to have an impact on the world around you and to be significant, is an immensely normal, lovely, garden-variety human desire. The fact that you have it doesn't make you uniquely evil; it makes you just like the rest of us. Folks who don't humble themselves enough to accept that their lust for power is both completely wonderful and utterly, unremarkably ordinary tend to either hide and suppress it into "nice" personas thoroughly laced with passive-aggressive behavior (like always being late) or, to mix this basic drive with grandiose resentment and to give it extraneous justifications like, "I must rise to power so I can eliminate all the evil-doers! I will implement THE FINAL SOLUTION!"
All nonhumble reactions to the human, all-too-human thirst for power have the effect of warping that natural, beautiful drive into numbness that steamrolls over other people instead of inspiring and uplifting them like genuine, epic power can. If you boldly claim and revel in your previously suppressed desire for power, allowing yourself to savor the intense secret pleasure of all the times you've "accidentally" inconvenienced or upset others, you will find this doesn't morph you into a murderous fascist. Instead it gives you the opportunity to compassionately feel your connection to all us other "awful" humans out there who have the exact same desire for power, and it liberates your awareness and energy so that you can start finding energizing, gorgeous ways to make your power felt in the world rather than acting it out in sideways, resentful, passive-aggressive fashions.
All nonhumble reactions to the human, all-too-human thirst for power have the effect of warping that natural, beautiful drive into numbness that steamrolls over other people instead of inspiring and uplifting them like genuine, epic power can. If you boldly claim and revel in your previously suppressed desire for power, allowing yourself to savor the intense secret pleasure of all the times you've "accidentally" inconvenienced or upset others, you will find this doesn't morph you into a murderous fascist. Instead it gives you the opportunity to compassionately feel your connection to all us other "awful" humans out there who have the exact same desire for power, and it liberates your awareness and energy so that you can start finding energizing, gorgeous ways to make your power felt in the world rather than acting it out in sideways, resentful, passive-aggressive fashions.
One of the amazing insights that Tani Thole and Leslie Rogers of the Light/Dark Institute passed onto me is that sadism isn't necessarily the desire to inflict pain; it's the desire to inflict sensation, to make oneself felt.
One of the amazing insights that Tani Thole and Leslie Rogers of the Light/Dark Institute passed onto me is that sadism isn't necessarily the desire to inflict pain; it's the desire to inflict sensation, to make oneself felt.
So if you're working on dissolving a passive-aggressive pattern that negatively impacts you and others, I encourage you to consider all the ways that you hold yourself back from giving others the exact sensations that it would truly please you to give them. For example, maybe you're late all the time (thus inflicting sensations of frustration on others) and this is a compensation because you never let yourself inflict the kind of sensations on others that would be actually fun and inspiring to you to inflict—like your sexiness or your gut-busting zany humor.
So if you're working on dissolving a passive-aggressive pattern that negatively impacts you and others, I encourage you to consider all the ways that you hold yourself back from giving others the exact sensations that it would truly please you to give them. For example, maybe you're late all the time (thus inflicting sensations of frustration on others) and this is a compensation because you never let yourself inflict the kind of sensations on others that would be actually fun and inspiring to you to inflict—like your sexiness or your gut-busting zany humor.
Make it into a fine art. Consider the idea that all the best artists and the most inspiring leaders are masters of torture. They torture us by getting us to feel deep emotions, by exposing taboos, by leading us through almost-unbearable sensations of anticipation, surprise, and revelation. Your problem is not that you torture others; it's that you don't torture them exquisitely enough. So stop shaming yourself for torturing us, get off on all the sensation you've already inflicted, and learn to torture us in much better, more beautiful and consenting ways.
Make it into a fine art. Consider the idea that all the best artists and the most inspiring leaders are masters of torture. They torture us by getting us to feel deep emotions, by exposing taboos, by leading us through almost-unbearable sensations of anticipation, surprise, and revelation. Your problem is not that you torture others; it's that you don't torture them exquisitely enough. So stop shaming yourself for torturing us, get off on all the sensation you've already inflicted, and learn to torture us in much better, more beautiful and consenting ways.
What if your brain is tuned to cynicism and dread? Maybe you've just had a lot of hard-knocks in your life and it's tough to trust that everything will suddenly get all rosy for no reason? Well, there's a way to leverage that. Faith in an outcome is just a sensation of certainty. So you can take the very same well-developed brain muscles that you use to get a sensation of certainty about the negative stuff you dread, and turn that around into certainty about positive outcomes. Here's how: dread the wonderful.
What if your brain is tuned to cynicism and dread? Maybe you've just had a lot of hard-knocks in your life and it's tough to trust that everything will suddenly get all rosy for no reason? Well, there's a way to leverage that. Faith in an outcome is just a sensation of certainty. So you can take the very same well-developed brain muscles that you use to get a sensation of certainty about the negative stuff you dread, and turn that around into certainty about positive outcomes. Here's how: dread the wonderful.
Here's how it works. Try leveraging your dread by saying this to yourself: "Oh no, if only there was something I could do to stop the inevitable arrival of this magnificent new partner in my life. This is so awful. Now I have someone sane and healthy and hot who adores me. It's utterly disgusting. I'm really grieving that my singlehood is coming to this tragic and decisive end. It's just that I'm powerless over this new romance thing; I just know it's unavoidably going to happen—ugh. I really wish it was somehow possible for me to escape this relentless, terrifying fate of being completely fulfilled in love." Ahhhhh, can you feel the honesty there? Refreshing, isn't it? Because there is some shadowy part of you that's disgusted and miserable at the idea of fresh new love, isn't there? Otherwise you'd be such a radiant beacon of romance that you'd get swept off the scene in a hot minute.
Here's how it works. Try leveraging your dread by saying this to yourself: "Oh no, if only there was something I could do to stop the inevitable arrival of this magnificent new partner in my life. This is so awful. Now I have someone sane and healthy and hot who adores me. It's utterly disgusting. I'm really grieving that my singlehood is coming to this tragic and decisive end. It's just that I'm powerless over this new romance thing; I just know it's unavoidably going to happen—ugh. I really wish it was somehow possible for me to escape this relentless, terrifying fate of being completely fulfilled in love." Ahhhhh, can you feel the honesty there? Refreshing, isn't it? Because there is some shadowy part of you that's disgusted and miserable at the idea of fresh new love, isn't there? Otherwise you'd be such a radiant beacon of romance that you'd get swept off the scene in a hot minute.
In an argument where I don't even remember the subject (it wasn't remotely important in the end), I again found myself giving in, letting go of my desire, and letting my partner get what they wanted at the expense of my own plans. Instead of feeling disgusted with myself or berating myself for being weak, I relaxed into the feeling and gave myself permission to enjoy it. And enjoy it I did. The thought "I love being a martyr to other people's decisions" brought an amazing rush of physical pleasure and mental clarity. On a physical, emotional, and intellectual level, I enjoy being bound by other people's beliefs and desires. It makes me feel self-righteous, and I take a huge amount of pleasure in making them feel guilty over how they've made me a victim. I really, really don't hate to say, "I told you so." Standing up for myself robs me of the opportunity to experience the bliss of martyrdom. (See, therapists? It's not self-esteem.)
In an argument where I don't even remember the subject (it wasn't remotely important in the end), I again found myself giving in, letting go of my desire, and letting my partner get what they wanted at the expense of my own plans. Instead of feeling disgusted with myself or berating myself for being weak, I relaxed into the feeling and gave myself permission to enjoy it. And enjoy it I did. The thought "I love being a martyr to other people's decisions" brought an amazing rush of physical pleasure and mental clarity. On a physical, emotional, and intellectual level, I enjoy being bound by other people's beliefs and desires. It makes me feel self-righteous, and I take a huge amount of pleasure in making them feel guilty over how they've made me a victim. I really, really don't hate to say, "I told you so." Standing up for myself robs me of the opportunity to experience the bliss of martyrdom. (See, therapists? It's not self-esteem.)
Updated: Mar 12, 2023
So if we humans love dark pain and horror as entertainment soooo much, don't you think it's just a little bit possible that we might unconsciously create painful and horrible situations in our own lives—not because we "deserve them" or because we're "losers" and "failures," but just because we have an attraction to the nail-biting intensity of it? If there was a TV show about healthy people who were totally happy, thriving in all of their work and relationships, with no problems or challenges, absolutely no one would watch it.
So if we humans love dark pain and horror as entertainment soooo much, don't you think it's just a little bit possible that we might unconsciously create painful and horrible situations in our own lives—not because we "deserve them" or because we're "losers" and "failures," but just because we have an attraction to the nail-biting intensity of it? If there was a TV show about healthy people who were totally happy, thriving in all of their work and relationships, with no problems or challenges, absolutely no one would watch it.
If you're a habitually miserable, self-pitying person, odds are very, very high that you will find yourself with more and more things to be miserable and self-pitying about; and if you're a grateful, enthusiastic person, the odds are also quite high that you'll find yourself with more and more things to be grateful and enthusiastic about.
If you're a habitually miserable, self-pitying person, odds are very, very high that you will find yourself with more and more things to be miserable and self-pitying about; and if you're a grateful, enthusiastic person, the odds are also quite high that you'll find yourself with more and more things to be grateful and enthusiastic about.
Hell yeah, I generated this! Hell yeah, a part of me fucking loves it and that part of me deserves to enjoy itself too, because every part of me is worthy and awesome, including the perverse shadowy parts!
Hell yeah, I generated this! Hell yeah, a part of me fucking loves it and that part of me deserves to enjoy itself too, because every part of me is worthy and awesome, including the perverse shadowy parts!
Q. I don't feel anything at all when I try to do Existential Kink. What's going on? A. You might need to relax more before attempting the Existential Kink practice. Try taking a hot bath and taking some deep belly breaths to help you become more present in your body; then try the Existential Kink meditation again.
Q. I don't feel anything at all when I try to do Existential Kink. What's going on? A. You might need to relax more before attempting the Existential Kink practice. Try taking a hot bath and taking some deep belly breaths to help you become more present in your body; then try the Existential Kink meditation again.
When I've been depressed, The Work of Byron Katie inquiry practice has helped me immensely. We humans tend to make ourselves depressed by believing bleak narratives about ourselves and other people. When you question these, often the heavy feelings tend to lift. So, definitely do that. See the Appendix for more information on The Work.
When I've been depressed, The Work of Byron Katie inquiry practice has helped me immensely. We humans tend to make ourselves depressed by believing bleak narratives about ourselves and other people. When you question these, often the heavy feelings tend to lift. So, definitely do that. See the Appendix for more information on The Work.
I also (speaking as a human being and not as any kind of psychologist or medical professional, since I'm not those) recommend practicing Brahmavihara meditation as an antidote to depression. The book Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection does an excellent job of explaining how to do the Metta sort of Brahmavihara meditation, which involves sending powerful well-wishes to others.
I also (speaking as a human being and not as any kind of psychologist or medical professional, since I'm not those) recommend practicing Brahmavihara meditation as an antidote to depression. The book Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection does an excellent job of explaining how to do the Metta sort of Brahmavihara meditation, which involves sending powerful well-wishes to others.
Q. I can definitely feel some strong electric sensations when I do EK, but so far nothing close to climaxing. Am I doing this right? A. Yes, you are totally doing it right. When I talk about "getting off" in EK, I mean experiencing pretty much any kind of pleasure surrounding a topic that previously only brought frustration. This could be a sexual climax experienced genitally; or it could be sensations of electricity moving in the body; or it could be an emotion of simple relief or of joy and laughter.
Q. I can definitely feel some strong electric sensations when I do EK, but so far nothing close to climaxing. Am I doing this right? A. Yes, you are totally doing it right. When I talk about "getting off" in EK, I mean experiencing pretty much any kind of pleasure surrounding a topic that previously only brought frustration. This could be a sexual climax experienced genitally; or it could be sensations of electricity moving in the body; or it could be an emotion of simple relief or of joy and laughter.
Also, keep in mind: depending on the issue, it may take you a few hours, days, weeks, or even months of practice before you're able to relax fully enough to give yourself permission to "get off." Even if it takes you months, remember, that's still a relatively very brief span of time and effort to permanently change a life-long negative pattern. Consider that most human beings only shift their negative patterns after years of therapy or, you know, never.
Also, keep in mind: depending on the issue, it may take you a few hours, days, weeks, or even months of practice before you're able to relax fully enough to give yourself permission to "get off." Even if it takes you months, remember, that's still a relatively very brief span of time and effort to permanently change a life-long negative pattern. Consider that most human beings only shift their negative patterns after years of therapy or, you know, never.
Updated: Mar 13, 2023
The Existential Kink approach to life is absolutely not about denial; it's about fully feeling what's honestly there. So if immense grief and feelings of betrayal are what's there, then go all the way into it, mourn in the most profound ways you can. Wear all black. Make performance art about it. Burn effigies of your betrayers. Whatever you gotta do.
Third, traumas require immense grieving. See the Q&A above about EK and grief. Reminder: I am not a psychologist or a medical professional. That said, as another human being who has suffered trauma, I suggest plenty of regular ole' therapy, exploring bodywork and acupuncture, gathering tons of support from friends, and moving heaven and earth to get thyself to many ayahuasca ceremonies and to legal MDMA therapy sessions if you can find them. Ayahuasca is the most useful, beautiful, and rapid means I know of for addressing deep trauma (it has helped me immensely), and studies have shown that MDMA in a therapeutic context is also quite powerful for resolving trauma.
My friends Pam and Brown at the Avatar Centre in Peru are quite experienced and excellent ceremony leaders, and I very strongly recommend (speaking as a human, not a psychologist or medical professional) seeking their help.
You can find free information on how to do The Work at thework.com. You can also find tons of videos on YouTube of Byron Katie leading people through the process. If The Work interests you, I suggest that you invest in Byron Katie's books, Loving What Is and A Thousand Names for Joy.
Similar to the Work but less well-known, the Option Method also involves investigating one's habitual perceptions. You can find instructions on the Option Method at www.optionmethodnetwork.com.
This form of Inquiry is perhaps the most direct of the bunch, focused on "letting go" of difficult emotions. You can find the basic instructions for the Sedona Method at www.sedona.com. If the Sedona Method interests you, I also recommend buying and reading The Sedona Method book because it contains more detailed context and perspective that makes the practice more helpful. David Hawkins' book Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender also focuses on principles related to the Sedona Method.
My general advice for practicing any form of Inquiry is to approach the practice with a willingness to set aside everything you think you know to be true and to simply investigate with a radically open mind. Gradually, with Inquiry, you might discover that when a statement or proposition is true for you it feels different in your body than a fictional statement. True statements (or your being giving an affirmative answer to a question) tends to feel warm, soft, expansive, resonant, and open in the heart. Untrue statements (or your being giving a negative answer to a question) tend to feel tight, heavy, weakening, and constricting. For example, in doing the Work, if I write down a judgment and ask myself "Is it true?" (the first question of the Work) and find only a tight, heavy, weak, and constricted feeling in my body, that's a clue to me that the judgment is not true, that it's an unhappy fiction.
Miles shook his head. "I’ll allow you know the man better than I do. And yet . . . well, people do get hypnotized by the hard choices. And stop looking for alternatives. The will to be stupid is a very powerful force—
Updated: Mar 15, 2022
Miles shook his head. "I’ll allow you know the man better than I do. And yet . . . well, people do get hypnotized by the hard choices. And stop looking for alternatives. The will to be stupid is a very powerful force—"
"But pain . . . seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?"
It went back too far beyond her, even with her own twinned soul. So she kept her peace, heard another pebble dislodged, another bird cry, farther away, and then listened as Matt Sören finally spoke, very softly, never looking around. "Loren, hear me. I regret nothing: not a breath, not a moment, not the shadow of a moment. This is truth, my friend, and I swear it to be such in the name of the crystal I fashioned long ago, the crystal I threw in the Lake on the night the full moon made me King. There is no weaving the Loom could have held to my name that I can imagine to be richer than the one I have known."
Ivor looked at Dalreidan for a long time without answering. Then: "No Chieftain can reclaim an exile within the Law. But nothing I know in the parchments at Celidon speaks to what the Aven may do in such a case. We are at war, and you have done service already in our cause. You have leave to return. As Aven I say so now." He stopped. Then, in a different voice, Ivor said, "You have leave to return to the Plain and to your tribe, though not under the name you have taken now. Be welcome back under the name you bore before the accident that thrust you forth into the mountains. This is a brighter thread in darkness than I ever thought to see, a promise of return. I cannot say how glad I am to see you here again." He smiled. "Turn now, for there is another here who will be as glad. Sorcha of the third tribe, turn and greet your son!" In front of Dave, Torc went rigid, as Levon let out a whoop of delight. Sorcha turned. He looked at his son, and Dave, still standing behind Torc, saw the old Dalrei’s begrimed face light up with an unlooked-for joy. One moment the tableau held; then Torc stumbled forward with unwonted awkwardness, and he and his father met in an embrace so fierce it seemed as if they meant to squeeze away all the dark years that had lain between. Dave, who had given Torc the push that sent him forward, was smiling through tears. He looked at Levon and then at Ivor. He thought of his own father, so far away—so far away, it seemed, all his life. He looked over and up at Rangat and remembered the hand of fire. "Do you think," Mabon of Rhoden murmured, "that that small expedition we were planning might just as easily be done with seven?" Dave wiped his eyes. He nodded. Then, still unable to speak, he nodded again.
"I should go," he said, wanting to be elsewhere before one of them said something that was wounding, and so spoiled even this goodbye. "I’ll see you this evening, I guess." He turned to the door. "Paul," she said. "Wait." Not Pwyll. Paul. Something stirred like a wind within him. He turned again. She had not moved. Her hands were crossed in front of her chest, as if she were suddenly cold in the midst of summer. "Are you really going to leave me?" Jaelle asked, in a voice so strained he needed a second to be sure of what he’d heard. And then he was sure, and in that instant the world rocked and shifted within him and around him and everything changed. Something burst in his chest like a dam breaking, a dam that had held back need for so long, that had denied the truth of his heart, even to this moment. "Oh, my love," he said. There seemed to be so much light in the room. He took one step, another; then she was within the circle of his arms and the impossible flame of her hair was about them both. He lowered his mouth and found her own turned up to his kiss. And in that moment he was clear at last. It was all clear. He was in the clear and running like his running pulsebeat, the clear hammer of his heart. He was translucent. Not Lord of the Summer Tree then, but only a mortal man, long denied, long denying himself, touching and touched by love. She was fire and water to his hands, she was everything he had ever desired. Her fingers were behind his head, laced through his hair, drawing him down to her lips, and she whispered his name over and over and over while she wept. And so they came together then, at the last, the children of the Goddess and the God.
Leadership is mostly a power over imagination, and never more so than in combat. The bravest man alone can only be an armed lunatic. The real strength lies in the ability to get others to do your work.
A Caligula, or a Yuri Vorbarra, can rule a long time, while the best men hesitate to do what is necessary to stop him, and the worst ones take advantage.
"So what does the man have, anyway?" "I don’t know. The virtues of his vices, perhaps. Courage. Strength. Energy. He could run me into the ground any day. He has power over people. Not leadership, exactly, although there’s that too. They either worship him or hate his guts. The strangest man I ever met did both at the same time. But nobody falls asleep when he’s around." "And which category do you fall in, Cordelia?" asked her mother, bemused. "Well, I don’t hate him. Can’t say as I worship him, either." She paused a long time, and looked up to meet her mother’s eyes square on. "But when he’s cut, I bleed."
Now, if I went on acknowledging everyone who made this book possible, it would seem that I only did a tiny fraction of the total work. This hews a little too close to the truth for my comfort, so I’m going to cut these acknowledgments short. But if you don’t see your name here, I’d like to thank you twice: once for your contribution, and again for your anonymity, through which you preserve the illusion that novel writing is a solitary affair.
She had no memory of her escape from the stricken ship, but she must have gotten out somehow. If she were still inside, she would be on fire, and she was reasonably convinced that this was not the case.
"Well, I expect you’ll manage," the general said. "The ship’s Mistral. It’s a new design." Josette’s enthusiasm was momentarily checked, for the general had said the two words every airman dreaded: "new design." Army flight engineers were forever searching for new and more efficient ways to get airmen killed. When they’d collected enough of them, they put them together in a devious package called a "new design." But she took heart. At least he hadn’t said "revolutionary new design." After a sip of tea, the general went on. "My advisors tell me that it’s quite revolutionary."
"I … I’m sorry," Bernat said. "For what?" She gave him an approving nod. "You did well, Bernie. As Captain Emery said, you gave us a chance." A wave of relief seemed to pass through him. "So, you’re not going to throw me overboard?" "Oh, I’m certainly going to throw you overboard," she said, "but on your way down, I want you to know that you have my admiration." He smiled, put his hand over his heart, and said, "I will hit the ground a contented man."
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Updated: Feb 08, 2022
But no such happy marriage could now teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was.
Lan hesitated, then spoke in a loud voice. "Why do we mourn?" The soldiers nearby turned toward him. "Is this not what we have trained for?" Lan shouted. "Is this not our purpose, our very lives? This war is not a thing to mourn. Other men may have been lax, but we have not been. We are prepared, and so this is a time of glory. "Let there be laughter! Let there be joy! Let us cheer the fallen and drink to our forefathers, who taught us well. If you die on the morrow, awaiting your rebirth, be proud. The Last Battle is upon us, and we are ready!"
Updated: Dec 03, 2021
Loial, son of Arent son of Halan, had secretly always wanted to be hasty.
Updated: Dec 03, 2021
Tam went up to the bier, beside Thom and Moiraine, who were holding hands, faces solemn. Moiraine reached over and gently squeezed Tam’s arm. Tam looked at the corpse, gazing down into his son’s face by the fire’s light. He did not wipe the tears from his eyes. You did well. My boy … you did so well. He lit the pyre with a reverent hand.
Updated: Dec 04, 2021
He came like the wind, like the wind touched everything, and like the wind was gone. —from The Dragon Reborn. By Loial, son of Arent son of Halan, the Fourth Age.
Before long, they were making dust along the road. Thom stepped up beside Mat, watching the riders. "Sweetbuns?" "Tradition among us Two Rivers folk." "Never heard of that tradition." "It’s very obscure." "Ah, I see. And what did you do to those buns?" "Sprinklewort," Mat said. "It’ll turn her mouth blue for a week, maybe two. And she won’t share the sweetbuns with anyone, except maybe her Warders. Joline is addicted to the things. She must have eaten seven or eight bags’ worth since we got to Caemlyn." "Nice," Thom said, knuckling his mustache. "Childish, though." "I’m trying to get back to my basic roots," Mat said. "You know, recapture some of my lost youth." "You’re barely twenty winters old!" "Sure, but I did a lot of living when I was younger. Come on. Mistress Anan is staying, and that gives me an idea."
Honor didn’t come from being punished, but accepting a punishment and bearing it restored honor. That was the soul of toh—the willing lowering of oneself in order to recover that which had been lost.
She tried to draw the pain inside her, to drink it in like breath. Pain was as much a part of life as breathing. That was how the Aiel saw life.
He had always been called a gambler, though he was not. The trick was in knowing what risks you could take. And sometimes, in knowing which ones you had to take.
Updated: Nov 20, 2021
A useful maxim: two rarities combined call for close attention."
"Matherin has always maintained faith with Trakand," Elayne told him, "and I put my trust that it always will. I value Lord Aedmun’s loyalty, Master Ros, and yours." She did not insult Matherin, and him, by promising to remember or offering rewards, yet Master Ros’ broad smile said she had already given him as much reward as he desired. Matherin would receive rewards, if they were earned, but they could not be held out as if offering to buy a horse.
He smiled and made his goodbyes before there could be any thought of kicking him out. Strategy. Think to the future. Do the unexpected. The next night, he brought a small red paper flower made by one of the show’s seamstresses. And presented it to a startled Selucia. Setalle’s eyebrows rose, and even Tuon seemed taken aback. Tactics. Put your opponent off balance. Come to think, women and battles were not that different.
"You can never know everything," Lan said quietly, "and part of what you know is always wrong. Perhaps even the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing that. A portion of courage lies in going on anyway."
She could still hear Siuan going on about what she called the Law of Unintended Consequences, stronger than any written law. Whether or not what you do has the effect you want, it will have three at least you never expected, and one of those usually unpleasant.
"Will I?" Perrin almost laughed. "I will that. We will be into the Ways in a few hours." "The Ways?" Gaul’s expression did not change, but he blinked. "Does that make a difference?" "Death comes for all men, Perrin." It was hardly a comforting answer.
That was part of a saying he had picked up in the Borderlands. "Death is lighter than a feather, duty heavier than a mountain."
"That mountain can grow awfully heavy sometimes," he sighed, taking a spear and buckler from Rhuarc. "When do you find a chance to put it down awhile?" "When you die," Lan said simply.
"Well, the sword that could not be broken was shattered in the end, sheepherder, but it fought the Shadow to the last. There is one rule, above all others, for being a man. Whatever comes, face it on your feet. Now, are you ready? The Amyrlin Seat waits."
Updated: Oct 30, 2021
"No." His voice was cool, but he took up the firetool again and gave the blaze a fierce poking it did not need. Sparks cascaded up the chimney. "I chose freely, knowing what it entailed." The iron rod clattered back onto its hook, and he made a formal bow. "Honor to serve, Moiraine Aes Sedai. It has been and will be so, always." Moiraine sniffed. "Your humility, Lan Gaidin, has always been more arrogance than most kings could manage with their armies at their backs. From the first day I met you, it has been so."
"A king of sheep!" Mat hooted. He was smaller than the others, always bouncing on his toes. One glance at his face, and you knew he was looking for mischief. He always looked for mischief. And usually found it. "Rand al’Thor, King of the Sheep." Lem snickered. Ban punched him on the shoulder, and Lem punched Ban back, and then they both snickered. Egwene shook her head.
But the Light had a leader who would never give up, a man called Lews Therin Telamon. The Dragon.
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
Updated: Oct 28, 2021
With himself and his stallion, Mandarb—he said it meant "Blade" in the Old Tongue—he was not so sparing. The Warder covered twice as much ground as they did, galloping ahead, his color-shifting cloak swirling in the wind, to scout what lay before them, or dropping behind to examine their backtrail.
Updated: Oct 28, 2021
"Yes, that’s the way of your kind, isn’t it?" The Ogier’s voice changed, as if he were quoting something. "Till shade is gone, till water is gone, into the Shadow with teeth bared, screaming defiance with the last breath, to spit in Sightblinder’s eye on the Last Day." Loial cocked his shaggy head expectantly, but Rand had no idea what it was he expected.
"The rose petal floats on water," Lan recited softly. "The kingfisher flashes above the pond. Life and beauty swirl in the midst of death." "Yes," Agelmar said. "Yes. That one has always symbolized the whole of it to me, too." The two men bowed their heads to one another.
Updated: May 23, 2022
This far below Emond’s Field, halfway to the Waterwood, trees lined the banks of the Winespring Water.
Mum spent a lot of time in my formative years gently reminding me that people don’t think about us nearly as much as we think they do, because they’re all busy worrying what people are thinking about them. I thought that I’d listened to her, but it turned out I hadn’t. Privately I’d believed, on some deep level, that everyone was in fact thinking about me all the time, evaluating me, et cetera, when really they hadn’t been giving me much of a thought at all.
There was no better way to seem trustworthy than to be liked by a dog, and there was no better way to convince a dog to like you than bribery.
The keel-mounted rail gun pushed the whole ship backward in a solid mathematical relationship to the mass of the two-kilo tungsten round moving at a measurable fraction of c. Newton’s third law expressed as violence.
She wanted to win, to protect her tribe and wipe the enemy into a paste of blood and dismay. But failing that, she wanted to die trying. A snippet of something she’d once read popped in her head: Facing fearful odds protecting the bones of her fathers and the temples of her gods.
The display between them glowed blue and gold. Holden looked tired, but Amos had seen him looking worse one time and another. Holden was the kind of guy who smoked himself down to the filter if he thought it was the right thing to do.
She’d learned more about how to be with traumatized people in the last year than she’d ever hoped to know, and much of what she came to understand was that humans were domestic animals like dogs and cats. They responded poorly to threats and well to a gentle building of trust.
It was astounding, Bobbie thought, how quickly humanity could go from What unimaginable intelligence fashioned these soul-wrenching wonders? to Well, since they’re not here, can I have their stuff?
"That. We’re not doing that." "Sir?" Reeve said. "The thing where we start sniping at each other. We don’t do that here." Wei and Reeve looked at each other. "I’m sorry, sir," Wei said. "I was out of line." "Not a problem, because it’s not going to happen again," Murtry said. "What action have we seen from the Barbapiccola?"
"Uh, Captain?" the huge baby-man said. "Amos?" "There’s another mess of legal crap just came through from the UN for you." Holden sighed. "Am I supposed to read it?" "Don’t see how they can make you," Amos said. "Just thought you’d want to ignore it intentionally."
Alex leaned forward, grabbing Basia’s hands in his own. "It’s still on you. I will never live down not being the person my wife needed after she spent twenty years waitin’ for me. I can never make that right. Don’t go feelin’ sorry for yourself. You fucked up. You failed the people you love. They’re payin’ the price for it right now and you demean them every second you don’t own that shit."
"Good. This is Detective Miller. He died when Eros hit Venus and now he’s a puppet of the protomolecule." "Semi-autonomous," the alien said. "Pleased to meet you." "Likewise."
Bull, Fred had said. Just that, at first. He could still remember Fred’s dark eyes meeting his. The shame had made Bull try to stand straighter, to suck in his gut a little. In that moment, he saw how far he’d fallen. Two seconds of seeing himself through Fred Johnson’s eyes was all it took for that.
He hadn’t had a drink since, even on the nights he’d wanted one more than oxygen.
I DECIDED that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life. I hadn’t really cared much about him before then one way or another, but I had limits. It would’ve been all right if he’d saved my life some really extraordinary number of times, ten or thirteen or so—thirteen is a number with distinction. Orion Lake, my personal bodyguard; I could have lived with that. But we’d been in the Scholomance almost three years by then, and he hadn’t shown any previous inclination to single me out for special treatment.
He had a deep voice, and even; well-tempered, I would say, which meant he knew how to use it, and he had that good leader’s trick of making every man feel singled out for welcome.
Updated: May 23, 2022
ONCE UPON a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.
"I saw your hat," Crispin said, not looking up. "I only came home to burn it, you understand."
But you could use imperfections. You could compensate for them, and even turn them into strengths . . . if you knew them, and where they were.
Perfection, he had just been thinking, was not attainable by men. Imperfections could be turned into strengths. Perhaps.
On a morning in the springtime of the year, when the snows of the mountains were melting and the rivers swift in their running, Aelis de Miraval watched her husband ride out at dawn to hunt in the forest west of their castle, and shortly after that she took horse herself, travelling north and east along the shores of the lake towards the begetting of her son.
It was just past midday, not long before the third summons to prayer, that Ammar ibn Khairan passed through the Gate of the Bells and entered the palace of Al-Fontina in Silvenes to kill the last of the khalifs of Al-Rassan.
Always remember that they come from the desert.
A different life, if she hadn’t gone. Less wind, less rain. Perhaps none of the visions offered those who stand in the high, windy places of the world.
"Doesn’t it cause you some concern," Gonzalez de Rada said in a deceptively grave, an almost gentle tone, "to be riding off into infidel lands after speaking so rashly to the constable of Valledo, leaving your poor wife alone on a ranch with children and ranch hands?" "In a word," said the Captain, "no. For one thing, you value your own life too much to make a real enemy of me. I will not be subtle about this: if any man I can trace to your authority is found within half a day’s ride of my ranch I will know how to proceed and I will. I hope you understand me. I am speaking about killing you. For another thing, I may have my own thoughts about our king’s ascension, but I believe him to be a fair man. What, think you, will Ramiro do when a messenger reports to him the precise words of this conversation?"
Rodrigo Belmonte nodded. "Whistled, sung, spat on a wheel. Anything to let us know you were there. Why didn’t you?" There was no good, clever answer so he offered the truth: "I was afraid. I still couldn’t believe you were bringing me on this ride. I didn’t want to be noticed." The Captain nodded again. He gazed past Alvar at the rolling hills and the dense pine forest to the west. Then the clear grey eyes shifted and Alvar found himself pinned by a vivid gaze. "All right. First lesson. I do not choose men for my company, even for a short journey, by mistake. If you were named to be with us it was for a reason. I have little patience with that kind of thing in a fighting man. Understood?" Alvar jerked his head up and down. He took a breath and let it out. Before he could speak, the Captain went on. "Second lesson. Tell me, why do you think I called you out from behind the wagon? I made an enemy for you—the second most powerful man in Valledo. That wasn’t a generous thing for me to do. Why did I do it?" Alvar looked away from the Captain and rode for a time thinking hard. He didn’t know it, but his face bore an expression that used to induce apprehension in his family. His thoughts sometimes took him to unexpected, dangerous places. This, as it happened, was such a time. He glanced over at Ser Rodrigo and then away again, uncharacteristically cautious. "Say it!" the Captain snapped. Alvar suddenly wished he were back on the farm, planting grain with his father and the farm hands, waiting for one of his sisters to walk out with beer and cheese and bread, and gossip from the house. He swallowed. He might be back there, soon enough. But it had never been said that Pellino de Damon’s son was a coward or, for that matter, overly shy with his thoughts. "You weren’t thinking about me," he said as firmly as he could manage. There was no point saying this if he sounded like a quavering child. "You pulled me out to be a body between Count Gonzalez and your family. I may be nothing in myself, but my father was known, and the constable now realizes that I’m a witness to what happened this morning. I’m protection for your wife and sons." He closed his eyes. When he opened them it was to see Rodrigo Belmonte grinning at him. Miraculously, the Captain didn’t seem angry. "As I said, there was a reason you were chosen to be tested on this ride. I don’t mind a clever man, Alvar. Within limits, mind you. You may even be right. I may have been entirely selfish. When it comes to threats against my family, I can be. I did make a possible enemy for you. I even put your life at some risk. Not a very honorable thing for a leader to do to one of his company, is it?" This was another test, and Alvar was aware of it. His father had told him, more than once, that he would do better if he thought a little less and spoke a great deal less. But this was Ser Rodrigo Belmonte himself, the Captain, asking questions that demanded thought. He could dodge it, Alvar supposed. Perhaps…
The Captain hadn’t seemed to see it that way, though. Ser Rodrigo had made a point of dismounting to speak to each of the farmers they saw. Alvar had been close enough to overhear him once: the talk was of crop rotation and the pattern of rainfall here in the tagra lands. "We aren’t the real warriors of Valledo," he’d said to his company upon mounting up again after one such conversation. "These people are. It will be a mistake for any man who rides with me to forget that."
There are moments in some lives when it can truly be said that everything pivots and changes, when the branching paths show clearly, when one does make a choice.
She could almost hear her father’s words, as well. "An obvious failure to think clearly enough," Ishak would have murmured. "Start at the beginning, Jehane. Take all the time you need."
"Hah!" Jehane said. The most sophisticated rejoinder she could manage for the moment. He smiled again. This time it was an expression she remembered from the morning. "I am duly refuted, I suppose. Shall I fall out of the window now?"
"You did leave in rather a hurry from ibn Musa’s," ibn Khairan said mildly, "and so did Velaz and Husari. I thought you might want the flask, and perhaps make better use of it than the Muwardis when they arrived." Jehane swallowed and bit her lip. If they had found this . . . She stepped forward and took the flask from his hand. Their fingers touched. "Thank you," she said. And remained motionless, astonished, as he leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. The scent of his perfume briefly surrounded her. One of his hands came up and lightly touched her hair. "Courier’s fee," he said easily, leaning back again. "Ragosa is a good thought. But do mention Valledo to ibn Musa—he may do better with King Ramiro." Jehane felt the rush of color to her face already beginning to recede. What followed, predictably, was something near to anger. Her father and mother, Velaz, Ser Rezzoni—everyone who knew her well—had always warned her about her pride. She took a step forward and, standing on tiptoe, kissed Ammar ibn Khairan in her turn. She could feel his sharply intaken breath of surprise. That was better: he had been much, much too casual before. "Doctor’s fee," she said sweetly, stepping back. "We tend to charge more than couriers." "I will fall out of the window," he said, but only after a moment. "Don’t. It’s a long way down. You haven’t said, but it seems fairly obvious you have your own plan of vengeance to pursue in Cartada. Falling from a window would be a poor way to begin." She was gratified to see that he hadn’t been prepared for that either. He paused a second time. "We shall meet again, I dare hope." "That would be interesting," Jehane said calmly, though her heart was beating very fast. He smiled. A moment later she watched him climb down the rough wall to the courtyard. He went through an archway towards the gates without looking back.
It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship, or achieving any other goal, we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about. Meanwhile, improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding.
That said, it doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat. If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses, and see how your daily choices will compound ten or twenty years down the line. Are you spending less than you earn each month? Are you making it into the gym each week? Are you reading books and learning something new each day? Tiny battles like these are the ones that will define your future self. Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.
Positive Compounding Productivity compounds. Accomplishing one extra task is a small feat on any given day, but it counts for a lot over an entire career. The effect of automating an old task or mastering a new skill can be even greater. The more tasks you can handle without thinking, the more your brain is free to focus on other areas. Knowledge compounds. Learning one new idea won’t make you a genius, but a commitment to lifelong learning can be transformative. Furthermore, each book you read not only teaches you something new but also opens up different ways of thinking about old ideas. As Warren Buffett says, “That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.” Relationships compound. People reflect your behavior back to you. The more you help others, the more others want to help you. Being a little bit nicer in each interaction can result in a network of broad and strong connections over time. Negative Compounding Stress compounds. The frustration of a traffic jam. The weight of parenting responsibilities. The worry of making ends meet. The strain of slightly high blood pressure. By themselves, these common causes of stress are manageable. But when they persist for years, little stresses compound into serious health issues. Negative thoughts compound. The more you think of yourself as worthless, stupid, or ugly, the more you condition yourself to interpret life that way. You get trapped in a thought loop. The same is true for how you think about others. Once you fall into the habit of seeing people as angry, unjust, or selfish, you see those kind of people everywhere. Outrage compounds. Riots, protests, and mass movements are rarely the result of a single event. Instead, a long series of microaggressions and daily aggravations slowly multiply until one event tips the scales and outrage spreads like wildfire.
Imagine that you have an ice cube sitting on the table in front of you. The room is cold and you can see your breath. It is currently twenty-five degrees. Ever so slowly, the room begins to heat up. Twenty-six degrees. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. The ice cube is still sitting on the table in front of you. Twenty-nine degrees. Thirty. Thirty-one. Still, nothing has happened. Then, thirty-two degrees. The ice begins to melt. A one-degree shift, seemingly no different from the temperature increases before it, has unlocked a huge change. Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change. This pattern shows up everywhere. Cancer spends 80 percent of its life undetectable, then takes over the body in months. Bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years as it builds extensive root systems underground before exploding ninety feet into the air within six weeks. Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance. In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks, and even months. It doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere. It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed. This is one of the core reasons why it is so hard to build habits that last. People make a few small changes, fail to see a tangible result, and decide to stop. You think, “I’ve been running every day for a month, so why can’t I see any change in my body?” Once this kind of thinking takes over, it’s easy to let good habits fall by the wayside. But in order to make a meaningful difference, habits need to persist long enough to break through this plateau—what I call the Plateau of Latent Potential. If you find yourself struggling to build a good habit or break a bad one, it is not because you have lost your ability to improve. It is often because you have not yet crossed the Plateau of Latent Potential. Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored.
Prevailing wisdom claims that the best way to achieve what we want in life—getting into better shape, building a successful business, relaxing more and worrying less, spending more time with friends and family—is to set specific, actionable goals. For many years, this was how I approached my habits, too. Each one was a goal to be reached. I set goals for the grades I wanted to get in school, for the weights I wanted to lift in the gym, for the profits I wanted to earn in business. I succeeded at a few, but I failed at a lot of them. Eventually, I began to realize that my results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed. What’s the difference between systems and goals? It’s a distinction I first learned from Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the Dilbert comic. Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.
Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That’s the counterintuitive thing about improvement. We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
The implicit assumption behind any goal is this: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone. I’ve slipped into this trap so many times I’ve lost count. For years, happiness was always something for my future self to enjoy. I promised myself that once I gained twenty pounds of muscle or after my business was featured in the New York Times, then I could finally relax. Furthermore, goals create an “either-or” conflict: either you achieve your goal and are successful or you fail and you are a disappointment. You mentally box yourself into a narrow version of happiness. This is misguided. It is unlikely that your actual path through life will match the exact journey you had in mind when you set out. It makes no sense to restrict your satisfaction to one scenario when there are many paths to success. A systems-first mentality provides the antidote. When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running. And a system can be successful in many different forms, not just the one you first envision.
True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity. Anyone can convince themselves to visit the gym or eat healthy once or twice, but if you don’t shift the belief behind the behavior, then it is hard to stick with long-term changes. Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are. The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader. The goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to learn an instrument, the goal is to become a musician.
This is a gradual evolution. We do not change by snapping our fingers and deciding to be someone entirely new. We change bit by bit, day by day, habit by habit. We are continually undergoing microevolutions of the self. Each habit is like a suggestion: “Hey, maybe this is who I am.” If you finish a book, then perhaps you are the type of person who likes reading. If you go to the gym, then perhaps you are the type of person who likes exercise. If you practice playing the guitar, perhaps you are the type of person who likes music. Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.
Putting this all together, you can see that habits are the path to changing your identity. The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do. Each time you write a page, you are a writer. Each time you practice the violin, you are a musician. Each time you start a workout, you are an athlete. Each time you encourage your employees, you are a leader. Each habit not only gets results but also teaches you something far more important: to trust yourself. You start to believe you can actually accomplish these things. When the votes mount up and the evidence begins to change, the story you tell yourself begins to change as well.
How to Create a Good Habit The 1st law (Cue): Make it obvious. The 2nd law (Craving): Make it attractive. The 3rd law (Response): Make it easy. The 4th law (Reward): Make it satisfying.
How to Break a Bad Habit Inversion of the 1st law (Cue): Make it invisible. Inversion of the 2nd law (Craving): Make it unattractive. Inversion of the 3rd law (Response): Make it difficult. Inversion of the 4th law (Reward): Make it unsatisfying.
Whenever you want to change your behavior, you can simply ask yourself: How can I make it obvious? How can I make it attractive? How can I make it easy? How can I make it satisfying?
As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Broadly speaking, the format for creating an implementation intention is: “When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.”
Diderot’s scarlet robe was beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that he immediately noticed how out of place it seemed when surrounded by his more common possessions. He wrote that there was “no more coordination, no more unity, no more beauty” between his elegant robe and the rest of his stuff. Diderot soon felt the urge to upgrade his possessions. He replaced his rug with one from Damascus. He decorated his home with expensive sculptures. He bought a mirror to place above the mantel, and a better kitchen table. He tossed aside his old straw chair for a leather one. Like falling dominoes, one purchase led to the next. Diderot’s behavior is not uncommon. In fact, the tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.
One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking. Habit stacking is a special form of an implementation intention. Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location, you pair it with a current habit. This method, which was created by BJ Fogg as part of his Tiny Habits program, can be used to design an obvious cue for nearly any habit.
I’ve experienced the power of obvious cues in my own life. I used to buy apples from the store, put them in the crisper in the bottom of the refrigerator, and forget all about them. By the time I remembered, the apples would have gone bad. I never saw them, so I never ate them. Eventually, I took my own advice and redesigned my environment. I bought a large display bowl and placed it in the middle of the kitchen counter. The next time I bought apples, that was where they went—out in the open where I could see them. Almost like magic, I began eating a few apples each day simply because they were obvious rather than out of sight. Here are a few ways you can redesign your environment and make the cues for your preferred habits more obvious: If you want to remember to take your medication each night, put your pill bottle directly next to the faucet on the bathroom counter. If you want to practice guitar more frequently, place your guitar stand in the middle of the living room. If you want to remember to send more thank-you notes, keep a stack of stationery on your desk. If you want to drink more water, fill up a few water bottles each morning and place them in common locations around the house.
If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment. The most persistent behaviors usually have multiple cues. Consider how many different ways a smoker could be prompted to pull out a cigarette: driving in the car, seeing a friend smoke, feeling stressed at work, and so on. The same strategy can be employed for good habits. By sprinkling triggers throughout your surroundings, you increase the odds that you’ll think about your habit throughout the day. Make sure the best choice is the most obvious one. Making a better decision is easy and natural when the cues for good habits are right in front of you.
The power of context also reveals an important strategy: habits can be easier to change in a new environment. It helps to escape the subtle triggers and cues that nudge you toward your current habits. Go to a new place—a different coffee shop, a bench in the park, a corner of your room you seldom use—and create a new routine there.
When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations. The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t have to use it very often. So, yes, perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.
Ronan Byrne, an electrical engineering student in Dublin, Ireland, enjoyed watching Netflix, but he also knew that he should exercise more often than he did. Putting his engineering skills to use, Byrne hacked his stationary bike and connected it to his laptop and television. Then he wrote a computer program that would allow Netflix to run only if he was cycling at a certain speed. If he slowed down for too long, whatever show he was watching would pause until he started pedaling again. He was, in the words of one fan, “eliminating obesity one Netflix binge at a time.” He was also employing temptation bundling to make his exercise habit more attractive. Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do. In Byrne’s case, he bundled watching Netflix (the thing he wanted to do) with riding his stationary bike (the thing he needed to do).
It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action. The greater the anticipation, the greater the dopamine spike.
Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
The Polgar sisters grew up in a culture that prioritized chess above all else—praised them for it, rewarded them for it. In their world, an obsession with chess was normal. And as we are about to see, whatever habits are normal in your culture are among the most attractive behaviors you’ll find.
Join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.
Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe. It transforms a personal quest into a shared one. Previously, you were on your own. Your identity was singular. You are a reader. You are a musician. You are an athlete. When you join a book club or a band or a cycling group, your identity becomes linked to those around you. Growth and change is no longer an individual pursuit. We are readers. We are musicians. We are cyclists. The shared identity begins to reinforce your personal identity. This is why remaining part of a group after achieving a goal is crucial to maintaining your habits. It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.
Asch ran this experiment many times and in many different ways. What he discovered was that as the number of actors increased, so did the conformity of the subject. If it was just the subject and one actor, then there was no effect on the person’s choice. They just assumed they were in the room with a dummy. When two actors were in the room with the subject, there was still little impact. But as the number of people increased to three actors and four and all the way to eight, the subject became more likely to second-guess themselves. By the end of the experiment, nearly 75 percent of the subjects had agreed with the group answer even though it was obviously incorrect.
When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.
Reframing your habits to highlight their benefits rather than their drawbacks is a fast and lightweight way to reprogram your mind and make a habit seem more attractive.
The cause of your habits is actually the prediction that precedes them. The prediction leads to a feeling.
Increase the friction associated with bad behaviors. When friction is high, habits are difficult.
Researchers estimate that 40 to 50 percent of our actions on any given day are done out of habit. This is already a substantial percentage, but the true influence of your habits is even greater than these numbers suggest. Habits are automatic choices that influence the conscious decisions that follow. Yes, a habit can be completed in just a few seconds, but it can also shape the actions that you take for minutes or hours afterward.
Even when you know you should start small, it’s easy to start too big. When you dream about making a change, excitement inevitably takes over and you end up trying to do too much too soon. The most effective way I know to counteract this tendency is to use the Two-Minute Rule, which states, “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.” You’ll find that nearly any habit can be scaled down into a two-minute version: “Read before bed each night” becomes “Read one page.” “Do thirty minutes of yoga” becomes “Take out my yoga mat.” “Study for class” becomes “Open my notes.”
The Two-Minute Rule can seem like a trick to some people. You know that the real goal is to do more than just two minutes, so it may feel like you’re trying to fool yourself. Nobody is actually aspiring to read one page or do one push-up or open their notes. And if you know it’s a mental trick, why would you fall for it? If the Two-Minute Rule feels forced, try this: do it for two minutes and then stop. Go for a run, but you must stop after two minutes. Start meditating, but you must stop after two minutes. Study Arabic, but you must stop after two minutes. It’s not a strategy for starting, it’s the whole thing. Your habit can only last one hundred and twenty seconds.
Strategies like this work for another reason, too: they reinforce the identity you want to build. If you show up at the gym five days in a row—even if it’s just for two minutes—you are casting votes for your new identity. You’re not worried about getting in shape. You’re focused on becoming the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. You’re taking the smallest action that confirms the type of person you want to be. We rarely think about change this way because everyone is consumed by the end goal. But one push-up is better than not exercising. One minute of guitar practice is better than none at all. One minute of reading is better than never picking up a book. It’s better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.
Becoming an Early Riser Phase 1: Be home by 10 p.m. every night. Phase 2: Have all devices (TV, phone, etc.) turned off by 10 p.m. every night. Phase 3: Be in bed by 10 p.m. every night (reading a book, talking with your partner). Phase 4: Lights off by 10 p.m. every night. Phase 5: Wake up at 6 a.m. every day.
Becoming Vegan Phase 1: Start eating vegetables at each meal. Phase 2: Stop eating animals with four legs (cow, pig, lamb, etc.). Phase 3: Stop eating animals with two legs (chicken, turkey, etc.). Phase 4: Stop eating animals with no legs (fish, clams, scallops, etc.). Phase 5: Stop eating all animal products (eggs, milk, cheese).
The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1830, Victor Hugo was facing an impossible deadline. Twelve months earlier, the French author had promised his publisher a new book. But instead of writing, he spent that year pursuing other projects, entertaining guests, and delaying his work. Frustrated, Hugo’s publisher responded by setting a deadline less than six months away. The book had to be finished by February 1831. Hugo concocted a strange plan to beat his procrastination. He collected all of his clothes and asked an assistant to lock them away in a large chest. He was left with nothing to wear except a large shawl. Lacking any suitable clothing to go outdoors, he remained in his study and wrote furiously during the fall and winter of 1830. The Hunchback of Notre Dame was published two weeks early on January 14, 1831.* Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard. This is an inversion of the 3rd Law of Behavior Change: make it difficult. If you find yourself continually struggling to follow through on your plans, then you can take a page from Victor Hugo and make your bad habits more difficult by creating what psychologists call a commitment device. A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future. It is a way to lock in future behavior, bind you to good habits, and restrict you from bad ones. When Victor Hugo shut his clothes away so he could focus on writing, he was creating a commitment device.* There are many ways to create a commitment device. You can reduce overeating by purchasing food in individual packages rather than in bulk size. You can voluntarily ask to be added to the banned list at casinos and online poker sites to prevent future gambling sprees. I’ve even heard of athletes who have to “make weight” for a competition choosing to leave their wallets at home during the week before weigh-in so they won’t be tempted to buy fast food.
The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the friction until you don’t even have the option to act.
When you automate as much of your life as possible, you can spend your effort on the tasks machines cannot do yet. Each habit that we hand over to the authority of technology frees up time and energy to pour into the next stage of growth. As mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”
The average person spends over two hours per day on social media. What could you do with an extra six hundred hours per year?) During the year I was writing this book, I experimented with a new time management strategy. Every Monday, my assistant would reset the passwords on all my social media accounts, which logged me out on each device. All week I worked without distraction. On Friday, she would send me the new passwords. I had the entire weekend to enjoy what social media had to offer until Monday morning when she would do it again. (If you don’t have an assistant, team up with a friend or family member and reset each other’s passwords each week.) One of the biggest surprises was how quickly I adapted. Within the first week of locking myself out of social media, I realized that I didn’t need to check it nearly as often as I had been, and I certainly didn’t need it each day. It had simply been so easy that it had become the default. Once my bad habit became impossible, I discovered that I did actually have the motivation to work on more meaningful tasks. After I removed the mental candy from my environment, it became much easier to eat the healthy stuff.
What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided. You learn what to do in the future based on what you were rewarded for doing (or punished for doing) in the past. Positive emotions cultivate habits. Negative emotions destroy them. The first three laws of behavior change—make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it easy—increase the odds that a behavior will be performed this time. The fourth law of behavior change—make it satisfying—increases the odds that a behavior will be repeated next time. It completes the habit loop. But there is a trick. We are not looking for just any type of satisfaction. We are looking for immediate satisfaction.
Imagine you’re an animal roaming the plains of Africa—a giraffe or an elephant or a lion. On any given day, most of your decisions have an immediate impact. You are always thinking about what to eat or where to sleep or how to avoid a predator. You are constantly focused on the present or the very near future. You live in what scientists call an immediate-return environment because your actions instantly deliver clear and immediate outcomes. Now switch back to your human self. In modern society, many of the choices you make today will not benefit you immediately. If you do a good job at work, you’ll get a paycheck in a few weeks. If you exercise today, perhaps you won’t be overweight next year. If you save money now, maybe you’ll have enough for retirement decades from now. You live in what scientists call a delayed-return environment because you can work for years before your actions deliver the intended payoff. The human brain did not evolve for life in a delayed-return environment. The earliest remains of modern humans, known as Homo sapiens sapiens, are approximately two hundred thousand years old. These were the first humans to have a brain relatively similar to ours. In particular, the neocortex—the newest part of the brain and the region responsible for higher functions like language—was roughly the same size two hundred thousand years ago as today. You are walking around with the same hardware as your Paleolithic ancestors. It is only recently—during the last five hundred years or so—that society has shifted to a predominantly delayed-return environment.
Similar to other animals on the African savannah, our ancestors spent their days responding to grave threats, securing the next meal, and taking shelter from a storm. It made sense to place a high value on instant gratification. The distant future was less of a concern. And after thousands of generations in an immediate-return environment, our brains evolved to prefer quick payoffs to long-term ones. Behavioral economists refer to this tendency as time inconsistency. That is, the way your brain evaluates rewards is inconsistent across time.* You value the present more than the future. Usually, this tendency serves us well. A reward that is…
Why would someone smoke if they know it increases the risk of lung cancer? Why would someone overeat when they know it increases their risk of obesity? Why would someone have unsafe sex if they know it can result in sexually transmitted disease? Once you understand how the brain prioritizes rewards, the answers become clear: the consequences of bad habits are delayed while the rewards are immediate. Smoking might kill you in ten years, but it reduces stress and eases your nicotine cravings now. Overeating is harmful in the long run but appetizing in the moment. Sex—safe or not—provides pleasure right away. Disease and infection won’t show up for days or weeks, even years. Every habit produces multiple outcomes across time. Unfortunately, these outcomes are often misaligned. With our bad habits, the immediate outcome usually feels good, but the ultimate outcome feels bad. With good habits, it is the reverse: the immediate outcome is unenjoyable, but the ultimate outcome feels good. The French economist Frédéric Bastiat explained the problem clearly when he wrote, “It almost always happens that when the immediate…
With a fuller understanding of what causes our brain to repeat some behaviors and avoid others, let’s update the Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided. Our preference for instant gratification reveals an important truth about success: because of how we are wired, most people will spend all day chasing quick hits of satisfaction. The road less traveled is the road of delayed gratification. If you’re willing to wait for the rewards, you’ll face less competition and often get a bigger payoff. As the saying goes, the last mile is always the least crowded.
The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.
To get a habit to stick you need to feel immediately successful—even if it’s in a small way.
As Charlie Munger says, “The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily.” This is why the “bad” workouts are often the most important ones. Sluggish days and bad workouts maintain the compound gains you accrued from previous good days. Simply doing something—ten squats, five sprints, a push-up, anything really—is huge. Don’t put up a zero. Don’t let losses eat into your compounding. Furthermore, it’s not always about what happens during the workout. It’s about being the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. It’s easy to train when you feel good, but it’s crucial to show up when you don’t feel like it—even if you do less than you hope. Going to the gym for five minutes may not improve your performance, but it reaffirms your identity.
One of the most satisfying feelings is the feeling of making progress. A habit tracker is a simple way to measure whether you did a habit—like marking an X on a calendar. Habit trackers and other visual forms of measurement can make your habits satisfying by providing clear evidence of your progress. Don’t break the chain. Try to keep your habit streak alive. Never miss twice. If you miss one day, try to get back on track as quickly as possible.
The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, ‘George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.’ He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home. “When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, ‘My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.’” Throughout our discussion of the 4th Law of Behavior Change we have covered the importance of making good habits immediately satisfying. Fisher’s proposal is an inversion of the 4th Law: Make it immediately unsatisfying. Just as we are more likely to repeat an experience when the ending is satisfying, we are also more likely to avoid an experience when the ending is painful. Pain is an effective teacher. If a failure is painful, it gets fixed. If
To make bad habits unsatisfying, your best option is to make them painful in the moment. Creating a habit contract is a straightforward way to do exactly that. Even if you don’t want to create a full-blown habit contract, simply having an accountability partner is useful. The comedian Margaret Cho writes a joke or song every day. She does the “song a day” challenge with a friend, which helps them both stay accountable. Knowing that someone is watching can be a powerful motivator. You are less likely to procrastinate or give up because there is an immediate cost. If you don’t follow through, perhaps they’ll see you as untrustworthy or lazy. Suddenly, you are not only failing to uphold your promises to yourself, but also failing to uphold your promises to others. You can even automate this process. Thomas Frank, an entrepreneur in Boulder, Colorado, wakes up at 5:55 each morning. And if he doesn’t, he has a tweet automatically scheduled that says, “It’s 6:10 and I’m not up because I’m lazy! Reply to this for $5 via PayPal (limit 5), assuming my alarm didn’t malfunction.”
In summary, one of the best ways to ensure your habits remain satisfying over the long-run is to pick behaviors that align with your personality and skills. Work hard on the things that come easy.
Martin’s story offers a fascinating perspective on what it takes to stick with habits for the long run. Comedy is not for the timid. It is hard to imagine a situation that would strike fear into the hearts of more people than performing alone on stage and failing to get a single laugh. And yet Steve Martin faced this fear every week for eighteen years. In his words, “10 years spent learning, 4 years spent refining, and 4 years as a wild success.”
improvement. “What’s the difference between the best athletes and everyone else?” I asked. “What do the really successful people do that most don’t?” He mentioned the factors you might expect: genetics, luck, talent. But then he said something I wasn’t expecting: “At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.”
As Machiavelli noted, “Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.”
I can guarantee that if you manage to start a habit and keep sticking to it, there will be days when you feel like quitting. When you start a business, there will be days when you don’t feel like showing up. When you’re at the gym, there will be sets that you don’t feel like finishing. When it’s time to write, there will be days that you don’t feel like typing. But stepping up when it’s annoying or painful or draining to do so, that’s what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur. Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way. Professionals know what is important to them and work toward it with purpose; amateurs get pulled off course by the urgencies of life. David Cain, an author and meditation teacher, encourages his students to avoid being “fair-weather meditators.” Similarly, you don’t want to be a fair-weather athlete or a fair-weather writer or a fair-weather anything. When a habit is truly important to you, you have to be willing to stick to it in any mood. Professionals take action even when the mood isn’t right. They might not enjoy it, but they find a way to put the reps in.
I know of executives and investors who keep a “decision journal” in which they record the major decisions they make each week, why they made them, and what they expect the outcome to be. They review their choices at the end of each month or year to see where they were correct and where they went wrong.
In the words of investor Paul Graham, “keep your identity small.” The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you.
Men are born soft and supple; dead, they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail. —LAO TZU
The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1 percent improvement, but a thousand of them. It’s a bunch of atomic habits stacking up, each one a fundamental unit of the overall system.
The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements. It’s remarkable what you can build if you just don’t stop. It’s remarkable the business you can build if you don’t stop working. It’s remarkable the body you can build if you don’t stop training. It’s remarkable the knowledge you can build if you don’t stop learning. It’s remarkable the fortune you can build if you don’t stop saving. It’s remarkable the friendships you can build if you don’t stop caring. Small habits don’t add up. They compound. That’s the power of atomic habits. Tiny changes. Remarkable results.
As Caed Budris says, “Happiness is the space between one desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming.”
Polecat’s hatchet face leaned around the doorjamb. “Hhhmm. Oats is hugging Jackal. Annnnnd Jackal’s naked. I’ll tell the boys everything’s normal, chief.”
Jackal ran a slow hand through his hair. “Warbler takes baths in the brothel, Hoodwink is spying on the hoof for him, the Claymaster can unleash the plague that ended the Incursion, and Fetch is a half-elf that the Sludge Man wants to sacrifice in the marsh.” “Hogshit!” Oats declared with raised eyebrows. “Warbler sits in those nasty tubs?” “I mean to stop it, Oats.” “Well, sure, you wouldn’t want the old man’s cock falling off.”
ONE ASKS WHY human beings, who have lived on this earth for million of years, who are technologically intelligent, have not applied their intelligence to be free from this very complex problem of fear, which may be one of the reasons for war, for killing one another. And religions throughout the world have not solved the problem; not the gurus, nor the saviours; nor ideals.
When you compare yourself with another, ideologically, psychologically, or even physically, there is the striving to become that; and there is the fear that you may not. It is the desire to fulfil and you may not be able to fulfil. Where there is comparison there must be fear.
WHAT IS YOUR fundamental, lasting interest in life? Putting all oblique answers aside and dealing with this question directly and honestly, what would you answer? Do you know? Isn’t it yourself? Anyway, that is what most of us would say if we answered truthfully. I am interested in my progress, my job, my family, the little corner in which I live, in getting a better position for myself, more prestige, more power, more domination over others, and so on. I think it would be logical, wouldn’t it, to admit to ourselves that that is what most of us are primarily interested in—me first?
When we say we want freedom, we want it because we think it may be wonderfully satisfying, and the ultimate satisfaction, of course, is this peculiar idea of self-realization. What we are really seeking is a satisfaction in which there is no dissatisfaction at all.
“Why not? We need Gressang to believe we understand more about all of this than he does. It will take him about thirty seconds to realize you don’t know your ass from a hot rock.”
“You left me a body to find?” he’d growled at her when she’d agreed to meet him at Il Bastone. “Sorry,” Alex had said. “You’re really hard to shop for.”
“So,” she said as the wind picked up, shaking the new leaves on their branches, moaning over the gravestones like a mourner lost to grief. “Who’s ready to go to hell?”
CEOs are often advised to be circumspect about their own views when running a meeting, lest they suppress new ideas. But in any meeting with Henri in charge, it was immediately apparent what outcome he wanted, because he would state it up front. Then, quite sincerely, he would encourage dialogue and dissenting views. Of course, in the end, having been listened to, we almost always decided to do what Henri had suggested.
Fortunate breaks occur when you create an environment that has ample opportunity and the foresight to capture them. —HENRI TERMEER
Termeer was not just present at the creation of the orphan drug revolution—he was in many ways its catalyst and instigator. He took the first steps on a journey that would lead to the approval of dozens of orphan drugs and the growth of a multibillion-dollar industry and would take Genzyme from a company with 17 full-time U.S. employees to a powerhouse with more than 14,000 employees in 50 offices and labs around the world. At the beginning of this adventure, Henri Termeer might well have felt it was just him and Brian Berman taking an enormous chance. There is always a risk in going first in a clinical trial. There is no conventional wisdom, no standard operating procedure, and no history of trial and error. But for Brian Berman and his family, it was the ultimate leap of faith. “I can tell you that of all the things that I remember from the 30 years that I was there,” Henri Termeer told an audience of business students, “those are the moments that I remember the most, and those motivated me forever the most—that moment of saying, ‘Wow. It works.’
Henri Termeer’s and Genzyme’s success would later be measured by the growth of Genzyme into a multibillion-dollar, Fortune 500 company and the development of a roster of innovative, life-saving treatments. But to families of rare disease patients like Brian Berman, it all added up to one word—hope. And, exclaiming in front of a gathering that had assembled to honor Henri Termeer, the grief-stricken father of a rare diseased daughter remembered his words the day he had learned of a therapy being developed by a Boston biotech company, “Hope was spelled Genzyme.”
The manner in which Termeer ran his shop reflected his Dutch commercial upbringing. His principles were fundamental. Your reputation was paramount. You were to avoid indebtedness, operate modestly with pureness, and conduct yourself as an individualist. In the spirit of how he ran his shop, Jacques Termeer’s message to his kids and grandkids would be, “go forth, work hard, redouble your efforts.”
Henri Termeer would live his adult life with little connection to organized religion, but he no doubt drew many of his philosophies and moral foundation from these youthful impressions. His style of servant leadership, his modesty, his empathy for the plight of those less fortunate—these core traits derived, at least in part, from his faith and, by extension, his mother.
As described by his siblings, Henri Termeer was an ambitious yet unexceptional young boy. He was compliant, well-mannered, smart, and ingenious, but hardly a boy wonder. He did have a deeply competitive drive that sometimes got the better of him, as his brother, Bert, recalls. “He was one class below me in primary school, and one day there was a contest to make drawings of safety signs for people who drive cars and bicycles. I made a drawing and Henri looked at it very carefully, because sometimes he had no inspiration himself, and I had too much inspiration. So, I made a drawing of a crossroads and a sign, and he looked at it very carefully and made exactly the same drawing himself. I won first prize, and he got nothing. He was so angry! He said, ‘They’re the same, there’s no difference, why didn’t I also get first prize?’
“When you’re young, being asked to take responsibility for managing people or operations is a magnificent experience,” Henri said. “I learned a lot. Thousands of things needed to be managed and controlled in order to keep the planes in the air.
People would often talk about how passionate Bill Graham was about patient care, eclipsing the personal dedication and emotion of all his other employees, except one. Monica Higgins quotes a businessman who said that Graham’s “only rival in his passion for saving lives is Henri Termeer. Henri can make you cry.”
The “Baxter way” was akin to stretching a rubber band. Take a hugely talented, relatively inexperienced leader/manager and place him (nearly all of the MBAs hired in this era were men) in a role beyond his experience curve. At Genzyme, Termeer often employed this technique as a way of identifying his top performers, developing these executives, building out his management ranks, and, in the end, providing for leadership succession.
This is the inevitable disadvantage of studying Asian philosophy by the purely literary methods of Western scholarship, for words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
The reason why Taoism and Zen present, at first sight, such a puzzle to the Western mind is that we have taken a restricted view of human knowledge. For us, almost all knowledge is what a Taoist would call conventional knowledge, because we do not feel that we really know anything unless we can represent it to ourselves in words, or in some other system of conventional signs such as the notations of mathematics or music.
In English the differences between things and actions are clearly, if not always logically, distinguished, but a great number of Chinese words do duty for both nouns and verbs–so that one who thinks in Chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities.
But the conventions; which govern human identity are more subtle and much less obvious than these. We learn, very thoroughly though far less explicitly, to identify ourselves with an equally conventional view of “myself.” For the conventional “self” or “person” is composed mainly of a history consisting of selected memories, and beginning from the moment of parturition. According to convention, I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real “me” than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future, and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is! It is important to recognize that the memories and past events which make up a man’s historical identity are no more than a selection. From the actual infinitude of events and experiences some have been picked out–abstracted–as significant, and this significance has of course been determined by conventional standards. For the very nature of conventional knowledge is that it is a system of abstractions. It consists of signs and symbols in which things and events are reduced to their general outlines, as the Chinese character jena stands for “man” by being the utmost simplification and generalization of the human form.
Abstraction is thus almost a necessity for communication, since it enables us to represent our experiences with simple and rapidly made “grasps” of the mind. When we say that we can think only of one thing at a time, this is like saying that the Pacific Ocean cannot be swallowed at a gulp. It has to be taken in a cup, and downed bit by bit. Abstractions and conventional signs are like the cup; they reduce experience to units simple enough to be comprehended one at a time.
Thus communication by conventional signs of this type gives us an abstract, one-at-a-time translation of a universe in which things are happening altogether-at-once-a universe whose concrete reality always escapes perfect description in these abstract terms.
Confucianism presides, then, over the socially necessary task of forcing the original spontaneity of life into the rigid rules of convention–a task which involves not only conflict and pain, but also the loss of that peculiar naturalness and un-self-consciousness for which little children are so much loved, and which is sometimes regained by saints and sages. The function of Taoism is to undo the inevitable damage of this discipline, and not only to restore but also to develop the original spontaneity, which is termed tzu-janb or “self-so-ness.”
Taoism is a way of liberation, which never comes by means of revolution, since it is notorious that most revolutions establish worse tyrannies than they destroy. To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it. It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it. The West has no recognized institution corresponding to Taoism because our Hebrew-Christian spiritual tradition identifies the Absolute–God–with the moral and logical order of convention. This might almost be called a major cultural catastrophe, because it weights the social order with excessive authority, inviting just those revolutions against religion and tradition which have been so characteristic of Western history.
The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated. —POUL ANDERSON1
A system* is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.
The elements of a system are often the easiest parts to notice, because many of them are visible, tangible things.
Keeping sub-purposes and overall system purposes in harmony is an essential function of successful systems.
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.
‘It is a small part of life we really live.’ Indeed, all the rest is not life but merely time. Vices surround and assail men from every side, and do not allow them to rise again and lift their eyes to discern the truth, but keep them overwhelmed and rooted in their desires. Never can they recover their true selves. If by chance they achieve some tranquillity, just as a swell remains on the deep sea even after the wind has dropped, so they go on tossing about and never find rest from their desires. Do you think I am speaking only of those whose wickedness is acknowledged? Look at those whose good fortune people gather to see: they are choked by their own blessings. How many find their riches a burden! How many burst a blood vessel by their eloquence and their daily striving to show off their talents! How many are pale from constant pleasures! How many are left no freedom by the crowd of clients surrounding them!
Even if all the bright intellects who ever lived were to agree to ponder this one theme, they would never sufficiently express their surprise at this fog in the human mind. Men do not let anyone seize their estates, and if there is the slightest dispute about their boundaries they rush to stones and arms; but they allow others to encroach on their lives – why, they themselves even invite in those who will take over their lives. You will find no one willing to share out his money; but to how many does each of us divide up his life! People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy. So, I would like to fasten on someone from the older generation and say to him: ‘I see that you have come to the last stage of human life; you are close upon your hundredth year, or even beyond: come now, hold an audit of your life. Reckon how much of your time has been taken up by a money-lender, how much by a mistress, a patron, a client, quarrelling with your wife, punishing your slaves, dashing about the city on your social obligations. Consider also the diseases which we have brought on ourselves, and the time too which has been unused. You will find that you have fewer years than you reckon. Call to mind when you ever had a fixed purpose; how few days have passed as you had planned; when you were ever at your own disposal; when your face wore its natural expression; when your mind was undisturbed; what work you have achieved in such a long life; how many have plundered your life when you were unaware of your losses; how much you have lost through groundless sorrow, foolish joy, greedy desire, the seductions of society; how little of your own was left to you. You will realize that you are dying prematurely.’ So what is the reason for this? You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply – though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.
Finally, it is generally agreed that no activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied – not rhetoric or liberal studies – since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it. Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn. There are many instructors in the other arts to be found everywhere: indeed, some of these arts mere boys have grasped so thoroughly that they can even teach them. But learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die. So many of the finest men have put aside all their encumbrances, renouncing riches and business and pleasure, and made it their one aim up to the end of their lives to know how to live. Yet most of these have died confessing that they did not yet know – still less can those others know. Believe me, it is the sign of a great man, and one who is above human error, not to allow his time to be frittered away: he has the longest possible life simply because whatever time was available he devoted entirely to himself. None of it lay fallow and neglected, none of it under another’s control; for being an extremely thrifty guardian of his time he never found anything for which it was worth exchanging. So he had enough time; but those into whose lives the public have made great inroads inevitably have too little.
But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day. For what new pleasures can any hour now bring him? He has tried everything, and enjoyed everything to repletion.
So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbour, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of opposing winds? He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.
People are delighted to accept pensions and gratuities, for which they hire out their labour or their support or their services. But nobody works out the value of time: men use it lavishly as if it cost nothing. But if death threatens these same people, you will see them praying to their doctors; if they are in fear of capital punishment, you will see them prepared to spend their all to stay alive. So inconsistent are they in their feelings. But if each of us could have the tally of his future years set before him, as we can of our past years, how alarmed would be those who saw only a few years ahead, and how carefully would they use them!
You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that.
The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately. Listen to the cry of our greatest poet, who as though inspired with divine utterance sings salutary verses: Life’s finest day for wretched mortals here Is always first to flee.
But Fabianus, who was not one of today’s academic philosophers but the true old-fashioned sort, used to say that we must attack the passions by brute force and not by logic; that the enemy’s line must be turned by a strong attack and not by pinpricks; for vices have to be crushed rather than picked at.
“So I gathered. I’m rarely invited to feasts for the pleasure of my company.” “You’re probably not very interesting company, then. What else have you gathered?”
I sighed. Maggie’s limp, warm little body was emitting a barrage of some kind of subatomic particle that was making me drowsy. Probably sleepeons. Mouse snored a little, generating his own sleepeon field.
“I’m not sure I do anymore,” I said, “and it scares the hell out of me. What happens if she does it? What happens if she turns me into her personal monster? What is she going to do with me then?” “Oh, Harry,” Michael said. “You’re asking exactly the wrong question, my friend.” “What do you mean?” I asked. He looked at me, his face serious, even worried. “What is she going to do with you if she can’t?” A fluttery fear went through my belly at the thought. Silence fell. The night was dark and quiet and misty. Somewhere, out there in it, Mab was moving, planning. Part of her plans, the dark, bloody, violent parts, included me.
Occasionally, people who watched Amos in action sensed that he was more afraid of being thought unmanly than he was actually brave. “He was always very gung ho,” recalled Uri Shamir. “I thought it was maybe compensation for being thin and weak and pale.” At some point it didn’t matter: He compelled himself to be brave until bravery became a habit. And as his time in the army came to an end he clearly sensed a change in himself.
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To those who knew Amos best, Amos’s stories were just an excuse to enjoy Amos. “People who knew Amos could talk of nothing else,” as one Israeli woman, a friend of long standing, put it. “There was nothing we liked to do more than to get together and talk about him, over and over and over.” There were—for starters—the stories about the funny things Amos had said, usually directed at people whom he found full of themselves. He had listened to an American economist talk about how so-and-so was stupid and so-and-so was a fool, then said, “All your economic models are premised on people being smart and rational, and yet all the people you know are idiots.” Much later, he heard Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics, hold forth on seemingly every subject under the sun. After Gell-Man was done, Amos said, “You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are.”
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There was—to take just one example—the time that Tel Aviv University threw a party for a physicist who had just won the Wolf Prize. It was the discipline’s second-highest honor, and its winners more often than not went on to win the Nobel. Most of the leading physicists in the country came to the party, but somehow the prizewinner ended up in the corner with Amos—who had recently taken an interest in black holes. The next day the prizewinner called his hosts to ask, “Who was that physicist I was talking to? He never told me his name.” After some confusing back-and-forth, his hosts figured out that the man meant Amos, and they told him that Amos wasn’t a physicist but a psychologist. “It’s not possible,” the physicist said, “he was the smartest of all the physicists.”
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The Princeton philosopher Avishai Margalit said, “No matter what the topic was, the first thing Amos thought was in the top 10 percent. This was such a striking ability. The clarity and depth of his first reaction to any problem—any intellectual problem—was something mind-boggling. It was as if he was right away in the middle of any discussion.” Irv Biederman, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, said, “Physically he was unremarkable. In a room full of thirty people he’d be the last one you’d notice. And then he’d start to talk. Everyone who ever met him thought he was the smartest person they had ever met.”
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A lot of things that most human beings would never think to do, to Amos simply made sense. For instance, when he wanted to go for a run he . . . went for a run. No stretching, no jogging outfit or, for that matter, jogging: He’d simply strip off his slacks and sprint out his front door in his underpants and run as fast as he could until he couldn’t run anymore. “Amos thought people paid an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment,” said his friend Avishai Margalit, “and he himself decided very early on it was not worth it.” What all those who came to know Amos eventually realized was that the man had a preternatural gift for doing only precisely what he wanted to do. Varda Liberman recalled visiting him one day and seeing a table with a week’s worth of mail on it. There were tidy little stacks, one for each day, each filled with requests and entreaties and demands upon Amos’s time: job offers, offers of honorary degrees, requests for interviews and lectures, requests for help with some abstruse problem, bills. When the new mail came in Amos opened anything that interested him and left the rest in its daily pile. Each day the new mail arrived and shoved the old mail down the table. When a pile reached the end of the table Amos pushed it, unopened, off the edge into a waiting garbage can. “The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.” “I would say to Amos I have to do this or I have to do that,” recalled his old friend Yeshu Kolodny. “And he would say, ‘No. You don’t.’ And I thought: lucky man!”
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Amos’s three children have vivid memories of watching their parents drive off to see some movie picked by their mother, only to have their father turn up back at their couch twenty minutes later. Amos would have decided, in the first five minutes, whether the movie was worth seeing—and if it wasn’t he’d just come home and watch Hill Street Blues (his favorite TV drama) or Saturday Night Live (he never missed it) or an NBA game (he was obsessed with basketball). He’d then go back and fetch his wife after her movie ended. “They’ve already taken my money,” he’d explain. “Should I give them my time, too?” If by some freak accident he found himself at a gathering of his fellow human beings that held no appeal for him, he’d become invisible. “He’d walk into a room and decide he didn’t want anything to do with it and he would fade into the background and just vanish,” says Dona. “It was like a superpower. And it was absolutely an abnegation of social responsibility. He didn’t accept social responsibility—and so graciously, so elegantly, didn’t accept it.”
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Amos liked to say that stinginess was contagious and so was generosity, and since behaving generously made you happier than behaving stingily, you should avoid stingy people and spend your time only with generous ones.
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Amos had his own theory, which he called “features of similarity.”† He argued that when people compared two things, and judged their similarity, they were essentially making a list of features. These features are simply what they notice about the objects. They count up the noticeable features shared by two objects: The more they share, the more similar they are; the more they don’t share, the more dissimilar they are. Not all objects have the same number of noticeable features: New York City had more of them than Tel Aviv, for instance. Amos built a mathematical model to describe what he meant—and to invite others to test his theory, and prove him wrong.
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“Similarity increases with the addition of common features and/or deletion of distinctive features.”
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Otherwise Amos was unchanged: the last to go to bed at night, the life of every party, the light to which all butterflies flew, and the freest, happiest, and most interesting person anyone knew. He still did only what he wanted to do. Even his new interest in wearing a suit was more peculiarly Amos than it was bourgeois. Amos chose his suits only by the number and size of the jacket pockets. Along with an interest in pockets, he had what amounted to a fetish for briefcases, and acquired dozens of them. He’d returned from five years in the most materialistic culture on the face of the earth with a desire only for objects that might help him impose order on the world around him.
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That was another thing colleagues and students noticed about Danny: how quickly he moved on from his enthusiasms, how easily he accepted failure. It was as if he expected it. But he wasn’t afraid of it. He’d try anything. He thought of himself as someone who enjoyed, more than most, changing his mind. “I get a sense of movement and discovery whenever I find a flaw in my thinking,” he said. His theory of himself dovetailed neatly with his moodiness. In his darker moods, he became fatalistic—and so wasn’t surprised or disturbed when he did fail. (He’d been proved right!) In his up moments he was so full of enthusiasm that he seemed to forget the possibility of failure, and would run with any new idea that came his way. “He could drive people up the wall with his volatility,” said fellow Hebrew University psychologist Maya Bar-Hillel. “Something was genius one day and crap the next, and genius the next day and crap the next.” What drove others crazy might have helped to keep Danny sane. His moods were grease for his idea factory.
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They were seeking to understand not whether the eye played tricks on the mind, but if the mind also played tricks on the eye. Or, as they put it, how “intense mental activity hinders perception.” They found that it wasn’t just emotional arousal that altered the size of the pupil: Mental effort had the same effect. There was, quite possibly, as they put it, “an antagonism between thinking and perceiving.”
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Amos presented research done in Ward Edwards’s lab that showed that when people draw a red chip from the bag, they do indeed judge the bag to be more likely to contain mostly red chips. If the first three chips they withdrew from a bag were red, for instance, they put the odds at 3:1 that the bag contained a majority of red chips. The true, Bayesian odds were 27:1. People shifted the odds in the right direction, in other words; they just didn’t shift them dramatically enough. Ward Edwards had coined a phrase to describe how human beings responded to new information. They were “conservative Bayesians.” That is, they behaved more or less as if they knew Bayes’s rule. Of course, no one actually thought that Bayes’s formula was grinding away in people’s heads. What Edwards, along with a lot of other social scientists, believed (and seemed to want to believe) was that people behaved as if they had Bayes’s formula lodged in their minds.
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And yet, to Danny, the experiment that Amos described sounded just incredibly stupid. After a person has pulled a red chip out of a bag, he is more likely than before to think the bag to be the one whose chips are mostly red: well, duh. What else is he going to think?
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In Danny’s view, people were not conservative Bayesians. They were not statisticians of any kind. They often leapt from little information to big conclusions. The theory of the mind as some kind of statistician was of course just a metaphor. But the metaphor, to Danny, felt wrong. “I knew I was a lousy intuitive statistician,” he said. “And I really didn’t think I was stupider than anyone else.”
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Which was odd when you thought about it. Most real-life judgments did not offer probabilities as clean and knowable as the judgment of which book bag contained mostly red poker chips. The most you could hope to show with such experiments is that people were very poor intuitive statisticians—so poor they couldn’t even pick the book bag that offered them the most favorable odds. People who proved to be expert book bag pickers might still stumble when faced with judgments in which the probabilities were far more difficult to know—say, whether some foreign dictator did, or did not, possess weapons of mass destruction. Danny thought, this is what happens when people become attached to a theory. They fit the evidence to the theory rather than the theory to the evidence. They cease to see what’s right under their nose.
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Amos was a psychologist and yet the experiment he had just described, with apparent approval, or at least not obvious skepticism, had in it no psychology at all. “It felt like a math exercise,” said Danny. And so Danny did what every decent citizen of Hebrew University did when he heard something that sounded idiotic: He let Amos have it. “The phrase ‘I pushed him into the wall’ was often used, even for conversations among friends,” explained Danny later. “The idea that everyone is entitled to his/her opinion was a California thing—that’s not how we did things in Jerusalem.”
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The students who once wondered why the two brightest stars of Hebrew University kept their distance from each other now wondered how two so radically different personalities could find common ground, much less become soul mates. “It was very difficult to imagine how this chemistry worked,” said Ditsa Kaffrey, a graduate student in psychology who studied with them both. Danny was a Holocaust kid; Amos was a swaggering Sabra—the slang term for a native Israeli. Danny was always sure he was wrong. Amos was always sure he was right. Amos was the life of every party; Danny didn’t go to the parties. Amos was loose and informal; even when he made a stab at informality, Danny felt as if he had descended from some formal place. With Amos you always just picked up where you left off, no matter how long it had been since you last saw him. With Danny there was always a sense you were starting over, even if you had been with him just yesterday. Amos was tone-deaf but would nevertheless sing Hebrew folk songs with great gusto. Danny was the sort of person who might be in possession of a lovely singing voice that he would never discover. Amos was a one-man wrecking ball for illogical arguments; when Danny heard an illogical argument, he asked, What might that be true of? Danny was a pessimist. Amos was not merely an optimist; Amos willed himself to be optimistic, because he had decided pessimism was stupid. When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos liked to say. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens. “They were very different people,” said a fellow Hebrew University professor. “Danny was always eager to please. He was irritable and short-tempered, but he wanted to please. Amos couldn’t understand why anyone would be eager to please. He understood courtesy, but eager to please—why??” Danny took everything so seriously; Amos turned much of life into a joke. When Hebrew University put Amos on its committee to evaluate all PhD candidates, Amos was appalled at what passed for a dissertation in the humanities. Instead of raising a formal objection, he merely said, “If this dissertation is good enough for its field, it’s good enough for me. Provided the student can divide fractions!” Beyond that, Amos was the most terrifying mind most people had ever encountered. “People were afraid to discuss ideas in front of him,” said a friend—because they were afraid he would put his finger on the flaw that they had only dimly sensed. One of Amos’s graduate students, Ruma Falk, said she was so afraid of what Amos would think of her driving that when she drove him home, in her car, she insisted that he drive. And now here he was spending all of his time with Danny, whose susceptibility to criticism was so extreme that a single remark from a misguided student sent him down a long, dark tunnel of self-doubt. It was as if you had dropped a white mouse into a cage with a python and come back later and found the mouse…
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“Amos did not write in a defensive crouch,” he said. “There was something liberating about the arrogance—it was extremely rewarding to feel like Amos, smarter than almost everyone.”
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“Belief in the Law of Small Numbers” teased out the implications of a single mental error that people commonly made—even when those people were trained statisticians. People mistook even a very small part of a thing for the whole. Even statisticians tended to leap to conclusions from inconclusively small amounts of evidence. They did this, Amos and Danny argued, because they believed—even if they did not acknowledge the belief—that any given sample of a large population was more representative of that population than it actually was.
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They then went on to show that trained scientists—experimental psychologists—were prone to the same mental error. For instance, the psychologists who were asked to guess the mean IQ of the sample of kids, in which the first kid was found to have an IQ of 150, often guessed that it was 100, or the mean of the larger population of eight graders. They assumed that the kid with the high IQ was an outlier who would be offset by an outlier with an extremely low IQ—that every heads would be followed by a tails. But the correct answer—as produced by Bayes’s theorem—was 101. Even people trained in statistics and probability theory failed to intuit how much more variable a small sample could be than the general population—and that the smaller the sample, the lower the likelihood that it would mirror the broader population. They assumed that the sample would correct itself until it mirrored the population from which it was drawn. In very large populations, the law of large numbers did indeed guarantee this result. If you flipped a coin a thousand times, you were more likely to end up with heads or tails roughly half the time than if you flipped it ten times. For some reason human beings did not see it that way. “People’s intuitions about random sampling appear to satisfy the law of small numbers, which asserts that the law of large numbers applies to small numbers as well,” Danny and Amos wrote.
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But then UCLA sent back the analyzed data, and the story became unsettling. (Goldberg described the results as “generally terrifying.”) In the first place, the simple model that the researchers had created as their starting point for understanding how doctors rendered their diagnoses proved to be extremely good at predicting the doctors’ diagnoses. The doctors might want to believe that their thought processes were subtle and complicated, but a simple model captured these perfectly well. That did not mean that their thinking was necessarily simple, only that it could be captured by a simple model. More surprisingly, the doctors’ diagnoses were all over the map: The experts didn’t agree with each other. Even more surprisingly, when presented with duplicates of the same ulcer, every doctor had contradicted himself and rendered more than one diagnosis: These doctors apparently could not even agree with themselves. “These findings suggest that diagnostic agreement in clinical medicine may not be much greater than that found in clinical psychology—some food for thought during your next visit to the family doctor,” wrote Goldberg. If the doctors disagreed among themselves, they of course couldn’t all be right—and they weren’t. The researchers then repeated the experiment with clinical psychologists and psychiatrists, who gave them the list of factors they considered when deciding whether it was safe to release a patient from a psychiatric hospital. Once again, the experts were all over the map. Even more bizarrely, those with the least training (graduate students) were just as accurate as the fully trained ones (paid pros) in their predictions about what any given psychiatric patient would get up to if you let him out the door. Experience appeared to be of little value in judging, say, whether a person was at risk of committing suicide. Or, as Goldberg put it, “Accuracy on this task was not associated with the amount of professional experience of the judge.” Still, Goldberg was slow to blame the doctors. Toward the end of his paper, he suggested that the problem might be that doctors and psychiatrists seldom had a fair chance to judge the accuracy of their thinking and, if necessary, change it. What was lacking was “immediate feedback.” And so, with an Oregon Research Institute colleague named Leonard Rorer, he tried to provide it. Goldberg and Rorer gave two groups of psychologists thousands of hypothetical cases to diagnose. One group received immediate feedback on its diagnoses; the other did not—the purpose was to see if the ones who got feedback improved. The results were not encouraging. “It now appears that our initial formulation of the problem of learning clinical inference was far too simple—that a good deal more than outcome feedback is necessary for judges to learn a task as difficult as this one,” wrote Goldberg. At which point one of Goldberg’s fellow Oregon researchers—Goldberg doesn’t recall which one—made a radical suggestion. “…
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Anyway, he spent most of his time indoors, talking to Amos. They installed themselves in an office in the former Unitarian church, and continued the conversation they’d started in Jerusalem. “I had the sense, ‘My life has changed,’” said Danny. “We were quicker in understanding each other than we were in understanding ourselves. The way the creative process works is that you first say something, and later, sometimes years later, you understand what you said. And in our case it was foreshortened. I would say something and Amos would understand it. When one of us would say something that was off the wall, the other would search for the virtue in it. We would finish each other’s sentences and frequently did. But we also kept surprising each other. It still gives me goose bumps.” For the first time in their careers, they had something like a staff at their disposal. Papers got typed by someone else; subjects for their experiments got recruited by someone else; money for research got raised by someone else. All they had to do was talk to each other.
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When they sat down to write they nearly merged, physically, into a single form, in a way that the few people who happened to catch a glimpse of them found odd. “They wrote together sitting right next to each other at the typewriter,” recalls Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett. “I cannot imagine. It would be like having someone else brush my teeth for me.” The way Danny put it was, “We were sharing a mind.”
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Their first paper—which they still half-thought of as a joke played on the academic world—had shown that people faced with a problem that had a statistically correct answer did not think like statisticians. Even statisticians did not think like statisticians. “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers” had raised an obvious next question: If people did not use statistical reasoning, even when faced with a problem that could be solved with statistical reasoning, what kind of reasoning did they use? If they did not think, in life’s many chancy situations, like a card counter at a blackjack table, how did they think?
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“Subjective probabilities play an important role in our lives,” they began. “The decisions we make, the conclusions we reach, and the explanations we offer are usually based on our judgments of the likelihood of uncertain events such as success in a new job, the outcome of an election, or the state of a market.” In these and many other uncertain situations, the mind did not naturally calculate the correct odds. So what did it do? The answer they now offered: It replaced the laws of chance with rules of thumb. These rules of thumb Danny and Amos called “heuristics.” And the first heuristic they wanted to explore they called “representativeness.” When people make judgments, they argued, they compare whatever they are judging to some model in their minds. How much do those clouds resemble my mental model of an approaching storm? How closely does this ulcer resemble my mental model of a malignant cancer? Does Jeremy Lin match my mental picture of a future NBA player? Does that belligerent German political leader resemble my idea of a man capable of orchestrating genocide? The world’s not just a stage. It’s a casino, and our lives are games of chance. And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgments about similarity—or (strange new word!) representativeness. You have some notion of a parent population: “storm clouds” or “gastric ulcers” or “genocidal dictators” or “NBA players.” You compare the specific case to the parent population.
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group. “Our thesis,” they wrote, “is that, in many situations, an event A is judged to be more probable than an event B whenever A appears more representative than B.” The more the basketball player resembles your mental model of an NBA player, the more likely you will think him to be an NBA player.
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For instance, in families with six children, the birth order B G B B B B was about as likely as G B G B B G. But Israeli kids—like pretty much everyone else on the planet, it would emerge—naturally seemed to believe that G B G B B G was a more likely birth sequence. Why? “The sequence with five boys and one girl fails to reflect the proportion of boys and girls in the population,” they explained. It was less representative. What is more, if you asked the same Israeli kids to choose the more likely birth order in families with six children—B B B G G G or G B B G B G—they overwhelmingly opted for the latter. But the two birth orders are equally likely. So why did people almost universally believe that one was far more likely than the other? Because, said Danny and Amos, people thought of birth order as a random process, and the second sequence looks more “random” than the first.
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Londoners in the Second World War thought that German bombs were targeted, because some parts of the city were hit repeatedly while others were not hit at all. (Statisticians later showed that the distribution was exactly what you would expect from random bombing.) People find it a remarkable coincidence when two students in the same classroom share a birthday, when in fact there is a better than even chance, in any group of twenty-three people, that two of its members will have been born on the same day. We have a kind of stereotype of “randomness” that differs from true randomness. Our stereotype of randomness lacks the clusters and patterns that occur in true random sequences.
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The average heights of adult males and females in the U.S. are, respectively, 5 ft. 10 in. and 5 ft. 4 in. Both distributions are approximately normal with a standard deviation of about 2.5 in.§ An investigator has selected one population by chance and has drawn from it a random sample. What do you think the odds are that he has selected the male population if 1. The sample consists of a single person whose height is 5 ft. 10 in.? 2. The sample consists of 6 persons whose average height is 5 ft. 8 in.? The odds most commonly assigned by their subjects were, in the first case, 8:1 in favor and, in the second case, 2.5:1 in favor. The correct odds were 16:1 in favor in the first case, and 29:1 in favor in the second case. The sample of six people gave you a lot more information than the sample of one person.
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A certain town is served by two hospitals. In the larger hospital about 45 babies are born each day, and in the smaller hospital about 15 babies are born each day. As you know, about 50 percent of all babies are boys. The exact percentage of baby boys, however, varies from day to day. Sometimes it may be higher than 50 percent, sometimes lower. For a period of 1 year, each hospital recorded the days on which more than 60 percent of the babies born were boys. Which hospital do you think recorded more such days? Check one: — The larger hospital — The smaller hospital — About the same (that is, within 5 percent of each other) People got that one wrong, too. Their typical answer was “same.” The correct answer is “the smaller hospital.” The smaller the sample size, the more likely that it is unrepresentative of the wider population.
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The frequency of appearance of letters in the English language was studied. A typical text was selected, and the relative frequency with which various letters of the alphabet appeared in the first and third positions of the words was recorded. Words of less than three letters were excluded from the count. You will be given several letters of the alphabet, and you will be asked to judge whether these letters appear more often in the first or in the third position, and to estimate the ratio of the frequency with which they appear in these positions. . . . Consider the letter K Is K more likely to appear in ____the first position? ____the third position? (check one) My estimate for the ratio of these two values is:________:1 If you thought that K was, say, twice as likely to appear as the first letter of an English word than as the third letter, you checked the first box and wrote your estimate as 2:1. This was what the typical person did, as it happens. Danny and Amos replicated the demonstration with other letters—R, L, N, and V. Those letters all appeared more frequently as the third letter in an English word than as the first letter—by a ratio of two to one. Once again, people’s judgment was, systematically, very wrong. And it was wrong, Danny and Amos now proposed, because it was distorted by memory. It was simply easier to recall words that start with K than to recall words with K as their third letter. The more easily people can call some scenario to mind—the more available it is to them—the more probable they find it to be.
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“In assessing the profit of a given company, for example, people tend to assume normal operating conditions and make their estimates contingent upon that assumption,” they wrote in their notes. “They do not incorporate into their estimates the possibility that these conditions may be drastically changed because of a war, sabotage, depressions, or a major competitor being forced out of business.” Here, clearly, was another source of error: not just that people don’t know what they don’t know, but that they don’t bother to factor their ignorance into their judgments.
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The stories people told themselves, when the odds were either unknown or unknowable, were naturally too simple. “This tendency to consider only relatively simple scenarios,” they concluded, “may have particularly salient effects in situations of conflict. There, one’s own moods and plans are more available to one than those of the opponent. It is not easy to adopt the opponent’s view of the chessboard or of the battlefield.” The imagination appeared to be governed by rules. The rules confined people’s thinking. It’s far easier for a Jew living in Paris in 1939 to construct a story about how the German army will behave much as it had in 1919, for instance, than to invent a story in which it behaves as it did in 1941, no matter how persuasive the evidence might be that, this time, things are different.
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Amos liked to say that if you are asked to do anything—go to a party, give a speech, lift a finger—you should never answer right away, even if you are sure that you want to do it. Wait a day, Amos said, and you’ll be amazed how many of those invitations you would have accepted yesterday you’ll refuse after you have had a day to think it over.
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A human being who finds himself stuck at some boring meeting or cocktail party often finds it difficult to invent an excuse to flee. Amos’s rule, whenever he wanted to leave any gathering, was to just get up and leave. Just start walking and you’ll be surprised how creative you will become and how fast you’ll find the words for your excuse, he said. His attitude to the clutter of daily life was of a piece with his strategy for dealing with social demands. Unless you are kicking yourself once a month for throwing something away, you are not throwing enough away, he said.
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Dick is a 30 year old man. He is married with no children. A man of high ability and high motivation, he promises to be quite successful in his field. He is well liked by his colleagues. Then they ran another experiment. It was a version of the book bag and poker chips experiment that Amos and Danny had argued about in Danny’s seminar at Hebrew University. They told their subjects that they had picked a person from a pool of 100 people, 70 of whom were engineers and 30 of whom were lawyers. Then they asked them: What is the likelihood that the selected person is a lawyer? The subjects correctly judged it to be 30 percent. And if you told them that you were doing the same thing, but from a pool that had 70 lawyers in it and 30 engineers, they said, correctly, that there was a 70 percent chance the person you’d plucked from it was a lawyer. But if you told them you had picked not just some nameless person but a guy named Dick, and read them Danny’s description of Dick—which contained no information whatsoever to help you guess what Dick did for a living—they guessed there was an equal chance that Dick was a lawyer or an engineer, no matter which pool he had emerged from. “Evidently, people respond differently when given no specific evidence and when given worthless evidence,” wrote Danny and Amos. “When no specific evidence is given, the prior probabilities are properly utilized; when worthless specific evidence is given, prior probabilities are ignored.”*
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Biederman had been friends with Amos at the University of Michigan and was now a member of the faculty at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The Amos he knew was consumed by possibly important but probably insolvable and certainly obscure problems about measurement. “I wouldn’t have invited Amos to Buffalo to talk about that,” he said—as no one would have understood it or cared about it. But this new work Amos was apparently doing with Danny Kahneman was breathtaking. It confirmed Biederman’s sense that “most advances in science come not from eureka moments but from ‘hmmm, that’s funny.’”
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In the course of our personal and professional lives, we often run into situations that appear puzzling at first blush. We cannot see for the life of us why Mr. X acted in a particular way, we cannot understand how the experimental results came out the way they did, etc. Typically, however, within a very short time we come up with an explanation, a hypothesis, or an interpretation of the facts that renders them understandable, coherent, or natural. The same phenomenon is observed in perception. People are very good at detecting patterns and trends even in random data. In contrast to our skill in inventing scenarios, explanations, and interpretations, our ability to assess their likelihood, or to evaluate them critically, is grossly inadequate. Once we have adopted a particular hypothesis or interpretation, we grossly exaggerate the likelihood of that hypothesis, and find it very difficult to see things any other way. Amos was polite about it. He did not say, as he often said, “It is amazing how dull history books are, given how much of what’s in them must be invented.” What he did say was perhaps even more shocking to his audience: Like other human beings, historians were prone to the cognitive biases that he and Danny had described. “Historical judgment,” he said, was “part of a broader class of processes involving intuitive interpretation of data.” Historical judgments were subject to bias.
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After the trip, Fischhoff went back and asked the same people to recall the odds they had assigned to each outcome. Their memories of the odds they had assigned to various outcomes were badly distorted. They all believed that they had assigned higher probabilities to what happened than they actually had. They greatly overestimated the odds that they had assigned to what had actually happened. That is, once they knew the outcome, they thought it had been far more predictable than they had found it to be before, when they had tried to predict it. A few years after Amos described the work to his Buffalo audience, Fischhoff named the phenomenon “hindsight bias.”†
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In his talk to the historians, Amos described their occupational hazard: the tendency to take whatever facts they had observed (neglecting the many facts that they did not or could not observe) and make them fit neatly into a confident-sounding story: All too often, we find ourselves unable to predict what will happen; yet after the fact we explain what did happen with a great deal of confidence. This “ability” to explain that which we cannot predict, even in the absence of any additional information, represents an important, though subtle, flaw in our reasoning. It leads us to believe that there is a less uncertain world than there actually is, and that we are less bright than we actually might be. For if we can explain tomorrow what we cannot predict today, without any added information except the knowledge of the actual outcome, then this outcome must have been determined in advance and we should have been able to predict it. The fact that we couldn’t is taken as an indication of our limited intelligence rather…
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It wasn’t just sports announcers and political pundits who radically revised their narratives, or shifted focus, so that their stories seemed to fit whatever had just happened in a game or an election. Historians imposed false order upon random events, too, probably without even realizing what they were doing. Amos had a phrase for this. “Creeping determinism,” he called it—and jotted in his notes one…
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They had been gripped by “The Decision to Seed Hurricanes,” a paper coauthored by Stanford professor Ron Howard. Howard was one of the founders of a new field called decision analysis. Its idea was to force decision makers to assign probabilities to various outcomes: to make explicit the thinking that went into their decisions before they made them.
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Redelmeier had actually co-written an article about that: “Elevator Buttons as Unrecognized Sources of Bacterial Colonization in Hospitals.” For one of his studies, he had swabbed 120 elevator buttons and 96 toilet seats at three big Toronto hospitals and produced evidence that the elevator buttons were far more likely to infect you with some disease.
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Lung cancer proved to be a handy example. Lung cancer doctors and patients in the early 1980s faced two unequally unpleasant options: surgery or radiation. Surgery was more likely to extend your life, but, unlike radiation, it came with the small risk of instant death. When you told people that they had a 90 percent chance of surviving surgery, 82 percent of patients opted for surgery. But when you told them that they had a 10 percent chance of dying from the surgery—which was of course just a different way of putting the same odds—only 54 percent chose the surgery. People facing a life-and-death decision responded not to the odds but to the way the odds were described to them.
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Many sentences popped out of Amos’s mouth that Redelmeier knew he would forever remember: A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said. The difference between being very smart and very foolish is often very small. So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative. The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.
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Basketball experts seized on random streaks as patterns in players’ shooting that didn’t exist. Arthritis sufferers found patterns in suffering that didn’t exist. “We attribute this phenomenon to selective matching,” Tversky and Redelmeier wrote.† “. . . For arthritis, selective matching leads people to look for changes in the weather when they experience increased pain, and pay little attention to the weather when their pain is stable. . . . [A] single day of severe pain and extreme weather might sustain a lifetime of belief in a relation between them.”
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By the fall of 1973 it was fairly clear to Danny that other people would never fully understand his relationship with Amos. The previous academic year, they’d taught a seminar together at Hebrew University. From Danny’s point of view, it had been a disaster. The warmth he felt when he was alone with Amos vanished whenever Amos was in the presence of an audience. “When we were with other people we were one of two ways,” said Danny. “Either we finished each other’s sentences and told each other’s jokes. Or we were competing. No one ever saw us working together. No one knows what we were like.” What they were like, in every way but sexually, was lovers. They connected with each other more deeply than either had connected with anyone else. Their wives noticed it. “Their relationship was more intense than a marriage,” said Barbara. “I think they were both turned on intellectually more than either had ever been before. It was as if they were both waiting for it.” Danny sensed that his wife felt some jealousy; Amos actually praised Barbara, behind her back, for dealing so gracefully with the intrusion on their marriage. “Just to be with him,” said Danny. “I never felt that way with anyone else, really. You are in love and things. But I was rapt. And that’s what it was like. It was truly extraordinary.”
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The distinction between judgment and decision making appeared as fuzzy as the distinction between judgment and prediction. But to Amos, as to other mathematical psychologists, they were distinct fields of inquiry. A person making a judgment was assigning odds. How likely is it that that guy will be a good NBA player? How risky is that triple-A-rated subprime mortgage–backed CDO? Is the shadow on the X-ray cancer? Not every judgment is followed by a decision, but every decision implies some judgment. The field of decision making explored what people did after they had formed some judgment—after they knew the odds, or thought they knew the odds, or perhaps had judged the odds unknowable. Do I pick that player? Do I buy that CDO? Surgery or chemotherapy? It sought to understand how people acted when faced with risky options.
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But to Danny the reason seemed obvious: regret. In the first situation people sensed that they would look back on their decision, if it turned out badly, and feel they had screwed up; in the second situation, not so much. Anyone who turned down a certain gift of $5 million would experience far more regret, if he wound up with nothing, than a person who turned down a gamble in which he stood a slight chance of winning $5 million. If people mostly chose option 1, it was because they sensed the special pain they would experience if they chose option 2 and won nothing. Avoiding that pain became a line item on the inner calculation of their expected utility. Regret was the ham in the back of the deli that caused people to switch from turkey to roast beef.
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Happy people did not dwell on some imagined unhappiness the way unhappy people imagined what they might have done differently so that they might be happy. People did not seek to avoid other emotions with the same energy they sought to avoid regret. When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret. As the starting point for a new theory, it sounded promising. When people asked Amos how he made the big decisions in his life, he often told them that his strategy was to imagine what he would come to regret, after he had chosen some option, and to choose the option that would make him feel the least regret.
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Once, at a dinner with Amos and their wives, Danny went on at length and with great certainty about his premonition that his son, then still a boy, would one day join the Israeli military; that war would break out; and that his son would be killed. “What were the odds of all that happening?” said Barbara Tversky. “Minuscule. But I couldn’t talk him out of it. It was so unpleasant talking with him about these small probabilities that I just gave up.” It was as if Danny thought that by anticipating his feelings he might dull the pain they would inevitably bring.
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Weirdly—but as Danny and Amos had suspected—the further the winning number was from the number on a person’s lottery ticket, the less regret they felt. “In defiance of logic, there is a definite sense that one comes closer to winning the lottery when one’s ticket number is similar to the number that won,” Danny wrote in a memo to Amos, summarizing their data. In another memo, he added that “the general point is that the same state of affairs (objectively) can be experienced with very different degrees of misery,” depending on how easy it is to imagine that things might have turned out differently.
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Amos and Danny had a thought: People regretted what they had done, and what they wished they hadn’t done, far more than what they had not done and perhaps should have. “The pain that is experienced when the loss is caused by an act that modified the status quo is significantly greater than the pain that is experienced when the decision led to the retention of the status quo,” Danny wrote in a memo to Amos. “When one fails to take action that could have avoided a disaster, one does not accept responsibility for the occurrence of the disaster.”
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They set out to build a theory of regret. They were uncovering, or thought they were uncovering, what amounted to the rules of regret. One rule was that the emotion was closely linked to the feeling of “coming close” and failing. The nearer you came to achieving a thing, the greater the regret you experienced if you failed to achieve it.† A second rule: Regret was closely linked to feelings of responsibility. The more control you felt you had over the outcome of a gamble, the greater the regret you experienced if the gamble turned out badly. People anticipated regret in Allais’s problem not from the failure to win a gamble but from the decision to forgo a certain pile of money.
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They were “risk averse.” But what was this thing that everyone had been calling “risk aversion?” It amounted to a fee that people paid, willingly, to avoid regret: a regret premium.
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When choosing between sure things and gambles, people’s desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure gain.
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For most people, the happiness involved in receiving a desirable object is smaller than the unhappiness involved in losing the same object.”
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As they sorted through the implications of their new discovery, one thing was instantly clear: Regret had to go, at least as a theory. It might explain why people made seemingly irrational decisions to accept a sure thing over a gamble with a far greater expected value. It could not explain why people facing losses became risk seeking. Anyone who wanted to argue that regret explains why people prefer a certain $500 to an equal chance to get $0 and $1,000 would never be able to explain why, if you simply subtracted $1,000 from all the numbers and turned the sure thing into a $500 loss, people would prefer the gamble.
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People’s emotional response to extremely long odds led them to reverse their usual taste for risk, and to become risk seeking when pursuing a long-shot gain and risk avoiding when faced with the extremely remote possibility of loss.
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The Asian Disease Problem was actually two problems, which they gave, separately, to two different groups of subjects innocent of the power of framing. The first group got this problem: Problem 1. Imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimate of the consequence of the programs is as follows: If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved. If Program B is adopted, there is a 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and a 2/3 probability that no people will be saved. Which of the two programs would you favor? An overwhelming majority chose Program A, and saved 200 lives with certainty. The second group got the same setup but with a choice between two other programs: If Program C is adopted, 400 people will die. If Program D is adopted, there is a 1/3 probability that nobody will die and a 2/3 probability that 600 people will die. When the choice was framed this way, an overwhelmingly majority chose Program D. The two problems were identical, but, in the first case, when the choice was framed as a gain, the subjects elected to save 200 people for sure (which meant that 400 people would die for sure, though the subjects weren’t thinking of it that way). In the second case, with the choice framed as a loss, they did the reverse, and ran the risk that they’d kill everyone. People did not choose between things. They chose between descriptions of things.
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Thaler got someone to send him a draft of “Value Theory.” He instantly saw it for what it was, a truck packed with psychology that might be driven into inner sanctums of economics and exploded.
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Amos, to be Amos, needed opposition. Without it he had nothing to triumph over. And Amos, like his homeland, lived in a state of readiness for battle. “Amos didn’t have Danny’s feeling that we should all think together and work together,” said Walter Mischel, who had been the chair of Stanford’s Psychology Department when it hired Amos. “He thought, ‘Fuck You.’”
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“Amos changed,” said Danny. “When I gave him an idea he would look for what was good in it. For what was right with it. That, for me, was the happiness in the collaboration. He understood me better than I understood myself. He stopped doing that.”
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“Prospect Theory,” scarcely cited in the first decade after its publication, would become, by 2010, the second most cited paper in all of economics. “People tried to ignore it,” said Thaler. “Old economists never change their minds.” By 2016 every tenth paper published in economics would have a behavioral angle to it, which is to say it had at least a whisper of the work of Danny and Amos.
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A paper Thaler had titled in his mind “Stupid Shit That People Do” he’d finally published as “Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice.”
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In May Amos gave his final lecture at Stanford, about the many statistical fallacies in professional basketball. His former graduate student and collaborator Craig Fox asked Amos if he would like for it to be videotaped. “He thought about it and said, ‘No, I don’t think so,’” recalled Fox. With one exception, Amos didn’t change his routine, or even his interactions with those around him, in any way. The exception was that, for the first time, he spoke of his experience of war. For instance, he told Varda Liberman the story of how he had saved the life of the soldier who had fainted on top of the Bangalore mine. “He said this one event in a way kind of shaped his entire life,” said Liberman. “He said, ‘Once I did that, I felt obliged to keep this image of hero. I did that, now I have to live up to it.’”
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Most people with whom Amos interacted never even suspected he was ill. To a graduate student who asked if he would supervise his dissertation, Amos simply said, “I’m going to be very busy the next few years,” and sent him on his way.
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But because he was Danny, he made a rule about his fantasy life: He never fantasized about something that might happen. He established this private rule for his imagination once he realized that, after he had fantasized about something that might actually happen, he lost his drive to make it happen. His fantasies were so vivid that “it was as if you actually had it,” and if you actually had it, why would you bother to work hard to get it? He’d never end the war that killed his father, so what did it matter if he created an elaborate scenario in which he won it single-handedly?
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There was—to take just one example—the time that Tel Aviv University threw a party for a physicist who had just won the Wolf Prize. It was the discipline’s second-highest honor, and its winners more often than not went on to win the Nobel. Most of the leading physicists in the country came to the party, but somehow the prizewinner ended up in the corner with Amos—who had recently taken an interest in black holes. The next day the prizewinner called his hosts to ask, “Who was that physicist I was talking to? He never told me his name.” After some confusing back-and-forth, his hosts figured out that the man meant Amos, and they told him that Amos wasn’t a physicist but a psychologist. “It’s not possible,” the physicist said, “he was the smartest of all the physicists.”
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When they sat down to write they nearly merged, physically, into a single form, in a way that the few people who happened to catch a glimpse of them found odd. “They wrote together sitting right next to each other at the typewriter,” recalls Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett. “I cannot imagine. It would be like having someone else brush my teeth for me.” The way Danny put it was, “We were sharing a mind.”
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group. “Our thesis,” they wrote, “is that, in many situations, an event A is judged to be more probable than an event B whenever A appears more representative than B.” The more the basketball player resembles your mental model of an NBA player, the more likely you will think him to be an NBA player.
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“Our thesis,” they wrote, “is that, in many situations, an event A is judged to be more probable than an event B whenever A appears more representative than B.” The more the basketball player resembles your mental model of an NBA player, the more likely you will think him to be an NBA player.
After the trip, Fischhoff went back and asked the same people to recall the odds they had assigned to each outcome. Their memories of the odds they had assigned to various outcomes were badly distorted. They all believed that they had assigned higher probabilities to what happened than they actually had. They greatly overestimated the odds that they had assigned to what had actually happened. That is, once they knew the outcome, they thought it had been far more predictable than they had found it to be before, when they had tried to predict it. A few years after Amos described the work to his Buffalo audience, Fischhoff named the phenomenon “hindsight bias.”†
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Amos and Danny had a thought: People regretted what they had done, and what they wished they hadn’t done, far more than what they had not done and perhaps should have. “The pain that is experienced when the loss is caused by an act that modified the status quo is significantly greater than the pain that is experienced when the decision led to the retention of the status quo,” Danny wrote in a memo to Amos. “When one fails to take action that could have avoided a disaster, one does not accept responsibility for the occurrence of the disaster.”
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In May Amos gave his final lecture at Stanford, about the many statistical fallacies in professional basketball. His former graduate student and collaborator Craig Fox asked Amos if he would like for it to be videotaped. “He thought about it and said, ‘No, I don’t think so,’” recalled Fox. With one exception, Amos didn’t change his routine, or even his interactions with those around him, in any way. The exception was that, for the first time, he spoke of his experience of war. For instance, he told Varda Liberman the story of how he had saved the life of the soldier who had fainted on top of the Bangalore mine. “He said this one event in a way kind of shaped his entire life,” said Liberman. “He said, ‘Once I did that, I felt obliged to keep this image of hero. I did that, now I have to live up to it.’”
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I stared at Bury, swallowed my saliva, and ventured after a bit to ask if he had had a hard flight. Bury, bent over his plate in frowning absorption, could not hear me. In those days we flew open ships and thrust our heads out round the windshield, in bad weather, to take our bearings: the wind that whistled in our ears was a long time clearing out of our heads. Finally Bury looked up, seemed to understand me, to think back to what I was referring to, and suddenly he gave a bright laugh. This brief burst of laughter, from a man who laughed little, startled me. For a moment his weary being was bright with it. But he spoke no word, lowered his head, and went on chewing in silence. And in that dismal restaurant, surrounded by the simple government clerks who sat there repairing the wear and tear of their humble daily tasks, my broad-shouldered messmate seemed to me strangely noble; beneath his rough hide I could discern the angel who had vanquished the dragon.
Guillaumet exuded confidence the way a lamp gives off light. He was himself later on to break the record for postal crossings in the Andes and the South Atlantic. On this night, sitting in his shirtsleeves, his arms folded in the lamplight, smiling the most heartening of smiles, he said to me simply: “You’ll be bothered from time to time by storms, fog, snow. When you are, think of those who went through it before you, and say to yourself, ‘What they could do, I can do.’” I spread out my maps and asked him hesitantly if he would mind going over the hop with me. And there, bent over in the lamplight, shoulder to shoulder with the veteran, I felt a sort of schoolboy peace.
Nor were they receiving any of those messages now being despatched to me by the night. For this snowstorm that was gathering, and that was to burden my first flight, concerned my frail flesh, not theirs. What could they know of those stars that one by one were going out? I alone was in the confidence of the stars. To me alone news was being sent of the enemy’s position before the hour of battle. My footfall rang in a universe that was not theirs.
“Lécrivain didn’t land at Casablanca last night.” “Ah!” said the inspector. “Ah?” Torn from his dream he made an effort to wake up, to display his zeal, and added: “Is that so? Couldn’t he get through? Did he come back?” And in the dead darkness of the omnibus the answer came: “No.” We waited to hear the rest, but no word sounded. And as the seconds fell it became more and more evident that that “no” would be followed by no further word, was eternal and without appeal, that Lécrivain not only had not landed at Casablanca but would never again land anywhere.
You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.
For the most part the flights were without incident. Like sea-divers, we sank peacefully into the depths of our element. Flying, in general, seemed to us easy. When the skies are filled with black vapors, when fog and sand and sea are confounded in a brew in which they become indistinguishable, when gleaming flashes wheel treacherously in these skyey swamps, the pilot purges himself of the phantoms at a single stroke. He lights his lamps. He brings sanity into his house as into a lonely cottage on a fearsome heath. And the crew travel a sort of submarine route in a lighted chamber.
Out of doors the mountains are immersed in tenebrous darkness; but they are no longer mountains, they are invisible powers whose approach must be computed. The operator sits in the light of his lamp, dutifully setting down figures; the mechanic ticks off points on his chart; the pilot swerves in response to the drift of the mountains as quickly as he sees that the summits he intends to pass on the left have deployed straight ahead of him in a silence and secrecy as of military preparations. And below on the ground the watchful radio men in their shacks take down submissively in their notebooks the dictation of their comrade in the air: “12:40 a.m. En route 230. All well.”
“You mean the kitsen?” he said. “They’re a Superiority race with secondary citizenship. Oh! You’ll find this amusing. I just translated the name of their ship. In their language, it roughly means, ‘Big Enough to Kill You.’
"Just drive," I said. He grimaced and did. After a few miles he asked, "You think this is going to work? This peaceful summit thing?" "Sure," I said. After a second, I added, "Probably." "Probably?" "Maybe," I said. "We’re down to maybe now?" I shrugged. "We’ll see."
Updated: Sep 24, 2022
"If the problem was simple and easy, it wouldn’t require wizards to fix it," I said. "The impossible we do immediately. The unimaginable takes a little while."
"If the problem was simple and easy, it wouldn’t require wizards to fix it," I said. "The impossible we do immediately. The unimaginable takes a little while."
To my wife, Kristi, who is far too practical to have suggested I quit my job to write and far too wise to keep repeating for five years, “Let’s not have a backup plan.” Yet she did.
Ferkudi loved lists, all lists. When the palace chatelaine had shown him her immaculately organized ledgers, the look on his face had been a baggage train of astonishment, then disbelief, then rapture, and finally utter infatuation for the bespectacled sexagenarian and her perfect figures.
Big Leo held his gaze until Kip’s grin collapsed, then said, “Andross and Gavin couldn’t have done what you did—because they’re men invested in their own greatness. It makes them small next to you. Breaker, you didn’t get this far by being like anyone else. So. If the Lightbringer’s a man unmirrored, why the hell do you keep trying to be a mirror?”
“Trainer Tzeddig pointed after you, where the physickers were carrying you, and—” Samite’s voice cracked with sudden emotion. She cleared her throat, but her eyes brimmed. “And she said, ‘That girl Karris has all of two muscles to rub together, and she wants to be here with you so bad she’s literally pissing them down her leg. She is working harder than anyone here. That goddam slip of a girl is working herself to death. Aghilas, do you know how good you could be if you worked half that hard? I don’t, and I don’t think you ever will, either. Last week we rigged the race so you couldn’t do better than second—and you gave up and didn’t finish in the top ten. You haven’t stopped complaining since. You know who’s never complained?’” Samite shook her head, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Orholam’s stones, I remember it like it was yesterday. That woman was magnificent when she was chewing our asses.” Karris was barely holding back tears herself. “Tzeddig said, ‘That little girl will run through a brick wall for you. You give her a goal and death itself won’t keep it from her. For years now I’ve trained the best fighters in the world, and I tell you that you haven’t seen a person until you’ve seen how hard they’ll push themselves and what they do after they reach their end and fail. So you tell me, when you go to war—and you will, may Orholam grant that it’s merely a metaphorical one—but when you go to war, who do you want beside you?’ And I tell you what, Karris, you weren’t there, and Aghilas was. And a lot of us were afraid of him, and we knew we’d have to spar him that afternoon, and the next day, and the next, but almost everyone in the cohort chose you anyway.”
“Anyway, that day changed my life. That was the day I stopped hating you. I realized that if you could get in on sheer grit, I could, too. So that day you kind of became my role model, and uh, you’ve never stopped. So when I lost my hand, I had this little moment where I thought my life was over and I’d have to retire. It’d kill me, you know? This work is everything for me. But then I thought, ‘How can I quit now? I’m not pissing my muscles down my leg yet.’”
“How many second chances does a man get? I would’ve said one, and that then he deserves everything he gets and worse. But you give Conn Arthur a third chance—and it feels right. You confuse me, and I can’t tell if things work out for you because different rules apply to you, or if you’re just the only person I know brave enough to try them.”
Kip met her gaze. “I want to lead as well as you all deserve, and I’m afraid I won’t.” Her eyes widened briefly at his honesty, and he could see her tuck that away to share it with others later. They would love him more for it, he knew, but that hadn’t been why he said it. Somewhere, oddly, he’d displaced some essential part of his fear. He wasn’t, perhaps, fully the man they thought he was, but neither was he a fraud.
He joined the fire of some river sailors and longshoremen and asked a question about some intricate knot a man was using. When he didn’t understand the answer about why a particular fiber was good for a task, he asked again, and then a follow-up; he dared to do so now because he wasn’t afraid of looking stupid. Even if he would never understand the things these men understood easily, it was no essential threat to him. He did other things well. He didn’t have to be good at everything. Strangely, that lack of fear of failure made failures infrequent.
Patience against Wrath, Abstinence against Gluttony, Liberality against Greed, Diligence against Sloth, Chastity against Lust, Kindness against Envy, and Humility against Pride.
“You think they cheered only because you carried me?” this phantasm of Tremblefist said. “Do you not remember your own wounds?” No. He hadn’t been harmed, had he? Hanishu had taken all the brunt of the Tiru fans’ rage. And then he remembered the blood. He’d taken blows in the face, a broken nose, a sliced forehead. Two or three broken ribs. He’d forgotten those. By the time he’d crossed the finish line, he and Hanishu had been a gory mess together. “I begged you to quit. I knew my wounds were temporary, but I was afraid you would die. You said, ‘I don’t know quit.’”
How could he be daunted? He could give no more than everything in him, and that was exactly what he planned to do.
And now he saw something of that same beauty in himself, an image of the divine. Here was Dazen Guile through the eyes of charity. And as unwilling tears flooded his eyes, he realized that—wonder of wonders!—he was glorious. Beneath all he’d despised, there had been someone worthy of love here all along. His eyes had simply been too clouded to be able to see it.
Marissia said, “Every one of these thousands you see here: every gunner, soldier, and sailor has told me some variation of the same thing: ‘When I needed help most, Gavin Guile stood for me. How could I not stand for him now?’”
What I want in my life is compassion, a flow between myself and others based on a mutual giving from the heart. —Marshall B. Rosenberg, PhD
Believing that it is our nature to enjoy giving and receiving in a compassionate manner, I have been preoccupied most of my life with two questions: What happens to disconnect us from our compassionate nature, leading us to behave violently and exploitatively? And conversely, what allows some people to stay connected to their compassionate nature under even the most trying circumstances?
I am not easily frightened. Not because I am brave but because I know that I am dealing with human beings, and that I must try as hard as I can to understand everything that anyone ever does. And that was the real import of this morning: not that a disgruntled young Gestapo officer yelled at me, but that I felt no indignation, rather a real compassion, and would have liked to ask, ‘Did you have a very unhappy childhood, has your girlfriend let you down?’ Yes, he looked harassed and driven, sullen and weak. I should have liked to start treating him there and then, for I know that pitiful young men like that are dangerous as soon as they are let loose on mankind. —Etty Hillesum in Etty: A Diary 1941–1943
I have since identified a specific approach to communicating—both speaking and listening—that leads us to give from the heart, connecting us with ourselves and with each other in a way that allows our natural compassion to flourish. I call this approach Nonviolent Communication, using the term nonviolence as Gandhi used it—to refer to our natural state of compassion when violence has subsided from the heart.
We perceive relationships in a new light when we use NVC to hear our own deeper needs and those of others.
On a deeper level, it is an ongoing reminder to keep our attention focused on a place where we are more likely to get what we are seeking.
I find that my cultural conditioning leads me to focus attention on places where I am unlikely to get what I want. I developed NVC as a way to train my attention—to shine the light of consciousness—on places that have the potential to yield what I am seeking. What I want in my life is compassion, a flow between myself and others based on a mutual giving from the heart.
I never feel more given to than when you take from me— when you understand the joy I feel giving to you. And you know my giving isn’t done to put you in my debt, but because I want to live the love I feel for you. To receive with grace may be the greatest giving. There’s no way I can separate the two. When you give to me, I give you my receiving. When you take from me, I feel so given to. —“Given To” (1978) by Ruth Bebermeyer from the album Given To
When we give from the heart, we do so out of the joy that springs forth whenever we willingly enrich another person’s life. This kind of giving benefits both the giver and the receiver. The receiver enjoys the gift without worrying about the consequences that accompany gifts given out of fear, guilt, shame, or desire for gain. The giver benefits from the enhanced self-esteem that results when we see our efforts contributing to someone’s well-being.
First, we observe what is actually happening in a situation: what are we observing others saying or doing that is either enriching or not enriching our life? The trick is to be able to articulate this observation without introducing any judgment or evaluation—to simply say what people are doing that we either like or don’t like. Next, we state how we feel when we observe this action: are we hurt, scared, joyful, amused, irritated? And thirdly, we say what needs of ours are connected to the feelings we have identified. An awareness of these three components is present when we use NVC to clearly and honestly express how we are.
For example, a mother might express these three pieces to her teenage son by saying, “Felix, when I see two balls of soiled socks under the coffee table and another three next to the TV, I feel irritated because I am needing more order in the rooms that we share in common.” She would follow immediately with the fourth component—a very specific request: “Would you be willing to put your socks in your room or in the washing machine?” This fourth component addresses what we are wanting from the other person that would enrich our lives or make life more wonderful for us. Thus, part of NVC is to express these four pieces of information very clearly, whether verbally or by other means. The other part of this communication consists of receiving the same four pieces of information from others. We connect with them by first sensing what they are observing, feeling, and needing; then we discover what would enrich their lives by receiving the fourth piece—their request. As we keep our attention focused on the areas mentioned, and help others do likewise, we establish a flow of communication, back and forth, until compassion manifests naturally:
NVC Process The concrete actions we observe that affect our well-being How we feel in relation to what we observe The needs, values, desires, etc. that create our feelings The concrete actions we request in order to enrich our lives
The Sufi poet Rumi once wrote, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Life-alienating communication, however, traps us in a world of ideas about rightness and wrongness—a world of judgments. It is a language rich with words that classify and dichotomize people and their actions. When we speak this language, we judge others and their behavior while preoccupying ourselves with who’s good, bad, normal, abnormal, responsible, irresponsible, smart, ignorant, etc.
When I encountered people or behaviors I either didn’t like or didn’t understand, I would react in terms of their wrongness. If my teachers assigned a task I didn’t want to do, they were “mean” or “unreasonable.” If someone pulled out in front of me in traffic, my reaction would be, “You idiot!” When we speak this language, we think and communicate in terms of what’s wrong with others for behaving in certain ways or, occasionally, what’s wrong with ourselves for not understanding or responding as we would like. Our attention is focused on classifying, analyzing, and determining levels of wrongness rather than on what we and others need and are not getting. Thus if my partner wants more affection than I’m giving her, she is “needy and dependent.” But if I want more affection than she is giving me, then she is “aloof and insensitive.”
It is my belief that all such analyses of other human beings are tragic expressions of our own values and needs. They are tragic because when we express our values and needs in this form, we increase defensiveness and resistance among the very people whose behaviors are of concern to us. Or, if people do agree to act in harmony with our values, they will likely do so out of fear, guilt, or shame because they concur with our analysis of their wrongness.
It is important here not to confuse value judgments and moralistic judgments. All of us make value judgments as to the qualities we value in life; for example, we might value honesty, freedom, or peace. Value judgments reflect our beliefs of how life can best be served. We make moralistic judgments of people and behaviors that fail to support our value judgments; for example, “Violence is bad. People who kill others are evil.” Had we been raised speaking a language that facilitated the expression of compassion, we would have learned to articulate our needs and values directly, rather than to insinuate wrongness when they have not been met. For example, instead of “Violence is bad,” we might say instead, “I am fearful of the use of violence to resolve conflicts; I value the resolution of human conflicts through other means.”
It does not surprise me to hear that there is considerably less violence in cultures where people think in terms of human needs than in cultures where people label one another as “good” or “bad” and believe that the “bad” ones deserve to be punished.
We deny responsibility for our actions when we attribute their cause to factors outside ourselves:
We can replace language that implies lack of choice with language that acknowledges choice.
Communicating our desires as demands is yet another form of language that blocks compassion. A demand explicitly or implicitly threatens listeners with blame or punishment if they fail to comply. It is a common form of communication in our culture, especially among those who hold positions of authority.
The concept that certain actions merit reward while others merit punishment is also associated with life-alienating communication. This thinking is expressed by the word deserve as in “He deserves to be punished for what he did.” It assumes “badness” on the part of people who behave in certain ways, and it calls for punishment to make them repent and change their behavior. I believe it is in everyone’s interest that people change, not in order to avoid punishment, but because they see the change as benefiting themselves. Thinking based on “who deserves what” blocks compassionate communication.
The language of wrongness, should, and have to is perfectly suited for this purpose: the more people are trained to think in terms of moralistic judgments that imply wrongness and badness, the more they are being trained to look outside themselves—to outside authorities—for the definition of what constitutes right, wrong, good, and bad. When we are in contact with our feelings and needs, we humans no longer make good slaves and underlings.
It is our nature to enjoy giving and receiving compassionately. We have, however, learned many forms of life-alienating communication that lead us to speak and behave in ways that injure others and ourselves. One form of life-alienating communication is the use of moralistic judgments that imply wrongness or badness on the part of those who don’t act in harmony with our values. Another is the use of comparisons, which can block compassion both for others and for ourselves. Life-alienating communication also obscures our awareness that we are each responsible for our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. Communicating our desires in the form of demands is yet another characteristic of language that blocks compassion.
The Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti once remarked that observing without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence.
Communication Example of observation with evaluation mixed in Example of observation separate from evaluation 1. Use of verb to be without indication that the evaluator takes responsibility for the evaluation You are too generous. When I see you give all your lunch money to others, I think you are being too generous. 2. Use of verbs with evaluative connotations Doug procrastinates. Doug only studies for exams the night before. 3. Implication that one’s inferences about another person’s thoughts, feelings, intentions, or desires are the only ones possible She won’t get her work in. I don’t think she’ll get her work in. or She said, “I won’t get my work in.” 4. Confusion of prediction with certainty If you don’t eat balanced meals, your health will be impaired. If you don’t eat balanced meals, I fear your health may be impaired. 5. Failure to be specific about referents Immigrants don’t take care of their property. I have not seen the immigrant family living at 1679 Ross shovel the snow on their sidewalk. 6. Use of words denoting ability without indicating that an evaluation is being made Hank Smith is a poor soccer player. Hank Smith has not scored a goal in twenty games. 7. Use of adverbs and adjectives in ways that do not indicate an evaluation has been made Jim is ugly. Jim’s looks don’t appeal to me.
The first component of NVC entails the separation of observation from evaluation. When we combine observation with evaluation, others are apt to hear criticism and resist what we are saying. NVC is a process language that discourages static generalizations. Instead, observations are to be made specific to time and context, for example, “Hank Smith has not scored a goal in twenty games,” rather than “Hank Smith is a poor soccer player.”
NVC in Action “The Most Arrogant Speaker We’ve Ever Had!” This dialogue occurred during a workshop I was conducting. About half an hour into my presentation, I paused to invite reactions from the participants. One of them raised a hand and declared, “You’re the most arrogant speaker we’ve ever had!” I have several options open to me when people address me this way. One option is to take the message personally; I know I’m doing this when I have a strong urge to either grovel, defend myself, or make excuses. Another option (for which I am well-rehearsed) is to attack the other person for what I perceive as their attack upon me. On this occasion, I chose a third option by focusing on what might be going on behind the man’s statement. MBR: (guessing at the observations being made) Are you reacting to my having taken thirty straight minutes to present my views before giving you a chance to talk? Phil: No, you make it sound so simple. MBR: (trying to obtain further clarification) Are you reacting to my not having said anything about how the process can be difficult for some people to apply? Phil: No, not some people—you! MBR: So you’re reacting to my not having said that the process can be difficult for me at times? Phil: That’s right. MBR: Are you feeling annoyed because you would have liked some sign from me that indicated that I have some problems with the process myself? Phil: (after a moment’s pause) That’s right. MBR: (feeling more relaxed now that I am in touch with the person’s feeling and need, I direct my attention to what he might be requesting of me) Would you like me to admit right now that this process can be a struggle for me to apply? Phil: Yes. MBR: (having gotten clear on his observation, feeling, need, and request, I check inside myself to see if I am willing to do as he requests) Yes, this process is often difficult for me. As we continue with the workshop, you’ll probably hear me describe several incidents where I’ve struggled … or completely lost touch … with this process, this consciousness, that I am presenting here to you. But what keeps me in the struggle are the close connections to other people that happen when I do stay with the process.
The first component of NVC is to observe without evaluating; the second component is to express how we are feeling. Psychoanalyst Rollo May suggests that “the mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones as in the different passages of music in a symphony.” For many of us, however, our feelings are, as May would describe it, “limited like notes in a bugle call.”
I went through twenty-one years of American schools and can’t recall anyone in all that time ever asking me how I felt. Feelings were simply not considered important. What was valued was “the right way to think”—as defined by those who held positions of rank and authority. We are trained to be “other-directed” rather than to be in contact with ourselves. We learn to be “up in our head,” wondering, “What is it that others think is right for me to say and do?”
Assuming the voice of an administrator in a role-playing session, I opened with, “I’m feeling frightened to be bringing up this issue.” I chose to start this way because I sensed how frightened the administrators were as they prepared to confront the physicians on this topic again. Before I could continue, one of the administrators stopped me to protest, “You’re being unrealistic! We could never tell the physicians that we were frightened.” When I asked why an admission of fear seemed so impossible, he replied without hesitation, “If we admitted we’re frightened, then they would just pick us to pieces!” His answer didn’t surprise me; I have often heard people say they cannot imagine ever expressing feelings at their workplace.
“Good morning!” I greeted. Silence. I felt very uncomfortable, but was afraid to express it. Instead, I proceeded in my most professional manner: “For this class, we will be studying a process of communication that I hope you will find helpful in your relationships at home and with your friends.” I continued to present information about NVC, but no one seemed to be listening. One girl, rummaging through her bag, fished out a file and began vigorously filing her nails. Students near the windows glued their faces to the panes as if fascinated by what was going on in the street below. I felt increasingly more uncomfortable, yet continued to say nothing about it. Finally, a student who had certainly more courage than I was demonstrating, piped up, “You just hate being with black people, don’t you?” I was stunned, yet immediately realized how I had contributed to this student’s perception by trying to hide my discomfort. “I am feeling nervous,” I admitted, “but not because you are black. My feelings have to do with my not knowing anyone here and wanting to be accepted when I came in the room.” My expression of vulnerability had a pronounced effect on the students. They started to ask questions about me, to tell me things about themselves, and to express curiosity about NVC.
A common confusion, generated by the English language, is our use of the word feel without actually expressing a feeling. For example, in the sentence, “I feel I didn’t get a fair deal,” the words I feel could be more accurately replaced with I think.
Conversely, in the English language, it is not necessary to use the word feel at all when we are actually expressing a feeling: we can say, “I’m feeling irritated,” or simply, “I’m irritated.”
Note the difference between the following expressions of disappointment: Example 1 A: “You disappointed me by not coming over last evening.” B: “I was disappointed when you didn’t come over, because I wanted to talk over some things that were bothering me.” Speaker A attributes responsibility for his disappointment solely to another person’s action. Speaker B traces his feeling of disappointment to his own unfulfilled desire.
As we shall see, the more we are able to connect our feelings to our own needs, the easier it is for others to respond compassionately.
The basic mechanism of motivating by guilt is to attribute the responsibility for one’s own feelings to others. When parents say, “It hurts Mommy and Daddy when you get poor grades at school,” they are implying that the child’s actions are the cause of the parents’ happiness or unhappiness.
Unfortunately, most of us have never been taught to think in terms of needs. We are accustomed to thinking about what’s wrong with other people when our needs aren’t being fulfilled. Thus, if we want coats to be hung up in the closet, we may characterize our children as lazy for leaving them on the couch. Or we may interpret our co-workers as irresponsible when they don’t go about their tasks the way we would prefer them to.
It has been my experience over and over again that from the moment people begin talking about what they need rather than what’s wrong with one another, the possibility of finding ways to meet everybody’s needs is greatly increased.
In our development toward a state of emotional liberation, most of us experience three stages in the way we relate to others. Stage 1: In this stage, which I refer to as emotional slavery, we believe ourselves responsible for the feelings of others. We think we must constantly strive to keep everyone happy. If they don’t appear happy, we feel responsible and compelled to do something about it. This can easily lead us to see the very people who are closest to us as burdens. Taking responsibility for the feelings of others can be very detrimental to intimate relationships.
This response is common among those who experience love as denial of one’s own needs in order to attend to the needs of the beloved.
Stage 2: In this stage, we become aware of the high costs of assuming responsibility for others’ feelings and trying to accommodate them at our own expense. When we notice how much of our lives we’ve missed and how little we have responded to the call of our own soul, we may get angry. I refer jokingly to this stage as the obnoxious stage because we tend toward obnoxious comments like, “That’s your problem! I’m not responsible for your feelings!” when presented with another person’s pain. We are clear what we are not responsible for, but have yet to learn how to be responsible to others in a way that is not emotionally enslaving.
For example, during a break in one of my workshops, a young woman expressed appreciation for the insights she’d gained into her own state of emotional enslavement. When the workshop resumed, I suggested an activity to the group. The same young woman then declared assertively, “I’d rather do something else.” I sensed she was exercising her newfound right to express her needs—even if they ran counter to those of others. To encourage her to sort out what she wanted, I asked, “Do you want to do something else even if it conflicts with my needs?” She thought for a moment, and then stammered, “Yes…. er … I mean, no.” Her confusion reflects how, in the obnoxious stage, we have yet to grasp that emotional liberation entails more than simply asserting our own needs.
Stage 3: At the third stage, emotional liberation, we respond to the needs of others out of compassion, never out of fear, guilt, or shame. Our actions are therefore fulfilling to us, as well as to those who receive our efforts. We accept full responsibility for our own intentions and actions, but not for the feelings of others. At this stage, we are aware that we can never meet our own needs at the expense of others. Emotional liberation involves stating clearly what we need in a way that communicates we are equally concerned that the needs of others be fulfilled.
Making requests in clear, positive, concrete action language reveals what we really want.
My theory is that we get depressed because we’re not getting what we want, and we’re not getting what we want because we have never been taught to get what we want. Instead, we’ve been taught to be good little boys and girls and good mothers and fathers. If we’re going to be one of those good things, better get used to being depressed. Depression is the reward we get for being “good.” But, if you want to feel better, I’d like you to clarify what you would like people to do to make life more wonderful for you.
When we simply express our feelings, it may not be clear to the listener what we want them to do.
Requests may sound like demands when unaccompanied by the speaker’s feelings and needs.
My belief is that, whenever we say something to another person, we are requesting something in return. It may simply be an empathic connection—a verbal or nonverbal acknowledgment, as with the man on the train, that our words have been understood. Or we may be requesting honesty: we wish to know the listener’s honest reaction to our words. Or we may be requesting an action that we hope would fulfill our needs. The clearer we are on what we want back from the other person, the more likely it is that our needs will be met.
To make sure the message we sent is the message that’s received, ask the listener to reflect it back.
Sometimes we’d like to know the feelings that are stimulated by what we said, and the reasons for those feelings. We might request this by asking, “I would like you to tell me how you feel about what I just said, and your reasons for feeling as you do.”
Sometimes we’d like to know something about our listener’s thoughts in response to what they just heard us say. At these times, it’s important to specify which thoughts we’d like them to share. For example, we might say, “I’d like you to tell me if you predict that my proposal would be successful, and if not, what you believe would prevent its success,” rather than simply saying, “I’d like you to tell me what you think about what I’ve said.”
Sometimes we’d like to know whether the person is willing to take certain actions that we’ve recommended. Such a request may sound like this: “I’d like you to tell me if you would be willing to postpone our meeting for one week.”
The use of NVC requires that we be conscious of the specific form of honesty we would like to receive, and to make that request for honesty in concrete language.
I then addressed the man who had initiated the discussion: “Can you tell me, when you brought up the newspaper article, what response you were wanting from the group?” “I thought it was interesting,” he replied. I explained that I was asking what response he wanted from the group, rather than what he thought about the article. He pondered awhile and then conceded, “I’m not sure what I wanted.” And that’s why, I believe, twenty minutes of the group’s valuable time had been squandered on fruitless discourse. When we address a group without being clear what we are wanting back, unproductive discussions will often follow. However, if even one member of a group is conscious of the importance of clearly requesting the response that is desired, he or she can extend this consciousness to the group. For example, when this particular speaker didn’t define what response he wanted, a member of the group might have said, “I’m confused about how you’d like us to respond to your story. Would you be willing to say what response you’d like from us?”
In a group, much time is wasted when speakers aren’t certain what response they’re wanting.
In India, when people have received the response they want in conversations they have initiated, they say “bas” (pronounced “bus”). This means, “You need not say more. I feel satisfied and am now ready to move on to something else.”
If we are prepared to show an empathic understanding of what prevents someone from doing as we asked, then by my definition, we have made a request, not a demand. Choosing to request rather than demand does not mean we give up when someone says no to our request. It does mean that we don’t engage in persuasion until we have empathized with what’s preventing the other person from saying yes.
The process is designed for those of us who would like others to change and respond, but only if they choose to do so willingly and compassionately. The objective of NVC is to establish a relationship based on honesty and empathy. When others trust that our primary commitment is to the quality of the relationship, and that we expect this process to fulfill everyone’s needs, then they can trust that our requests are true requests and not camouflaged demands.
Our objective is a relationship based on honesty and empathy. A consciousness of this objective is difficult to maintain, especially for parents, teachers, managers, and others whose work centers around influencing people and obtaining behavioral results.
Requests are received as demands when listeners believe that they will be blamed or punished if they do not comply. We can help others trust that we are requesting, not demanding, by indicating our desire for them to comply only if they can do so willingly. The objective of NVC is not to change people and their behavior in order to get our way; it is to establish relationships based on honesty and empathy that will eventually fulfill everyone’s needs.
The Chinese philosopher Chuang-Tzu stated that true empathy requires listening with the whole being: “The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty, to the ear, or to the mind. Hence it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right there before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind.”
Empathy with others occurs only when we have successfully shed all preconceived ideas and judgments about them. The Austrian-born Israeli philosopher Martin Buber describes this quality of presence that life demands of us: “In spite of all similarities, every living situation has, like a newborn child, a new face, that has never been before and will never come again. It demands of you a reaction that cannot be prepared beforehand. It demands nothing of what is past. It demands presence, responsibility; it demands you.”
“The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle,” asserts French philosopher Simone Weil. “Nearly all those who think they have the capacity do not possess it.” Instead of offering empathy, we tend instead to give advice or reassurance and to explain our own position or feeling. Empathy, on the other hand, requires us to focus full attention on the other person’s message.
My friend Holley Humphrey identified some common behaviors that prevent us from being sufficiently present to connect empathically with others. The following are examples: Advising: “I think you should … ” “How come you didn’t … ?” One-upping: “That’s nothing; wait’ll you hear what happened to me.” Educating: “This could turn into a very positive experience for you if you just … ” Consoling: “It wasn’t your fault; you did the best you could.” Story-telling: “That reminds me of the time … ” Shutting down: “Cheer up. Don’t feel so bad.” Sympathizing: “Oh, you poor thing … ” Interrogating: “When did this begin?” Explaining: “I would have called but … ” Correcting: “That’s not how it happened.”
Believing we have to “fix” situations and make others feel better prevents us from being present.
The key ingredient of empathy is presence: we are wholly present with the other party and what they are experiencing. This quality of presence distinguishes empathy from either mental understanding or sympathy.
In NVC, no matter what words people use to express themselves, we listen for their observations, feelings, needs, and requests.
Any more would”—he paused, considering his words—“would obviate certain options, and we ain’t big on that around here.” I thought about that for a moment. Then I said, “You just used obviate and ain’t in the same sentence.” “I got me one of them word-a-day calendars,” he said. “Don’t be obstreperous.”
Courage is about learning how to function despite the fear, to put aside your instincts to run or give in completely to the anger born from fear. Courage is about using your brain and your heart when every cell of your body is screaming at you to fight or flee—and then following through on what you believe is the right thing to do.
I folded my arms, glowered out at the night, and said, “I have literally killed people I liked better than you, Martin.” After another few moments, I asked, “Are we there yet?”
The man once wrote: Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. Tolkien had that one mostly right. I stepped forward, let the door bang closed, and snarled, “Fuck subtle.”
“They say you can know a man by his enemies, Dresden.” He smiled, and laughter lurked beneath his next words, never quite surfacing. “You defy beings that should cow you into silence. You resist forces that are inevitable for no more reason than that you believe they should be resisted. You bow your head to neither demons nor angels, and you put yourself in harm’s way to defend those who cannot defend themselves.” He nodded slowly. “I think I like you.”
Martin was alphabetizing my bookshelves. They used to kill men for sacrilege like that.
“Butters,” I said. “Look at me.” He did, his eyes wide. “Polka,” I said, “will never die.”
“I do not see how this helps us,” Sanya said, as I walked out from the little shop with four boxes of pizza. “You’re used to solving all your problems the simple way,” I said. “Kick down the door, chop up everybody who looks fiendish, save everyone who looks like they might need it. Yeah?” “It is not always that simple,” Sanya said, rather stiffly. “And sometimes I use a gun.” “Which I applaud you for, very progressive,” I said.
Sanya’s eyes danced, though his face was sober. “You are a drug dealer. To tiny faeries. Shame.”
Sanya stood looking steadily at me. I coughed. I waited. “So,” he said. “Mab.” I grunted vaguely in reply. “You hit that,” Sanya said.
I had expected him to try to talk me out of it. Or at least to berate me for being an idiot. He didn’t do either. There was a calm acceptance of terrible things that was part and parcel of Sanya’s personality. No matter how bad things got, I didn’t think anything would ever truly faze him. He simply accepted the bad things that happened and soldiered on as best he could.
I should have been feeling some of the strain by now, but I wasn’t. Go, go, Gadget Faustian bargain.
Susan screamed. I screamed. The vampire screamed. The Ick . . . did that teakettle thing. And then we all started trying to kill one another.
Susan went out first, to make sure there weren’t any problems with Lea, and everyone filed out after her, Sanya last. “Sanya,” I said. “Who did I get cast as?” “Sam,” Sanya said. I blinked at him. “Not . . . Oh, for crying out loud, it was perfectly obvious who I should have been.” Sanya shrugged. “It was no contest. They gave Gandalf to your godmother. You got Sam.” He started to leave and then paused. “Harry. You have read the books as well, yes?” “Sure,” I said. “Then you know that Sam was the true hero of the tale,” Sanya said. “That he faced far greater and more terrible foes than he ever should have had to face, and did so with courage. That he went alone into a black and terrible land, stormed a dark fortress, and resisted the most terrible temptation of his world for the sake of the friend he loved. That in the end, it was his actions and his actions alone that made it possible for light to overcome darkness.” I thought about that for a second. Then I said, “Oh.” He clapped me on the shoulder and left.
Susan arched an eyebrow and looked from me to my godmother. “You have no shame about it at all, do you?” “Shame, child, is for those who fail to live up to the ideal of what they believe they should be.” She waved her hand. “It was shame that drove me to my queen, to beseech her aid.” Her long, delicate fingers idly moved to the streaks of white in her otherwise flawless red tresses. “But she showed me the way back to myself, through exquisite pain, and now I am here to watch over my dear godson—and the rest of you, as long as it is quite convenient.” “Spooky death Sidhe lady,” Molly said. “Now upgraded to spooky, crazy death Sidhe lady.”
The Red King spoke. Alamaya listened and then said, “You do not speak the true tongue of the ages, wizard, so my lord will use this slave to ensure that understanding exists between us.” “Radical,” I said. “Wicked cool.”
I remembered as a kid, no matter how fucked up our life was, my mother always figured out a way to stock our damn cookie jar. She’d buy wafers and Oreos, Pepperidge Farm Milanos and Chips Ahoy!, and whenever she showed up with a new batch of cookies, she dumped them into one jar. With her permission we’d get to pick one or two out at a time. It was like a mini treasure hunt. I remember the joy of dropping my fist into that jar, wondering what I’d find, and before I crammed the cookie in my mouth I always took the time to admire it first, especially when we were broke in Brazil. I’d turn it around in my hand and say my own little prayer of thanks. The feeling of being that kid, locked in a moment of gratitude for a simple gift like a cookie, came back to me. I felt it viscerally, and I used that concept to stuff a new kind of Cookie Jar. Inside it were all my past victories. Like the time when I had to study three times as hard as anybody else during my senior year in high school just to graduate. That was a cookie. Or when I passed the ASVAB test as a senior and then again to get into BUD/S. Two more cookies. I remembered dropping over a hundred pounds in under three months, conquering my fear of water, graduating BUD/S at the top of my class, and being named Enlisted Honor Man in Army Ranger School (more on that soon). All those were cookies loaded with chocolate chunks.
Updated: Aug 29, 2021
Living with purpose changed everything for me—at least in the short term. During my senior year in high school, studying and working out gave my mind so much energy that hate flaked from my soul like used-up snakeskin. The resentment I held toward the racists in Brazil, the emotion that had dominated me and was burning me up inside, dissipated because I’d finally considered the fucking source. I looked at the people who were making me feel uncomfortable and realized how uncomfortable they were in their own skin. To make fun of or try to intimidate someone they didn’t even know based on race alone was a clear indication that something was very wrong with them, not me. But when you have no confidence it becomes easy to value other people’s opinions, and I was valuing everyone’s opinion without considering the minds that generated them. That sounds silly, but it’s an easy trap to fall into, especially when you are insecure on top of being the only. As soon as I made that connection, being upset with them was not worth my time. Because if I was gonna kick their ass in life, and I was, I had way too much shit to do. Each insult or dismissive gesture became more fuel for the engine revving inside me.
By the time I graduated, I knew that the confidence I’d managed to develop didn’t come from a perfect family or God-given talent. It came from personal accountability which brought me self-respect, and self-respect will always light a way forward.
I wanted to be big because being big hid David Goggins. I was able to tuck this 175-pound person into those twenty-one-inch biceps and that flabby belly. I grew a burly mustache and was intimidating to everyone who saw me, but inside I knew I was a pussy, and that’s a haunting feeling.
That’s when I first realized that not all physical and mental limitations are real, and that I had a habit of giving up way too soon. I also knew that it would take every ounce of courage and toughness I could muster to pull off the impossible. I was staring at hours, days, and weeks of nonstop suffering. I would have to push myself to the very edge of my mortality. I had to accept the very real possibility that I might die because this time I wouldn’t quit, no matter how fast my heart raced and no matter how much pain I was in.
When I was done, I’d swim a mile or two, then head to a pond near my mother’s home. Remember, this was Indiana—the American Midwest—in December. The trees were naked. Icicles hung like crystals from the eaves of houses and snow blanketed the earth in all directions, but the pond wasn’t completely frozen yet. I waded into the icy water, dressed in camo pants, a brown short sleeved T-shirt, and boots, laid back and looked into the gray sky. The hypothermic water washed over me, the pain was excruciating, and I fucking loved it. After a few minutes I got out and started running, water sloshing in my boots, sand in my underwear. Within seconds my T-shirt was frozen to my chest, my pants iced at the cuffs. I hit the Monon trail. Steam poured from my nose and mouth as I grunted and slalomed speed-walkers and joggers. Civilians. Their heads turned as I picked up speed and began sprinting, like Rocky in downtown Philly. I ran as fast as I could for as long as I could, from a past that no longer defined me, toward a future undetermined. All I knew was that there would be pain and there would be purpose.
"Follow me," he said as he charged up the beach. I caught up and we ran north for a good mile. By then we could barely see the boats and their bobbing lights through the mist and over the waves. "All right, Goggins. Now go swim out and find your fucking boat!" He’d landed a hollow point on my deepest insecurity, pierced my confidence, and I was stunned silent. I gave him a look that said, "Are you fucking kidding me?" I was a decent swimmer by then, and surf torture didn’t scare me because we weren’t that far from shore, but an open water, hypothermic swim a thousand yards off shore in a storm, to a boat that had no fucking idea I was heading their way? That sounded like a death sentence, and I hadn’t prepared for anything like it. But sometimes the unexpected descends like chaos, and without warning even the bravest among us must be ready to take on risks and tasks that seem beyond our capabilities. For me, in that moment, it came down to how I wanted to be remembered. I could have refused the order, and I wouldn’t have gotten in trouble because I had no swim buddy (in SEAL training you always have to be with a swim buddy), and it was obvious that he was asking me to do something that was extremely unsafe. But I also knew that my objective coming into SEAL training was more than making it through to the other side with a Trident. For me it was the opportunity to go up against the best of the best and distance myself from the pack. So even though I couldn’t see the boats out past the thrashing waves there was no time to dwell on fear. There was no choice to make at all. "What are you waiting on Goggins? Get your fucking ass out there, and do not fuck this up!" "Roger that!" I shouted and sprinted into the surf. Trouble was, strapped with a buoyancy vest, nursing a wounded knee, wearing boots, I could barely swim for shit and it was almost impossible to duck dive through the waves. I had to flail over the white wash, and with my mind managing so many variables, the ocean seemed colder than ever. I swallowed water by the gallon.
I remember my very first day in the gym back in Indiana. My palms were soft and quickly got torn up on the bars because they weren’t accustomed to gripping steel. But over time, after thousands of reps, my palms built up a thick callous as protection. The same principle works when it comes to mindset. Until you experience hardships like abuse and bullying, failures and disappointments, your mind will remain soft and exposed. Life experience, especially negative experiences, help callous the mind. But it’s up to you where that callous lines up. If you choose to see yourself as a victim of circumstance into adulthood, that callous will become resentment that protects you from the unfamiliar. It will make you too cautious and untrusting, and possibly too angry at the world. It will make you fearful of change and hard to reach, but not hard of mind. That’s where I was as a teenager, but after my second Hell Week, I’d become someone new. I’d fought through so many horrible situations by then and remained open and ready for more. My ability to stay open represented a willingness to fight for my own life, which allowed me to withstand hailstorms of pain and use it to callous over my victim’s mentality. That shit was gone, buried under layers of sweat and hard fucking flesh, and I was starting to callous over my fears too. That realization gave me the mental edge I needed to outlast Psycho Pete one more time. To show him he couldn’t hurt me anymore I smiled back, and the feeling of being on the edge of a blackout went away. Suddenly, I was energized. The pain faded and I felt like I could stay under all day. Psycho saw that in my eyes. I tied off the last knot at leisurely pace, glaring at him the whole time. He gestured with his hands for me to hurry up as his diaphragm contracted. I finally finished, he gave me a quick affirmative and kicked to the surface, desperate for a breath. I took my time, joined him topside and found him gasping, while I felt strangely relaxed. When the chips were down at the pool during Air Force pararescue training, I’d buckled. This time I won a major battle in the water. It was a big victory, but the war wasn’t over.
Those mornings when going on a run is the last thing you want to do, but then twenty minutes into it you feel energized, that’s the work of the sympathetic nervous system. What I’ve found is that you can tap into it on call as long as you know how to manage your own mind. When you indulge in negative self-talk, the gifts of a sympathetic response will remain out of reach. However, if you can manage those moments of pain that come with maximum effort, by remembering what you’ve been through to get to that point in your life, you will be in a better position to persevere and choose fight over flight. That will allow you to use the adrenaline that comes with a sympathetic response to go even harder.
I was rejecting my past and therefore rejecting myself. My foundation, my character was defined by self-rejection. All my fears came from that deep-seated uneasiness I carried with being David Goggins because of what I’d gone through. Even after I’d reached a point where I no longer cared about what others thought of me, I still had trouble accepting me. Anyone who is of sound mind and body can sit down and think of twenty things in their life that could have gone differently. Where maybe they didn’t get a fair shake and where they took the path of least resistance. If you’re one of the few who acknowledge that, want to callous those wounds, and strengthen your character, it’s up to you to go back through your past and make peace with yourself by facing those incidents and all of your negative influences, and accepting them as weak spots in your own character. Only when you identify and accept your weaknesses will you finally stop running from your past. Then those incidents can be used more efficiently as fuel to become better and grow stronger.
Our minds are fucking strong, they are our most powerful weapon, but we have stopped using them. We have access to so many more resources today than ever before and yet we are so much less capable than those who came before us. If you want to be one of the few to defy those trends in our ever-softening society, you will have to be willing to go to war with yourself and create a whole new identity, which requires an open mind. It’s funny, being open-minded is often tagged as new age or soft. Fuck that. Being open-minded enough to find a way is old school. It’s what knuckle draggers do.
I learned quickly that I was my own best prop. Sometimes I’d dress in a SEAL T-shirt with a Trident on it, run fifty miles to a speaking engagement, and show up soaking wet. Or I would do push-ups for the first five minutes of my speech, or roll a pull-up bar out on stage and do pull-ups while I was talking.
Wherever I went, whether the students were interested in a military career or not, they always asked if they had the same hardware I had. Could they run a hundred miles in one day? What would it take to reach their full potential? This is what I’d tell them: Our culture has become hooked on the quick fix, the life hack, efficiency. Everyone is on the hunt for that simple action algorithm that nets maximum profit with the least amount of effort. There’s no denying this attitude may get you some of the trappings of success, if you’re lucky, but it will not lead to a calloused mind or self-mastery. If you want to master the mind and remove your governor, you’ll have to become addicted to hard work. Because passion and obsession, even talent, are only useful tools if you have the work ethic to back them up.
No matter who you are, life will present you similar opportunities where you can prove to be uncommon. There are people in all walks of life who relish those moments, and when I see them I recognize them immediately because they are usually that motherfucker who’s all by himself. It’s the suit who’s still at the office at midnight while everyone else is at the bar, or the badass who hits the gym directly after coming off a forty-eight-hour op. She’s the wildland firefighter who instead of hitting her bedroll, sharpens her chainsaw after working a fire for twenty-four hours. That mentality is there for all of us. Man, woman, straight, gay, black, white, or purple fucking polka dot. All of us can be the person who flies all day and night only to arrive home to a filthy house, and instead of blaming family or roommates, cleans it up right then because they refuse to ignore duties undone. All over the world amazing human beings like that exist. It doesn’t take wearing a uniform. It’s not about all the hard schools they graduated from, all their patches and medals. It’s about wanting it like there’s no tomorrow—because there might not be. It’s about thinking of everybody else before yourself and developing your own code of ethics that sets you apart from others. One of those ethics is the drive to turn every negative into a positive, and then when shit starts flying, being prepared to lead from the front.
“I’ll have my cell phone on me. Try to call me before things start exploding.” “Maybe this time it’ll be different. Maybe I’ll work everything out through reason, diplomacy, dialogue, and mutual cooperation.” Thomas eyed me. I tried to look wounded. “It could happen.”
“I am freezing off my well-tailored ass,” Chandler said cheerily, in an elegant accent straight from Oxford. “But I endure thanks to excellent breeding, a background in preparatory academies, and metric tons of British fortitude.”
He stared at me for a silent minute before taking in a slow breath, settling back into the chair, and regarding me with steady blue eyes. “Why should I believe you would do any such thing?” “Because your balls are in a vise and I’m the only one who can pull them out,” I said. He arched an elegant silver eyebrow. “Okay,” I said. “That came out a little more homoerotic than I intended.” “Indeed,” said the Merlin.
The Merlin considered me for another long moment, and then shook his head. “There is a condition.” “A condition,” I said. “Before you will agree to let me help you get your ass out of the fire.” He gave me a bleak smile. “My ass is reasonably comfortable where it is. This is hardly my first crisis, Warden.” “And yet you haven’t told me to buzz off.” He lifted a finger, a gesture reminiscent of a fencer’s salute. “Touché. I acknowledge that it is, technically, possible for you to prove useful.”
“This is not how diplomacy is done,” Anastasia said as we approached the Château Raith. “You’re in America now,” I said. “Our idea of diplomacy is showing up with a gun in one hand and a sandwich in the other and asking which you’d prefer.” Anastasia’s mouth curved up at one corner. “You brought a sandwich?” “Who do I look like, Kissinger?”
After a few minutes, Molly came partway up the short ladder to the bridge and stopped. “Do I need to ask permission to come up there or something?” “Why would you?” I asked. She considered. “It’s what they do on Star Trek?” “Good point,” I said. “Permission granted, Ensign.”
“It isn’t a pizza.” I said. “It’s a promotion. Get this work done, and from that time forward, you will be . . .” I paused dramatically. “Major-General Toot-toot Minimus commanding the Za-Lord’s Elite.”
I shambled out onto the deck, unconcerned about the rain ruining my leather duster. One handy side effect of going through the painfully precise ritual of enchanting it to withstand physical force as if it had been plate steel was that the thing was rendered waterproof and stainproof as well—yet it still breathed. Let’s see Berman’s or Wilson’s do that. Sufficiently advanced technology, my ass.
“Stop learning, start dying,” Ebenezar said, in the tone of a man quoting a bedrock-firm maxim. “You’re never too old to learn.”
“Maybe,” Ebenezar said, “you’d have a thought or two of your own, someday, that you’d want to write down.” “Always the optimist, sir.”
Wardens formed a perimeter all the way around the stage, at the doors, and in the aisles that came down between the rows of benches. Everyone present was wearing his or her formal robes, all flowing black, with stoles of silk and satin in one of the various colors and patterns of trim that denoted status among the Council’s members. Blue stoles for members, red for those with a century of service, a braided silver cord for acknowledged master alchemists, a gold-stitched caduceus for master healers, a copper chevron near the collar for those with a doctorate in a scholarly discipline (some of the wizards had so many of them that they had stretched the fabric of the stole), an embroidered white Seal of Solomon for master exorcists and so on. I had a plain blue stole with no ornaments whatsoever, though I’d been toying with the idea of embroidering “GED” on it in red, white, and blue thread.
Warden Dresden, the Merlin said. Or thought. Or projected. If you would be so good as to prevent Peabody from escaping. Warden Thorsen and his cadre are on the way to support you, but we need someone to hound Peabody and prevent him from further mischief. We do not yet know the extent of his psychic manipulations, so trust none of the younger Wardens. I love being a wizard. Every day is like Disneyland.
I stepped aside, grabbed the geek standing behind me, and tugged him forward. “This is Waldo Butters,” I said. “And his geek penis is longer and harder than all of ours put together.”
Our equivalent of the Lord’s Prayer was the English author Alan Alexander Milne’s poem “Now We Are Six,” which ends: But now I am six, I’m as clever as clever. So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever. She read that poem to my brother and me again and again. Six, she told us, was the very best age, and she did her damnedest to live life with the spirit and awe of a child of that age. Even when we were very young, my grandmother didn’t want us to call her “grandmother.” Nor did she like the Hungarian term, “nagymama,” or any of the other warm terms of endearment such as “bubbie,” “grandma,” and “nana.” To us boys, and everyone else, she was simply Vera. Vera taught me to drive, swerving and swaying across all of the lanes, “dancing” to whatever music was on the car’s radio. She told me to enjoy my youth, to savor the feeling of being young. Adults, she said, always ruined things. Don’t grow up, she said. Never grow up. Well into her 60s and 70s, she was still what we call “young at heart,” drinking wine with friends and family, eating good food, telling great stories, helping the poor, sick, and less fortunate, pretending to conduct symphonies, laughing late into the night. By just about anyone’s standard, that’s the mark of a “life well lived.” But yes, the clock was ticking. By her mid-80s, Vera was a shell of her former self, and the final decade of her life was hard to watch. She was frail and sick. She still had enough wisdom left to insist that I marry my fiancée, Sandra, but by then music gave her no joy and she hardly got out of her chair; the vibrancy that had defined her was gone. Toward the end, she gave up hope. “This is just the way it goes,” she told me. She died at the age of 92.
“Compared to what we ought to be,” said the famous Professor William James of Harvard, “compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.”
1. If you wish to get the most out of this book, there is one indispensable requirement, one essential infinitely more important than any rule or technique. Unless you have this one fundamental requisite, a thousand rules on how to study will avail little. And if you do have this cardinal endowment, then you can achieve wonders without reading any suggestions for getting the most out of a book. What is this magic requirement? Just this: a deep, driving desire to learn, a vigorous determination to increase your ability to deal with people. How can you develop such an urge? By constantly reminding yourself how important these principles are to you. Picture to yourself how their mastery will aid you in leading a richer, fuller, happier and more fulfilling life. Say to yourself over and over: “My popularity, my happiness and sense of worth depend to no small extent upon my skill in dealing with people.”
Bernard Shaw once remarked: “If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.” Shaw was right. Learning is an active process. We learn by doing. So, if you desire to master the principles you are studying in this book, do something about them. Apply these rules at every opportunity. If you don’t you will forget them quickly. Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.
If Al Capone, “Two Gun” Crowley, Dutch Schultz, and the desperate men and women behind prison walls don’t blame themselves for anything—what about the people with whom you and I come in contact?
Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.
B. F. Skinner, the world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behavior will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behavior.
When Theodore Roosevelt stepped out of the White House in 1908, he supported Taft, who was elected President. Then Theodore Roosevelt went off to Africa to shoot lions. When he returned, he exploded. He denounced Taft for his conservatism, tried to secure the nomination for a third term himself, formed the Bull Moose party, and all but demolished the G.O.P. In the election that followed, William Howard Taft and the Republican party carried only two states—Vermont and Utah. The most disastrous defeat the party had ever known. Theodore Roosevelt blamed Taft, but did President Taft blame himself? Of course not. With tears in his eyes, Taft said: “I don’t see how I could have done any differently from what I have.” Who was to blame? Roosevelt or Taft? Frankly, I don’t know, and I don’t care. The point I am trying to make is that all of Theodore Roosevelt’s criticism didn’t persuade Taft that he was wrong. It merely made Taft strive to justify himself and to reiterate with tears in his eyes: “I don’t see how I could have done any differently from what I have.”
Benjamin Franklin, tactless in his youth, became so diplomatic, so adroit at handling people, that he was made American Ambassador to France. The secret of his success? “I will speak ill of no man,” he said, “ … and speak all the good I know of everybody.” Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.
“A great man shows his greatness,” said Carlyle, “by the way he treats little men.” Bob Hoover, a famous test pilot and frequent performer at air shows, was returning to his home in Los Angeles from an air show in San Diego. As described in the magazine Flight Operations, at three hundred feet in the air, both engines suddenly stopped. By deft maneuvering he managed to land the plane, but it was badly damaged although nobody was hurt. Hoover’s first act after the emergency landing was to inspect the airplane’s fuel. Just as he suspected, the World War II propeller plane he had been flying had been fueled with jet fuel rather than gasoline. Upon returning to the airport, he asked to see the mechanic who had serviced his airplane. The young man was sick with the agony of his mistake. Tears streamed down his face as Hoover approached. He had just caused the loss of a very expensive plane and could have caused the loss of three lives as well. You can imagine Hoover’s anger. One could anticipate the tongue-lashing that this proud and precise pilot would unleash for that carelessness. But Hoover didn’t scold the mechanic; he didn’t even criticize him. Instead, he put his big arm around the man’s shoulder and said, “To show you I’m sure that you’ll never do this again, I want you to service my F-51 tomorrow.”
Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. “To know all is to forgive all.”
“It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.”
There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes, just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it. Remember, there is no other way.
The only way I can get you to do anything is by giving you what you want. What do you want? Sigmund Freud said that everything you and I do springs from two motives: the sex urge and the desire to be great. John Dewey, one of America’s most profound philosophers, phrased it a bit differently. Dr. Dewey said that the deepest urge in human nature is “the desire to be important.” Remember that phrase: “the desire to be important.” It is significant. You are going to hear a lot about it in this book.
William James said: “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”
“I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people,” said Schwab, “the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. “There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticize anyone. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise.”
“In my wide association in life, meeting with many and great people in various parts of the world,” Schwab declared, “I have yet to find the person, however great or exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than he would ever do under a spirit of criticism.”
I once succumbed to the fad of fasting and went for six days and nights without eating. It wasn’t difficult. I was less hungry at the end of the sixth day than I was at the end of the second. Yet I know, as you know, people who would think they had committed a crime if they let their families or employees go for six days without food; but they will let them go for six days, and six weeks, and sometimes sixty years without giving them the hearty appreciation that they crave almost as much as they crave food.
Paul Harvey, in one of his radio broadcasts, “The Rest of the Story,” told how showing sincere appreciation can change a person’s life. He reported that years ago a teacher in Detroit asked Stevie Morris to help her find a mouse that was lost in the classroom. You see, she appreciated the fact that nature had given Stevie something no one else in the room had. Nature had given Stevie a remarkable pair of ears to compensate for his blind eyes. But this was really the first time Stevie had been shown appreciation for those talented ears. Now, years later, he says that this act of appreciation was the beginning of a new life. You see, from that time on he developed his gift of hearing and went on to become, under the stage name of Stevie Wonder, one of the great pop singers and songwriters of the seventies.
I shall pass this way but once; any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.
Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.
“If there is any one secret of success,” said Henry Ford, “it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”
Gentlemen: The operations at our outbound-rail-receiving station are handicapped because a material percentage of the total business is delivered us in the late afternoon. This condition results in congestion, overtime on the part of our forces, delays to trucks, and in some cases delays to freight. On November 10, we received from your company a lot of 510 pieces, which reached here at 4:20 P.M. We solicit your cooperation toward overcoming the undesirable effects arising from late receipt of freight. May we ask that, on days on which you ship the volume which was received on the above date, effort be made either to get the truck here earlier or to deliver us part of the freight during the morning? The advantage that would accrue to you under such an arrangement would be that of more expeditious discharge of your trucks and the assurance that your business would go forward on the date of its receipt. Very truly yours, J—— B——, Supt. After reading this letter, Mr. Vermylen, sales manager for A. Zerega’s Sons, Inc., sent it to me with the following comment: This letter had the reverse effect from that which was intended. The letter begins by describing the Terminal’s difficulties, in which we are not interested, generally speaking. Our cooperation is then requested without any thought as to whether it would inconvenience us, and then, finally, in the last paragraph, the fact is mentioned that if we do cooperate it will mean more expeditious discharge of our trucks with the assurance that our freight will go forward on the date of its receipt. In other words, that in which we are most interested is mentioned last and the whole effect is one of raising a spirit of antagonism rather than of cooperation. Let’s see if we can’t rewrite and improve this letter. Let’s not waste any time talking about our problems. As Henry Ford admonishes, let’s “get the other person’s point of view and see things from his or her angle, as well as from our own.” Here is one way of revising the letter. It may not be the best way, but isn’t it an improvement? Mr. Edward Vermylen c/o A. Zerega’s Sons, Inc. 28 Front St. Brooklyn, N.Y. 11201 Dear Mr. Vermylen: Your company has been one of our good customers for fourteen years. Naturally, we are very grateful for your patronage and are eager to give you the speedy, efficient service you deserve. However, we regret to say that it isn’t possible for us to do that when your trucks bring us a large shipment late in the afternoon, as they did on November 10. Why? Because many other customers make late afternoon deliveries also. Naturally, that causes congestion. That means your trucks are held up unavoidably at the pier and sometimes even your freight is delayed. That’s bad, but it can be avoided. If you make your deliveries at the pier in the morning when possible, your trucks will be able to keep moving, your freight will get immediate attention, and our workers will get home early at night to enjoy a dinner of the…
Dear Sir: My ten years of bank experience should be of interest to a rapidly growing bank like yours. In various capacities in bank operations with the Bankers Trust Company in New York, leading to my present assignment as Branch Manager, I have acquired skills in all phases of banking including depositor relations, credits, loans and administration. I will be relocating to Phoenix in May and I am sure I can contribute to your growth and profit. I will be in Phoenix the week of April 3 and would appreciate the opportunity to show you how I can help your bank meet its goals. Sincerely, Barbara L. Anderson Do you think Mrs. Anderson received any response from that letter? Eleven of the twelve banks invited her to be interviewed, and she had a choice of which bank’s offer to accept. Why? Mrs. Anderson did not state what she wanted, but wrote in the letter how she could help them, and focused on their wants, not her own.
The world is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage. He has little competition. Owen D. Young, a noted lawyer and one of America’s great business leaders, once said: “People who can put themselves in the place of other people, who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for them.” If out of reading this book you get just one thing—an increased tendency to think always in terms of other people’s point of view, and see things from their angle—if you get that one thing out of this book, it may easily prove to be one of the building blocks of your career.
To repeat Professor Overstreet’s wise advice: First, arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.
William Winter once remarked that “self-expression is the dominant necessity of human nature.” Why can’t we adapt this same psychology to business dealings? When we have a brilliant idea, instead of making others think it is ours, why not let them cook and stir the idea themselves. They will then regard it as their own; they will like it and maybe eat a couple of helpings of it. Remember: “First, arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.”
PRINCIPLE 1 Don’t criticize, condemn or complain. PRINCIPLE 2 Give honest and sincere appreciation. PRINCIPLE 3 Arouse in the other person an eager want.
Why read this book to find out how to win friends? Why not study the technique of the greatest winner of friends the world has ever known? Who is he? You may meet him tomorrow coming down the street. When you get within ten feet of him, he will begin to wag his tail. If you stop and pat him, he will almost jump out of his skin to show you how much he likes you. And you know that behind this show of affection on his part, there are no ulterior motives: he doesn’t want to sell you any real estate, and he doesn’t want to marry you. Did you ever stop to think that a dog is the only animal that doesn’t have to work for a living? A hen has to lay eggs, a cow has to give milk, and a canary has to sing. But a dog makes his living by giving you nothing but love.
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
I once took a course in short-story writing at New York University, and during that course the editor of a leading magazine talked to our class. He said he could pick up any one of the dozens of stories that drifted across his desk every day and after reading a few paragraphs he could feel whether or not the author liked people. “If the author doesn’t like people,” he said, “people won’t like his or her stories.”
But Thurston’s method was totally different. He told me that every time he went on stage he said to himself: “I am grateful because these people come to see me. They make it possible for me to make my living in a very agreeable way. I’m going to give them the very best I possibly can.” He declared he never stepped in front of the footlights without first saying to himself over and over: “I love my audience. I love my audience.”
George Dyke of North Warren, Pennsylvania, was forced to retire from his service station business after thirty years when a new highway was constructed over the site of his station. It wasn’t long before the idle days of retirement began to bore him, so he started filling in his time trying to play music on his old fiddle. Soon he was traveling the area to listen to music and talk with many of the accomplished fiddlers. In his humble and friendly way he became generally interested in learning the background and interests of every musician he met. Although he was not a great fiddler himself, he made many friends in this pursuit. He attended competitions and soon became known to the country music fans in the eastern part of the United States as “Uncle George, the Fiddle Scraper from Kinzua County.” When we heard Uncle George, he was seventy-two and enjoying every minute of his life. By having a sustained interest in other people, he created a new life for himself at a time when most people consider their productive years over.
My wife one time asked the President about a bobwhite. She had never seen one and he described it to her fully. Sometime later, the telephone at our cottage rang. [Amos and his wife lived in a little cottage on the Roosevelt estate at Oyster Bay.] My wife answered it and it was Mr. Roosevelt himself. He had called her, he said, to tell her that there was a bobwhite outside her window and that if she would look out she might see it. Little things like that were so characteristic of him. Whenever he went by our cottage, even though we were out of sight, we would hear him call out: “Oo-oo-oo, Annie?” or “Oo-oo-oo, James!” It was just a friendly greeting as he went by.
All of us, be we workers in a factory, clerks in an office or even a king upon his throne—all of us like people who admire us.
Charles Schwab told me his smile had been worth a million dollars. And he was probably understating the truth. For Schwab’s personality, his charm, his ability to make people like him, were almost wholly responsible for his extraordinary success; and one of the most delightful factors in his personality was his captivating smile. Actions speak louder than words, and a smile says, “I like you. You make me happy. I am glad to see you.” That is why dogs make such a hit. They are so glad to see us that they almost jump out of their skins. So, naturally, we are glad to see them.
The chairman of the board of directors of one of the largest rubber companies in the United States told me that, according to his observations, people rarely succeed at anything unless they have fun doing it. This industrial leader doesn’t put much faith in the old adage that hard work alone is the magic key that will unlock the door to our desires. “I have known people,” he said, “who succeeded because they had a rip-roaring good time conducting their business. Later, I saw those people change as the fun became work. The business had grown dull. They lost all joy in it, and they failed.” You must have a good time meeting people if you expect them to have a good time meeting you.
You don’t feel like smiling? Then what? Two things. First, force yourself to smile. If you are alone, force yourself to whistle or hum a tune or sing. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy. Here is the way the psychologist and philosopher William James put it: “Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. “Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. …”
It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it. For example, two people may be in the same place, doing the same thing; both may have about an equal amount of money and prestige—and yet one may be miserable and the other happy. Why? Because of a different mental attitude. I have seen just as many happy faces among the poor peasants toiling with their primitive tools in the devastating heat of the tropics as I have seen in air-conditioned offices in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. “There is nothing either good or bad,” said Shakespeare, “but thinking makes it so.” Abe Lincoln once remarked that “most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” He was right. I saw a vivid illustration of that truth as I was walking up the stairs of the Long Island Railroad station in New York. Directly in front of me thirty or forty crippled boys on canes and crutches were struggling up the stairs. One boy had to be carried up. I was astonished at their laughter and gaiety. I spoke about it to one of the men in charge of the boys. “Oh, yes,” he said, “when a boy realizes that he is going to be a cripple for life, he is shocked at first; but after he gets over the shock, he usually resigns himself to his fate and then becomes as happy as normal boys.” I felt like taking my hat off to those boys. They taught me a lesson I hope I shall never forget.
Peruse this bit of sage advice from the essayist and publisher Elbert Hubbard—but remember, perusing it won’t do you any good unless you apply it: Whenever you go out-of-doors, draw the chin in, carry the crown of the head high, and fill the lungs to the utmost; drink in the sunshine; greet your friends with a smile, and put soul into every handclasp. Do not fear being misunderstood and do not waste a minute thinking about your enemies. Try to fix firmly in your mind what you would like to do; and then, without veering off direction, you will move straight to the goal. Keep your mind on the great and splendid things you would like to do, and then, as the days go gliding away, you will find yourself unconsciously seizing upon the opportunities that are required for the fulfillment of your desire, just as the coral insect takes from the running tide the element it needs. Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful person you desire to be, and the thought you hold is hourly transforming you into that particular individual. … Thought is supreme. Preserve a right mental attitude—the attitude of courage, frankness, and good cheer. To think rightly is to create. All things come through desire and every sincere prayer is answered. We become like that on which our hearts are fixed. Carry your chin in and the crown of your head high. We are gods in the chrysalis.
PRINCIPLE 3 Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
What is the secret, the mystery, of a successful business interview? Well, according to former Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, “There is no mystery about successful business intercourse. … Exclusive attention to the person who is speaking to you is very important. Nothing else is so flattering as that.” Eliot himself was a past master of the art of listening. Henry James, one of America’s first great novelists, recalled: “Dr. Eliot’s listening was not mere silence, but a form of activity. Sitting very erect on the end of his spine with hands joined in his lap, making no movement except that he revolved his thumbs around each other faster or slower, he faced his interlocutor and seemed to be hearing with his eyes as well as his ears. He listened with his mind and attentively considered what you had to say while you said it. … At the end of an interview the person who had talked to him felt that he had had his say.”
One evening she was sitting in the kitchen with her son, Robert, and after a brief discussion of something that was on his mind, Robert said: “Mom, I know that you love me very much.” Mrs. Esposito was touched and said: “Of course I love you very much. Did you doubt it?” Robert responded: “No, but I really know you love me because whenever I want to talk to you about something you stop whatever you are doing and listen to me.”
One of the great listeners of modern times was Sigmund Freud. A man who met Freud described his manner of listening: “It struck me so forcibly that I shall never forget him. He had qualities which I had never seen in any other man. Never had I seen such concentrated attention. There was none of that piercing ‘soul penetrating gaze’ business. His eyes were mild and genial. His voice was low and kind. His gestures were few. But the attention he gave me, his appreciation of what I said, even when I said it badly, was extraordinary. You’ve no idea what it meant to be listened to like that.”
So if you aspire to be a good conversationalist, be an attentive listener. To be interesting, be interested. Ask questions that other persons will enjoy answering. Encourage them to talk about themselves and their accomplishments.
The law is this: Always make the other person feel important. John Dewey, as we have already noted, said that the desire to be important is the deepest urge in human nature; and William James said: “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”
You want the approval of those with whom you come in contact. You want recognition of your true worth. You want a feeling that you are important in your little world. You don’t want to listen to cheap, insincere flattery, but you do crave sincere appreciation. You want your friends and associates to be, as Charles Schwab put it, “hearty in their approbation and lavish in their praise.” All of us want that. So let’s obey the Golden Rule, and give unto others what we would have others give unto us.
The unvarnished truth is that almost all the people you meet feel themselves superior to you in some way, and a sure way to their hearts is to let them realize in some subtle way that you recognize their importance, and recognize it sincerely. Remember what Emerson said: “Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.”
“Not bad, kid,” the would-be kingpin said. “That judo or something?” “Something like that.” “I could use a man of your skills, once my health club finishes”—he gave Demeter a sour glance—“reprioritizing.” “You couldn’t afford me,” I said. “I’m going to be able to afford a lot,” he said. “Name your price.” “One hundred and fifty-six gajillion dollars,” I said promptly.
At one time in my life, a shapeshifted, demonically possessed maniac crashing through a window and trying to rip my face off would have come as an enormous and nasty surprise. But that time was pretty much in the past.
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.
Tyrannosaur Bob let out a bellow and swiped one enormous talon at Kumori. Cowl’s apprentice was tough and competent, but no amount of training or forethought can prepare you for the sight of an angry dinosaur coming to eat your ass.
The business school students appear to be collaborating, but in fact they are engaged in a process psychologists call status management. They are figuring out where they fit into the larger picture: Who is in charge? Is it okay to criticize someone’s idea? What are the rules here? Their interactions appear smooth, but their underlying behavior is riddled with inefficiency, hesitation, and subtle competition. Instead of focusing on the task, they are navigating their uncertainty about one another. They spend so much time managing status that they fail to grasp the essence of the problem (the marshmallow is relatively heavy, and the spaghetti is hard to secure).
(A strong culture increases net income 756 percent over eleven years, according to a Harvard study of more than two hundred companies.)
Skill 1—Build Safety—explores how signals of connection generate bonds of belonging and identity. Skill 2—Share Vulnerability—explains how habits of mutual risk drive trusting cooperation. Skill 3—Establish Purpose—tells how narratives create shared goals and values.
Over and over Felps examines the video of Jonathan’s moves, analyzing them as if they were a tennis serve or a dance step. They follow a pattern: Nick behaves like a jerk, and Jonathan reacts instantly with warmth, deflecting the negativity and making a potentially unstable situation feel solid and safe. Then Jonathan pivots and asks a simple question that draws the others out, and he listens intently and responds. Energy levels increase; people open up and share ideas, building chains of insight and cooperation that move the group swiftly and steadily toward its goal. “Basically, [Jonathan] makes it safe, then turns to the other people and asks, ‘Hey, what do you think of this?’ ” Felps says. “Sometimes he even asks Nick questions like, ‘How would you do that?’ Most of all he radiates an idea that is something like, Hey, this is all really comfortable and engaging, and I’m curious about what everybody else has to say. It was amazing how such simple, small behaviors kept everybody engaged and on task.” Even Nick, almost against his will, found himself being helpful. The story of the good apples is surprising in two ways. First, we tend to think group performance depends on measurable abilities like intelligence, skill, and experience, not on a subtle pattern of small behaviors. Yet in this case those small behaviors made all the difference. The second surprise is that Jonathan succeeds without taking any of the actions we normally associate with a strong leader. He doesn’t take charge or tell anyone what to do. He doesn’t strategize, motivate, or lay out a vision. He doesn’t perform so much as create conditions for others to perform, constructing an environment whose key feature is crystal clear: We are solidly connected. Jonathan’s group succeeds not because its members are smarter but because they are safer.
Safety is not mere emotional weather but rather the foundation on which strong culture is built. The deeper questions are, Where does it come from? And how do you go about building it?
When you ask people inside highly successful groups to describe their relationship with one another, they all tend to choose the same word. This word is not friends or team or tribe or any other equally plausible term. The word they use is family.
I made a list: • Close physical proximity, often in circles • Profuse amounts of eye contact • Physical touch (handshakes, fist bumps, hugs) • Lots of short, energetic exchanges (no long speeches) • High levels of mixing; everyone talks to everyone • Few interruptions • Lots of questions • Intensive, active listening • Humor, laughter • Small, attentive courtesies (thank-yous, opening doors, etc.) One more thing: I found that spending time inside these groups was almost physically addictive. I would extend my reporting trips, inventing excuses to stick around for another day or two. I found myself daydreaming about changing occupations so I could apply for a job with them. There was something irresistible about being around these groups that made me crave more connection.
“Human signaling looks like other animal signaling,” Pentland says as we sit down at a coffee table in his small homey office. “You can measure interest levels, who the alpha is, who’s cooperating, who’s mimicking, who’s in synchrony. We have these communication channels, and we do it without thinking about it. For instance, if I lean a few inches closer to you, we might begin mirroring.”
Belonging cues possess three basic qualities: 1. Energy: They invest in the exchange that is occurring 2. Individualization: They treat the person as unique and valued 3. Future orientation: They signal the relationship will continue
“As humans, we are very good at reading cues; we are incredibly attentive to interpersonal phenomena,” says Amy Edmondson, who studies psychological safety at Harvard. “We have a place in our brain that’s always worried about what people think of us, especially higher-ups. As far as our brain is concerned, if our social system rejects us, we could die. Given that our sense of danger is so natural and automatic, organizations have to do some pretty special things to overcome that natural trigger.”
The key to creating psychological safety, as Pentland and Edmondson emphasize, is to recognize how deeply obsessed our unconscious brains are with it. A mere hint of belonging is not enough; one or two signals are not enough. We are built to require lots of signaling, over and over. This is why a sense of belonging is easy to destroy and hard to build. The dynamic evokes the words of Texas politician Sam Rayburn: “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”
It’s possible to predict performance by ignoring all the informational content in the exchange and focusing on a handful of belonging cues.
“The executives [listening to the pitches] thought they were evaluating the plans based on rational measures, such as: How original is this idea? How does it fit the current market? How well developed is this plan?” Pentland wrote. “While listening to the pitches, though, another part of their brain was registering other crucial information, such as: How much does this person believe in this idea? How confident are they when speaking? How determined are they to make this work? And the second set of information—information that the business executives didn’t even know they were assessing—is what influenced their choice of business plans to the greatest degree.”
Overall Pentland’s studies show that team performance is driven by five measurable factors: 1. Everyone in the group talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short. 2. Members maintain high levels of eye contact, and their conversations and gestures are energetic. 3. Members communicate directly with one another, not just with the team leader. 4. Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team. 5. Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back to share with the others.
Group performance depends on behavior that communicates one powerful overarching idea: We are safe and connected.
Not coincidentally, many successful groups have adopted the use of family-esque identifiers. People who work at Pixar are Pixarians, and people who work at Google are Googlers. It’s the same with Zappos (Zapponians), KIPP (KIPPsters), and others.
But Overture did not win. The winner of this race turned out to be a small, young company called Google. What’s more, it’s possible to isolate the moment that turned the race in its favor. On May 24, 2002, in Google’s kitchen at 2400 Bayshore Parkway in Mountain View, California, Google founder Larry Page pinned a note to the wall. The note contained three words: THESE ADS SUCK
His main leadership technique, if it could be called a technique, consisted of starting and sustaining big, energetic, no-holds-barred debates about how to build the best strategies, products, and ideas. To work at Google was to enter a giant, continuous wrestling match in which no person was considered above the fray. This approach extended to the raucous all-employee street hockey games in the parking lot (“No one held back when fighting the founders for the puck,” recalled one player) and to the all-company Friday forums, where anyone could challenge the founders with any question under the sun, no matter how controversial—and vice versa.
But at some point that Friday afternoon, Dean walked over to the kitchen to make a cappuccino and spotted Page’s note. He flipped through the attached pages—and as he did, a thought flickered through his mind, a hazy memory of a similar problem he’d encountered a while back. Dean walked back to his desk and started trying to fix the AdWords engine. He did not ask permission or tell anyone; he simply dove in. On almost every level, his decision made no sense. He was ignoring the mountain of work on his desk in order to wrestle with a difficult problem that no one expected him to take on. He could have quit at any point, and no one would have known. But he did not quit. In fact, he came in on Saturday and worked on the AdWords problem for several hours. On Sunday night, he had dinner with his family and put his two young children to bed. Around nine P.M., he drove back to the office, made another cappuccino, and worked through the night. At 5:05 A.M. on Monday, he sent out an email outlining a proposed fix. Then he drove home, climbed into bed, and went to sleep.
One day in 2013, Google adviser Jonathan Rosenberg approached Dean for a book he was co-writing about Google. Rosenberg wanted to get Dean’s version of the story, so he started in—I want to talk to you about the AdWords engine, Larry’s note, the kitchen—naturally expecting Dean to pick up on the cue and launch into a reminiscence. But Dean didn’t do that. Instead, he just stared at Rosenberg with a pleasantly blank expression. Rosenberg, slightly confused, kept going, filling in detail after detail. Only then did Dean’s face dawn with the light of recognition—oh yeah! This is not the response you would expect Dean to have. It is roughly the equivalent of Michael Jordan forgetting that he won six NBA titles. But that was how Dean felt and how he still feels today. “I mean, I remember that it happened,” Dean told me. “But to be completely honest, it didn’t register strongly in my memory because it didn’t feel like that big of a deal. It didn’t feel special or different. It was normal. That kind of thing happened all the time.” It was normal. Google personnel were interacting exactly as the kindergartners in the spaghetti-marshmallow challenge interacted. They did not manage their status or worry about who was in charge.
Say I give you a moderately tricky puzzle where the goal is to arrange colors and shapes on a map. You can work on it as long as you like. After explaining the task, I leave you to your work. Two minutes later I pop back in and hand you a slip of paper with a handwritten note. I tell you that the note is from a fellow participant named Steve, whom you’ve never met. “Steve did the puzzle earlier and wanted to share a tip with you,” I say. You read the tip and get back to work. And that’s when everything changes. Without trying, you start working harder on the puzzle. Areas deep in your brain begin to light up. You are more motivated—twice as much. You work more than 50 percent longer, with significantly more energy and enjoyment. What’s more, the glow endures. Two weeks later, you are inclined to take on similar challenges. In essence, that slip of paper changes you into a smarter, more attuned version of yourself. Here’s the thing: Steve’s tip was not actually useful. It contained zero relevant information. All the changes in motivation and behavior you experienced afterward were due to the signal that you were connected to someone who cared about you.
This idea—that belonging needs to be continually refreshed and reinforced—is worth dwelling on for a moment. If our brains processed safety logically, we would not need this steady reminding. But our brains did not emerge from millions of years of natural selection because they process safety logically. They emerged because they are obsessively on the lookout for danger.
“Just like that never occurred to me about Crane,” Murphy said. “So the Skavis . . . he could be anyone.” “I’m pretty sure he’s not me,” I said. “I’m almost as sure he’s not you.” “Are you sure you’re a professional investigator?” “I sometimes wonder.”
We walked together to the parking lot, and on the way Elaine said, “Tell me you’ve gotten a new car.” We rounded a corner, and there was the Beetle in all its battle-scarred glory. “I like this one,” I told her, and opened the door for her. “You redid the interior,” she said as I got in and started the car. “Demons ate the old one.”
The dog wasn’t six inches behind the Skavis agent as it closed on me, its one remaining arm raised up to . . . well, hit me. But given how hard the blow was going to be, I upgraded the verb to smite. He was about to smite me.
“Padawan,” I said, “I’m doubling your pay.” “You don’t pay me, Harry.” “Tripling it, then.”
“Dresden,” Marcone said, his tone pleasant. Helen made no move to stir from where she was. “It’s nice to see you alive. Your sense of humor, of course, remains unchanged, which is unsurprising, as it seems to have died in your adolescence. Presumably it entered a suicide pact with your manners.”
Paranoid? Probably. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that there isn’t an invisible demon about to eat your face.
She walked everywhere with a book. She studied as she ate. When she tired, she conjured up images for herself, telling herself the story of the worst possible future. You walk up the aisle in a dress that doesn’t fit you. You’re trembling. He’s waiting at the other end. He looks at you like you’re a juicy, fattened pig, a marbled slab of meat for his purchase. He spreads saliva over his dry lips. He doesn’t look away from you throughout the entire banquet. When it’s over, he carries you to his bedroom. He pushes you onto the sheets. She shuddered. Squeezed her eyes shut. Reopened them and found her place on the page.
“Because I can,” she said. “Because he thought he could get rid of me. Because I want to break his stupid face.”
Probably this long-standing status as sucker accounts for my interest in the study of compliance: Just what are the factors that cause one person to say yes to another person?
Most frequently, though, it has taken the form of participant observation. Participant observation is a research approach in which the researcher becomes a spy of sorts. With disguised identity and intent, the investigator infiltrates the setting of interest and becomes a full-fledged participant in the group to be studied. So when I wanted to learn about the compliance tactics of encyclopedia (or vacuum-cleaner, or portrait-photography, or dance-lesson) sales organizations, I would answer a newspaper ad for sales trainees and have them teach me their methods. Using similar but not identical approaches, I was able to penetrate advertising, public-relations, and fund-raising agencies to examine their techniques. Much of the evidence presented in this book, then, comes from my experience posing as a compliance professional, or aspiring professional, in a large variety of organizations dedicated to getting us to say yes.
Each of these categories is governed by a fundamental psychological principle that directs human behavior and, in so doing, gives the tactics their power. The book is organized around these six principles, one to a chapter. The principles—consistency, reciprocation, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity—are each discussed in terms of their function in the society and in terms of how their enormous force can be commissioned by a compliance professional who deftly incorporates them into requests for purchases, donations, concessions, votes, assent, etc.
A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do. Langer demonstrated this unsurprising fact by asking a small favor of people waiting in line to use a library copying machine: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush? The effectiveness of this request-plus-reason was nearly total: Ninety-four percent of those asked let her skip ahead of them in line. Compare this success rate to the results when she made the request only: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine? Under those circumstances, only 60 percent of those asked complied. At first glance, it appears that the crucial difference between the two requests was the additional information provided by the words “because I’m in a rush.” But a third type of request tried by Langer showed that this was not the case. It seems that it was not the whole series of words, but the first one, “because,” that made the difference. Instead of including a real reason for compliance, Langer’s third type of request used the word “because” and then, adding nothing new, merely restated the obvious: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies? The result was that once again nearly all (93 percent) agreed, even though no real reason, no new information, was added to justify their compliance.
The renowned British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead recognized this inescapable quality of modern life when he asserted that “civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.” Take, for example, the “advance” offered to civilization by the discount coupon, which allows consumers to assume that they will receive a reduced purchase price by presenting the coupon.
There is a principle in human perception, the contrast principle, that affects the way we see the difference between two things that are presented one after another. Simply put, if the second item is fairly different from the first, we will tend to see it as more different than it actually is. So if we lift a light object first and then lift a heavy object, we will estimate the second object to be heavier than if we had lifted it without first trying the light one. The contrast principle is well established in the field of psychophysics and applies to all sorts of perceptions besides weight. If we are talking to a beautiful woman at a cocktail party and are then joined by an unattractive one, the second woman will strike us as less attractive than she actually is. In fact, studies done on the contrast principle at Arizona State and Montana State universities suggest that we may be less satisfied with the physical attractiveness of our own lovers because of the way the popular media bombard us with examples of unrealistically attractive models. In one study college students rated a picture of an average-looking member of the opposite sex as less attractive if they had first looked through the ads in some popular magazines. In another study, male college-dormitory residents rated the photo of a potential blind date. Those who did so while watching an episode of the Charlie’s Angels TV series viewed the blind date as a less attractive woman than those who rated her while watching a different show.
A nice demonstration of perceptual contrast is sometimes employed in psychophysics laboratories to introduce students to the principle firsthand. Each student takes a turn sitting in front of three pails of water—one cold, one at room temperature, and one hot. After placing one hand in the cold water and one in the hot water, the student is told to place both in the lukewarm water simultaneously. The look of amused bewilderment that immediately registers tells the story: Even though both hands are in the same bucket, the hand that has been in the cold water feels as if it is now in hot water, while the one that was in the hot water feels as if it is now in cold water. The point is that the same thing—in this instance, room-temperature water—can be made to seem very different, depending on the nature of the event that precedes it.
Retail clothiers are a good example. Suppose a man enters a fashionable men’s store and says that he wants to buy a three-piece suit and a sweater. If you were the salesperson, which would you show him first to make him likely to spend the most money? Clothing stores instruct their sales personnel to sell the costly item first. Common sense might suggest the reverse: If a man has just spent a lot of money to purchase a suit, he may be reluctant to spend very much more on the purchase of a sweater. But the clothiers know better. They behave in accordance with what the contrast principle would suggest: Sell the suit first, because when it comes time to look at sweaters, even expensive ones, their…
Fortunately a journalist who had been as bewildered as I was by the Ethiopians’ action had asked for an explanation. The answer he received offers eloquent validation of the reciprocity rule: Despite the enormous needs prevailing in Ethiopia, the money was being sent because Mexico had sent aid to Ethiopia in 1935, when it was invaded by Italy.
Make no mistake, human societies derive a truly significant competitive advantage from the reciprocity rule, and consequently they make sure their members are trained to comply with and believe in it. Each of us has been taught to live up to the rule, and each of us knows about the social sanctions and derision applied to anyone who violates it. The labels we assign to such a person are loaded with negativity—moocher, ingrate, welsher. Because there is general distaste for those who take and make no effort to give in return, we will often go to great lengths to avoid being considered one of their number. It is to those lengths that we will often be taken and, in the process, be “taken” by individuals who stand to gain from our indebtedness.
One of the reasons reciprocation can be used so effectively as a device for gaining another’s compliance is its power. The rule possesses awesome strength, often producing a “yes” response to a request that, except for an existing feeling of indebtedness, would have surely been refused.
There was a significant tendency for subjects to buy more raffle tickets from Joe the more they liked him. But this alone is hardly a startling finding. Most of us would have guessed that people are more willing to do a favor for someone they like. The interesting thing about the Regan experiment, however, is that the relationship between liking and compliance was completely wiped out in the condition under which subjects had been given a Coke by Joe. For those who owed him a favor, it made no difference whether they liked him or not; they felt a sense of obligation to repay him, and they did. The subjects in that condition who indicated that they disliked Joe bought just as many of his tickets as did those who indicated that they liked him. The rule for reciprocity was so strong that it simply overwhelmed the influence of a factor—liking for the requester—that normally affects the decision to comply.
The Krishnas’ resolution was brilliant. They switched to a fund-raising tactic that made it unnecessary for target persons to have positive feelings toward the fund-raisers. They began to employ a donation-request procedure that engaged the rule for reciprocation, which, as demonstrated by the Regan study, is strong enough to overcome the factor of dislike for the requester. The new strategy still involves the solicitation of contributions in public places with much pedestrian traffic (airports are a favorite), but now, before a donation is requested, the target person is given a “gift”—a book (usually the Bhagavad Gita), the Back to Godhead magazine of the Society, or, in the most cost-effective version, a flower. The unsuspecting passerby who suddenly finds a flower pressed into his hands or pinned to his jacket is under no circumstances allowed to give it back, even if he asserts that he does not want it. “No, it is our gift to you,” says the solicitor, refusing to accept it. Only after the Krishna member has thus brought the force of the reciprocation rule to bear on the situation is the target asked to provide a contribution to the Society. This benefactor-before-beggar strategy has been wildly successful for the Hare Krishna Society, producing large-scale economic gains and funding the ownership of temples, businesses, houses, and property in 321 centers in the United States and overseas.
After once falling victim to their tactic, many travelers are now alert to the presence of robed Krishna Society solicitors in airports and train stations, adjusting their paths to avoid an encounter and preparing beforehand to ward off a solicitor’s “gift.” Although the Society has tried to counter this increased vigilance by instructing members to be dressed and groomed in modern styles to avoid immediate recognition when soliciting (some actually carry flight bags or suitcases), even disguise has not worked especially well for the Krishnas. Too many individuals now know better than to accept unrequested offerings in public places like airports. Furthermore, airport administrators have initiated a number of procedures designed to forewarn us of the Krishnas’ true identity and intent. Thus, it is now common airport practice to restrict the Krishnas’ soliciting activity to certain areas of the airport and to announce through signs and the public address system that the Krishnas are soliciting there. It is a testament to the societal value of reciprocation that we have chosen to fight the Krishnas mostly by seeking to avoid rather than to withstand the force of their gift giving. The reciprocity rule that empowers their tactic is too strong—and socially beneficial—for us to want to violate it.
Close examination by political scientists has found the cause to be not so much Johnson’s political savvy as the large score of favors he had been able to provide to other legislators during his many years of power in the House and Senate. As President, he was able to produce a truly remarkable amount of legislation in a short time by calling in those favors. It is interesting that this same process may account for the problems Jimmy Carter had in getting his programs through Congress during his early administration, despite heavy Democratic majorities in both House and Senate. Carter came to the presidency from outside the Capitol Hill establishment. He campaigned on his outside-Washington identity, saying that he was indebted to no one there. Much of his legislative difficulty upon arriving may be traced to the fact that no one there was indebted to him.
At another level, we can see the recognized strength of the reciprocity rule in the desire of corporations and individuals to provide judicial and legislative officials with gifts and favors, and in the series of legal restrictions against such gifts and favors. Even with legitimate political contributions, the stockpiling of obligations often underlies the stated purpose of supporting a favorite candidate.
During the 1992 presidential primary campaign, actress Sally Kellerman was asked why she was lending her name and efforts to the candidacy of Democratic hopeful Jerry Brown. Her reply: “Twenty years ago, I asked ten friends to help me move. He was the only one who showed up.”
A different version of the free-sample tactic is used by the Amway Corporation, a rapid-growth company that manufactures and distributes household and personal-care products in a vast national network of door-to-door neighborhood sales. The company, which has grown from a basement-run operation a few years ago to a one-and-a-half-billion-dollar-yearly-sales business, makes use of the free sample in a device called the BUG. The BUG consists of a collection of Amway products—bottles of furniture polish, detergent, or shampoo, spray containers of deodorizers, insect killers, or window cleaners—carried to the customer’s home in a specially designed tray or just a polyethylene bag. The confidential Amway Career Manual then instructs the salesperson to leave the BUG with the customer “for 24, 48, or 72 hours, at no cost or obligation to her. Just tell her you would like her to try the products…. That’s an offer no one can refuse.” At the end of the trial period, the Amway representative returns and picks up orders for those of the products the customer wishes to purchase.
Posing as representatives of the “County Youth Counseling Program,” we approached college students walking on campus and asked if they would be willing to chaperon a group of juvenile delinquents on a day trip to the zoo. The idea of being responsible for a group of juvenile delinquents of unspecified age for hours in a public place without pay was hardly an inviting one for these students. As we expected, the great majority (83 percent) refused. Yet we obtained very different results from a similar sample of college students who were asked the very same question with one difference. Before we invited them to serve as unpaid chaperons on the zoo trip, we asked them for an even larger favor—to spend two hours per week as a counselor to a juvenile delinquent for a minimum of two years. It was only after they refused this extreme request, as all did, that we made the smaller, zoo-trip request. By presenting the zoo trip as a retreat from our initial request, our success rate increased dramatically. Three times as many of the students approached in this manner volunteered to serve as zoo chaperons.
employed in a variety of natural settings. Labor negotiators, for instance, often use the tactic of beginning with extreme demands that they do not actually expect to win but from which they can retreat in a series of seeming concessions designed to draw real concessions from the opposing side. It would appear, then, that the larger the initial request, the more effective the procedure, since there would be more room available for illusory concessions.
Let’s once again say that I wish to borrow five dollars from you. By beginning with a ten-dollar request, I really can’t lose. If you agree to it, I will have gotten twice the amount from you I would have settled for. If, on the other hand, you turn down my initial request, I can retreat to the five-dollar favor that I desired from the outset and, through the action of the reciprocity and contrast principles, greatly enhance my likelihood of success. Either way, I benefit; it’s a case of heads I win, tails you lose.
But what we have not yet examined is a little-known pair of positive by-products of the act of concession: feelings of greater responsibility for, and satisfaction with, the arrangement. It is this set of sweet side effects that enables the technique to move its victims to fulfill their agreements and to engage in further such agreements.
The requester’s concession within the technique not only causes targets to say yes more often, it also causes them to feel more responsible for having “dictated” the final agreement. Thus the uncanny ability of the rejection-then-retreat technique to make its targets meet their commitments becomes understandable: A person who feels responsible for the terms of a contract will be more likely to live up to that contract. Satisfaction. Even though, on the average, they gave the most money to the opponent who used the concessions strategy, the subjects who were the targets of this strategy were the most satisfied with the final arrangement. It appears that an agreement that has been forged through the concessions of one’s opponent is quite satisfying. With this in mind, we can begin to explain the second previously puzzling feature of the rejection-then-retreat tactic—the ability to prompt its victims to agree to further requests.
He simply called a sample of Bloomington, Indiana, residents as part of a survey he was taking and asked them to predict what they would say if asked to spend three hours collecting money for the American Cancer Society. Of course, not wanting to seem uncharitable to the survey taker or to themselves, many of these people said that they would volunteer. The consequence of this sly commitment procedure was a 700 percent increase in volunteers when, a few days later, a representative of the American Cancer Society did call and ask for neighborhood canvassers.
The Chinese answer was elementary: Start small and build. For instance, prisoners were frequently asked to make statements so mildly anti-American or pro-Communist as to seem inconsequential (“The United States is not perfect.” “In a Communist country, unemployment is not a problem.”). But once these minor requests were complied with, the men found themselves pushed to submit to related yet more substantive requests. A man who had just agreed with his Chinese interrogator that the United States is not perfect might then be asked to indicate some of the ways in which he thought this was the case. Once he had so explained himself, he might be asked to make a list of these “problems with America” and to sign his name to it. Later he might be asked to read his list in a discussion group with other prisoners. “After all, it’s what you really believe, isn’t it?” Still later he might be asked to write an essay expanding on his list and discussing these problems in greater detail. The Chinese might then use his name and his essay in an anti-American radio broadcast beamed not only to the entire camp, but to other POW camps in North Korea, as well as to American forces in South Korea. Suddenly he would find himself a “collaborator,” having given aid to the enemy. Aware that he had written the essay without any strong threats or coercion, many times a man would change his image of himself to be consistent with the deed and with the new “collaborator” label, often resulting in even more extensive acts of collaboration.
For the salesperson, the strategy is to obtain a large purchase by starting with a small one. Almost any small sale will do, because the purpose of that small transaction is not profit. It is commitment. Further purchases, even much larger ones, are expected to flow naturally from the commitment.
The homeowners were asked to allow a public-service billboard to be installed on their front lawns. To get an idea of just how the sign would look, they were shown a photograph depicting an attractive house, the view of which was almost completely obscured by a very large, poorly lettered sign reading DRIVE CAREFULLY. Although the request was normally and understandably refused by the great majority (83 percent) of the other residents in the area, this particular group of people reacted quite favorably. A full 76 percent of them offered the use of their front yards. The prime reason for their startling compliance has to do with something that had happened to them about two weeks earlier: They had made a small commitment to driver safety. A different volunteer worker had come to their doors and asked them to accept and display a little three-inch-square sign that read BE A SAFE DRIVER. It was such a trifling request that nearly all of them had agreed to it. But the effects of that request were enormous. Because they had innocently complied with a trivial safe-driving request a couple of weeks before, these homeowners became remarkably willing to comply with another such request that was massive in size.
At first, even Freedman and Fraser were bewildered by their findings. Why should the little act of signing a petition supporting state beautification cause people to be so willing to perform a different and much larger favor? After considering and discarding other explanations, Freedman and Fraser came upon one that offered a solution to the puzzle: Signing the beautification petition changed the view these people had of themselves. They saw themselves as public-spirited citizens who acted on their civic principles. When, two weeks later, they were asked to perform another public service by displaying the DRIVE CAREFULLY sign, they complied in order to be consistent with their newly formed self-images.
What the Freedman and Fraser findings tell us, then, is to be very careful about agreeing to trivial requests. Such an agreement can not only increase our compliance with very similar, much larger requests, it can also make us more willing to perform a variety of larger favors that are only remotely connected to the little one we did earlier.
Our best evidence of what people truly feel and believe comes less from their words than from their deeds. Observers trying to decide what a man is like look closely at his actions. What the Chinese have discovered is that the man himself uses this same evidence to decide what he is like. His behavior tells him about himself; it is a primary source of information about his beliefs and values and attitudes. Understanding fully this important principle of self-perception, the Chinese set about arranging the prison-camp experience so that their captives would consistently act in desired ways. Before long, the Chinese knew, these actions would begin to take their toll, causing the men to change their views of themselves to align with what they had done.
For example, one study found that after hearing that they were considered charitable people, New Haven, Connecticut, housewives gave much more money to a canvasser from the Multiple Sclerosis Association.33 Apparently the mere knowledge that someone viewed them as charitable caused these women to make their actions consistent with another’s perception of them.
The prisoner experience in Korea showed the Chinese to be quite aware of an important psychological principle: Public commitments tend to be lasting commitments.
Whenever one takes a stand that is visible to others, there arises a drive to maintain that stand in order to look like a consistent person.
The results were quite clear. The students who had never written down their first choices were the least loyal to those choices. When new evidence was presented that questioned the wisdom of decisions that had never left their heads, these students were the most influenced by the new information to change what they had viewed as the “correct” decision. Compared to these uncommitted students, those who had merely written their decisions for a moment on a Magic Pad were significantly less willing to change their minds when given the chance. Even though they had committed themselves under the most anonymous of circumstances, the act of writing down their first judgments caused them to resist the influence of contradictory new data and to remain consistent with the preliminary choices. But Deutsch and Gerard found that, by far, it was the students who had publicly recorded their initial positions who most resolutely refused to shift from those positions later. Public commitment had hardened them into the most stubborn of all.
I used to get determined to quit, but I never could. This time, though, I decided I had to do something. I’m a proud person. It matters to me if other people see me in a bad light. So I thought, “Maybe I can use that pride to help me dump this damn habit.” So I made a list of all the people who I really wanted to respect me. Then I went out and got some blank business cards and I wrote on the back of each card, “I promise you that I will never smoke another cigarette.” Within a week, I had given or sent a signed card to everybody on the list—my dad, my brother back East, my boss, my best girlfriend, my ex-husband, everybody but one—the guy I was dating then. I was just crazy about him, and I really wanted him to value me as a person. Believe me, I thought twice about giving him a card because I knew that if I couldn’t keep my promise to him I’d die. But one day at the office—he worked in the same building as I did—I just walked up to him, handed him the card, and walked away without saying anything. Quitting “cold turkey” was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. There must have been a thousand times when I thought I had to have a smoke. But whenever that happened, I’d just picture how all of the people on my list, especially this one guy, would think less of me if I couldn’t stick to my guns. And that’s all it took. I’ve never taken another puff.
Indeed, one study of fifty-four tribal cultures found that those with the most dramatic and stringent initiation ceremonies were those with the greatest group solidarity.
Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures. A large reward is one such external pressure. It may get us to perform a certain action, but it won’t get us to accept inner responsibility for the act. Consequently, we won’t feel committed to it.
Second, the boys took personal responsibility for their choice to stay away from the robot during that time. They decided that they hadn’t played with it because they didn’t want to. After all, there were no strong punishments associated with the toy to explain their behavior otherwise. Thus, weeks later, when Freedman was nowhere around, they still ignored the robot because they had been changed inside to believe that they did not want to play with it.41
For certain customers, a very good price is offered on a car, perhaps as much as four hundred dollars below competitors’ prices. The good deal, however, is not genuine; the dealer never intends it to go through. Its only purpose is to cause a prospect to decide to buy one of the dealership’s cars.
Another, even more insidious form of lowballing occurs when the salesman makes an inflated trade-in offer on the prospect’s old car as part of the buy/trade package. The customer recognizes the offer as overly generous and jumps at the deal. Later, before the contract is signed, the used-car manager says that the salesman’s estimate was four hundred dollars too high and reduces the trade-in allowance to its actual, blue-book level. The customer, realizing that the reduced offer is the fair one, accepts it as appropriate and sometimes feels guilty about trying to take advantage of the salesman’s high estimate.
These people had been lowballed into a conservation commitment through a promise of newspaper publicity. Once made, that commitment started generating its own support: The homeowners began acquiring new energy habits, began feeling good about their public-spirited efforts, began convincing themselves of the vital need to reduce American dependence on foreign fuel, began appreciating the monetary savings in their utility bills, began feeling proud of their capacity for self-denial, and, most important, began viewing themselves as conservation-minded. With all these new reasons present to justify the commitment to use less energy, it is no wonder that the commitment remained firm even after the original reason, newspaper publicity, had been kicked away.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense. —Rumi
A meditation student at a retreat I was teaching told me about an experience that brought home to her the tragedy of living in trance. Marilyn had spent many hours sitting at the bedside of her dying mother—reading to her, meditating next to her late at night, holding her hand and telling her over and over that she loved her. Most of the time Marilyn’s mother remained unconscious, her breath labored and erratic. One morning before dawn, she suddenly opened her eyes and looked clearly and intently at her daughter. “You know,” she whispered softly, “all my life I thought something was wrong with me.” Shaking her head slightly, as if to say, “What a waste,” she closed her eyes and drifted back into a coma. Several hours later she passed away.
The belief that we are deficient and unworthy makes it difficult to trust that we are truly loved. Many of us live with an undercurrent of depression or hopelessness about ever feeling close to other people. We fear that if they realize we are boring or stupid, selfish or insecure, they’ll reject us. If we’re not attractive enough, we may never be loved in an intimate, romantic way. We yearn for an unquestioned experience of belonging, to feel at home with ourselves and others, at ease and fully accepted. But the trance of unworthiness keeps the sweetness of belonging out of reach.
Chögyam Trungpa, a contemporary Tibetan Buddhist teacher, writes, “The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.” What I brought to my spiritual path included all my needs to be admired, all my insecurities about not being good enough, all my tendencies to judge my inner and outer world. The playing field was larger than my earlier pursuits, but the game was still the same: striving to be a different and better person. In retrospect, it is no surprise that my self-doubts were transferred intact into my spiritual life. Those who feel plagued by not being good enough are often drawn to idealistic worldviews that offer the possibility of purifying and transcending a flawed nature. This quest for perfection is based in the assumption that we must change ourselves to belong. We may listen longingly to the message that wholeness and goodness have always been our essence, yet still feel like outsiders, uninvited guests at the feast of life.
We learn early in life that any affiliation—with family and friends, at school or in the workplace—requires proving that we are worthy. We are under pressure to compete with each other, to get ahead, to stand out as intelligent, attractive, capable, powerful, wealthy. Someone is always keeping score.
As the Dalai Lama pointed out so poignantly, we all have Buddha nature. Spiritual awakening is the process of recognizing our essential goodness, our natural wisdom and compassion. In stark contrast to this trust in our inherent worth, our culture’s guiding myth is the story of Adam and Eve’s exile from the Garden of Eden. We may forget its power because it seems so worn and familiar, but this story shapes and reflects the deep psyche of the West. The message of “original sin” is unequivocal: Because of our basically flawed nature, we do not deserve to be happy, loved by others, at ease with life. We are outcasts, and if we are to reenter the garden, we must redeem our sinful selves. We must overcome our flaws by controlling our bodies, controlling our emotions, controlling our natural surroundings, controlling other people. And we must strive tirelessly—working, acquiring, consuming, achieving, e-mailing, overcommitting and rushing—in a never-ending quest to prove ourselves once and for all.
Through this clear mirroring a child develops a sense of security and trust early in life, as well as the capacity for spontaneity and intimacy with others. When my clients examine their wounds, they recognize how, as children, they did not receive the love and understanding they yearned for. Furthermore, they are able to see in their relationships with their own children the ways they too fall short of the ideal—how they can be inattentive, judgmental, angry and self-centered. Our imperfect parents had imperfect parents of their own. Fears, insecurities and desires get passed along for generations. Parents want to see their offspring make it in ways that are important to them. Or they want their children to be special, which in our competitive culture means more intelligent, accomplished and attractive than other people. They see their children through filters of fear (they might not get into a good college and be successful) and filters of desire (will they reflect well on us?).
Over the years we each develop a particular blend of strategies designed to hide our flaws and compensate for what we believe is wrong with us. We embark on one self-improvement project after another. We strive to meet the media standards for the perfect body and looks by coloring out the gray, lifting our face, being on a perpetual diet. We push ourselves to get a better position at work. We exercise, take enriching courses of study, meditate, make lists, volunteer, take workshops. Certainly any of these activities can be undertaken in a wholesome way, but so often they are driven by anxious undercurrents of “not good enough.” Rather than relaxing and enjoying who we are and what we’re doing, we are comparing ourselves with an ideal and trying to make up for the difference.
Playing it safe requires that we avoid risky situations—which covers pretty much all of life. We might not take on leadership or responsibility at work, we might not risk being really intimate with others, we might hold back from expressing our creativity, from saying what we really mean, from being playful or affectionate.
There’s an old joke about a Jewish mother who sends a telegram to her son: “Start worrying, details to follow.” Because we live in a free-floating state of anxiety, we don’t even need a problem to set off a stream of disaster scenarios. Living in the future creates the illusion that we are managing our life and steels us against personal failure.
We keep busy. Staying occupied is a socially sanctioned way of remaining distant from our pain. How often do we hear that someone who has just lost a dear one is “doing a good job at keeping busy”? If we stop we run the risk of plunging into the unbearable feeling that we are alone and utterly worthless. So we scramble to fill ourselves—our time, our body, our mind. We might buy something new or lose ourselves in mindless small talk. As soon as we have a gap, we go on-line to check our e-mail, we turn on music, we get a snack, watch television—anything to help us bury the feelings of vulnerability and deficiency lurking in our psyche.
During his all-night vigil, the Buddha looked deeply into his own suffering. His amazing insight was that all suffering or dissatisfaction arises from a mistaken understanding that we are a separate and distinct self. This perception of “selfness” imprisons us in endless rounds of craving and aversion. When our sense of being is confined in this way, we have forgotten the loving awareness that is our essence and that connects us with all of life. What we experience as the “self” is an aggregate of familiar thoughts, emotions and patterns of behavior. The mind binds these together, creating a story about a personal, individual entity that has continuity through time. Everything we experience is subsumed into this story of self and becomes my experience. I am afraid. This is my desire. The contemporary Thai Buddhist meditation master and writer Ajahn Buddhadasa refers to this habit of attaching a sense of self to our experience as “I-ing” and “my-ing.” We interpret everything we think and feel, and everything that happens to us, as in some way belonging to or caused by a self. Our most habitual and compelling feelings and thoughts define the core of who we think we are. If we are caught in the trance of unworthiness, we experience that core as flawed. When we take life personally by I-ing and my-ing, the universal sense that “something is wrong” easily solidifies into “something is wrong with me.”
Wanting and fearing are natural energies, part of evolution’s design to protect us and help us to thrive. But when they become the core of our identity, we lose sight of the fullness of our being. We become identified with, at best, only a sliver of our natural being—a sliver that perceives itself as incomplete, at risk and separate from the rest of the world. If our sense of who we are is defined by feelings of neediness and insecurity, we forget that we are also curious, humorous and caring. We forget about the breath that is nourishing us, the love that unites us, the enormous beauty and fragility that is our shared experience in being alive. Most basically, we forget the pure awareness, the radiant wakefulness that is our Buddha nature.
Many people have told me that when they finally are able to see how long their life has been imprisoned by self-hatred and shame, they feel not only grief but also a sense of life-giving hope. Like waking up from a bad dream, when we can see our prison, we also see our potential. The renowned seventh-century Zen master Seng-tsan taught that true freedom is being “without anxiety about imperfection.” This means accepting our human existence and all of life as it is. Imperfection is not our personal problem—it is a natural part of existing. We all get caught in wants and fears, we all act unconsciously, we all get diseased and deteriorate. When we relax about imperfection, we no longer lose our life moments in the pursuit of being different and in the fear of what is wrong.
Do I accept my body as it is? Do I blame myself when I get sick? Do I feel I am not attractive enough? Am I dissatisfied with how my hair looks? Am I embarrassed about how my face and body are aging? Do I judge myself for being too heavy? Underweight? Not physically fit? Do I accept my mind as it is? Do I judge myself for not being intelligent enough? Humorous? Interesting? Am I critical of myself for having obsessive thoughts? For having a repetitive, boring mind? Am I ashamed of myself for having bad thoughts—mean, judgmental or lusty thoughts? Do I consider myself a bad meditator because my mind is so busy? Do I accept my emotions and moods as they are? Is it okay for me to cry? To feel insecure and vulnerable? Do I condemn myself for getting depressed? Am I ashamed of feeling jealous? Am I critical of myself for being impatient? Irritable? Intolerant? Do I feel that my anger or anxiety is a sign that I am not progressing on the spiritual path? Do I feel I’m a bad person because of ways I behave? Do I hate myself when I act in a self-centered or hurtful way? Am I ashamed of my outbursts of anger? Do I feel disgusted with myself when I eat compulsively? When I smoke cigarettes or drink too much alcohol? Do I feel that because I am selfish and often do not put others first, I am not spiritually evolved? Do I feel as if I am always falling short in how I relate to my family and friends? Do I feel something is wrong with me because I am not capable of intimacy? Am I down on myself for not accomplishing enough—for not standing out or being special in my work?
As you go through your day, pause occasionally to ask yourself, “This moment, do I accept myself just as I am?” Without judging yourself, simply become aware of how you are relating to your body, emotions, thoughts and behaviors. As the trance of unworthiness becomes conscious, it begins to lose its power over our lives.
The way out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience. By accepting absolutely everything, what I mean is that we are aware of what is happening within our body and mind in any given moment, without trying to control or judge or pull away. I do not mean that we are putting up with harmful behavior—our own or another’s. This is an inner process of accepting our actual, present-moment experience. It means feeling sorrow and pain without resisting. It means feeling desire or dislike for someone or something without judging ourselves for the feeling or being driven to act on it.
When we get lost in our stories, we lose touch with our actual experience. Leaning into the future, or rehashing the past, we leave the living experience of the immediate moment. Our trance deepens as we move through the day driven by “I have to do more to be okay” or “I am incomplete; I need more to be happy.” These “mantras” reinforce the trance-belief that our life should be different from what it is.
When we are meditating, we experience a delicious stretch of tranquility and peace, and then immediately begin wondering how to keep it going. Our enjoyment is tainted by anxiety about keeping what we have and our compulsion to reach out and get more.
The second wing of Radical Acceptance, compassion, is our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive. Instead of resisting our feelings of fear or grief, we embrace our pain with the kindness of a mother holding her child. Rather than judging or indulging our desire for attention or chocolate or sex, we regard our grasping with gentleness and care. Compassion honors our experience; it allows us to be intimate with the life of this moment as it is.
Quoth Govinda: "Siddhartha is putting me on. How could you have learned meditation, holding your breath, insensitivity against hunger and pain there among these wretched people?" And Siddhartha said quietly, as if he was talking to himself: "What is meditation? What is leaving one's body? What is fasting? What is holding one's breath? It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice-wine or fermented coconut-milk. Then he won't feel his self any more, then he won't feel the pains of life any more, then he finds a short numbing of the senses. When he falls asleep over his bowl of rice-wine, he'll find the same what Siddhartha and Govinda find when they escape their bodies through long exercises, staying in the non-self. This is how it is, oh Govinda."
Throughout his life Steinbeck signed his letters with his personal “Pigasus” logo, symbolizing himself “a lumbering soul but trying to fly.” The Latin motto Ad Astra Per Alia Porci translates “To the stars on the wings of a pig.”
And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies.
We always preferred to think it was the former. Samuel had good looks and charm and gaiety. It is hard to imagine that any country Irish girl refused him.
I don’t know what directed his steps toward the Salinas Valley. It was an unlikely place for a man from a green country to come to, but he came about thirty years before the turn of the century and he brought with him his tiny Irish wife, a tight hard little woman humor-less as a chicken. She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.
Samuel had no equal for soothing hysteria and bringing quiet to a frightened child. It was the sweetness of his tongue and the tenderness of his soul. And just as there was a cleanness about his body, so there was a cleanness in his thinking. Men coming to his blacksmith shop to talk and listen dropped their cursing for a while, not from any kind of restraint but automatically, as though this were not the place for it.
Cyrus wanted a woman to take care of Adam. He needed someone to keep house and cook, and a servant cost money. He was a vigorous man and needed the body of a woman, and that too cost money—unless you were married to it. Within two weeks Cyrus had wooed, wedded, bedded, and impregnated her. His neighbors did not find his action hasty. It was quite normal in that day for a man to use up three or four wives in a normal lifetime.
The death of Lincoln caught Cyrus in the pit of the stomach. Always he remembered how he felt when he first heard the news. And he could never mention it or hear of it without quick tears in his eyes. And while he never actually said it, you got the indestructible impression that Private Cyrus Trask was one of Lincoln’s closest, warmest, and most trusted friends. When Mr. Lincoln wanted to know about the army, the real army, not those prancing dummies in gold braid, he turned to Private Trask. How Cyrus managed to make this understood without saying it was a triumph of insinuation. No one could call him a liar. And this was mainly because the lie was in his head, and any truth coming from his mouth carried the color of the lie.
When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
As they walked back toward the house Cyrus turned left and entered the woodlot among the trees, and it was dusk. Suddenly Adam said, “You see that stump there, sir? I used to hide between the roots on the far side. After you punished me I used to hide there, and sometimes I went there just because I felt bad.” “Let’s go and see the place,” his father said. Adam led him to it, and Cyrus looked down at the nestlike hole between the roots. “I knew about it long ago,” he said. “Once when you were gone a long time I thought you must have such a place, and I found it because I felt the kind of a place you would need. See how the earth is tamped and the little grass is torn? And while you sat in there you stripped little pieces of bark to shreds. I knew it was the place when I came upon it.” Adam was staring at his father in wonder. “You never came here looking for me,” he said. “No,” Cyrus replied. “I wouldn’t do that. You can drive a human too far. I wouldn’t do that. Always you must leave a man one escape before death. Remember that! I knew, I guess, how hard I was pressing you. I didn’t want to push you over the edge.”
They moved restlessly off through the trees. Cyrus said, “So many things I want to tell you. I’ll forget most of them. I want to tell you that a soldier gives up so much to get something back. From the day of a child’s birth he is taught by every circumstance, by every law and rule and right, to protect his own life. He starts with that great instinct, and everything confirms it. And then he is a soldier and he must learn to violate all of this—he must learn coldly to put himself in the way of losing his own life without going mad. And if you can do that—and, mind you, some can’t—then you will have the greatest gift of all. Look, son,” Cyrus said earnestly, “nearly all men are afraid, and they don’t even know what causes their fear—shadows, perplexities, dangers without names or numbers, fear of a faceless death. But if you can bring yourself to face not shadows but real death, described and recognizable, by bullet or saber, arrow or lance, then you need never be afraid again, at least not in the same way you were before. Then you will be a man set apart from other men, safe where other men may cry in terror. This is the great reward. Maybe this is the only reward. Maybe this is the final purity all ringed with filth. It’s nearly dark. I’ll want to talk to you again tomorrow night when both of us have thought about what I’ve told you.”
But Adam said, “Why don’t you talk to my brother? Charles will be going. He’ll be good at it, much better than I am.” “Charles won’t be going,” Cyrus said. “There’d be no point in it.” “But he would be a better soldier.” “Only outside on his skin,” said Cyrus. “Not inside. Charles is not afraid so he could never learn anything about courage. He does not know anything outside himself so he could never gain the things I’ve tried to explain to you. To put him in an army would be to let loose things which in Charles must be chained down, not let loose. I would not dare to let him go.” Adam complained, “You never punished him, you let him live his life, you praised him, you did not haze him, and now you let him stay out of the army.” He stopped, frightened at what he had said, afraid of the rage or the contempt or the violence his words might let loose. His father did not reply. He walked on out of the woodlot, and his head hung down so that his chin rested on his chest, and the rise and fall of his hip when his wooden leg struck the ground was monotonous. The wooden leg made a side semicircle to get ahead when its turn came. It was completely dark by now, and the golden light of the lamps shone out from the open kitchen door. Alice came to the doorway and peered out, looking for them, and then she heard the uneven footsteps approaching and went back to the kitchen. Cyrus walked to the kitchen stoop before he stopped and raised his head. “Where are you?” he asked. “Here—right behind you—right here.” “You asked a question. I guess I’ll have to answer. Maybe it’s good and maybe it’s bad to answer it. You’re not clever. You don’t know what you want. You have…
As he revolted more and more from violence, his impulse took the opposite direction. He ventured his life a number of times to bring in wounded men. He volunteered for work in field hospitals even when he was exhausted from his regular duties. He was regarded by his comrades with contemptuous affection and the unspoken fear men have of impulses they do not understand.
Tom, the third son, was most like his father. He was born in fury and he lived in lightning. Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn’t discover the world and its people, he created them. When he read his father’s books, he was the first. He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through it and out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow, so that when his dog died the world ended.
Liza enjoyed universal respect because she was a good woman and raised good children. She could hold up her head anywhere. Her husband and her children and her grandchildren respected her. There was a nail-hard strength in her, a lack of any compromise, a rightness in the face of all opposing wrongness, which made you hold her in a kind of awe but not in warmth.
AFTER ADAM JOINED THE ARMY and Cyrus moved to Washington, Charles lived alone on the farm. He boasted about getting himself a wife, but he did not go about doing it by the usual process of meeting girls, taking them to dances, testing their virtues or otherwise, and finally slipping feebly into marriage.
Spring urged him east again, but more slowly than before. Summer was cool in the mountains, and the mountain people were kind as lonesome people are kind. Adam took a job on a widow’s outfit near Denver and shared her table and her bed humbly until the frost drove him south again. He followed the Rio Grande past Albuquerque and El Paso through the Big Bend, through Laredo to Brownsville. He learned Spanish words for food and pleasure, and he learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it. He developed a love for poor people he could not have conceived if he had not been poor himself.
Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous. It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life. Some balance wheel was misweighted, some gear out of ratio. She was not like other people, never was from birth. And just as a cripple may learn to utilize his lack so that he becomes more effective in a limited field than the uncrippled, so did Cathy, using her difference, make a painful and bewildering stir in her world.
Cathy’s lies were never innocent. Their purpose was to escape punishment, or work, or responsibility, and they were used for profit. Most liars are tripped up either because they forget what they have told or because the lie is suddenly faced with an incontrovertible truth. But Cathy did not forget her lies, and she developed the most effective method of lying. She stayed close enough to the truth so that one could never be sure. She knew two other methods also—either to interlard her lies with truth or to tell a truth as though it were a lie.
Cathy learned when she was very young that sexuality with all its attendant yearnings and pains, jealousies and taboos, is the most disturbing impulse humans have. And in that day it was even more disturbing than it is now, because the subject was unmentionable and unmentioned. Everyone concealed that little hell in himself, while publicly pretending it did not exist—and when he was caught up in it he was completely helpless. Cathy learned that by the manipulation and use of this one part of people she could gain and keep power over nearly anyone. It was at once a weapon and a threat. It was irresistible. And since the blind helplessness seems never to have fallen on Cathy, it is probable that she had very little of the impulse herself and indeed felt a contempt for those who did. And when you think of it in one way, she was right. What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.
History was secreted in the glands of a million historians. We must get out of this banged-up century, some said, out of this cheating, murderous century of riot and secret death, of scrabbling for public lands and damn well getting them by any means at all.
SOMETIMES A KIND OF GLORY lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then—the glory—so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.
When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against? Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
He built a chip fire in the black square of the forge and pulled a bellows breeze on it and then fed wet coke over with his fingers until it glowed. “Here, Louis,” he said, “wave your wing on my fire. Slow, man, slow and even.” He laid the strips of iron on the glowing coke. “No, sir, Mr. Trask, Liza’s used to cooking for nine starving children. Nothing can startle her.” He tonged the iron to more advantageous heat, and he laughed. “I’ll take that last back as a holy lie,” he said. “My wife is rumbling like round stones in the surf. And I’ll caution the both of you not to mention the word ‘sofa.’ It’s a word of anger and sorrow to Liza.” “You said something about it,” Adam said. “If you knew my boy Tom, you’d understand it better, Mr. Trask. Louis knows him.” “Sure I know him,” Louis said. Samuel went on, “My Tom is a hell-bent boy. Always takes more on his plate than he can eat. Always plants more than he can harvest. Pleasures too much, sorrows too much. Some people are like that. Liza thinks I’m like that. I don’t know what will come to Tom. Maybe greatness, maybe the noose—well, Hamiltons have been hanged before. And I’ll tell you about that sometime.” “The sofa,” Adam suggested politely. “You’re right. I do, and Liza says I do, shepherd my words like rebellious sheep. Well, came the dance at the Peach Tree school and the boys, George, Tom, Will, and Joe, all decided to go. And of course the girls were asked. George and Will and Joe, poor simple boys, each asked one lady friend, but Tom—he took too big a helping as usual. He asked two Williams sisters, Jennie and Belle. How many screw holes do you want, Louis?” “Five,” said Louis. “All right. Now I must tell you, Mr. Trask, that my Tom has all the egotism and self-love of a boy who thinks he’s ugly. Mostly lets himself go fallow, but comes a celebration and he garlands himself like a may-pole, and he glories like spring flowers. This takes him quite a piece of time. You notice the wagon house was empty? George and Will and Joe started early and not so beautiful as Tom. George took the rig, Will had the buggy, and Joe got the little two-wheeled cart.” Samuel’s blue eyes shone with pleasure. “Well then, Tom came out as shy and shining as a Roman emperor and the only thing left with wheels was a hay rake, and you can’t take even one Williams sister on that. For good or bad, Liza was taking her nap. Tom sat on the steps and thought it out. Then I saw him go to the shed and hitch up two horses and take the doubletree off the hay rake. He wrestled the sofa out of the house and ran a fifth-chain under the legs—the fine goose-neck horsehair sofa that Liza loves better than anything. I gave it to her to rest on before George was born. The last I saw, Tom went dragging up the hill, reclining at his ease on the sofa to get the Williams girls. And, oh, Lord, it’ll be worn thin as a wafer from scraping by the time he gets it back.” Samuel put down his tongs and placed his hands on his hips the better to…
“I’ve dug into it plenty,” Samuel said. “Something went on under it— maybe still is going on. There’s an ocean bed underneath, and below that another world. But that needn’t bother a farming man. Now, on top is good soil, particularly on the flats. In the upper valley it is light and sandy, but mixed in with that, the top sweetness of the hills that washed down on it in the winters. As you go north the valley widens out, and the soil gets blacker and heavier and perhaps richer. It’s my belief that marshes were there once, and the roots of centuries rotted into the soil and made it black and fertilized it. And when you turn it up, a little greasy clay mixes and holds it together. That’s from about Gonzales north to the river mouth. Off to the sides, around Salinas and Blanco and Castroville and Moss Landing, the marshes are still there. And when one day those marshes are drained off, that will be the richest of all land in this red world.”
Olive could not hear over the noise of the engine. The pilot throttled down and shouted, “Stunt?” It was a kind of joke. Olive saw his goggled face and the slip stream caught his word and distorted it. What Olive heard was the word “stuck.” Well, she thought, here it is just as I knew it would be. Here was her death. Her mind flashed to see if she had forgotten anything—will made, letters burned, new underwear, plenty of food in the house for dinner. She wondered whether she had turned out the light in the back room. It was all in a second. Then she thought there might be an outside chance of survival. The young soldier was obviously frightened and fear might be the worst thing that could happen to him in handling the situation. If she gave way to the panic that lay on her heart it might frighten him more. She decided to encourage him. She smiled brightly and nodded to give him courage, and then the bottom fell out of the world. When he leveled out of his loop the pilot looked back again and shouted, “More?” Olive was way beyond hearing anything, but her chin was set and she was determined to help the pilot so that he would not be too afraid before they hit the earth. She smiled and nodded again. At the end of each stunt he looked back, and each time she encouraged him. Afterward he said over and over, “She’s the goddamest woman I ever saw. I tore up the rule book and she wanted more. Good Christ, what a pilot she would have made!”
And Samuel could remember hearing of a cousin of his mother’s in Ireland, a knight and rich and handsome, and anyway shot himself on a silken couch, sitting beside the most beautiful woman in the world who loved him. “There’s a capacity for appetite,” Samuel said, “that a whole heaven and earth of cake can’t satisfy.”
“That’s why I’m talking to you. You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.”
“I guess that’s right,” said Samuel. “In my own way I tell jokes because people come all the way to my place to laugh. I try to be funny for them even when the sadness is on me.” “But the Irish are said to be a happy people, full of jokes.” “There’s your pidgin and your queue. They’re not. They’re a dark people with a gift for suffering way past their deserving. It’s said that without whisky to soak and soften the world, they’d kill themselves. But they tell jokes because it’s expected of them.”
He had hung his black hat on his saddle horn. An ache was on the top of his stomach, an apprehension that was like a sick thought. It was a Weltschmerz—which we used to call “Welshrats”— the world sadness that rises into the soul like a gas and spreads despair so that you probe for the offending event and can find none.
Samuel said, “Offhand I’d say I’m against it, Joe. Your mother needs you here.” “But I want to go, Father. And don’t forget, next year I’ll be going to college in Palo Alto. And that’s going away, isn’t it? Please let me go. I’ll work hard.” “I’m sure you would if you could come. But I’m against it. And when you talk to your mother about it, I’ll thank you to let it slip that I’m against it. You might even throw in that I refused you.” Joe grinned, and Tom laughed aloud. “Will you let her persuade you?” Tom asked. Samuel scowled at his sons. “I’m a hard-opinioned man,” he said. “Once I’ve set my mind, oxen can’t stir me. I’ve looked at it from all angles and my word is—Joe can’t go. You wouldn’t want to make a liar of my word, would you?”
“Take a look at it, son. What do you think it is?” Joe wandered over from his place in front of the tent. Tom studied the fragments in his hand. “Whatever it is, it’s hard,” he said. “Couldn’t be a diamond that big. Looks like metal. Do you think we’ve bored into a buried locomotive?” His father laughed. “Thirty feet down,” he said admiringly. “It looks like tool steel,” said Tom. “We haven’t got anything that can touch it.” Then he saw the faraway joyous look on his father’s face and a shiver of shared delight came to him. The Hamilton children loved it when their father’s mind went free. Then the world was peopled with wonders.
“It must have been long thousand centuries ago,” Samuel said, and his sons knew he was seeing it. “Maybe it was all water here—an inland sea with the seabirds circling and crying. And it would have been a pretty thing if it happened at night. There would come a line of light and then a pencil of white light and then a tree of blinding light drawn in a long arc from heaven. Then there’d be a great water spout and a big mushroom of steam. And your ears would be staggered by the sound because the soaring cry of its coming would be on you at the same time the water exploded. And then it would be black night again, because of the blinding light. And gradually you’d see the killed fish coming up, showing silver in the starlight, and the crying birds would come to eat them. It’s a lonely, lovely thing to think about, isn’t it?”
The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing.
IN HUMAN AFFAIRS OF DANGER and delicacy successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry. So often men trip by being in a rush. If one were properly to perform a difficult and subtle act, he should first inspect the end to be achieved and then, once he had accepted the end as desirable, he should forget it completely and concentrate solely on the means. By this method he would not be moved to false action by anxiety or hurry or fear. Very few people learn this.
One day Samuel strained his back lifting a bale of hay, and it hurt his feelings more than his back, for he could not imagine a life in which Sam Hamilton was not privileged to lift a bale of hay. He felt insulted by his back, almost as he would have been if one of his children had been dishonest.
Samuel dug up his old gaiety. His sardonic mind glowed and his speech took on its old singing rhythm. He hung on with the talk and the singing and the memories, and then suddenly, and it not midnight, he tired. Weariness came down on him, and he went to his bed where Liza had been for two hours. He was puzzled at himself, not that he had to go to bed but that he wanted to. When the mother and father were gone, Will brought the whisky in from the forge and the clan had a meeting in the kitchen with whisky passed around in round-bottomed jelly glasses. The mothers crept to the bedrooms to see that the children were covered and then came back. They all spoke softly, not to disturb the children and the old people. There were Tom and Dessie, George and his pretty Mamie, who had been a Dempsey, Mollie and William J. Martin, Olive and Ernest Steinbeck, Will and his Deila. They all wanted to say the same thing—all ten of them. Samuel was an old man. It was as startling a discovery as the sudden seeing of a ghost. Somehow they had not believed it could happen. They drank their whisky and talked softly of the new thought. His shoulders—did you see how they slump? And there’s no spring in his step. His toes drag a little, but it’s not that—it’s in his eyes. His eyes are old. He never would go to bed until last. Did you notice he forgot what he was saying right in the middle of a story? It’s his skin told me. It’s gone wrinkled, and the backs of his hands have turned transparent. He favors his right leg. Yes, but that’s the one the horse broke. I know, but he never favored it before. They said these things in outrage. This can’t happen, they were saying. Father can’t be an old man. Samuel is young as the dawn—the perpetual dawn. He might get old as midday maybe, but sweet God! the evening cannot come, and the night—? Sweet God, no! It was natural that their minds leaped on and recoiled, and they would not speak of that, but their minds said, There can’t be any world without Samuel. How could we think about anything without knowing what he thought about it?
Samuel may have thought and played and philosophized about death, but he did not really believe in it. His world did not have death as a member. He, and all around him, was immortal. When real death came it was an outrage, a denial of the immortality he deeply felt, and the one crack in his wall caused the whole structure to crash. I think he had always thought he could argue himself out of death. It was a personal opponent and one he could lick.
“I can’t tell you how to live your life,” Samuel said, “although I do be telling you how to live it. I know that it might be better for you to come out from under your might-have-beens, into the winds of the world. And while I tell you, I am myself sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It’s small mining—small mining. You’re too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.”
When Adam left Kate’s place he had over two hours to wait for the train back to King City. On an impulse he turned off Main Street and walked up Central Avenue to number 130, the high white house of Ernest Steinbeck. It was an immaculate and friendly house, grand enough but not pretentious, and it sat inside its white fence, surrounded by its clipped lawn, and roses and cotoneasters lapped against its white walls.
DESSIE WAS THE BELOVED of the family. Mollie the pretty kitten, Olive the strong-headed, Una with clouds on her head, all were loved, but Dessie was the warm-beloved. Hers was the twinkle and the laughter infectious as chickenpox, and hers the gaiety that colored a day and spread to people so that they carried it away with them.
She smiled and walked up behind him. “I beg your pardon, stranger,” she said quietly. “Is there a Mister Tom Hamilton here?” He spun around and he squealed with pleasure and picked her up in a bear hug and danced her around. He held her off the ground with one arm and spanked her bottom with his free hand. He nuzzled her cheek with his harsh mustache. Then he held her back by the shoulders and looked at her. Both of them threw back their heads and howled with laughter. The station agent leaned out his window and rested his elbows, protected with black false sleeves, on the sill. He said over his shoulder to the telegrapher, “Those Hamiltons! Just look at them!” Tom and Dessie, fingertips touching, were doing a courtly heel-and-toe while he sang Doodle-doodle-doo and Dessie sang Deedle-deedle-dee, and then they embraced again.
THE GREEN LASTED on the hills far into June before the grass turned yellow. The heads of the wild oats were so heavy with seed that they hung over on their stalks. The little springs trickled on late in the summer. The range cattle staggered under their fat and their hides shone with health. It was a year when the people of the Salinas Valley forgot the dry years. Farmers bought more land than they could afford and figured their profits on the covers of their checkbooks. Tom Hamilton labored like a giant, not only with his strong arms and rough hands but also with his heart and spirit. The anvil rang in the forge again. He painted the old house white and whitewashed the sheds. He went to King City and studied a flush toilet and then built one of craftily bent tin and carved wood. Because the water came so slowly from the spring, he put a redwood tank beside the house and pumped the water up to it with a handmade windmill so cleverly made that it turned in the slightest wind. And he made metal and wood models of two ideas to be sent to the patent office in the fall. That was not all—he labored with humor and good spirits. Dessie had to rise very early to get in her hand at the housework before Tom had it all done. She watched his great red happiness, and it was not light as Samuel’s happiness was light. It did not rise out of his roots and come floating up. He was manufacturing happiness as cleverly as he knew how, molding it and shaping it. Dessie, who had more friends than anyone in the whole valley, had no confidants. When her trouble had come upon her she had not talked about it. And the pains were a secret in herself. When Tom found her rigid and tight from the grabbing pain and cried in alarm, “Dessie, what’s the matter?” she controlled her face and said, “A little crick, that’s all. Just a little crick. I’m all right now.” And in a moment they were laughing. They laughed a great deal, as though to reassure themselves. Only when Dessie went to her bed did her loss fall on her, bleak and unendurable. And Tom lay in the dark of his room, puzzled as a child. He could hear his heart beating and rasping a little in its beat. His mind fell away from thought and clung for safety to little plans, designs, machines. Sometimes in the summer evenings they walked up the hill to watch the afterglow clinging to the tops of the western mountains and to feel the breeze drawn into the valley by the rising day-heated air. Usually they stood silently for a while and breathed in peacefulness. Since both were shy they never talked about themselves. Neither knew about the other at all. It was startling to both of them when Dessie said one evening on the hill, “Tom, why don’t you get married?” He looked quickly at her and away. He said, “Who’d have me?” “Is that a joke or do you really mean it?” “Who’d have me?” he said again. “Who’d want a thing like me?” “It sounds to me as though you really mean it.” Then she violated their unstated code. “Have you been in…
He remembered that his mother had a strong distaste for suicide, feeling that it combined three things of which she strongly disapproved—bad manners, cowardice, and sin.
A CHILD MAY ASK, “What is the world’s story about?” And a grown man or woman may wonder, “What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we’re at it, what’s the story about?” I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?
In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world. We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
“I wondered,” said Lee. “I don’t think your father ever hated her. He had only sorrow.” Cal drifted toward the door, slowly, softly. He shoved his fists deep in his pockets. “It’s like you said about knowing people. I hate her because I know why she went away. I know—because I’ve got her in me.” His head was down and his voice was heartbroken. Lee jumped up. “You stop that!” he said sharply. “You hear me? Don’t let me catch you doing that. Of course you may have that in you. Everybody has. But you’ve got the other too. Here—look up! Look at me!” Cal raised his head and said wearily, “What do you want?” “You’ve got the other too. Listen to me! You wouldn’t even be wondering if you didn’t have it. Don’t you dare take the lazy way. It’s too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don’t let me catch you doing it! Now—look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do it—not your mother.” “Do you believe that, Lee?” “Yes, I believe it, and you’d better believe it or I’ll break every bone in your body.” After Cal had gone Lee went back to his chair. He thought ruefully, I wonder what happened to my Oriental repose?
Will looked at the dark-faced boy and he liked him. He thought, This boy is sharp. He’s nobody’s fool. “I guess you’ll be going into business pretty soon,” he said. “Yes, sir. I thought I might run the ranch when I get out of high school.” “There’s no money in that,” said Will. “Farmers don’t make any money. It’s the man who buys from him and sells. You’ll never make any money farming.” Will knew that Cal was feeling him, testing him, observing him, and he approved of that. And Cal had made up his mind, but first he asked, “Mr. Hamilton, you haven’t any children, have you?” “Well, no. And I’m sorry about that. I guess I’m sorriest about that.” And then, “What makes you ask?” Cal ignored the question. “Would you give me some advice?” Will felt a glow of pleasure. “If I can, I’ll be glad to. What is it you want to know?” And then Cal did something Will Hamilton approved even more. He used candor as a weapon. He said, “I want to make a lot of money. I want you to tell me how.”
We used every cruelty we could think of on Mr. Fenchel. He was our German. He passed our house every day, and there had been a time when he spoke to every man and woman and child and dog, and everyone had answered. Now no one spoke to him, and I can see now in my mind his tubby loneliness and his face full of hurt pride. My little sister and I did our part with Mr. Fenchel, and it is one of those memories of shame that still makes me break into a sweat and tighten up around the throat. We were standing in our front yard on the lawn one evening and we saw him coming with little fat steps. His black homburg was brushed and squarely set on his head. I don’t remember that we discussed our plan but we must have, to have carried it out so well. As he came near, my sister and I moved slowly across the street side by side. Mr. Fenchel looked up and saw us moving toward him. We stopped in the gutter as he came by. He broke into a smile and said, “Gut efning, Chon. Gut efning, Mary.” We stood stiffly side by side and we said in unison, “Hoch der Kaiser!” I can see his face now, his startled innocent blue eyes. He tried to say something and then he began to cry. Didn’t even try to pretend he wasn’t. He just stood there sobbing. And do you know?—Mary and I turned around and walked stiffly across the street and into our front yard. We felt horrible. I still do when I think of it.
“I burned all of Aron’s letters.” “Did he do bad things to you?” “No. I guess not. Lately I never felt good enough. I always wanted to explain to him that I was not good.” “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good. Is that it?”
“Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity,”
Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.
As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant: writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.
And I think I’ve found the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong. Because all of us have been wrong on various occasions, engaged in cruelty and hypocrisy, and we’ve forgotten most of those occasions. And that means we don’t really know ourselves. How much personal insight can I claim if I can’t trust my memory? How much can you? You’re probably thinking that, while your memory isn’t perfect, you’ve never engaged in revisionism of the magnitude I’m guilty of. But I was just as certain as you, and I was wrong. You may say, “I know I’m not perfect. I’ve made mistakes.” I am here to tell you that you have made more than you think, that some of the core assumptions on which your self-image is built are actually lies. Spend some time using Remem, and you’ll find out.
Imagine the table has no pockets and is frictionless, so the balls just keep rebounding, never coming to a stop; how accurately can you predict the path of any given ball as it collides against the others? In 1978, the physicist Michael Berry calculated that you could predict only nine collisions before you would need to account for the gravitational effect of a person standing in the room. If your initial measurement of a ball’s position is off by even a nanometer, your prediction becomes useless within a matter of seconds.
“I know it’s not,” said Dana. “But the question was, given that we know about other branches, whether making good choices is worth doing. I think it absolutely is. None of us are saints, but we can all try to be better. Each time you do something generous, you’re shaping yourself into someone who’s more likely to be generous next time, and that matters. “And it’s not just your behavior in this branch that you’re changing: you’re inoculating all the versions of you that split off in the future. By becoming a better person, you’re ensuring that more and more of the branches that split off from this point forward are populated by better versions of you.” Better versions of Nat. “Thanks,” she said. “That’s what I was looking for.”
Finally, let me quote Molly Gloss, who gave a speech in which she talked about the impact that being a mother had on her as a writer. Raising a child, she said, “puts you in touch, deeply, inescapably, daily, with some pretty heady issues: What is love and how do we get ours? Why does the world contain evil and pain and loss? How can we discover dignity and tolerance? Who is in power and why? What’s the best way to resolve conflict?” If we want to give an AI any major responsibilities, then it will need good answers to these questions.
“But one day you will find out how good it is to have someone who chooses to come when you call.”
“Be gentle with yourself, my white one. Come with me tomorrow through the forest; we will gather black mushrooms and herbs that, crushed against the fingers, give a magic smell. You will feel the sun on your hair and the rich earth beneath your feet, and the fresh winds scented with the spice of snow from the hidden places on Eld Mountain. Be patient, as you must always be patient with new pale seeds buried in the dark ground. When you are stronger, you can begin to think again. But now is the time to feel.”
That was when I saw the Pendulum. The sphere, hanging from a long wire set into the ceiling of the choir, swayed back and forth with isochronal majesty. I knew—but anyone could have sensed it in the magic of that serene breathing—that the period was governed by the square root of the length of the wire and by it, that number which, however irrational to sublunar minds, through a higher rationality binds the circumference and diameter of all possible circles. The time it took the sphere to swing from end to end was determined by an arcane conspiracy between the most timeless of measures: the singularity of the point of suspension, the duality of the plane’s dimensions, the triadic beginning of K, the secret quadratic nature of the root, and the unnumbered perfection of the circle itself.
No other sky was quite what this one was. Any time of year, any season: whether a late autumn’s cold dawn or midday in drowsy summer among the cicadas. Or when the knife of wind—the mistral—ripped down the Rhone valley (the way soldiers had so often come), making each olive or cypress tree, magpie, vineyard, lavender bush, aqueduct in the distance stand against the wind-scoured sky as if it were the first, the perfect, example in the world of what it was.
“What’s the best part about being immortal?” he asked Kit. The ghoul spent a long moment considering. “Fearlessness,” he said at last. One of the little owlbears stirred awake. Moog laid the shell aside and hauled the cub into his lap, stroking the silky feathers between its saucer-shaped eyes. “How do you mean?” he asked. “You’d be surprised how many choices one makes due to the intrinsic nature of self-preservation,” Kit said. “When survival is no longer an issue, well, all bets are off, as they say. My first few years as an immortal were especially reckless.
It was Matty who broke the spell of baffled silence with a joyous hoot. “Hells yes!” he bellowed. “Let’s hear it for plan B!”
“I love you guys,” he said, and gods-be-damned if his voice didn’t sell him out at the end and crack like a boy of twelve summers. Moog nearly choked on a sob himself. “I love you guys, too,” he said, unashamed by the tears rolling over his cheeks. “Me too,” Matty croaked. “I love you,” said Gabriel, matching gazes with each of them one by one. “All of you.” Ganelon remained silent, but when the rest of them looked his way he rolled his eyes and loosed a sympathetic growl. “Okay, fine. You’re the last four people I’d ever kill.”
"You think too much!" "I was just going to tell you that I’m really willing to change. That’s one thing about me; I’ve always been open to change." "That," said Socrates, "is one of your biggest illusions. You’ve been willing to change clothes, hairstyles, women, apartments, and jobs. You are all too willing to change anything except yourself, but change you will. Either I help you open your eyes or time will, but time is not always gentle," he said ominously. "Take your choice. But first realize that you’re in prison — then we can plot your escape."
Updated: Jan 09, 2021
I walked up University, then along Shattuck, passing through the streets like a happy phantom, the Buddha’s ghost. I wanted to whisper in people’s ears, "Wake up! Wake up! Soon the person you believe you are will die — so now, wake up and be content with this knowledge: There is no need to search; achievement leads to nowhere. It makes no difference at all, so just be happy now! Love is the only reality of the world, because it is all One, you see. And the only laws are paradox, humor, and change. There is no problem, never was, and never will be. Release your struggle, let go of your mind, throw away your concerns, and relax into the world. No need to resist life; just do your best. Open your eyes and see that you are far more than you imagine. You are the world, you are the universe; you are yourself and everyone else, too! It’s all the marvelous Play of God. Wake up, regain your humor. Don’t worry, you are already free!"
Updated: Feb 14, 2021
"Feelings change, Dan. Sometimes sorrow, sometimes joy. But beneath it all remember the innate perfection of your life unfolding. That is the secret of unreasonable happiness."
Updated: Feb 21, 2022
Warriors, warriors we call ourselves. We fight for splendid virtue, for high endeavor, for sublime wisdom, therefore we call ourselves warriors. — Aunguttara Nikaya
That did it. "Look, I can’t waste my time here any longer. I need to get some sleep." I put the carburetor down and got ready to leave. "How do you know you haven’t been asleep your whole life? How do you know you’re not asleep right now?" he said, watching me intently.
"The world out there," he said, waving his arm across the horizon, "is a school, Dan. Life is the only real teacher. It offers many experiences, and if experience alone brought wisdom and fulfillment, then elderly people would all be happy, enlightened masters. But the lessons of experience are hidden. I can help you learn from experience to see the world clearly, and clarity is something you desperately need right now. You know this is true, but your mind rebels; you haven’t yet turned knowledge into wisdom."
"Use whatever knowledge you have but see its limitations. Knowledge alone does not suffice; it has no heart. No amount of knowledge will nourish or sustain your spirit; it can never bring you ultimate happiness or peace. Life requires more than knowledge; it requires intense feeling and constant energy. Life demands right action if knowledge is to come alive." "I know that, Soc." "That’s your problem — you know but you don’t act. You’re no warrior."
"I met him on a construction site in the Midwest. When the lunch whistle blew, all the workers would sit down together to eat. And every day, Sam would open his lunch pail and start to complain. "‘Son of a gun!’ he’d cry, ‘not peanut butter and jelly sandwiches again. I hate peanut butter and jelly!’ "He whined about his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches day after day after day until one of the guys on the work crew finally said, ‘Fer crissakes, Sam, if you hate peanut butter and jelly so much, why don’t you just tell yer old’ lady to make you something different?’ "‘What do you mean, my ol’ lady?’ Sam replied. ‘I’m not married. I make my own sandwiches.’" Socrates paused, then added, "We all make our own sandwiches."
The world was peopled with minds, whirling faster than any wind, in search of distraction and escape from the predicament of change, the dilemma of life and death — seeking purpose, security, enjoyment, trying to make sense of the mystery. Everyone everywhere lived a confused, bitter search. Reality never matched their dreams; happiness was just around the corner — a corner they never turned. And the source of it all was the human mind.
"Facts," he said, tossing aside the tofu he’d been dicing. "Dan, you are suffering; you do not fundamentally enjoy your life. Your entertainments, your playful affairs, and even your gymnastics are temporary ways to distract you from your underlying sense of fear." "Wait a minute, Soc." I was irritated. "Are you saying that gymnastics and sex and movies are bad?" "Of course not. But for you they’re addictions, not enjoyments. You use them to distract you from your chaotic inner life — the parade of regrets, anxieties, and fantasies you call your mind." "Wait, Socrates. Those aren’t facts." "Yes, they are, and they are entirely verifiable, even though you don’t see it yet. In your habitual quest for achievement and entertainment, you avoid the fundamental source of your suffering." He paused. "That was not something you really wanted to hear, was it?"
"If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change, free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is a law, and no amount of pretending will alter that reality."
"Life is not suffering; it’s just that you will suffer it, rather than enjoy it, until you let go of your mind’s attachments and just go for the ride freely, no matter what happens."
"‘Mind’ is an illusory reflection of cerebral fidgeting. It comprises all the random, uncontrolled thoughts that bubble into awareness from the subconscious. Consciousness is not mind; awareness is not mind; attention is not mind. Mind is an obstruction, an aggravation. It is a kind of evolutionary mistake in the human being, a primal weakness in the human experiment. I have no use for the mind."
"First," he said, munching on some lettuce, "neither your disappointment nor your anger was caused by the rain." My mouth was too full of potato salad for me to protest. Socrates continued, regally waving a carrot slice at me. "The rain was a perfectly lawful display of nature. Your ‘upset’ at the ruined picnic and your ‘happiness’ when the sun reappeared were the product of your thoughts. They had nothing to do with the actual events. Haven’t you been ‘unhappy’ at celebrations for example? It is obvious then that your mind, not other people or your surroundings, is the source of your moods. That is the first lesson." Swallowing his potato salad, Soc said, "The second lesson comes from observing how you became even more angry when you noticed that I wasn’t upset in the least. You began to see yourself compared to a warrior — two warriors, if you please." He grinned at Joy. "You didn’t like that, did you, Dan? It might have implied a change was necessary."
Socrates and Joy came back to the blanket. Socrates started jumping up and down, mimicking my earlier behavior. "Damn rain!" he yelled. "There goes our picnic!" He stomped back and forth, then stopped in mid-stomp and winked at me, grinning mischievously. Then he dove onto his belly in a puddle of wet leaves and pretended to be swimming. Joy started singing, or laughing — I couldn’t tell which. I just let go then and started rolling around with them in the wet leaves, wrestling with Joy. I particularly enjoyed that part, and I think she did, too. We ran and danced wildly until it was time to leave. Joy romped like a playful puppy, yet with all the qualities of a woman warrior. I was sinking fast.
"OK, Don, I guess it’s your life. Anyway, 99 percent of the people in the world kill themselves." "What the hell is that supposed to mean?" he said, an edge of life coming back into his voice. He started gripping the wall more tightly. "Well, I’ll tell you. The way most people live kills them — you know what I mean? They may take thirty or forty years to kill themselves by smoking or drinking or stress or overeating, but they kill themselves just the same."
Just so, stressful thoughts reflect a conflict with reality. Stress happens when the mind resists what is."
"A similar leap of awareness will be required of you. When you understand the source clearly, you’ll see that the ripples of your mind have nothing to do with you; you’ll just watch them, without attachment, no longer compelled to overreact every time a pebble drops. You will be free of the world’s turbulence as soon as you stop taking your thoughts so seriously. Remember — when you are in trouble, let go of your thoughts to see through your mind!"
"Meditation consists of two simultaneous processes: One is insight — paying attention to what is arising. The other is surrender — letting go of attachment to arising thoughts. This is how you cut free of the mind."
We ate. I stabbed at my vegetables with a fork; he picked up each small bite with wooden chopsticks, breathing quietly as he chewed. He never picked up another bite until he was completely done with the first, as if each bite was a small meal in itself.
"Here is the bottom line," Socrates said, in a voice that firmly held my attention. "You still believe that you are your thoughts and defend them as if they were treasures."
Updated: Feb 23, 2022
"That’s exactly what it is, Dan — a thought — no more real than the shadow of a shadow. Consciousness is not in the body; the body is in Consciousness. And you are that Consciousness — not the phantom mind that troubles you so. You are the body, but you are everything else, too. That is what your vision revealed to you. Only the mind resists change. When you relax mindless into the body, you are happy and content and free, sensing no separation. Immortality is already yours, but not in the way you imagine or hope for. You have been immortal since before you were born and will be long after the body dissolves. The body is Consciousness; never born; never dies; only changes. The mind — your ego, personal beliefs, history, and identity — is all that ends at death. And who needs it?" Socrates leaned back into his chair.
"Socrates, if I’m not my thoughts, what am I?" He looked at me as if he’d just finished explaining that one and one are two and I’d then asked, "Yes, but what are one and one?" He reached over to the refrigerator, grasped an onion, and tossed it to me. "Peel it, layer by layer," he demanded. I started peeling. "What do you find?" "Another layer." "Continue." I peeled off a few more layers. "Just more layers, Soc." "Keep going." "There’s nothing left." "There’s something left, all right." "What’s that?" "The universe. Consider that as you walk home."
I stood up to get some water. Socrates asked, "Are you paying close attention to your standing?" "Yeah, sure," I answered, not at all sure that I was. I walked over to the dispenser. "Are you paying close attention to your walking?" he asked. "Yes, I am," I answered, starting to catch on to the game. "Are you paying attention to how your mouth shapes the words you say?" "Well, I guess so," I said, listening to my voice. I was getting flustered. "Are you paying attention to how you think?" he asked. "Socrates, give me a break — I’m doing the best I can!" He leaned toward me. "Your best is apparently not good enough. At least not yet. Your attention must burn. Aimlessly rolling around a gym mat doesn’t develop a champion; sitting with your eyes closed and letting your mind wander doesn’t train your attention. Focus! Do or die!"
"Why should a warrior sit around meditating?" I asked. "I thought the warrior’s way was about action." "Sitting meditation is the beginner’s practice. Eventually, you will learn to meditate in every action. Sitting serves as a ceremony, a time to practice balance, ease, and divine detachment. Master the ritual before you expand the same insight and surrender fully into daily life.
An old man and his son worked a small farm, with only one horse to pull the plow. One day, the horse ran away. "How terrible," sympathized the neighbors. "What bad luck." "Who knows whether it is bad luck or good luck," the farmer replied. A week later, the horse returned from the mountains, leading five wild mares into the barn. "What wonderful luck!" said the neighbors. "Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?" answered the old man. The next day, the son, trying to tame one of the horses, fell and broke his leg. "How terrible. What bad luck!" "Bad luck? Good luck?" The army came to all the farms to take the young men for war, but the farmer’s son was of no use to them, so he was spared. "Good? Bad?" I smiled sadly, then bit my lip as I was assaulted by another wave of pain. Joy soothed me with her voice. "Everything has a purpose, Danny; it’s for you to make the best use of it."
"A warrior doesn’t seek pain, but if pain comes, he uses it.
"Fear and sorrow inhibit action; anger generates it. When you learn to make proper use of your anger, you can change fear and sorrow to anger, then turn anger to action. That’s the body’s secret of internal alchemy."
"To rid yourself of old patterns, focus all your energy not on struggling with the old, but on building the new." "How can I control my habits if I can’t even seem to control my emotions?" "You don’t need to control emotion," he said. "Emotions are natural, like passing weather. Sometimes it’s fear, sometimes sorrow or anger. Emotions are not the problem. The key is to transform the energy of emotion into constructive action." I got up, took the whistling kettle off the hot plate, and poured the steaming water into our mugs. "Can you give me a specific example, Socrates?" "Spend time with a baby." Smiling, I blew on my tea. "Funny, I never thought of babies as masters of emotions." "When a baby is upset, it expresses itself in banshee wails — pure crying. It doesn’t wonder about whether it should be crying. Babies accept their emotions completely. They let feelings flow, then let them go. In this way, infants are fine teachers. Learn their lessons and you’ll dissolve old habits."
"My diet may at first seem spartan compared to the indulgences you call ‘moderation,’ Dan, but I take great pleasure in what I eat because I’ve developed the capacity to enjoy the simplest foods. And so will you."
"The pleasure from eating, Dan, is more than the taste of the food and the feeling of a full belly. Learn to enjoy the entire process — the hunger beforehand, the careful preparation, setting an attractive table, chewing, breathing, smelling, tasting, swallowing, and the feeling of lightness and energy after the meal. You can even enjoy the full and easy elimination of the food after it’s digested. When you pay attention to all elements of the process, you’ll begin to appreciate simple meals." "The irony of your present eating habits is that while you fear missing a meal, you aren’t fully aware of the meals you do eat."
She gave it to me and I sat down, gazed at the burger, and took a huge bite. Suddenly I realized what I was doing — choosing between Socrates and a cheeseburger. I spit it out, threw it angrily in the trash, and walked out. It was over; I was through being a slave to random impulses. That night marked the beginning of a new glow of self-respect and a feeling of personal power. I knew it would get easier now. Small changes began to add up in my life. Ever since I was a kid, I’d suffered all kinds of minor symptoms, like a runny nose at night when the air cooled, headaches, stomach upsets, and mood swings, all of which I thought were normal and inevitable. Now they had all vanished. I felt a constant sense of lightness and energy that radiated around me. Maybe that accounted for the number of women flirting with me, the little kids and dogs coming up to me and wanting to play. A few of my teammates started asking for advice about personal problems. No longer a small boat in a stormy sea, I started to feel like the Rock of Gibraltar. I told Socrates about these experiences. He nodded. "Your energy level is rising. People, animals, and even things are attracted to energy fields. That’s how it works."
Then, to my amazement, Socrates took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. "Speaking of smoke," he said, "did I ever mention to you that there’s no such thing as a bad habit?" I couldn’t believe my eyes or my ears. This isn’t happening, I told myself. "No, you didn’t, and I’ve gone to great lengths on your recommendation to change my bad habits." "That was to develop your will, you see, and to give your instincts a refresher course. You see, any unconscious, compulsive ritual is a problem. But specific activities — smoking, drinking, taking drugs, eating sweets, or asking silly questions — are both bad and good; every action has its price, and its pleasures. Recognizing both sides, you become realistic and responsible for your actions. And only then can you make the warrior’s free and conscious choice — to do or not to do. "There is a saying: ‘When you sit, sit; when you stand, stand; whatever you do, don’t wobble.’ Once you make your choice, do it with all your spirit. Don’t be like the preacher who thought about praying while making love to his wife, and thought about making love to his wife while praying."
"It’s better to make a mistake with the full force of your being than to timidly avoid mistakes with a trembling spirit. Responsibility means recognizing both pleasure and price, action and consequence, then making a choice." "It sounds so ‘either-or.’ What about moderation?" "Moderation?" He leaped up on the desk, like an evangelist. "Moderation? It’s mediocrity, fear, and confusion in disguise. It’s the devil’s dilemma. It’s neither doing nor not doing. It’s the wobbling compromise that makes no one happy. Moderation is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fencesitters of the world afraid to take a stand. It’s for those afraid to laugh or cry, for those afraid to live or die. Moderation" — he took a deep breath, getting ready for his final condemnation — "is lukewarm tea, the devil’s own brew!"
"Soc, I’ve been battling illusions my whole life, preoccupied with every petty personal problem. I’ve dedicated my life to self-improvement without grasping the one problem that sent me seeking in the first place. While trying to make everything in the world work out for me, I kept getting sucked back into my own mind, always preoccupied with me, me, me. That giant was me — the ego, the little self — who
"There are no ordinary moments!"
"Now let me tell you about satori, a Zen concept. Satori occurs when attention rests in the present moment, when the body is alert, sensitive, relaxed, and the emotions are open and free. Satori is what you experienced when the knife was flying toward you. Satori is the warrior’s state of being." "You know, Soc, I’ve had that feeling many times, especially during competitions. Often I’m concentrating so hard, I don’t even hear the applause." "Yes, that is the experience of satori. Sports, dance, or music, and any other challenging activity can serve as a gateway to satori. You imagine that you love gymnastics, but it’s merely the wrapping for the gift of satori. Your gymnastics requires full attention on your actions. Gymnastics draws you into the moment of truth; your life is on the line. As with a dueling samurai, it’s satori or death."
"Dan," he said, "you’ve achieved a high level of skill. You’re an expert gymnast." "Why thank you, Socrates." "It wasn’t a compliment." He turned to face me more directly. "An expert dedicates his life to his training with the purpose of winning competitions. Someday, you may become a master gymnast. The master dedicates his training to life." "I understand that, Soc. You’ve told me a number... " "I know you understand it. What I am telling you is that you haven’t yet realized it; you don’t yet live it. You persist in gloating over a few new physical skills, then mope around if the training doesn’t go well one day. But when you begin transcendental training, focusing your best efforts, without attachment to outcomes, you will understand the peaceful warrior’s way."
Then it was over. A long-awaited goal was accomplished. Only then did I realize that the applause, the scores and victories were not the same anymore. I had changed so much; my search for victory had finally ended. It was early spring 1968. My college career was drawing to a close. What would follow, I knew not. I felt numb as I said farewell to my team in Arizona and boarded a jet, heading back to Berkeley, and Socrates — and to Linda. I looked aimlessly at the clouds below, drained of ambition. All these years I had been sustained by an illusion — happiness through victory — and now that illusion was burned to ashes. I was no happier, no more fulfilled, for all my achievements. Finally I saw through the clouds. I saw that I had never learned how to enjoy life, only how to achieve. All my life I had been busy seeking happiness, not finding it.
"You ‘fell’ from grace when you began thinking, about — when you became a namer and a knower. It’s not just Adam and Eve, you see, it’s all of us. The birth of the mind is the death of the senses — it’s not that we eat an apple and get a little sexy!" "I wish I could go back," I sighed. "It was so bright, so clear, so beautiful." "What you enjoyed as a child can be yours again. Jesus of Nazareth, one of the Great Warriors, once said that you must become like a little child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven."
Soc pointed to the tropical foliage that towered over us. "As a child, all this would appear before your eyes and ears and touch as if for the first time. But now you’ve learned names and categories for everything: ‘That’s good, that’s bad, that’s a table, that’s a chair, that’s a car, a house, a flower, dog, cat, chicken, man, woman, sunset, ocean, star.’ You’ve become bored with things because they only exist as names to you. The dry concepts of the mind obscure your direct perception." Socrates waved his arm in a sweeping gesture, taking in the palms high above our heads that nearly touched the Plexiglas canopy of the geodesic dome. "You now see everything through a veil of associations about things, projected over a direct, simple awareness. You’ve ‘seen it all before’: it’s like watching a movie for the twentieth time. You see only memories of things, so you become bored, trapped in the mind. This is why you have to ‘lose your mind’ before you can come to your senses."
Updated: Feb 23, 2022
"You, on the other hand," he said, rubbing salt in the wound, "are only vaguely aware of what’s going on inside that bag of skin. Like a balance beam performer just learning a handstand, you’re not yet sensitive enough to detect when you’re out of balance, and you can still ‘fall’ ill. And for all your gymnastics skills, you’ve only developed a gross level of awareness, sufficient to perform certain movement patterns but nothing to write home about." "You sure take the romance out of a triple somersault, Soc." "There is no romance in it; it’s a stunt that requires time and practice to learn. But when you can feel the flow of energies in your body, then you’ll have your ‘romance.’ So keep practicing, Dan. Refine your senses a little more each day; stretch them, as you would in the gym. Finally, your awareness will pierce deeply into your body and into the world. Then you’ll think less and feel more. That way you’ll enjoy even the simplest things in life — no longer addicted to achievement or expensive entertainments. Next time," he laughed, "perhaps we can have a real competition."
"A peaceful warrior has the insight and discipline to choose the simple way — to know the difference between needs and wants. We have few basic needs but endless wants. Full attention to every moment is my pleasure. Attention costs no money; your only investment is training. That’s another advantage of being a warrior, Dan — it’s cheaper! The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less."
"Understand this above all," he interrupted. "You can do nothing to change the past, and the future will never come exactly as you expect or hope for. There have never been past warriors, nor will there be future ones. The warrior is here, now. Your sorrow, your fear and anger, regret and guilt, your envy and plans and cravings live only in the past, or in the future."
"Yes. You haven’t yet opened your heart fully, to life, to each moment. The peaceful warrior’s way is not about invulnerability, but absolute vulnerability — to the world, to life, and to the Presence you felt. All along I’ve shown you by example that a warrior’s life is not about imagined perfection or victory; it is about love. Love is the warrior’s sword; wherever it cuts, it gives life, not death."
"Better to live until you die," he said. "I am a warrior, so my way is action. I am a teacher, so I teach by example. Some day you may teach others as I have taught you — then you’ll understand that words are not enough; you, too, must teach by example what you’ve realized through experience."
His laughter rang out in my memory. Then I remembered an incident in the station: I had been acting lethargic; Socrates suddenly grabbed me and shook me. "Wake up! If you knew for certain that you had a terminal illness — if you had little time left to live — you would waste precious little of it! Well, I’m telling you, Dan — you do have a terminal illness: It’s called birth. You don’t have more than a few years left. No one does! So be happy now, without reason — or you never will be at all."
As I lay in the sun, I remembered peeling away the last layer of the onion in Soc’s office to see "who I was." I remembered a character in a J. D. Salinger novel, who, upon seeing someone drink a glass of milk, said, "It was like pouring God into God, if you know what I mean."
It was a ragged English translation of spiritual folktales. Flipping through the pages, I came upon a story about enlightenment: "Milarepa had searched everywhere for enlightenment, but could find no answer — until one day, he saw an old man walking slowly down a mountain path, carrying a heavy sack. Immediately, Milarepa sensed that this old man knew the secret he had been desperately seeking for many years. "‘Old man, please tell me what you know. What is enlightenment?’ "The old man smiled at him for a moment, and swung the heavy burden off his shoulders, and stood straight. "‘Yes, I see!’ cried Milarepa. ‘My everlasting gratitude. But please, one question more. What is after enlightenment?’ "Smiling again, the old man picked up the sack once again, slung it over his shoulders, steadied his burden, and continued on his way."
"I have nothing to bring you, Socrates. I’m still lost — no closer to the gate than I was when we first met. I’ve failed you, and life has failed me; life has broken my heart." He was jubilant. "Yes! Your heart has been broken, Dan — broken open to reveal the gate, shining within. It’s the only place you haven’t looked. Open your eyes, buffoon — you’ve almost arrived!"
From the start, I have shown you the way of the peaceful warrior, not the way to the peaceful warrior. As long as you tread the way, you are a warrior. These past eight years you have abandoned your "warriorship" so you could search for it. But the way is now; it always has been." "So what do I do now? Where do I go from here?" "Who cares?" he yelled gleefully. "A fool is ‘happy’ when his cravings are satisfied. A warrior is happy without reason. That’s what makes happiness the ultimate discipline — above all else I have taught you. Happiness is not just something you feel — it is who you are."
Act happy, be happy, without a reason in the world. Then you can love, and do what you will."
I didn’t speak much, but I laughed often, because every time I looked around — at the earth, the sky, the sun, the trees, the lakes, the streams — I realized that it was all Me — that no separation existed at all. All these years Dan Millman had grown up, struggling to "be a somebody." Talk about backward! Dan had been a somebody in a fearful mind and a mortal body.
And so I awoke to reality, free of any meaning or any search. What could there possibly be to search for? All of Soc’s words had come alive with my death. This was the paradox of it all, the humor of it all, and the great change. All searches, all achievements, all goals, were equally enjoyable, and equally unnecessary.
Updated: Feb 25, 2022
And so I awoke to reality, free of any meaning or any search. What could there possibly be to search for? All of Soc’s words had come alive with my death. This was the paradox of it all, the humor of it all, and the great change. All searches, all achievements, all goals, were equally enjoyable, and equally unnecessary. Energy coursed through my body. I overflowed with happiness and burst with laughter; it was the laugh of an unreasonably happy man.
Updated: Oct 21, 2022
"Soc, I’ve been battling illusions my whole life, preoccupied with every petty personal problem. I’ve dedicated my life to self-improvement without grasping the one problem that sent me seeking in the first place. While trying to make everything in the world work out for me, I kept getting sucked back into my own mind, always preoccupied with me, me, me. That giant was me — the ego, the little self — who I’ve always believed myself to be. And I cut through it!"
And when satori becomes your everyday reality, we will be equals. Satori is your key to the gate."
But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy.
you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives.
After three centuries of this toil, we have the option to take a vacation. We all choose the same destination: we project ourselves into lower-dimensional creatures. We project ourselves into the tiny, delicate, three-dimensional bodies that we call humans, and we are born onto the resort we call Earth. The idea, on such vacations, is to capture small experiences. On the Earth, we care only about our immediate surroundings. We watch comedy movies. We drink alcohol and enjoy music. We form relationships, fight, break up, and start again. When we’re in a human body, we don’t care about universal collapse—instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair.
To understand the meaning of this afterlife, you must remember that everyone is multifaceted. And since you always lived inside your own head, you were much better at seeing the truth about others than you ever were at seeing yourself. So you navigated your life with the help of others who held up mirrors for you. People praised your good qualities and criticized your bad habits, and these perspectives—often surprising to you—helped you to guide your life. So poorly did you know yourself that you were always surprised at how you looked in photographs or how you sounded on voice mail. In this way, much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears, and fingertips of others. And now that you’ve left the Earth, you are stored in scattered heads around the globe. Here in this Purgatory, all the people with whom you’ve ever come in contact are gathered. The scattered bits of you are collected, pooled, and unified. The mirrors are held up in front of you. Without the benefit of filtration, you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you.
But they’re both wrong. In truth, God lives a life very much like ours—we were created not only in His image but in His social situation as well. God spends most of His time in pursuit of happiness. He reads books, strives for self-improvement, seeks activities to stave off boredom, tries to keep in touch with fading friendships, wonders if there’s something else He should be doing with His time. Over the millennia, God has grown bitter. Nothing continues to satisfy. Time drowns Him. He envies man his brief twinkling of a life, and those He dislikes are condemned to suffer immortality with Him.
But eventually it comes to be appreciated that not just the finitude of life but also the surprise timing of death is critical to motivation. So people begin to set ranges for their death dates. In this new framework, their friends throw surprise parties for them—like birthday parties—except they jump out from behind the couch and kill them. Since you never know when your friends are going to schedule your party, it reinstills the carpe diem attitude of former years. Unfortunately, people begin to abuse the surprise-party system to extinguish their enemies under the protection of necrolegislation.
This moment of lucidity does not last long. But it serves as the punishment for your sins, a Promethean entrails-pecking moment, crouching half-horse half-man, with the knowledge that you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives.
Waxillium crouched down beside the chair. “Wayne. I can’t go back to what I was. You sauntering in here, meddling in my life, isn’t going to change that. I’m a different person now.” “If you were going to become a different person, couldn’t you have chosen one without such an ugly face?” “Wayne, this is serious.”
“We can’t do more until Wayne returns,” Waxillium said. “In fact, he should have been back by now.” “He is,” Wayne’s voice said from the hallway outside. Marasi jumped, letting out a faint yelp. Waxillium sighed. “How long have you been out there?” Wayne’s head poked around the corner, wearing a constable’s hat. “Oh, a little while. Seemed like you two were having some kind of ‘smart people’ moment. Didn’t want to interfere.” “Wise of you. Your stupidity can be infectious.”
She shook her head. “That jester lived as much in his few years as most men do in their entire lives. He hid much behind his raffish ways, but do you know, I think he may have been one of the wisest men I’ll ever know. He took every passing minute and squeezed all the life from it he could.”
But in the process Kelly was learning some things about Davisson. If the Western Electric engineers in the tube shop confronted a baffling question, they would approach Davy, who would give a deep and thoughtful and ultimately convincing response—though it sometimes took him days to do so. Increasingly, Kelly recalled, he and the rest of the staff went to Davy as a matter of last resort.
Davisson used to tell people he was lazy, but Kelly believed otherwise: “He worked at a slow pace but persistently.” Years later, Kelly noted that Davy might well be called “the father of basic research” at Bell Labs. It was another way of saying that early on, long before either man had gained power or fame, Kelly recognized in Davisson not only a friend and gifted scientist but a model for what might come later.
The young Bell Labs recruits had other things in common. Almost all had grown up with a peculiar desire to know more about the stars or the telephone lines or (most often) the radio, and especially their makeshift home wireless sets. Almost all of them had put one together themselves, and in turn had discovered how sound could be pulled from the air.
Some years later the physicist Richard Feynman would elegantly explain that “it was discovered that things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale.”
By intention, everyone would be in one another’s way. Members of the technical staff would often have both laboratories and small offices—but these might be in different corridors, therefore making it necessary to walk between the two, and all but assuring a chance encounter or two with a colleague during the commute. By the same token, the long corridor for the wing that would house many of the physics researchers was intentionally made to be seven hundred feet in length. It was so long that to look down it from one end was to see the other end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling its length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions, and ideas would be almost impossible. Then again, that was the point. Walking down that impossibly long tiled corridor, a scientist on his way to lunch in the Murray Hill cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.
While it’s hard to imagine now, when we started Google Maps, people thought that our goal of mapping the entire world, including photographing every street, would prove impossible. So if the past is any indicator of our future, today’s big bets won’t seem so wild in a few years’ time. These are some of the principles that I think are important, and there are more in the pages that follow. Hopefully you can take these ideas and do some impossible things of your own!
Process is a great thing. It is the art and science of taking something that needs to be done and reducing it to a documented set of steps, often supported by information tools and systems. With process comes scale; you absolutely need process to grow a company profitably. At some point, though, process starts to take over. It becomes so entrenched that it can trump common sense and cause executives to, as our head of business operations, Kristen Gil, says, “lose muscle memory.” People stop thinking and instead just depend on the process to make decisions for them. As process gets better, judgment can weaken. It’s like there is a big pendulum in companies, swinging from centralized control and consistency on one side to decentralized chaos on the other. In a big company, that pendulum always pulls toward the control side. But a start-up, or any new venture that is trying to do something big and new, favors the chaos. Start-ups don’t run on process, they run on ideas, passion, and a common set of goals. They don’t wait for the meeting to make decisions. Dependence on process, no matter how well intentioned, squelches start-ups and the start-up spirit.
As a company gets big and complex, you can’t just organize around people who create innovation; you need to organize around people who can create and lead entire new ventures and businesses. This is a special class of smart creative: the CEO. The decision to create Alphabet was driven in part by the realization that leaders with the audacity and talent to start new businesses are a special breed and are often averse to working within the structure of a big company. They need the freedom to build things their way, without being forced to adhere to cumbersome processes or politic across various teams.
We have long felt that the start-up model, with small, autonomous teams located in one office led by passionate founders, is the most effective way to achieve remarkable new things (or fail quickly in the effort). So we wondered, What if you could figure out a way to think big (solving big problems by taking advantage of big-company assets such as talent, resources, and technology) while simultaneously acting small (growing “start-ups” built through bottoms-up insights and with the autonomy to move fast)? This think-big-act-small concept was the inspiration for a new program called Area 120. We have always had “20 percent projects,” where Googlers are allowed and encouraged to work on projects of their own choosing. Area 120 gives a select group of Googlers the opportunity to spend 100 percent of their time on 20 percent projects (100 + 20 = 120!). Teams are given the money, space, and autonomy to pursue their ideas, and founders are given the chance, in the words of Don Harrison, who runs the lab alongside Bradley Horowitz, “to throw themselves against it as hard as they can.” We attempt to re-create the Darwinian world of start-ups by establishing aggressive milestones and timelines. For example, of the inaugural class of fourteen teams that started at Area 120 in September 2016 (selected from more than three hundred applicants), we expect half to fail within six months. Area 120 becomes a new arrow in our innovation quiver, giving Googlers another way to try new big things.
Hire as many talented software engineers as possible, and give them freedom. This approach suited a company born in a university lab, since in academia the most valuable asset is intellect (also, for some American universities, the ability to throw a football fifty yards). But while most companies say that their employees are everything, Larry and Sergey actually ran the company that way. This behavior wasn’t corporate messaging, and it wasn’t altruism. They felt that attracting and leading the very best engineers was the only way for Google to thrive and achieve its lofty ambitions. And they really meant engineers: The founders stopped Eric’s first attempt to hire the estimable Sheryl Sandberg, now Facebook’s COO, because she wasn’t an engineer.
The management tactics the founders used to run the company were equally simplistic. Like the professors in their Stanford computer science lab, who did not dictate what their thesis projects should be but rather provided direction and suggestions, Larry and Sergey offered their employees plenty of freedom and used communication as a tool to keep everyone moving in the same general direction. They had a very strong belief in the profound importance of the Internet and the power of search, and they communicated these points via informal meetings with the small engineering teams that populated the Google offices, and through company-wide “TGIF” meetings held every Friday afternoon, where any topic was fair game for discussion.
One of the biggest reasons for our success, though, is that the plan we delivered to the board that day in 2003 wasn’t much of a plan at all. There were no financial projections or discussions of revenue streams. There was no market research on what users, advertisers, or partners wanted or how they fit into nicely defined market segments. There was no concept of market research or discussion of which advertisers we would target first. There was no channel strategy or discussion of how we would sell our ad products. There was no concept of an org chart, with sales doing this, product doing that, and engineering doing some other that. There was no product roadmap detailing what we would build and when. There was no budget. There were no targets or milestones that the board and company leaders could use to monitor our progress.
When it came to management tactics, the only thing we could say for sure back then was that much of what the two of us had learned in the twentieth century was wrong, and that it was time to start over.
Cazaril sighed. "I’m not saying you were wrong, Royesse. This time. I’m saying you were running blindfolded. And if it wasn’t headlong into a tree, it was only by the mercy of the gods, and not by any care of yours." "Oh." "You may have slandered an honest man. Or you may have struck a blow for justice. I don’t know. The point is…neither do you." Her oh this time was so repressed as to be unvoiced. The horribly practical part of Cazaril’s mind that had eased him through so many scrapes couldn’t help adding, "And right or wrong, what I also saw was that you made an enemy, and left him alive behind you. Great charity. Bad tactics." Damn, but that was no remark to make to a gentle maiden…with an effort, he kept from clapping his hands over his mouth, a gesture that would do nothing to prop up his pose as a high-minded and earnest corrector.
"Vastly better. She’s…I want to say, collapsed, but I don’t mean overcome. The blessed release that comes when an unbearable pressure is suddenly removed. It’s a joy to look upon her."
Cazaril hesitated. "Do you know that you are lit like a burning torch?" The groom inclined his head. "So I have been told, my lord, by the few with eyes to see. One can never see oneself, alas. No mundane mirror reflects this. Only the eyes of a soul." "There was a woman inside who glowed like a green candle." "Mother Clara? Yes, she just spoke to me of you. She is a most excellent midwife." "What is that, that anti-light, then?" Cazaril glanced toward where the women lingered. Umegat touched his lips. "Not here, if you please, my lord." Cazaril’s mouth formed a silent Oh. He nodded. The Roknari swept him a lower bow. As he turned to pad quietly into the gathering gloom, he added over his shoulder, "You are lit like a burning city."
"So," said the Fox in an odd voice, staring up at Cazaril, "you did not interpose your body to save the royse of Ibra from defilement, but merely to save some random boy." "Random slave boy. My lord." Cazaril’s lips twisted, as he watched the Fox trying to work out just what this made Cazaril, hero or fool. "I wonder at your wits." "I’m sure I was half-witted by then," Cazaril conceded amiably. "I’d been on the galleys since I was sold as a prisoner of war after the fall of Gotorget." The Fox’s eyes narrowed. "Oh. So you’re that Cazaril, eh?" Cazaril essayed him a small bow, wondering what he had heard of that fruitless campaign, and shook out his tunic. Bergon hastened to help him don it again. Cazaril found himself the object of stunned stares from every man in the room, including Ferda and Foix. His tilted grin barely kept back bubbling laughter, though underneath the laughter seethed a new terror that he could scarcely name. How long have I been walking down this road?
"I’ll never forget the first time I met you," said Bergon, "when they dropped me down beside you on the galley bench. For a moment you frightened me more than the Roknari did." Cazaril grinned. "What, just because I was a scaly, scabbed, burnt scarecrow, hairy and stinking?" Bergon grinned back. "Something like that," he admitted sheepishly. "But then you smiled, and said Good evening, young sir, for all the world as if you were inviting me to share a tavern bench and not a rowing bench."
Updated: Dec 03, 2022
He could not imagine that young lady being late anywhere. Her energy was appalling.
If this was to be anything like training young soldiers, young horses, or young hawks, the key was to take the initiative from the first moment, and keep it thereafter. He could be as hollow as a drum, so long as he was as loud.
She turned the page. "Let us," she said in an icy voice, "go on." Five gods, he’d seen exactly that same look of frustrated fury in the eyes of the young men who’d picked themselves up, spat the dirt from their mouths, and gone on to become his best lieutenants. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so difficult after all. With great effort, he cranked a broad grin downward into a grave frown and nodded august tutorly permission. "Continue."
But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.
A true-made bow, Odysseus had called her. A fixed star. A woman who knew herself. "I asked her how she did it once, how she understood the world so clearly. She told me that it was a matter of keeping very still and showing no emotions, leaving room for others to reveal themselves. She tried to practice with me, but I made her laugh. ‘You are as secret as a bull hiding on a beach!’ she said."
He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.
He said what he meant; he was puzzled if you did not. Some people might have mistaken this for simplicity. But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart?
Every time an impurity arises in the mind, such as anger, hatred, passion, fear etc., one becomes miserable. Whenever something unwanted happens, one becomes tense and starts tying knots inside. Whenever something wanted does not happen, again one generates tension within. Throughout life one repeats this process until the entire mental and physical structure is a bundle of Gordian knots. And one does not keep this tension limited to oneself, but instead distributes it to all with whom one comes into contact. Certainly this is not the right way to live.
As soon as any impurity, any defilement arises in the mind, the breath becomes abnormal—one starts breathing a little rapidly, a little heavily. When the defilement passes away, the breath again becomes soft. Thus breath can help to explore the reality not only of the body, but also of the mind.
Perhaps during today there were only a few moments when your mind was fully concentrated on your breathing, but every such moment is very powerful in changing the habit pattern of the mind. In that moment, you are aware of the present reality, the breath entering or leaving the nostrils, without any illusion. And you cannot crave for more breath, or feel aversion towards your breathing: you simply observe, without reacting to it. In such a moment, the mind is free from the three basic defilements, that is, it is pure. This moment of purity at the conscious level has a strong impact on the old impurities accumulated in the unconscious. The contact of these positive and negative forces produces an explosion. Some of the impurities hidden in the unconscious rise to the conscious level, and manifest as various mental or physical discomforts. When one faces such a situation, there is the danger of becoming agitated, and multiplying the difficulties. However, it would be wise to understand that what seems to be a problem is actually a sign of success in the meditation, an indication that in fact the technique has started to work. The operation into the unconscious has begun, and some of the pus hidden there has started to come out of the wound. Although the process is unpleasant, this is the only way to get rid of the pus, to remove the impurities. If one continues working in the proper way, all these difficulties will gradually diminish. Tomorrow will be a little easier, next day more so. Little by little, all the problems will pass away, if you work. Nobody else can do the job for you; you have to work yourself. You have to explore reality within yourself. You have to liberate yourself.
The Buddha described it in very simple terms: Abstain from all sinful, unwholesome actions, perform only pious wholesome ones, purify the mind; this is the teaching of enlightened ones.
The path of Dhamma is called the Noble Eightfold Path, noble in the sense that anyone who walks on it is bound to become a noble-hearted, saintly person. The path is divided into three sections: Sīla, samādhi, and paññā. Sīla is morality—abstaining from unwholesome deeds of body and speech. Samādhi is the wholesome action of developing mastery over one’s mind. Practicing both is helpful, but neither Sīla nor samādhi can eradicate all the defilements accumulated in the mind. For this purpose the third section of the path must be practiced: paññā, the development of wisdom, of insight, which totally purifies the mind.
The habit pattern of the mind, as you have seen, is to roll in the future or in the past, generating craving or aversion. By practicing right awareness you have started to break this habit. Not that after this course you will forget the past entirely, and have no thought at all for the future. But in fact you used to waste your energy by rolling needlessly in the past or future, so much so that when you needed to remember or plan something, you could not do so. By developing sammā-sati, you will learn to fix your mind more firmly in the present reality, and you will find that you can easily recall the past when needed, and make proper provisions for the future. You will be able to lead a happy, healthy life.
Sammā-samādhi—right concentration. Mere concentration is not the aim of this technique; the concentration you develop must have a base of purity. With a base of craving, aversion, or illusion one may concentrate the mind, but this is not sammā-samādhi. One must be aware of the present reality within oneself, without any craving or aversion. Sustaining this awareness continuously from moment to moment—this is sammā-samādhi.
One begins the path by practicing sīla, that is, by abstaining from causing harm to others; but although one may not harm others, still one harms oneself by generating defilements in the mind. Therefore one undertakes the training of samādhi, learning to control the mind, to suppress the defilements that have arisen. However, suppressing defilements does not eliminate them. They remain in the unconscious and multiply there, continuing to cause harm to oneself. Therefore the third step of Dhamma, paññā: neither giving a free licence to the defilements nor suppressing them, but instead allowing them to arise and be eradicated.
Sīla leads to the development of samādhi, right concentration; samādhi leads to the developments of paññā, wisdom which purifies the mind; paññā leads to nibbāna, liberation from all impurities, full enlightenment.
You have come to this course to take the medicine yourself, to develop your own wisdom. To do so, you must understand truth at the experiential level. So much confusion exists because the way things appear to be is totally different from their real nature. To remove this confusion, you must develop experiential wisdom. And outside of the framework of the body, truth cannot be experienced; it can only be intellectualized. Therefore you must develop the ability to experience truth within yourself, from the grossest to the subtlest levels, in order to emerge from all illusions, all bondages. Everyone knows that the entire universe is constantly changing, but mere intellectual understanding of this reality will not help; one must experience it within oneself. Perhaps a traumatic event, such as the death of someone near or dear, forces one to face the hard fact of impermanence, and one starts to develop wisdom, to see the futility of striving after worldly goods and quarrelling with others. But soon the old habit of egotism reasserts itself, and the wisdom fades, because it was not based on direct, personal experience. One has not experienced the reality of impermanence within oneself.
As the understanding of anicca develops within oneself, another aspect of wisdom arises: anattā, no ‘I,’ no ‘mine.’ Within the physical and mental structure, there is nothing that lasts more than a moment, nothing that one can identify as an unchanging self or soul. If something is indeed ‘mine,’ then one must be able to possess it, to control it, but in fact one has no mastery even over one’s body: it keeps changing, decaying, regardless of one’s wishes. Then the third aspect of wisdom develops: dukkha, suffering. If one tries to possess and hold on to something that is changing beyond one’s control, then one is bound to create misery for oneself. Commonly, one identifies suffering with unpleasant sensory experiences, but pleasant ones can equally be causes of misery, if one develops attachment to them, because they are equally impermanent. Attachment to what is ephemeral is certain to result in suffering.
If the attention is fixed in one part of the body and a sensation starts in another, should one jump back or forward to observe this other sensation? No; continue moving in order. Don’t try to stop the sensations in other parts of the body—you cannot do so—but don’t give them any importance. Observe each sensation only when you come to it, moving in order.
How much time should one take to pass the attention from head to feet? This will vary according to the situation one faces. The instruction is to fix your attention in a certain area, and as soon as you feel a sensation, to move ahead. If the mind is sharp enough, it will be aware of sensation as soon as it comes to an area, and you can move ahead at once. If this situation occurs throughout the body, it may be possible to move from head to feet in about ten minutes, but it is not advisable to move more quickly at this stage. If the mind is dull, however, there may be many areas in which it is necessary to wait for up to a minute for a sensation to appear.
How big should the area be in which to fix the attention? Take a section of the body about two or three inches wide; then move ahead another two or three inches, and so on.
The technique is not to experience something special, but rather to remain equanimous in the face of any sensation. In the past you had similar sensations in your body, but you were not aware of them consciously, and you reacted to them. Now you are learning to be aware and not to react, to feel whatever is happening at the physical level and to maintain equanimity.
This is what Siddhattha Gotama did to become a Buddha, and it became clear to him, and will become clear to anyone who works as he did, that throughout the universe, within the body as well as outside it, everything keeps changing. Nothing is a final product; everything is involved in the process of becoming—bhava. And another reality will become clear: nothing happens accidentally. Every change has a cause which produces an effect, and that effect in turn becomes the cause for a further change, making an endless chain of cause and effect. And still another law will become clear: as the cause is, so the effect will be; as the seed is, so the fruit will be. On the same soil one sows two seeds, one of sugarcane, the other of neem—a very bitter tropical tree. From the seed of sugarcane develops a plant that is sweet in every fibre, from the seed of neem, a plant that is bitter in every fibre. One may ask why nature is kind to one plant and cruel to the other. In fact nature is neither kind nor cruel; it works according to set rules. Nature merely helps the quality of each seed to manifest. If one sows seeds of sweetness, the harvest will be sweetness. If one sows seeds of bitterness, the harvest will be bitterness. As the seed is, so the fruit will be; as the action is, so the result will be. The problem is that one is very alert at harvest time, wanting to receive sweet fruit, but during the sowing season one is very heedless, and plants seeds of bitterness. If one wants sweet fruit, one should plant the proper type of seeds.
Hence the Buddha declared: Mind precedes all phenomena, mind matters most, everything is mind-made. If with an impure mind you speak or act, then suffering follows you as the cartwheel follows the foot of the draft animal. If with a pure mind you speak or act, then happiness follows you as a shadow that never departs.
A sound comes into contact with the ear, and the viññāṇa notes only the fact that a sound has come. Then the next part of the mind starts working: saññā, perception. A sound has come, and from one’s past experience and memories, one recognizes it: a sound … words … words of praise good; or else, a sound … words … words of abuse … bad. One gives an evaluation of good or bad, according to one’s past experience. At once the third part of the mind starts working: vedanā, sensation. As soon as a sound comes, there is a sensation on the body, but when the perception recognizes it and gives it a valuation, the sensation becomes pleasant or unpleasant, in accordance with that valuation. For example: a sound has come … words … words of praise good—and one feels a pleasant sensation throughout the body. Or else; a sound has come … words … words of abuse … bad—and one feels an unpleasant sensation throughout the body. Sensations arise on the body, and are felt by the mind; this is the function called vedanā. Then the fourth part of the mind starts working: saṅkhāra, reaction. A sound has come … words … words of praise … good … pleasant sensation—and one starts liking it: “This praise is wonderful! I want more!” Or else: a sound has come … words … words of abuse … bad … unpleasant sensation—and one starts disliking it: “ I can’t bear this abuse, stop it!”
Here is the real seed that gives fruit, the action that will have results: the saṅkhāra, the mental reaction. Every moment one keeps sowing this seed, keeps reacting with liking or disliking, craving or aversion, and by doing so makes oneself miserable.
Vipassana teaches the art of dying: how to die peacefully, harmoniously. And one learns the art of dying by learning the art of living: how to become master of the present moment, how not to generate a saṅkhāra at this moment, how to live a happy life here and now. If the present is good, one need not worry about the future, which is merely a product of the present, and therefore bound to be good. There are two aspects of the technique: The first is breaking the barrier between the conscious and unconscious levels of the mind. Usually the conscious mind knows nothing of what is being experienced by the unconscious. Hidden by this ignorance, reactions keep occurring at the unconscious level; by the time they reach the conscious level, they have become so intense that they easily overpower the mind. By this technique, the entire mass of the mind becomes conscious, aware; the ignorance is removed. The second aspect of the technique is equanimity. One is aware of all that one experiences, of every sensation, but does not react, does not tie new knots of craving or aversion, does not create misery for oneself.
To begin, while you sit for meditation, most of the time you will react to the sensations, but a few moments will come when you remain equanimous, despite severe pain. Such moments are very powerful in changing the habit pattern of the mind. Gradually you will reach the stage in which you can smile at any sensation, knowing it is anicca, bound to pass away.
One begins by learning to observe without reacting. Examine the pain that you experience objectively, as if it is someone else’s pain. Inspect it like a scientist who observes an experiment in his laboratory. When you fail, try again. Keep trying, and you will find that gradually you are coming out of suffering.
He found that whenever one develops craving, whether to keep a pleasant sensation or to get rid of an unpleasant one, and that craving is not fulfilled, then one starts suffering. And going further, at the subtlest level, he found that when seen with a fully collected mind, it is clear that attachment to the five aggregates is suffering. Intellectually one may understand that the material aggregate, the body, is not ‘I,’ not ‘mine,’ but merely an impersonal, changing phenomenon which is beyond one’s control; actually, however, one identifies with the body, and develops tremendous attachment to it. Similarly one develops attachment to the four mental aggregates of consciousness, perception, sensation, reaction, and clings to them as ‘I, mine’ despite their constantly changing nature.
There are four types of attachment that one keeps developing in life. The first is attachment to one’s desires, to the habit of craving. Whenever craving arises in the mind, it is accompanied by a physical sensation. Although at a deep level a storm of agitation has begun, at a superficial level one likes the sensation and wishes it to continue. This can be compared with scratching a sore: doing so will only aggravate it, and yet one enjoys the sensation of scratching. In the same way, as soon as a desire is fulfilled, the sensation that accompanied the desire is also gone, and so one generates a fresh desire in order that the sensation may continue. One becomes addicted to craving and multiplies one’s misery.
Now what is the cause of this attachment? He found that it arises because of the momentary reactions of liking and disliking. Liking develops into great craving; disliking into great aversion, the mirror image of craving, and both turn into attachment. And why these momentary reactions of liking and disliking? Anyone who observes himself will find that they occur because of bodily sensations. Whenever a pleasant sensation arises, one likes it and wants to retain and multiply it. Whenever an unpleasant sensation arises, one dislikes it and wants to get rid of it.
Now here, at the link of sensation, one can break the chain. Previously, every sensation gave rise to a reaction of liking or disliking, which developed into great craving or aversion, great misery. But now, instead of reacting to sensation, you are learning just to observe equanimously, understanding, “This will also change.” In this way sensation gives rise only to wisdom, to the understanding of anicca.
Any moment in which one does not generate a new saṅkhāra, one of the old ones will arise on the surface of the mind, and along with it a sensation will start within the body. If one remains equanimous, it passes away and another old reaction arises in its place. One continues to remain equanimous to physical sensations and the old saṅkhārā continue to arise and pass away, one after another. If out of ignorance one reacts to sensations, then one multiplies the saṅkhārā, multiplies one’s misery. But if one develops wisdom and does not react to sensations, then one after another the saṅkhārā are eradicated, misery is eradicated.
In a few words, the entire path was explained: “All saṅkhārā are impermanent” When one perceives this with true insight, then one becomes detached from suffering; this is the path of purification.
The old mental habit is to seek to push away painful sensations and to pull in pleasurable ones. So long as one is involved in the game of pain-and-pleasure, push-and-pull, the mind remains agitated, and one’s misery increases. But once one learns to observe objectively without identifying with the sensations, then the process of purification starts, and the old habit of blind reaction and of multiplying one’s misery is gradually weakened and broken. One must learn how to just observe. This does not mean that by practicing Vipassana one becomes a ‘vegetable,’ passively allowing others to do one harm. Rather, one learns how to act instead of to react. Previously one lived a life of reaction, and reaction is always negative. Now you are learning how to live properly, to live a healthy life of real action. Whenever a difficult situation arises in life, one who has learned to observe sensations will not fall into blind reaction. Instead he will wait a few moments, remaining aware of sensations and also equanimous, and then will make a decision and choose a course of action. Such an action is certain to be positive, because it proceeds from a balanced mind; it will be a creative action, helpful to oneself and others.
Not knowing reality, one remains under the delusion that one reacts to external objects such as visions, sounds, tastes, etc. Apparently this is so, but someone who learns to observe himself will find that at a subtler level the reality is different. The entire external universe exists for a person only when he or she experiences it, that is, when a sensory object comes into contact with one of the sense doors. As soon as there is a contact, there will be a vibration, a sensation. The perception gives a valuation to the sensation as good or bad, based on one’s past experiences and conditionings, past saṅkhārā. In accordance with this colored valuation the sensation becomes pleasant or unpleasant, and according to the type of sensation, one starts reacting with liking or disliking, craving or aversion.
The unique element in his teaching lies elsewhere, in his identifying physical sensation as the crucial point at which craving and aversion begin, and at which they must be eliminated.
No sensation is eternal. Therefore one should not have preferences or prejudices towards any sensation. When a gross, unpleasant sensation arises, one observes it without becoming depressed. When a subtle, pleasant sensation arises, one accepts it, even enjoys it, without becoming elated or attached to it. In every case one understands the impermanent nature of all sensations; then one can smile when they arise and when they pass away. Equanimity must be practiced at the level of bodily sensation in order to make a real change in one’s life. At every moment sensations are arising within the body. Usually the conscious mind is unaware of them, but the unconscious mind feels the sensations and reacts to them with craving or aversion. If the mind is trained to become fully conscious of all that occurs within the physical structure and at the same time to maintain equanimity, then the old habit of blind reaction is broken. One learns how to remain equanimous in every situation, and can therefore live a balanced, happy life.
Similarly, when you go to bed at night, close your eyes and feel sensation anywhere within the body. If you fall asleep with this awareness, naturally as soon as you wake up in the morning, you will be aware of sensation. Perhaps you may not sleep soundly, or you may even remain fully awake throughout the night. This is wonderful, provided you stay lying in bed and maintain awareness and equanimity. The body will receive the rest it needs, and there is no greater rest for the mind than to remain aware and equanimous. However, if you start worrying that you are developing insomnia, then you will generate tensions, and will feel exhausted the next day. Nor should you forcefully try to stay awake, remaining in a seated posture all night; that would be going to an extreme. If sleep comes, very good; sleep. If sleep does not come, allow the body to rest by remaining in a recumbent position, and allow the mind to rest by remaining aware and equanimous.
The old habit of the mind is to react, and to multiply reactions. Something unwanted happens, and one generates a saṅkhāra of aversion. As the saṅkhāra arises in the mind, it is accompanied by an unpleasant physical sensation. Next moment, because of the old habit of reaction, one again generates aversion, which is actually directed towards the unpleasant bodily sensation. The external stimulus of the anger is secondary; the reaction is in fact to the sensation within oneself. The unpleasant sensation causes one to react with aversion, which generates another unpleasant sensation, which again causes one to react. In this way, the process of multiplication begins. If one does not react to the sensation but instead smiles and understands its impermanent nature, then one does not generate a new saṅkhāra, and the saṅkhāra that has already arisen will pass away without multiplying. Next moment, another saṅkhāra of the same type will arise from the depths of the mind; one remains equanimous, and it will pass away. Next moment another arises; one remains equanimous, and it passes away. The process of eradication has started.
The body needs food only two or three times a day, but the flow of the mind requires an input every moment. The mental input is saṅkhāra. Every moment the saṅkhāra that one generates is responsible for sustaining the flow of consciousness. The mind that arises in the next moment is a product of this saṅkhāra. Every moment one gives the input of saṅkhāra, and the flow of consciousness continues. If at any moment one does not generate a new saṅkhāra the flow does not stop at once; instead it draws on the stock of old saṅkhārā. An old saṅkhāra will be forced to give its fruit, that is, to come to the surface of the mind in order to sustain the flow; and it will manifest as a physical sensation. If one reacts to the sensation, again one starts making new saṅkhārā, planting new seeds of misery. But if one observes the sensation with equanimity, the saṅkhāra loses its strength and is eradicated. Next moment another old saṅkhāra must come up to sustain the mental flow. Again one does not react, and again it is eradicated. So long as one remains aware and equanimous, layer after layer of old saṅkhārā will come to the surface and be eradicated; this is the law of nature.
If equanimity is only superficial it will not help in daily life. It is as if each person carries a tank of petrol, of gasoline, within. If one spark comes, one fruit of a past reaction, immediately a great explosion results, producing millions more sparks, more saṅkhārā, which will bring more fire, more suffering in future. By the practice of Vipassana, one gradually empties the tank. Sparks will still come because of one’s past saṅkhārā, but when they come, they will burn only the fuel that they bring with them; no new fuel is given. They burn briefly until they consume the fuel they contain, and then they are extinguished. Later, as one develops further on the path, one naturally starts generating the cool water of love and compassion, and the tank becomes filled with this water. Now, as soon as a spark comes, it is extinguished. It cannot burn even the small amount of fuel it contains. One may understand this at the intellectual level, and know that one should have a water pump ready in case a fire starts. But when fire actually comes, one turns on the petrol pump and starts a conflagration. Afterwards one realizes the mistake, but still repeats it next time when fire comes, because one’s wisdom is only superficial. If someone has real wisdom in the depths of the mind, when faced with fire such a person will not throw petrol on it, understanding that this would only cause harm. Instead one throws the cool water of love and compassion, helping others and oneself.
The wisdom must be at the level of sensations. If you train yourself to be aware of sensations in any situation and to remain equanimous towards them, nothing can overpower you. Perhaps for just a few moments you observe without reacting. Then, with this balanced mind, you decide what action to take. It is bound to be right action, positive, helpful to others, because it is performed with a balanced mind.
Sometimes in life it is necessary to take strong action. One has tried to explain to someone politely, gently, with a smile, but the person can understand only hard words, hard actions. Therefore one takes hard vocal or physical action. But before doing so, one must examine oneself to see whether the mind is balanced, and whether one has only love and compassion for the person. If so, the action will be helpful; if not, it will not help anyone. One takes strong action to help the erring person. With this base of love and compassion one cannot go wrong.
However, enlightened persons discovered that whenever a defilement arises in the mind, simultaneously two things start happening at the physical level: respiration will become abnormal, and a biochemical reaction will start within the body, a sensation. A practical solution was found. It is very difficult to observe abstract defilements in the mind, but with training one can soon learn to observe respiration and sensation, both of which are physical manifestations of the defilements. By observing a defilement in its physical aspect, one allows it to arise and pass away without causing any harm. One becomes free from the defilement.
When one develops the ability to see things from different angles, then whenever another abuses or otherwise misbehaves, the understanding arises that this person is misbehaving because he is suffering. With this understanding, one cannot react with negativity, but will feel only love and compassion for the suffering person, as a mother would feel for a sick child. The volition arises to help the person come out of his misery. Thus one remains peaceful and happy, and helps others also to become peaceful and happy. This is the purpose of Dhamma: to practice the art of living, that is, to eradicate mental impurities and to develop good qualities, for one’s own good and for the good of others.
Another pāramī is khanti—tolerance. At course like this, working and living together in a group, one may find oneself becoming disturbed and irritated by the actions of another person. But soon one realizes that the person causing a disturbance is ignorant of what he is doing, or a sick person. The irritation goes away, and one feels only love and compassion for that person. One has started developing the quality of tolerance.
Another pāramī is sacca—truth. By practicing sīla one undertakes to maintain truthfulness at the vocal level. However, sacca must also be practiced in a deeper sense. Every step on the path must be a step with truth, from gross, apparent truth, to subtler truths, to ultimate truth. There is no room for imagination. One must always remain with the reality that one actually experiences at the present moment.
Another pāramī is adhiṭṭhāna—strong determination. When one starts a Vipassana course, one makes a determination to remain for the entire period of the course. One resolves to follow the precepts, the rule of silence, all the discipline of the course. After the introduction of the technique of Vipassana itself, one makes a strong determination to meditate for the entire hour during each group sitting without opening eyes, hands or legs.
Another pāramī is mettā—pure, selfless love. In the past one tried to feel love and goodwill for others, but this was only at the conscious level of the mind. At the unconscious level the old tensions continued. When the entire mind is purified, then from the depths one can wish for the happiness of others. This is real love, which helps others and helps oneself as well.
For this reason, a portion of what one earns must be given for the good of others. If one does this, ego will not develop, since one understands that one earns for one’s own benefit and also for the benefit of others. The volition arises to help others in whatever way one can. And one realizes that there can be no greater help to others than to help them learn the way out of suffering.
Observing reality as it is, without any preconceptions, in order to disintegrate apparent truth and to reach ultimate truth—this is Vipassana. The purpose of disintegrating apparent reality is to enable the meditator to emerge from the illusion of ‘I.’ This illusion is at the root of all our craving and aversion, and leads to great suffering. One may accept intellectually that it is an illusion, but this acceptance is not enough to end suffering. Regardless of religious or philosophical beliefs, one remains miserable so long as the habit of egotism persists. In order to break this habit one must experience directly the insubstantial nature of the mental-physical phenomenon, changing constantly beyond one’s control. This experience alone can dissolve egotism, leading to the way out of craving and aversion, out of suffering.
This does not mean that one should observe individual thoughts. If you try to do that, you will start rolling in the thoughts. You should simply remain aware of the nature of the mind at this moment; whether craving, aversion, ignorance, and agitation are present or not. And whatever arises in the mind, The Buddha discovered, will be accompanied by a physical sensation. Hence whether the meditator is exploring the mental or the physical aspect of the phenomenon of ‘I,’ awareness of sensation is essential.
What had been lacking was an understanding of the importance of sensation. Then as now, it was generally thought that our reactions are to the external objects of sense—vision, sound, odor, taste, touch, thoughts. However, observation of the truth within reveals that between the object and the reaction is a missing link: sensation. The contact of an object with the corresponding sense door gives rise to sensation; the saññā assigns a positive or negative valuation, in accordance with which the sensation becomes pleasant or unpleasant, and one reacts with craving or aversion. The process occurs so rapidly that conscious awareness of it develops only after a reaction has been repeated many times and has gathered dangerous strength sufficient to overpower the mind. To deal with the reactions, one must become aware of them at the point where they start; they start with sensation, and so one must be aware of sensations.
In Vipassana, any practice that interferes with the awareness of sensation is harmful, whether it is concentrating on a word or form, or giving attention merely to physical movements of the body or to thoughts arising in the mind. You cannot eradicate suffering unless you go to its source, sensation.
The first such station is that in which one experiences arising (samudaya) and passing away (vaya) separately. At this stage the meditator is aware of consolidated, integrated reality in the form of gross sensations within the body. One is aware of a sensation, perhaps a pain, arising. It seems to stay for some time and ultimately it passes away. Going further beyond this station, one penetrates to the stage of samudaya-vaya, in which one experiences arising and passing away simultaneously, without any interval between them. The gross, consolidated sensations have dissolved into subtle vibrations, arising and falling with great rapidity, and the solidity of the mental-physical structure disappears. Solidified, intensified emotion and solidified, intensified sensation both dissolve into nothing but vibration. This is the stage of bhaṅga—dissolution—in which one experiences the ultimate truth of mind and matter: constantly arising and passing away, without any solidity.
Meditate one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. This regular, daily practice is essential. At first it may seem a heavy burden to devote two hours a day to meditation, but you will soon find that much time will be saved that was wasted in the past. Firstly, you will need less time for sleep. Secondly, you will be able to complete your work more quickly, because your capacity for work will increase. When a problem arises you will remain balanced, and will be able immediately to find the correct solution. As you become established in the technique, you will find that having meditated in the morning, you are full of energy throughout the day, without any agitation.
When you go to bed at night, for five minutes be aware of sensations anywhere in the body before you fall asleep. Next morning, as soon as you wake up, again observe sensations within for five minutes. These few minutes of meditation immediately before falling asleep and after waking up will prove very helpful.
In your daily meditation, use most of the time for the practice of Vipassana. Only if your mind is agitated or dull, if for any reason it is difficult to observe sensations and maintain equanimity, then practice Anapana for as long as necessary.
When practicing Vipassana, be careful not to play the game of sensations, becoming elated with pleasant ones and depressed with unpleasant ones. Observe every sensation objectively. Keep moving your attention systematically throughout the body, not allowing it to remain on one part for long periods. A maximum of two minutes is enough in any part, or up to five minutes in rare cases, but never more than that. Keep the attention moving to maintain awareness of sensation in every part of the body. If the practice starts to become mechanical, change the way in which you move your attention. In every situation remain aware and equanimous, and you will experience the wonderful benefits of Vipassana.
Be careful, however, that when you meditate in public, in the presence of nonmeditators, you keep your eyes open; never make a show of the practice of Dhamma.
“Abstain from all unwholesome deeds, perform wholesome ones, purify your own mind”— this is the teaching of the Buddhas.
Mind precedes all phenomena, mind matters most, everything is mind-made. If with an impure mind one performs any action of speech or body, then suffering will follow that person as the cartwheel follows the foot of the draft animal.
Mind precedes all phenomena, mind matters most, everything is mind-made. If with a pure mind one performs any action of speech or body, then happiness will follow that person as a shadow that never departs.
Birth is suffering; ageing is suffering; sickness is suffering; death is suffering; association with the unpleasant is suffering; dissociation from the pleasant is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in short, attachment to the five aggregates is suffering.
Make an island of yourself, make yourself your refuge; there is no other refuge. Make truth your island, make truth your refuge; there is no other refuge.
“Feeling the entire body I shall breath in”; thus he trains himself. “Feeling the entire body I shall breathe out”; thus he trains himself.
“Ancestor?” Mother said, climbing the ladder outside the building. “She was a British Celt. Beowulf was Swedish, Genghis Khan Mongolian, and Sun Tzu Chinese. And they’re all supposedly my daughter’s ancestors?” “All of Old Earth is our heritage!” Gran-Gran said. “You, Spensa, are one in a line of warriors stretching back millennia, a true line to Old Earth and its finest blood.”
The girl and I soon passed a fountain. A real fountain, like from the stories. We both stopped to gape, and I extricated my arm from the girl’s grasp. Part of me wanted to be offended—but she seemed so genuine. “That music the water makes,” she said. “Isn’t it the most wonderful sound ever?” “The most wonderful sound ever is the lamentations of my enemies, screaming my name toward the heavens with ragged, dying voices.” The girl looked at me, cocking her head. “Well bless your stars.”
“—just because you bought your way into flight school doesn’t mean you’ll be flightleader. You need to watch yourself. Don’t make an enemy out of me.” “And if I do?” Scud, it was annoying to have to look up at him. I leaped onto my seat to gain a height advantage for the argument—an action that seemed to surprise him. He cocked his head. “What—” “Always attack from a position of superior advantage!” I said. “When this is done, Jerkface, I will hold your tarnished and melted pin up as my trophy as your smoldering ship marks your pyre, and the final resting place of your crushed and broken corpse!” The room grew quiet. “All right…,” Jerkface said. “Well, that was…descriptive.” “Bless your stars,” Kimmalyn added. Hudiya gave me a thumbs-up and a grin, though the others in the room plainly had no idea what to make of me.
We watched the debris fall, burning light reflecting against my canopy. “So…,” I said. “You’re saying that by the end of our training, you expect us to be able to use grappling hooks made of energy to smash our enemies with flaming chunks of space debris?” “Yes.” “That…,” I whispered, “that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”
I thought about guys, but my life hadn’t exactly left me time for that kind of thing. The last time I’d had any romantic inclinations had been when I’d been eight and had given Rig a particularly nice hatchet I’d made out of a rock and a stick—then had decided he was gross the next week. Because, well, I’d been eight. I jumped to my feet. “Uh, Bim?” I said. He looked at me again. “You ever heard of Odysseus?” “No,” he said. “He was an ancient hero who fought in the greatest war that ever happened on Earth, the Trojan War. It’s said he had a bow so strong that, other than him, only a giant could pull the string back. He…had blue hair, you know.” “Yeah?” Bim asked. “Pretty cool,” I said, then immediately sat down, taking a long gulp from my canteen. Was that smooth? That was smooth, right? I wasn’t sure what Sun Tzu or Beowulf would say about flirting with cute guys. Maybe share the skulls of your enemies with them, as a gesture of affection?
“So,” she said, hovering beside my seat as I rested and drank from my canteen, “is that why you’re always so bellicose?” “Bellicose?” I asked, unfamiliar with the word. “So willing to seize the stars with one hand and shove them in your pocket,” Kimmalyn said. She leaned in, as if the next part were somehow naughty. “You know. Heated.” “Heated.” “Maybe even…once in a while…cross.” “Is my father why I’m such a mess of anger, bravado, and temper? Is the fact that they call him a coward the reason I walk around with my sword in hand, screaming that I’ll make a pile of everyone’s skulls, then stand on that to help me behead the people who were too tall for me to reach?” Kimmalyn smiled fondly. “Bless my stars?” I asked her. “Every single one of them, Spensa. Every single bouncing star.”
“The only portion of my memory banks that seems to have survived intact—other than basic personality routines and things like general language usage—is an open database for recording fungoid life forms on this planet. I should very much like to fill the rest of it in.” “Fungoid?” “Mushrooms. Would you happen to have any I can categorize?” “You’re a hyperadvanced stealth fighter that—somehow—has a machine personality built into it…and you want me to bring you mushrooms?” “Yes, please,” M-Bot said. “Take stock. As in categorize local life forms. I’m certain that’s what he meant.”
“Theoretically,” I said, “humans had this thing when they first fought the Krell. It didn’t help then.” “I would note,” M-Bot said, “that ‘it’ is listening.” “And?” I asked the ship, yawning again. “And it’s generally considered bad form for humans to speak of one who is present as if they are not.” “I can’t make you out, M-Bot,” Rig said, sitting up. “You say you don’t care about things like that, right?” “Obviously I don’t. I’m a logical machine with only a thin veneer of simulated emotions.” “Okay,” Rig said. “That makes sense.” “It’s still rude,” M-Bot added.
He grunted as he worked on a particularly stubborn wire, and Doomslug helpfully imitated him. She sat on the stone ground near my head. M-Bot was “running diagnostics”—whatever that meant. It mostly involved him saying things like “Hmmmmm…” or “Carry the one…” to “give indication that the process is continuing, as humans quickly grow bored without auditory stimulation.”
“Whoa!” Nedd said. “Holy scud!” I knelt there on top of Jerkface, trembling, with my hand raised. “Really, wow!” Nedd said, kneeling down beside us. “Spin, that was incredible. Can you teach me that?” I glanced at him. “We don’t learn hand-to-hand,” he said, making some chopping motions. “Cobb says it’s useless, but what if a Krell tries to—you know—jump me in an alley or something?” “Nobody has ever seen a Krell alive, you idiot,” Hurl said. “Yeah, but what if that’s because—like—they always jump people in alleys, right? You ever think about that?”
“Huh,” M-Bot said. “Why don’t they bombard you from orbit?” “What?” “Not that I’d know anything about things like that,” he added. “Being a noncombat machine. Obviously.” “You have four guns.” “Someone must have stuck those on when I wasn’t looking.”
“And name your firstborn son after me.” “Firstborn will be Executioner Destructorius. But you can have number two.”
Rig rolled his eyes. “Would you go keep that thing occupied? I don’t want it jabbering at me while I work.” “I can both talk to her and bother you!” M-Bot called. “Multitasking is an essential means by which an artificial intelligence achieves more efficiency than fleshy human brains.” Rig looked at me. “No insult intended!” M-Bot added. “You have very nice shoes!” “We’ve been working on his compliments,” I said. “They aren’t nearly as stupid as the rest of your outfit!” “He still needs practice.”
“Wait,” Nedd said. “Am I an idiot, or did Spin just say her ship spoke?” “Hi, Nedd!” M-Bot said. “I can confirm you are an idiot, but all humans are. Your mental abilities appear to be within a standard deviation from their average.”
“Alta Base,” M-Bot said. “This is Skyward Eleven. You may commence thanking us for saving you from utter annihilation.” “Thank you!” some voices cried. “Thank you!” “Mushrooms are the preferred offering,” M-Bot said to them. “As many varieties as you can dig up.” “Really?” I said, pulling off my helmet to wipe my brow. “Still on the mushroom thing?” “I didn’t erase that part of my programming,” he said. “I’m fond of it. It gives me something to collect, like the way humans choose to accumulate useless items of sentimental and thematic value.”
Real power comes from the mind. When someone wants to keep you powerless, the first thing they do is try to control what it is permissible for you to think. They write your story for you without your consent and tell you this is how you must believe until even your own thoughts seem like alien things in your head. They hem you in so there is no escape or relief, until in desperation you step off the page, out of the story, into a place their narrative cannot find you.
He contemplated lifting his head, but he was not entirely sure it was still attached to his body. Inconvenient if it had rolled away. He had a brief weird vision of his headless body groping around in the rubble, trying on different rocks for size. But no. Many of the parts of him that hurt were well south of his neck, which indicated that there was at least some nominal communication with the outlying provinces. Perhaps a treaty was being worked out.
Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense.
The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose; Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart; If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.
But if you are not a liberal or libertarian Westerner, you probably think it’s wrong—morally wrong—for someone to have sex with a chicken carcass and then eat it. For you, as for most people on the planet, morality is broad. Some actions are wrong even though they don’t hurt anyone. Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.
Kohlberg’s most influential finding was that the most morally advanced kids (according to his scoring technique) were those who had frequent opportunities for role taking—for putting themselves into another person’s shoes and looking at a problem from that person’s perspective. Egalitarian relationships (such as with peers) invite role taking, but hierarchical relationships (such as with teachers and parents) do not.
If you want your kids to learn about the physical world, let them play with cups and water; don’t lecture them about the conservation of volume. And if you want your kids to learn about the social world, let them play with other kids and resolve disputes; don’t lecture them about the Ten Commandments.
Kids can’t talk like moral philosophers, but they are busy sorting social information in a sophisticated way. They seem to grasp early on that rules that prevent harm are special, important, unalterable, and universal. And this realization, Turiel said, was the foundation of all moral development. Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong.
Shweder offered a simple idea to explain why the self differs so much across cultures: all societies must resolve a small set of questions about how to order society, the most important being how to balance the needs of individuals and groups. There seem to be just two primary ways of answering this question. Most societies have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals. In contrast, the individualistic answer places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual.26 The sociocentric answer dominated most of the ancient world, but the individualistic answer became a powerful rival during the Enlightenment.
In other words, Shweder found almost no trace of social conventional thinking in the sociocentric culture of Orissa, where, as he put it, “the social order is a moral order.” Morality was much broader and thicker in Orissa; almost any practice could be loaded up with moral force. And if that was true, then Turiel’s theory became less plausible. Children were not figuring out morality for themselves, based on the bedrock certainty that harm is bad.
The biggest surprise was that so many subjects tried to invent victims. I had written the stories carefully to remove all conceivable harm to other people, yet in 38 percent of the 1,620 times that people heard a harmless-offensive story, they claimed that somebody was harmed. In the dog story, for example, many people said that the family itself would be harmed because they would get sick from eating dog meat. Was this an example of the “informational assumptions” that Turiel had talked about? Were people really condemning the actions because they foresaw these harms, or was it the reverse process—were people inventing these harms because they had already condemned the actions?
But something even more interesting happened when I or the other interviewers challenged these invented-victim claims. I had trained my interviewers to correct people gently when they made claims that contradicted the text of the story. For example, if someone said, “It’s wrong to cut up the flag because a neighbor might see her do it, and he might be offended,” the interviewer replied, “Well, it says here in the story that nobody saw her do it. So would you still say it was wrong for her to cut up her flag?” Yet even when subjects recognized that their victim claims were bogus, they still refused to say that the act was OK. Instead, they kept searching for another victim. They said things like “I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t think of a reason why.” They seemed to be morally dumbfounded—rendered speechless by their inability to explain verbally what they knew intuitively.29 These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions. It was reasoning as described by the philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”30 I had found evidence for Hume’s claim. I had found that moral reasoning was often a servant of moral emotions, and this was a challenge to the rationalist approach that dominated moral psychology.
Where does morality come from? The two most common answers have long been that it is innate (the nativist answer) or that it comes from childhood learning (the empiricist answer). In this chapter I considered a third possibility, the rationalist answer, which dominated moral psychology when I entered the field: that morality is self-constructed by children on the basis of their experiences with harm. Kids know that harm is wrong because they hate to be harmed, and they gradually come to see that it is therefore wrong to harm others, which leads them to understand fairness and eventually justice. I explained why I came to reject this answer after conducting research in Brazil and the United States. I concluded instead that: • The moral domain varies by culture. It is unusually narrow in Western, educated, and individualistic cultures. Sociocentric cultures broaden the moral domain to encompass and regulate more aspects of life. • People sometimes have gut feelings—particularly about disgust and disrespect—that can drive their reasoning. Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication. • Morality can’t be entirely self-constructed by children based on their growing understanding of harm. Cultural learning or guidance must play a larger role than rationalist theories had given it.
We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.
Rodion broke in, bristling. “We are men of God,” he said. “That is a devil. Surely nothing more needs to be said?” “I think,” said Sergei, “that a little more must be said.” He did not speak loudly, but everyone turned to him. “My daughter,” said Sergei calmly, “we will hear your tale from the beginning.”
No, herein the world was divided into those who had it and those who did not. This quality, this it, was never named, however, nor was it talked about in any way. As to just what this ineffable quality was … well, it obviously involved bravery. But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life. The idea seemed to be that any fool could do that, if that was all that was required, just as any fool could throw away his life in the process. No, the idea here (in the all-enclosing fraternity) seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite—and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God. Nor was there a test to show whether or not a pilot had this righteous quality. There was, instead, a seemingly infinite series of tests. A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even—ultimately, God willing, one day—that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.
As the aircraft came closer and the carrier heaved on into the waves and the plane’s speed did not diminish and the deck did not grow steady—indeed, it pitched up and down five or ten feet per greasy heave—one experienced a neural alarm that no lecture could have prepared him for: This is not an airplane coming toward me, it is a brick with some poor sonofabitch riding it (someone much like myself!), and it is not gliding, it is falling, a thirty-thousand-pound brick, headed not for a stripe on the deck but for me—and with a horrible smash! it hits the skillet, and with a blur of momentum as big as a freight train’s it hurtles toward the far end of the deck—another blinding storm!—another roar as the pilot pushes the throttle up to full military power and another smear of rubber screams out over the skillet—and this is nominal! —quite okay!—for a wire stretched across the deck has grabbed the hook on the end of the plane as it hit the deck tail down, and the smash was the rest of the fifteen-ton brute slamming onto the deck, as it tripped up, so that it is now straining against the wire at full throttle, in case it hadn’t held and the plane had “boltered” off the end of the deck and had to struggle up into the air again.
This man had been the budding ace of the training class; he had flown the hottest fighter-style trainer, the T–38, like a dream; and then he began the routine step of being checked out in the T–33. The T–33 was not nearly as hot an aircraft as the T–38; it was essentially the old P–80 jet fighter. It had an exceedingly small cockpit. The pilot could barely move his shoulders. It was the sort of airplane of which everybody said, “You don’t get into it, you wear it.” Once inside a T–33 cockpit this man, this budding ace, developed claustrophobia of the most paralyzing sort. He tried everything to overcome it. He even went to a psychiatrist, which was a serious mistake for a military officer if his superiors learned of it. But nothing worked. He was shifted over to flying jet transports, such as the C–135. Very demanding and necessary aircraft they were, too, and he was still spoken of as an excellent pilot. But as everyone knew—and, again, it was never explained in so many words—only those who were assigned to fighter squadrons, the “fighter jocks,” as they called each other with a self-satisfied irony, remained in the true fraternity. Those assigned to transports were not humiliated like washouts—somebody had to fly those planes—nevertheless, they, too, had been left behind for lack of the right stuff.
When a fighter pilot was in training, whether in the Navy or the Air Force, his superiors were continually spelling out strict rules for him, about the use of the aircraft and conduct in the sky. They repeatedly forbade so-called hot-dog stunts, such as outside loops, buzzing, flat-hatting, hedgehopping and flying under bridges. But somehow one got the message that the man who truly had it could ignore those rules—not that he should make a point of it, but that he could—and that after all there was only one way to find out—and that in some strange unofficial way, peeking through his fingers, his instructor halfway expected him to challenge all the limits.
Likewise, “hassling”—mock dogfighting—was strictly forbidden, and so naturally young fighter jocks could hardly wait to go up in, say, a pair of F–100s and start the duel by making a pass at each other at 800 miles an hour, the winner being the pilot who could slip in behind the other one and get locked in on his tail (“wax his tail”), and it was not uncommon for some eager jock to try too tight an outside turn and have his engine flame out, whereupon, unable to restart it, he has to eject … and he shakes his fist at the victor as he floats down by parachute and his million-dollar aircraft goes kaboom! on the palmetto grass or the desert floor, and he starts thinking about how he can get together with the other guy back at the base in time for the two of them to get their stories straight before the investigation: “I don’t know what happened, sir. I was pulling up after a target run, and it just flamed out on me.” Hassling was forbidden, and hassling that led to the destruction of an aircraft was a serious court-martial offense, and the man’s superiors knew that the engine hadn’t just flamed out, but every unofficial impulse on the base seemed to be saying: “Hell, we wouldn’t give you a nickel for a pilot who hasn’t done some crazy rat-racing like that. It’s all part of the right stuff.”
Being a fighter pilot—for that matter, simply taking off in a single-engine jet fighter of the Century series, such as an F–102, or any of the military’s other marvelous bricks with fins on them—presented a man, on a perfectly sunny day, with more ways to get himself killed than his wife and children could imagine in their wildest fears.
To take off in an F–100 at dawn and cut in the afterburner and hurtle twenty-five thousand feet up into the sky so suddenly that you felt not like a bird but like a trajectory, yet with full control, full control of five tons of thrust, all of which flowed from your will and through your fingertips, with the huge engine right beneath you, so close that it was as if you were riding it bareback, until you leveled out and went supersonic, an event registered on earth by a tremendous cracking boom that shook windows, but up here only by the fact that you now felt utterly free of the earth—to describe it, even to wife, child, near ones and dear ones, seemed impossible. So the pilot kept it to himself, along with an even more indescribable … an even more sinfully inconfessable … feeling of superiority, appropriate to him and to his kind, lone bearers of the right stuff.
By the time the fighting was stopped, there were thirty-eight Air Force aces, and they had accounted for a total of 299.5 kills. Only fifty-six F–86s were lost. High spirits these lads had. They chronicled their adventures with a good creamy romanticism such as nobody in flying had treated himself to since the days of Lufbery, Frank Luke, and von Richthofen in the First World War. Colonel Harrison R. Thyng, who shot down five MiGs in Korea (and eight German and Japanese planes in the Second World War), glowed like Excalibur when he described his Fourth Fighter-Interceptor Wing: “Like olden knights the F–86 pilots ride up over North Korea to the Yalu River, the sun glinting off silver aircraft, contrails streaming behind, as they challenge the numerically superior enemy to come on up and fight.” Lances and plumes! I’m a knight! Come on up and fight! Why hold back! Knights of the Right Stuff!
Yeager had started out as the equivalent, in the Second World War, of the legendary Frank Luke of the 27th Aero Squadron in the First. Which is to say, he was the boondocker, the boy from the back country, with only a high-school education, no credentials, no cachet or polish of any sort, who took off the feed-store overalls and put on a uniform and climbed into an airplane and lit up the skies over Europe.
The plane the Air Force wanted to break the sound barrier with was called the X–I at the outset and later on simply the X–I. The Bell Aircraft Corporation had built it under an Army contract. The core of the ship was a rocket of the type first developed by a young Navy inventor, Robert Truax, during the war. The fuselage was shaped like a 50-caliber bullet—an object that was known to go supersonic smoothly. Military pilots seldom drew major test assignments; they went to highly paid civilians working for the aircraft corporations. The prime pilot for the X–I was a man whom Bell regarded as the best of the breed. This man looked like a movie star. He looked like a pilot from out of Hell’s Angels. And on top of everything else there was his name: Slick Goodlin.
The only trouble they had with Yeager was in holding him back. On his first powered flight in the X–I he immediately executed an unauthorized zero-g roll with a full load of rocket fuel, then stood the ship on its tail and went up to .85 Mach in a vertical climb, also unauthorized. On subsequent flights, at speeds between .85 Mach and .9 Mach, Yeager ran into most known airfoil problems—loss of elevator, aileron, and rudder control, heavy trim pressures, Dutch rolls, pitching and buffeting, the lot—yet was convinced, after edging over .9 Mach, that this would all get better, not worse, as you reached Mach 1. The attempt to push beyond Mach 1—“breaking the sound barrier”—was set for October 14, 1947. Not being an engineer, Yeager didn’t believe the “barrier” existed.
Yeager gets up before daybreak on Tuesday morning—which is supposed to be the day he tries to break the sound barrier—and his ribs still hurt like a sonofabitch. He gets his wife to drive him over to the field, and he has to keep his right arm pinned down to his side to keep his ribs from hurting so much. At dawn, on the day of a flight, you could hear the X–I screaming long before you got there. The fuel for the X–I was alcohol and liquid oxygen, oxygen converted from a gas to a liquid by lowering its temperature to 297 degrees below zero. And when the lox, as it was called, rolled out of the hoses and into the belly of the X–I, it started boiling off and the X–I started steaming and screaming like a teakettle. There’s quite a crowd on hand, by Muroc standards … perhaps nine or ten souls. They’re still fueling the X–I with the lox, and the beast is wailing. The X–I looked like a fat orange swallow with white markings. But it was really just a length of pipe with four rocket chambers in it. It had a tiny cockpit and a needle nose, two little straight blades (only three and a half inches thick at the thickest part) for wings, and a tail assembly set up high to avoid the “sonic wash” from the wings.
Anyway, then his flight engineer, Jack Ridley, would climb down the ladder, out in the breeze, and shove into place the cockpit door, which had to be lowered out of the belly of the B–29 on a chain. Then Yeager had to push a handle to lock the door airtight. Since the X–I’s cockpit was minute, you had to push the handle with your right hand. It took quite a shove. There was no way you could move into position to get enough leverage with your left hand. Out in the hangar Yeager makes a few test shoves on the sly, and the pain is so incredible he realizes that there is no way a man with two broken ribs is going to get the door closed. It is time to confide in somebody, and the logical man is Jack Ridley. Ridley is not only the flight engineer but a pilot himself and a good old boy from Oklahoma to boot. He will understand about Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving through the goddamned Joshua trees. So Yeager takes Ridley off to the side in the tin hangar and says: Jack, I got me a little ol’ problem here. Over at Pancho’s the other night I sorta … dinged my goddamned ribs. Ridley says, Whattya mean … dinged? Yeager says, Well, I guess you might say I damned near like to … broke a coupla the sonsabitches. Whereupon Yeager sketches out the problem he foresees. Not for nothing is Ridley the engineer on this project. He has an inspiration. He tells a janitor named Sam to cut him about nine inches off a broom handle. When nobody’s looking, he slips the broomstick into the cockpit of the X–I and gives Yeager a little advice and counsel. So with that added bit of supersonic flight gear Yeager went aloft.
The X–I seemed to shoot straight up in an absolutely perpendicular trajectory, as if determined to snap the hold of gravity via the most direct route possible. In fact, he was only climbing at the 45-degree angle called for in the flight plan. At about .87 Mach the buffeting started. On the ground the engineers could no longer see Yeager. They could only hear … that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl. “Had a mild buffet there … jes the usual instability …” Jes the usual instability? Then the X–I reached the speed of .96 Mach, and that incredible caint-hardlyin’ aw-shuckin’ drawl said: “Say, Ridley … make a note here, will ya?” (if you ain’t got nothin’ better to do) “ … elevator effectiveness regained.” Just as Yeager had predicted, as the X–I approached Mach 1, the stability improved. Yeager had his eyes pinned on the machometer. The needle reached .96, fluctuated, and went off the scale. And on the ground they heard … that voice: “Say, Ridley … make another note, will ya?” (if you ain’t too bored yet) “ … there’s somethin’ wrong with this ol’ machometer …” (faint chuckle) “ … it’s gone kinda screwy on me …” And in that moment, on the ground, they heard a boom rock over the desert floor—just as the physicist Theodore von Kármán had predicted many years before. Then they heard Ridley back in the B–29: “If it is, Chuck, we’ll fix it. Personally I think you’re seeing things.” Then they heard Yeager’s poker-hollow drawl again: “Well, I guess I am, Jack … And I’m still goin’ upstairs like a bat.” The X–I had gone through “the sonic wall” without so much as a bump. As the speed topped out at Mach 1.05, Yeager had the sensation of shooting straight through the top of the sky. The sky turned a deep purple and all at once the stars and the moon came out—and the sun shone at the same time. He had reached a layer of the upper atmosphere where the air was too thin to contain reflecting dust particles. He was simply looking out into space. As the X–I nosed over at the top of the climb, Yeager now had seven minutes of … Pilot Heaven … ahead of him. He was going faster than any man in history, and it was almost silent up here, since he had exhausted his rocket fuel, and he was so high in such a vast space that there was no sensation of motion. He was master of the sky. His was a king’s solitude, unique and inviolate, above the dome of the world. It would take him seven minutes to glide back down and land at Muroc. He spent the time doing victory rolls and wing-over-wing aerobatics while Rogers Lake and the High Sierras spun around below.
Another possibility was that the chief at Wright had never quite known what to make of Muroc. There was some sort of weird ribald aerial tarpaper mad-monk squadron up on the roof of the desert out there …
In those planes, which were like chimneys with little razor-blade wings on them, you had to be “afraid to panic,” and that phrase was no joke. In the skids, the tumbles, the spins, there was, truly, as Saint-Exupéry had said, only one thing you could let yourself think about: What do I do next? Sometimes at Edwards they used to play the tapes of pilots going into the final dive, the one that killed them, and the man would be tumbling, going end over end in a fifteen-ton length of pipe, with all aerodynamics long gone, and not one prayer left, and he knew it, and he would be screaming into the microphone, but not for Mother or for God or the nameless spirit of Ahor, but for one last hopeless crumb of information about the loop: “I’ve tried A! I’ve tried B! I’ve tried C! I’ve tried D! Tell me what else I can try!” And then that truly spooky click on the machine. What do I do next? (In this moment when the Halusian Gulp is opening?) And everybody around the table would look at one another and nod ever so slightly, and the unspoken message was: Too bad! There was a man with the right stuff.
So Yeager did a very un-Yeager-like thing. He yelled into the microphone! He yelled: “Look, my dedicated young scientist—follow me down!” The change in tone—Yeager yelling!—penetrated the man’s impacted hypoxic skull. My God! The fabled Yeager! He’s yelling—Yeager’s yelling!—to me for help! Jesus H. Christ! And he started following him down. Yeager knew that if he could get the man down to 12,000 feet, the oxygen content of the air would bring him around, which it did. Hey! What happened? After he landed, he realized he had been no more than a minute or two from passing out and punching a hole in the desert. As he got out of the cockpit, an F–86 flew overhead and did a slow roll sixty feet off the deck and then disappeared across Rogers Lake. That was Yeager’s signature. Yeager was flying chase one day for Bill Bridgeman, the prime pilot for one of the greatest rocket planes, the Douglas Skyrocket, when the ship went into a flat spin followed by a violent tumble. Bridgeman fought his way out of it and regained stability, only to have his windows ice up. This was another common danger in rocket flights. He was out of fuel, so that he was now faced with the task of landing the ship both deadstick and blind. At this point Yeager drew alongside in his F–86 and became his eyes. He told Bridgeman every move to make every foot of the way down … as if he knew that ol’ Skyrocket like the back of his hand … and this was jes a little ol’ fishin’ trip on the Mud River … and there was jes the two of ‘em havin’ a little poker-hollow fun in the sun … and that lazy lollygaggin’ chucklin’ driftin’ voice was still purrin’ away … the very moment Bridgeman touched down safely. You could almost hear Yeager saying to Bridgeman, as he liked to do: “How d’ye hold with rockets now, son?” That was what you thought of when you saw the F–86 do a slow roll sixty feet off the deck and disappear across Rogers Lake.
And that voice … started drifting down from on high. At first the tower at Edwards began to notice that all of a sudden there were an awful lot of test pilots up there with West Virginia drawls. And pretty soon there were an awful lot of fighter pilots up there with West Virginia drawls. The air space over Edwards was getting so caint-hardly supercool day by day, it was terrible. And then that lollygaggin’ poker-hollow air space began to spread, because the test pilots and fighter pilots from Edwards were considered the pick of the litter and had a cachet all their own, wherever they went, and other towers and other controllers began to notice that it was getting awfully drawly and down-home up there, although they didn’t know exactly why. And then, because the military is the training ground for practically all airline pilots, it spread further, until airline passengers all over America began to hear that awshuckin’ driftin’ gone-fishin’ Mud River voice coming from the cockpit … “Now, folks, uh … this is the captain … ummmm … We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s tryin’ to tell us that the landin’ gears’re not … uh … lockin’ into position …”
Flickinger seemed to be telling him that Project Mercury just wasn’t suited for the righteous brethren of yore, the veterans of those high desert rat-shack broomstick days when there were no chiefs and no Indians and the pilot huddled in the hangar with the engineer and then went out and took the beast up and lit the candle and reached for the stars and rode his chimney and landed it on the lake bed and made it to Pancho’s in time for beer call.
Word of the Enema Bag Showdown spread rapidly among the other candidates, and they were delighted to hear about it. Practically all of them had wanted to do something of the sort. It wasn’t just that the testing procedures were unpleasant; the entire atmosphere of the testing constituted an affront. There was something … decidedly out of joint about it. Pilots and doctors were natural enemies, of course, at least as pilots saw it. The flight surgeon was pretty much kept in his place in the service. His only real purpose was to tend to pilots and keep ’em flying. He was an attendant to the pilots’ vital stuff. In fact, flight surgeons were encouraged to fly back-seat with fighter pilots from time to time, so as to understand what stresses and righteous stuff the job entailed.
In one test the interviewer gave each candidate a blank sheet of paper and asked him to study it and describe what he saw in it. There was no one right response in this sort of test, because it was designed to force the candidate to free-associate in order to see where his mind wandered. The test-wise pilot knew that the main thing was to stay on dry land and not go swimming. As they described with some relish later on in the BOQ, quite a few studied the sheet of paper and then looked the interviewer in the eye and said, “All I see is a blank sheet of paper.” This was not a “correct” answer, since the shrinks probably made a note of “inhibited imaginative capacity” or some goddamned thing, but neither did it get you in trouble. One man said, “I see a field of snow.” Well, you might get away with that, as long as you didn’t go any further … as long as you did not thereupon start ruminating about freezing to death or getting lost in the snow and running into bears or something of that sort. But Conrad … well, the man is sitting across the table from Conrad and gives him the sheet of paper and asks him to study it and tell him what he sees. Conrad stares at the piece of paper and then looks up at the man and says in a wary tone, as if he fears a trick: “But it’s upside down.”
The next day, after the heat-chamber test, in which he spent three hours shut up in a cubicle heated to 130 degrees, Conrad was rubbing the sweat off the end of his nose when he looked up—and sure enough, Dr. Gladys J. Loring was right there, making note of the event in her spiral notebook with a ballpoint pen. Conrad reached into the pocket of his pants … and came up with a spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen just like hers. “Gladys!” he said. She looked up. She was startled. Conrad started scribbling in his notebook and then looked at her again. “Aha! You touched your ear, Gladys! We call that inhibition of the exhibitionism!” More scribbling in the notebook. “Oh-oh! Lowering of the eyes, Gladys! Repressed hypertrophy of the latency! I’m sorry, but it has to go in the report!”
One thing Scott had going for him was his superb physical condition, although at the outset he would have never believed that sheer physical condition could be of any vital importance. He had been a gymnast at the University of Colorado and had terrific shoulders with the deltoid muscles bulging out in high relief, a thick strong neck, an absolutely lean and perfectly formed chest, like a South Sea pearl diver’s—and, in fact, he had done a great deal of scuba diving—and his torso tapered down like Captain America’s in the comic strip. Others complained the whole time, but the tests at Lovelace and Wright-Patterson didn’t bother Scott in the slightest. Each one was a moment of triumph for him.
By the next morning the seven Mercury astronauts were national heroes. It happened just like that. Even though so far they had done nothing more than show up for a press conference, they were known as the seven bravest men in America. They woke up to find astonishing acclaim all over the press. There it was, in the more sophisticated columns as well as in the tabloids and on television. Even James Reston of The New York Times had been so profoundly moved by the press conference and the sight of the seven brave men that his heart, he confessed, now beat a little faster. “What made them so exciting,” he wrote, “was not that they said anything new but that they said all the old things with such fierce convictions … They spoke of ‘duty’ and ‘faith’ and ‘country’ like Walt Whitman’s pioneers … This is a pretty cynical town, but nobody went away from these young men scoffing at their courage and idealism.”
John Glenn came out of it as tops among seven very fair-haired boys. He had the hottest record as a pilot, he was the most quotable, the most photogenic, and the lone Marine. But all seven, collectively, emerged in a golden haze as the seven finest pilots and bravest men in the United States. A blazing aura was upon them all.
Even so, why was the press aroused to create instant heroes out of these seven men? This was a question that not James Reston or the pilots themselves or anyone at NASA could have answered at the time, because the very language of the proposition had long since been abandoned and forgotten. The forgotten term, left behind in the superstitious past, was single combat.
The ability to launch Sputniks dramatized the ability to launch nuclear warheads on ICBMs. But in these neo-superstitious times it came to dramatize much more than that. It dramatized the entire technological and intellectual capability of the two nations and the strength of the national wills and spirits.
Surely all this would become obvious in time … and yet it wasn’t becoming obvious. Here at mighty Edwards itself the boys could feel the earth trembling. A great sliding of the templates was taking place inside the invisible pyramid. You could feel the old terrain crumbling, and … seven rookies were somehow being installed as the hottest numbers in flying—and they hadn’t done a goddamned thing yet but turn up at a press conference!
Most of the trips were to cities where components of the Mercury system were being manufactured, such as St. Louis, where the capsule was being built at the McDonnell factory, or San Diego, where the Atlas rocket was being built at Convair. St. Louis, San Diego, Akron, Dayton, Los Angeles—somebody was always suggesting that you “just say a few words.” It was on such occasions that a man realized most acutely that America’s seven astronauts were not by any means identical. Glenn seemed to eat this stuff up. He couldn’t get enough grins or handshakes, and he had a few words filed away in every pocket. He would even come back to Langley and write cards to workers he had met on the assembly line, giving them little “attaboys,” as if they were all in this thing together, partners in the great adventure, and he, the astronaut, would never forget his, the welding inspector’s, beaming mug.
She was also guaranteed a permanent marriage, if she wanted it, at least for as long as they were in the service. Divorce—still, as of 1960—was a fatal step for a career military officer; it led to damaging efficiency reports by one’s superiors, reports that could ruin chances of advancement. And she was guaranteed one thing more, something that was seldom talked about except in comical terms. Underneath, however, it was no joke. In the service, when the husband moved up, the wife moved up. If he advanced from lieutenant to captain, then she became Mrs. Captain and now outranked all the Mrs. Lieutenants and received all the social homage the military protocol provided. And if her husband received a military honor, then she became the Honorable Mrs. Captain—all this regardless of her own social adeptness. Of course, it was well known that a gracious, well-spoken, small-talking, competent, sophisticated wife was a great asset to her husband’s career, precisely because they were a team and both were in the service.
It was one of those bleached, sandy, bare-boned stretches where the land that any sane man wants runs out … and the government takes it over for the testing of hot and dangerous machines, and the kings of the resulting rat-shack kingdom are those who test them.
America seemed to be full of businessmen like Cole who exercised considerable power and were strong leaders but who had never exercised power and leadership in its primal form: manly courage in the face of physical danger. When they met someone who had it, they wanted to establish a relationship with that righteous stuff.
There was enough greed in the air to make things spicy, but the true fervor was the joie de combat. People coming to work at the Cape, for NASA, private contractors, or whomever, felt like part of the mad rush to battle the Soviets for dominion over the heavens. At Edwards, or Muroc, in the old days, the worthy warriors used to repair in the evening to Pancho’s, which, though theoretically a public place, was like a club for the adventurers over the high desert.
Naturally, nobody built hotels in Cocoa Beach, only motels; and when they built apartment houses, they built them like motels, so that you could drive up to your own door. At neither the motels nor the apartment houses did you have to go through a public lobby to get to your room. A minor architectural note, one might say—and yet in Cocoa Beach, like so many towns of the new era, this one fact did more than the pill to encourage what would later be rather primly named “the sexual revolution.”
The next day the seven of them were in the living room of a suite that had been set aside for their use, when Glenn launched into a lecture, along the following lines: the playing around with the girls, the cookies, had gotten out of hand. He knew, and they knew, that it could blow up into something very unfortunate. They were all squarely in the public eye. They had the opportunity of a lifetime, and he was sorry but he just wasn’t going to stand by and let other people compromise the whole thing because they couldn’t keep their pants zipped. There was no doubt whatsoever that Glenn meant every word of it. When he got his back up, he was formidable. He was not to be trifled with. In his eyes burned four centuries of Dissenting Protestant fervor, nailed down by two million laps that his legs had pounded around the BOQ driveway.
A peer vote!—it was unbelievable! Every move Glenn had made undoubtedly worked against him like a captured weapon in the peer vote. In the peer vote he was the prig who had risen at the seance like John Calvin himself and told them all to keep their pants zipped and their wicks dry. He was the Eddie Attaboy who had gotten up every morning at dawn and done all that ostentatious running and tried to make the rest of them look bad. He was the Harry Hairshirt who lived like an Early Christian martyr in the BOQ. He was the Willie Workadaddy who drove around in a broken-down Prinz, like a lonely beacon of restraint and self-sacrifice in a squall of car crazies.
There was no way the astronaut could simply urinate into the lining of the pressure suit and have it go unnoticed. The suit had its own cooling system, and the temperature was monitored by interior thermometers, which led to consoles, and in front of these consoles were some by now highly keyed-up technicians whose sole mission was to stare at the dials and account for every fluctuation. If a nice steaming subdermal river of 98.6 degrees was introduced into the system with no warning, the Freon flow would suddenly increase—Freon was the gas used to cool the suit—and, well, God knew what would result. Would they hold up the whole production? Terrific. Then the No. 1 astronaut could explain, over a radio transmitter, while the nation waited, while the Russians girded themselves for round 2 of the battle of the heavens, that he had just peed in his pressure suit.
And for the fellows, it was pure heaven. None of this altered the Edwards-style perfection of their lives. It merely added something new and marvelous to the ineffable contrasts of this astronaut business. Within hours after lunch at the White House or waterskiing in Hyannis Port you could be back at the Cape, back Drinking & Driving in that marvelous Low Rent rat-shack terrain, back in your Corvette spinning out on the shoulders of those hardtack Baptist roadways and pulling into the all-night diner for a little coffee to stabilize the system for the proficiency runs ahead. And if you had switched to your Ban-Lon shirts and your go-to-hell pants, they might not even recognize you in there, which would be all the better, and you could just sit there and drink coffee and have a couple of cigarettes and listen to the two policemen in the next booth with the Dawn Patrol radio sets in their pockets, and a little voice packed in static would be coming out of the radios saying, “Thirty-one, thirty-one [garble, garble] … man named Virgil Wiley refuses to return to his room at the Rio Banana,” and the policemen would look at each other as if to say, “Well, shit, is that anything to have to rise up from over a plate of french fries and death balls for?”—and then they’d sigh and start getting up and buckling on their gunbelts, and about the time they would head out the door, in would come the Hardiest Cracker, the Aboriginal Grit, an old guy drunk as a monkey and ricocheting off the doorframe and sliding in bowlegged over a counter stool and saying to the waitress: “How you doing?” And she says: “So-so, how you doing?” “I ain’t doing any more,” he says. “It’s dragging in the mud and it won’t come up”—and since this doesn’t get a rise out of her, he says it again: “It’s dragging in the mud and it won’t come up,” and she just clamps a burglar-proof look of aloofness across her face—and all this was bound to make you smile, because here you were, listening to the merry midnight small talk of the hardiest hardtack crackers of the most Low Rent stretch of the Cape, and just twelve hours ago you were leaning across a table in the White House, straining to catch the tiny shiny pearls of tinytalk from the most famous small talker in the world—and somehow you belonged and thrived in both worlds. Oh, yes, it was the perfect balance of the legendary Edwards, the fabled Muroc, in the original Chuck Yeager and Pancho Barnes days … now brought forward into the billion-volt limitless-budget future.
Annie’s stutter often makes people underestimate her, and Johnson’s people didn’t realize that she was a Presbyterian pioneer wife living in full vitality in the twentieth century. She could deal with any five of them with just a few amps from the wrath of God when she was angry.
Johnson was right up there at the head of the mob with Annie and the two children. He had gotten next to her at last. Johnson was right beside her now, out at Patrick, oozing protocol all over her and craning and straining his huge swollen head around, straining to get at John and pour Texas all over him.
Despite the tide of cheers and tears that had already started in Washington, none of them knew what to expect in New York. Like most military people, including those in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, they didn’t really consider New York part of the United States. It was like a free port, a stateless city, an international protectorate, Danzig in the Polish corridor, Beirut the crossroads of the Middle East, Trieste, Zurich, Macao, Hong Kong. Whatever ideals the military stood for, New York City did not. It was a foreign city full of a strange race of curiously tiny malformed gray people. And so forth and so on. What they saw when they got there bowled them over. The crowds were not only waiting in the airport, which was not surprising—a little publicity was all it took to get a mob of gawkers to an airport—but they were also lining the godforsaken highway into the city, through the borough of Queens, or whatever it was, out in the freezing cold in the most rancid broken-down industrial terrain you have ever seen, a decaying landscape that seemed to belong to another century—they were out there along the highway, anywhere they could squeeze in, and … they were crying!—crying as the black cars roared by!
Sometimes the pieces of paper would flutter right in front of your face—and you could see that they were tearing up their telephone books, just ripping the pages out and tearing them to bits and throwing them out the window as homage, as garlands, rose petals—and it was so touching! This horrible rat-gray city was suddenly touching, warm! You wanted to protect these poor souls who loved you so much! Huge waves of emotion rolled over you. You couldn’t hear yourself talk, but there was nothing you could have said, anyway. All you could do was let these incredible waves roll over you. Out in the middle of the intersections were the policemen, the policemen they had all heard about or read about, New York’s Finest, big tough-looking men in blue greatcoats—and they were crying! They were right out in the intersections in front of everybody, bawling away—tears streaming down their faces, saluting, then cupping their hands and yelling amazing things to John and the rest of them—“We love you, Johnny!”—and then bawling some more, just letting it pour out. The New York cops! And what was it that had moved them all so deeply? It was not a subject that you could discuss, but the seven of them knew what it was, and so did most of their wives. Or they knew about part of it. They knew it had to do with the presence, the aura, the radiation of the right stuff, the same vital force of manhood that had made millions vibrate and resonate thirty-five years before to Lindbergh—except that in this case it was heightened by Cold War patriotism, the greatest surge of patriotism since the Second World War. Neither the term nor the concept of the single-combat warrior did they know about, but the sheer patriotism of that moment—even in New York, the Danzig corridor!—was impossible to miss. We pay homage to you! You have fought back against the Russians in the heavens! There was something pure and rare about it. Patriotism!
After dinner on the spur of the moment, the whole bunch of them went to see a play, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which was a big hit at the time. John and Annie and the children, all of the other fellows and their wives and children, plus the bodyguards and some NASA people and some Time-Life people, quite an entourage—and all of it arranged at the last minute. The start of the play was held up for them. People in the audience gave up their seats, so the astronauts and their party could have the best seats in the house, a whole bloc. Just like that they gave up their seats. When John and the others walked into the theater, everybody else was already seated, because by now the play was a good thirty minutes late starting—and the audience rose and cheered until John sat down. Then a member of the cast came out in front of the curtain and welcomed them and congratulated John and praised the fellows as great human beings and humbly hoped that the little diversion about to be offered would please them. “And now the play will commence!” Then the lights went down and the curtain went up, and you had to be pretty dense not to realize what this was: a command performance! Royal treatment, point for point, right down the line, and they were the royal families. And it didn’t stop there. They had rewritten some of the lines, rewritten them in an hour or so—to make the jokes contain references to space and John’s flight and putting a man on the moon and so on. When they left the theater, there were still other people outside, waiting, hundreds more people, waiting in the cold, and they started yelling in those horrible twisted rat-gray New York street voices, but everything they said, even the wisecracks, was full of warmth and admiration. Christ, if they owned even New York, even this free port, this Hong Kong, this Polish corridor—what was not theirs now in America?
The President would lean down and put his arm around the old man’s shoulders and say: “Now, now, Dad, it’s all right, it’s okay.” But Joe Kennedy was still crying when they left the room. Obviously if the man hadn’t had a stroke, he wouldn’t have burst out crying. Until his stroke he had been a bear. Nevertheless, the emotion was there, and it would have been there whether he had had a stroke or not. That was what the sight of John Glenn did to Americans at that time. It primed them for the tears. And those tears ran like a river all over America. It was an extraordinary thing, being the sort of mortal who brought tears to other men’s eyes.
“Well … things are beginning to stack up a little,” said Gordo. It was the same old sod-hut drawl. He sounded like the airline pilot who, having just slipped two seemingly certain mid-air collisions and finding himself in the midst of a radar fuse-out and control-tower dysarthria, says over the intercom: “Well, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be busy up here in the cockpit making our final approach into Pittsburgh, and so we want to take this opportunity to thank you for flying American and we hope we’ll see you again real soon.” It was second-generation Yeager, now coming from earth orbit. Cooper was having a good time. He knew everybody was in a sweat down below. But this was what he and the boys had wanted all along, wasn’t it? They had wanted to take over the complete re-entry process—become true pilots in this damned thing, bring her in manually—and the engineers had always shuddered at the thought. Well, now they had no other choice, and he had the controls. On top of that, during his final orbit he would have to keep the capsule at the proper angle, by eye, on the night side of the earth and then be ready to fire the retro-rockets soon after he entered daylight over the Pacific. No sweat. Just made it a little more of a sporty course, that was all—and Gordo lined up the capsule, hit the button for the retro-rockets, and splashed down even closer to the carrier Kearsage than Schirra had. No one could deny it … no brethren, old or new, could fail to see it … when the evil wind was up, Ol’ Gordo had shown the world the pure and righteous stuff.
These days the way to the top—meaning the road to test-pilot astronaut—involved being very good at a lot of things without necessarily being “shit-hot,” to use the beer-call expression, at anything.
At 40,000 feet Yeager began his speed run. He cut in the afterburner and it slammed him back in his seat, and he was now riding an engine with nearly 16,000 pounds of thrust. As soon as the Machmeter hit 2.2, he pulled back on the stick and started the climb. The afterburner would carry him to 60,000 feet before exhausting its fuel. At precisely that moment he threw the switch for the rocket engine … terrific jolt … He’s slammed back in his seat again. The nose pitches up to 70 degrees. The g-forces start rising. The desert sky starts falling away. He’s going straight up into the indigo. At 78,000 feet a light on the console … as usual … the main engine overheating from the tremendous exertion of the climb. He throws the switch, and shuts it down, but the rocket is still accelerating. Who doesn’t know this feeling if he doesn’t! The bastards are fantastic!
“Are you all right!” The look on the kid’s face! Christalmighty! “I was in my car! I saw you coming down!” “Listen,” says Yeager. The pain in his finger is terrific. “Listen … you got a knife?” The kid digs into his pocket and pulls out a penknife. Yeager starts cutting the glove off his left hand. He can’t bear it any more. The kid stands there hypnotized and horrified. From the look on the kid’s face, Yeager can begin to see himself. His neck, the whole left side of his head, his ear, his cheek, his eye must be burned up. His eye socket is slashed, swollen, caked shut, and covered with a crust of burned blood, and half his hair is burned away. The whole mess and the rest of his face and his nostrils and his lips are smeared with the sludge of the burning rubber. And he’s standing there in the middle of the desert in a pressure suit with his head cocked, squinting out of one eye, working on his left glove with a penknife … The knife cuts through the glove and it cuts through the meat of his finger … You can’t tell any longer … It’s all run together … The goddamn finger looks like it’s melted … He’s got to get the glove off. That’s all there is to it. It hurts too goddamned much. He pulls off the glove and a big hunk of melted meat from the finger comes off with it … It’s like fried suet … “Arrggghhh …” It’s the kid. He’s retching. It’s too much for him, the poor bastard. He looks up at Yeager. His eyes open and his mouth opens. All the glue has come undone. He can’t hold it together any longer. “God,” he says, “you … look awful!” The Good Samaritan, A.A.D.! Also a doctor! And he just gave his diagnosis! That’s all a man needs … to be forty years old and to fall one hundred goddamned thousand feet in a flat spin and punch out and make a million-dollar hole in the ground and get half his head and his hand burned up and have his eye practically ripped out of his skull … and have the Good Samaritan, A.A.D., arrive as if sent by the spirit of Pancho Barnes herself to render a midnight verdict among the motherless Joshua trees while the screen doors bang and the pictures of a hundred dead pilots rattle in their frames: “My God! … you look awful.” A few minutes later the rescue helicopter arrived. The medics found Yeager standing out in the mesquite, him and some kid who had been passing by. Yeager was standing erect with his parachute rolled up and his helmet in the crook of his arm, right out of the manual, and staring at them quite levelly out of what was left of his face, as if they had had an appointment and he was on time.
But for the seven astronauts it was an important night. The radiant Kinch, the great blond movie-star picture of a pilot, was the most famous of the dead rocket pilots and could have cut his own orders in the Air Force, had he lived. He would have had Bob White’s job as prime pilot of the X–15 and God knows what else. There were aviation awards and aviation awards, but the Kincheloe Award—for “professional performance”—was the big one within the flight test fraternity. The seven men had finally closed the circle and brought together the scattered glories of their celebrity. They had fought for a true pilot’s role in Project Mercury, they had won it, step by step, and Cooper’s flight, on top of the others, had shown they could handle it in the classic way, out on the edge. Now they had the one thing that had been denied them for years while the rest of the nation worshipped them so unquestioningly: acceptance by their peers, their true brethren, as test pilots of the space age, deserving occupants of the top of the pyramid of the right stuff.
No more manned spaceflights were scheduled until the start of the Gemini program in 1965. By then the seven Mercury astronauts would begin to feel a change in the public attitude toward them and, for that matter, toward the Next Nine and the groups of astronauts that were to follow. They would feel the change, but they would not be able to put it into words. What was that feeling? Why, it was the gentle slither of the mantle of soldierly glory sliding off one’s shoulders!—and the cooling effect of oceans of tears drying up! The single-combat warriors’ war had been removed. They would continue to be honored, and men would continue to be awed by their courage; but the day when an astronaut could parade up Broadway while traffic policemen wept in the intersections was no more. Never again would an astronaut be perceived as a protector of the people, risking his life to do battle in the heavens. Not even the first American to walk on the moon would ever know the outpouring of a people’s most primal emotions that Shepard, Cooper, and, above all, Glenn had known. The era of America’s first single-combat warriors had come, and it had gone, perhaps never to be relived. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. The mantle of Cold Warrior of the Heavens had been placed on their shoulders one April day in 1959 without their asking for it or having anything to do with it or even knowing it. And now it would be taken away, without their knowing that, either, and because of nothing they ever did or desired. John Glenn had made up his mind to run for the Senate in Ohio in 1964. He could not have foreseen that the voters of Ohio would no longer regard him as a man with a protector’s aura. But at least he would be remembered. It would have been still more impossible for his confreres to realize that the day might come when Americans would hear their names and say, “Oh, yes—now, which one was he?”
Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair. Golden green and glossy above, the stems are banded with purple and white where they meet the ground. Hold the bundle up to your nose. Find the fragrance of honeyed vanilla over the scent of river water and black earth and you understand its scientific name: Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.
For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it. In the public arena, I’ve heard the Skywoman story told as a bauble of colorful “folklore.” But, even when it is misunderstood, there is power in the telling. Most of my students have never heard the origin story of this land where they were born, but when I tell them, something begins to kindle behind their eyes. Can they, can we all, understand the Skywoman story not as an artifact from the past but as instructions for the future? Can a nation of immigrants once again follow her example to become native, to make a home? Look at the legacy of poor Eve’s exile from Eden: the land shows the bruises of an abusive relationship. It’s not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land. As Gary Nabhan has written, we can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without “re-story-ation.” In other words, our relationship with land cannot heal until we hear its stories. But who will tell them?
This boom and bust cycle remains a playground of hypotheses for tree physiologists and evolutionary biologists. Forest ecologists hypothesize that mast fruiting is the simple outcome of this energetic equation: make fruit only when you can afford it. That makes sense. But trees grow and accumulate calories at different rates depending on their habitats. So, like the settlers who got the fertile farmland, the fortunate ones would get rich quickly and fruit often, while their shaded neighbors would struggle and only rarely have an abundance, waiting for years to reproduce. If this were true, each tree would fruit on its own schedule, predictable by the size of its reserves of stored starch. But they don’t. If one tree fruits, they all fruit—there are no soloists. Not one tree in a grove, but the whole grove; not one grove in the forest, but every grove; all across the county and all across the state. The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.
But what if those very same socks, red and gray striped, were knitted by my grandmother and given to me as a gift? That changes everything. A gift creates ongoing relationship. I will write a thank-you note. I will take good care of them and if I am a very gracious grandchild I’ll wear them when she visits even if I don’t like them. When it’s her birthday, I will surely make her a gift in return. As the scholar and writer Lewis Hyde notes, “It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people.” Wild strawberries fit the definition of gift, but grocery store berries do not. It’s the relationship between producer and consumer that changes everything. As a gift-thinker, I would be deeply offended if I saw wild strawberries in the grocery store.
That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage. The fields made a gift of berries to us and we made a gift of them to our father. The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes. This is hard to grasp for societies steeped in notions of private property, where others are, by definition, excluded from sharing. Practices such as posting land against trespass, for example, are expected and accepted in a property economy but are unacceptable in an economy where land is seen as a gift to all.
I looked in my basket: two zucchinis, an onion, tomatoes, bread, and a bunch of cilantro. It was still half empty, but it felt full. I had everything I needed. I glanced over at the cheese stall, thinking to get some, but knowing it would be given, not sold, I decided I could do without. It’s funny: Had all the things in the market merely been a very low price, I probably would have scooped up as much as I could. But when everything became a gift, I felt self-restraint. I didn’t want to take too much. And I began thinking of what small presents I might bring to the vendors tomorrow. The dream faded, of course, but the feelings first of euphoria and then of self-restraint remain. I’ve thought of it often and recognize now that I was witness there to the conversion of a market economy to a gift economy, from private goods to common wealth. And in that transformation the relationships became as nourishing as the food I was getting. Across the market stalls and blankets, warmth and compassion were changing hands.
What I mean of course is that our human relationship with strawberries is transformed by our choice of perspective. It is human perception that makes the world a gift. When we view the world this way, strawberries and humans alike are transformed. The relationship of gratitude and reciprocity thus developed can increase the evolutionary fitness of both plant and animal. A species and a culture that treat the natural world with respect and reciprocity will surely pass on genes to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than the people who destroy it. The stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences.
“This prisoner…who?” “Heboric Light Touch.” Kulp slowly nodded a second time. “Let me think on it, Duiker.” “May I ask what gives you pause?” Kulp scowled. “The thought of another traitorous historian loose in the world, what else?”
The Trell pushed himself upright. “Where is the library?” “Turn right, proceed thirty-four paces, turn right again, twelve paces, then through door on the right, thirty-five paces, through archway on right another eleven paces, turn right one last time, fifteen paces, enter the door on the right.” Mappo stared at Iskaral Pust. The High Priest shifted nervously. “Or,” the Trell said, eyes narrowed, “turn left, nineteen paces.” “Aye,” Iskaral muttered. Mappo strode to the door. “I shall take the short route, then.” “If you must,” the High Priest growled as he bent to close examination of the broom’s ragged end.
Fiddler sat up gingerly, moving like an ancient. He was tempted to ask Mappo for an assessment of the damage, especially his ankle, but decided to hold off hearing the likely bad news a while longer. “What’s that man’s story?” “I doubt even he knows.” “I awoke when he was sweeping my head.” “Not surprising.”
“Children are dying.” Lull nodded. “That’s a succinct summary of humankind, I’d say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words. Quote me, Duiker, and your work’s done.”
Salk Elan met Kalam’s eye, winked. “What if we were to touch on the small matter of those two privateers presently pursuing us?” “They’re not pursuing,” the captain said. He drained his goblet, smacked his lips, then refilled it from the webbed jug. “They are keeping pace, sir, and that is entirely different, as you must surely grasp.” “Well, I admit, I see the distinction less clearly than you do, Captain.” “How unfortunate.” “You might,” the treasurer rasped, “endeavor to enlighten us.” “What did you say? Lightendeavorus? Extraordinary, man!” He settled back in his seat, a contented expression on his face.
Then again, Toc considered, Dujek’s steady presence may have been providing the leveling influence. His father had spoken much of Dujek, of a man who never lost his touch with the powerless or the less powerful. In dealing with the former, he always made his own failings an easy recognition; and with the latter he had an unerring eye that cut away personal ambition with the precision of a surgeon removing septic flesh, leaving in its place someone who treated trust and honesty as givens. Studying Dujek’s easy, relaxed rapport with the others in attendance, including himself, and then with the servants who filed in bearing trays of food, it struck Toc that the man had not changed perceptibly from the one Toc the Elder had called friend. And that impressed Toc deeply, knowing as he did the pressures that burdened the High Fist.
“Should you ever outrun the guilt within your past, Sorceress, you will have outrun your soul. When it finds you again it will kill you.”
Kallor said: “I walked this land when the T’lan Imass were but children. I have commanded armies a hundred thousand strong. I have spread the fire of my wrath across entire continents, and sat alone upon tall thrones. Do you grasp the meaning of this?” “Yes,” said Caladan Brood, “you never learn.”
A large hand closed on his upper arm, and before Baruk could react, Lord Anomander Rake stepped forward. “I offer my services as second,” he said loudly. He met Rallick’s eyes. The assassin betrayed nothing, not once looking at Baruk. He answered Rake’s offer with a nod. “Perhaps,” Turban Orr sneered, “the two strangers know each other.” “We’ve never met,” Rake said. “However, I find myself instinctively sharing his distaste for your endless talk, Councilman. Thus I seek to avoid a Council debate on who will be this man’s second. Shall we proceed?”
Aye, there’s a sentimental streak in me. I don’t deny it, and maybe it’s wide as an ocean like Ges says. But I didn’t ask for it. I cried for a dying mouse once – dying because I tried to catch it only my hand was too clumsy and something got broken inside. Lying there in my palm, breaths coming so fast, but the tiny limbs’d stopped moving, and then the breaths slowed. I knelt on the stones and watched it slowly die. There in my hand. Gods, it’s enough to make me bawl all over again, just remembering. How old was I? Twenty?
He’d intended to call them all together during the Adjunct’s parley, but re-forming the squads had taken longer than he’d thought it would – a notion which, he decided, had been foolishly optimistic. Even with spaces in each campfire’s circle yawning like silent howls, marines and heavies might as well have been rooted to the ground. They’d needed pulling, kicking, dragging out of their old places. To fit into a new thing you had to leave the old thing behind, and that wasn’t as easy as it sounded, since it meant accepting that the old thing was dead, for ever gone, no matter where you tried standing or how stubbornly you held fast. Fiddler knew he’d been no different. As bad as Hedge in that regard, in fact. The heavies and the marines were a chewed-up mess. Standing over them, like some cutter above a mauled patient, trying to work out exactly what he was looking at – desperate for something even remotely recognizable – he’d watched them trickle slowly into the basin he’d chosen for this meeting. As the sun waned in the sky, as pairs of squad-mates set out to find some missing comrade, eventually returning with a scowling companion in tow – aye, this was a rough scene, resentment thickening in the dusty air. He’d waited, weathering their impatience, until at last, with dusk fast rushing in, the final recalcitrant soldier walked into the crowd – Koryk. Well. You can try all the browbeating you want, when the skull’s turned into a solid stone wall there’s no getting in. ‘So,’ Fiddler said, ‘I’m captain to you lot now.’ He stared at the faces – only half of which seemed to be paying him any attention. ‘If Whiskeyjack could see me right now, he’d probably choke – I was never cut out for anything more than what I was in the beginning. A sapper—’ ‘So what is it,’ a voice called out, ‘you want us to feel sorry for you?’ ‘No, Gaunt-Eye. With you all feeling so sorry for yourselves I wouldn’t stand a chance, would I? I look out at you now and you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking: you ain’t Bridgeburners. You ain’t even close.’ Even the gloom wasn’t enough to hide the hard hostility fixed on him now. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘You see, it was back in Blackdog that it finally clunked home that we were the walking dead. Someone wanted us in the ground, and damn if we didn’t mostly end up there. In the tunnels of Pale, the tombs of the Bridgeburners. Tombs they dug for themselves. Heard a few stragglers hung on until Black Coral, and those bodies ended up in Moon’s Spawn the day it was abandoned by the Tiste Andii. An end to the tale, but like I said, we saw that end coming from a long way off.’ He fell silent then, momentarily lost in his own memories, the million losses that added up to what he felt now. Then he shook himself and looked up once more. ‘But you lot.’ He shook his head. ‘You’re too stupid to know what’s been beating you on the heads ever since Y’Ghatan. Wide-eyed stupid.’ Cuttle spoke up. ‘We’re the walking dead.’ ‘Thanks for the good news, Fid,’…
‘Tehol, about this Imperial Standard—’ ‘Not again, Brys. I thought we were past all that. It’s lovely and most apt—’ ‘But who will rally under it?’ ‘Brys, if an army must rally, one must presume it is in dire straits, yes? Well then, where better to hide than under the king’s bed?’ ‘With all the other chickens,’ added Bugg. ‘Well now, sire, that’s clever.’
‘Write the following: “Private missive, from Lieutenant Master-Sergeant Field Quartermaster Pores, to Fist Kindly. Warmest salutations and congratulations on your promotion, sir. As one might observe from your advancement and, indeed, mine, cream doth rise, etc. In as much as I am ever delighted in corresponding with you, discussing all manner of subjects in all possible idioms, alas, this subject is rather more official in nature. In short, we are faced with a crisis of the highest order. Accordingly, I humbly seek your advice and would suggest we arrange a most private meeting at the earliest convenience. Yours affectionately, Pores.” Got that, Himble?’ ‘Yes sir.’ ‘Please read it back to me.’ Himble cleared his throat, squinted at the tablet. ‘“Pores to Kindly meet in secret when?”’ ‘Excellent. Dispatch that at once, Himble.’
‘Profound…huh.’ Temper was silent for a long moment, studying the cobbles of the alley mouth. And then he lifted his helmed head, faced Shadowthrone, and said, ‘Fuck off.’
‘She simply asks,’ Kalam said. Quick Ben snorted. ‘That’s it?’ ‘I think so. No offers – no riches, no titles, nothing any of us can see as payment or reward. No, she just looks you straight in the eye, and she asks.’ ‘You just sent a shiver up my spine, Kalam, and I don’t even know why.’ ‘You don’t? More rubbish.’ The wizard waved his hands, ‘Well, Hood knows it ain’t chivalry, is it? She won’t even nudge open that door. No fluttering eyelashes, no demure look or coy glance…’ Kalam grunted a laugh at the image, but then he shook himself. ‘She asks, and something in your head tells you that what she’s doing is right – and that it’s the only reason she has to live. She asked me to die defending her – knowing I didn’t even like her much. Quick, for the rest of my life, I will never forget that moment.’
The first truly Malazan card for the Deck of Dragons. Artist, you did me proud. A single misshapen, vaguely polished object in the centre of a dark field. ‘Behold,’ Paran said under his breath, ‘the Shaved Knuckle in the Hole.’
‘He’s younger,’ Kalam said. ‘That’s all it takes, you know. Us old farts ain’t got a chance.’ ‘Speak for yourself.’ ‘Wipe that grin off, Quick, or I’ll do it for you.’ They were closing on Erekala now, and would meet approximately halfway between the two armies. The way it should be. ‘Look at us,’ Quick Ben said again, low, under his breath. ‘What do we know about negotiating?’ ‘So leave it to me,’ Kalam replied. ‘I mean to keep it simple.’ ‘Oh, this should be fun.’ They halted six paces from the Perish commander, who also stopped, and the assassin wasted no time. ‘Commander Erekala, High Fist Paran extends his greetings. He wants you to surrender, so we don’t have to kill all of you.’
‘Will you think less of me if I choose to remain here, commanding these defences?’ ‘Brys, if I had to, I’d have tied you down to keep you here. Close to me. We’re not saving you just to see you fall to some errant arrow – no, you stay back, issue orders and leave the rest to everyone else.’ He smiled. ‘You have begun to show a stubborn side, Atri-Ceda.’ ‘Idiot.’ She lit a stick of rustleaf. ‘The only thing just begun is you noticing it – but that’s what makes the first flush of love so dangerous, and once it fades and you start seeing clearly again, why, it’s too late.’
‘It is not enough to wish for a better world for the children. It is not enough to shield them with ease and comfort. Lostara Yil, if we do not sacrifice our own ease, our own comfort, to make the future’s world a better one, then we curse our own children. We leave them a misery they do not deserve; we leave them a host of lessons unearned.
‘Sure, it’s wore us out, all that stuff. Tell me, Fid, we going to get time to rest up first?’ ‘Little late asking me that now.’ ‘So what? I’m still asking you.’ ‘To be honest, I don’t know. Depends.’ ‘On what?’ ‘Whether the Spire’s fallen to us. Whether they got the heart undamaged. Whether they managed to break its own set of chains, or whatever geas is protecting it – could be twenty Kenyll’rah demons for all we know, and imagine the scrap that’d be.’ ‘Twenty Kenyll’rah demons? What is this, some bad fairy tale? Why not a demon king? Or a giant three-headed ogre with scorpion tails at the end of every finger, and a big one on his cock for added measure? Breathing fire outa his arse, too.’
And now the page before us blurs. An age is done. The book must close. We are abandoned to history. Raise high one more time the tattered standard of the Fallen. See through the drifting smoke to the dark stains upon the fabric. This is the blood of our lives, this is the payment of our deeds, all soon to be forgotten. We were never what people could be. We were only what we were. Remember us.
You are never in love with anyone. You’re only in love with your prejudiced and hopeful idea of that person. Take a minute to think about that: You are never in love with anyone, you’re in love with your prejudiced idea of that person. Isn’t that how you fall out of love? Your idea changes, doesn’t it? "How could you let me down when I trusted you so much?" you say to someone. Did you really trust them? You never trusted anyone. Come off it! That’s part of society’s brainwashing. You never trust anyone. You only trust your judgment about that person. So what are you complaining about? The fact is that you don’t like to say, "My judgment was lousy." That’s not very flattering to you, is it? So you prefer to say, "How could you have let me down?"
The first thing I want you to understand, if you really want to wake up, is that you don’t want to wake up. The first step to waking up is to be honest enough to admit to yourself that you don’t like it. You don’t want to be happy. Want a little test? Let’s try it. It will take you exactly one minute. You could close your eyes while you’re doing it or you could keep them open. It doesn’t really matter. Think of someone you love very much, someone you’re close to, someone who is precious to you, and say to that person in your mind, "I’d rather have happiness than have you." See what happens. "I’d rather be happy than have you. If I had a choice, no question about it, I’d choose happiness." How many of you felt selfish when you said this? Many, it seems. See how we’ve been brainwashed? See how we’ve been brainwashed into thinking, "How could I be so selfish?" But look at who’s being selfish. Imagine somebody saying to you, "How could you be so selfish that you’d choose happiness over me?" Would you not feel like responding, "Pardon me, but how could you be so selfish that you would demand I choose you above my own happiness?!"
"The test of love is sacrifice, and the gauge of love is unselfishness." That’s marvelous! I asked her, "Would you want me to love you at the cost of my happiness?" "Yes," she answered. Isn’t that delightful? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? She would love me at the cost of her happiness and I would love her at the cost of my happiness, and so you’ve got two unhappy people, but long live love!
I was saying that we don’t want to be happy. We want other things. Or let’s put it more accurately: We don’t want to be unconditionally happy. I’m ready to be happy provided I have this and that and the other thing. But this is really to say to our friend or to our God or to anyone, "You are my happiness. If I don’t get you, I refuse to be happy." It’s so important to understand that. We cannot imagine being happy without those conditions. That’s…
I challenge anyone to think of anything more practical than spirituality as I have defined it—not piety, not devotion, not religion, not worship, but spirituality—waking up, waking up! Look at the heartache everywhere, look at the loneliness, look at the fear, the confusion, the conflict in the hearts of people, inner conflict, outer conflict. Suppose somebody gave you a way of getting rid of all of that? Suppose somebody gave you a way to stop that tremendous drainage of energy, of health, of emotion that comes from these conflicts and confusion. Would you want that? Suppose somebody showed us a way whereby we would truly love one another, and be at peace, be at love. Can you think of anything more practical than that? But, instead, you have people…
When you renounce something, you’re tied to it. The only way to get out of this is to see through it. Don’t renounce it, see through it. Understand its true value and you won’t need to renounce it; it will just drop from your hands. But of course, if you don’t see that, if you’re hypnotized into thinking that you won’t be happy without this, that, or the other thing, you’re stuck. What we need to do for you is not what so-called spirituality attempts to do—namely, to get you to make sacrifices, to renounce things. That’s useless. You’re still asleep. What we need to do is to help you understand, understand, understand. If you understood, you’d simply drop the desire for it. This is another way of saying: If you woke up, you’d simply drop the desire for it.
Somebody came up to me with a question. What do you think the question was? He asked me, "Are you enlightened?" What do you think my answer was? What does it matter! You want a better answer? My answer would be: "How would I know? How would you know? What does it matter?" You know something? If you want anything too badly, you’re in big trouble. You know something else? If I were enlightened and you listened to me because I was enlightened, then you’re in big trouble. Are you ready to be brainwashed by someone who’s enlightened? You can be brainwashed by anybody, you know. What does it matter whether someone’s enlightened or not? But see, we want to lean on someone, don’t we? We want to lean on anybody we think has arrived. We love to hear that people have arrived. It gives us hope, doesn’t it? What do you want to hope for? Isn’t that another form of desire? You want to hope for something better than what you have right now, don’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t be hoping. But then, you forget that you have it all right now anyway, and you don’t know it. Why not concentrate on the now instead of hoping for better times in the future? Why not understand the now instead of forgetting it and hoping for the future? Isn’t the future just another trap?
I’m talking about self-observation. What’s that? It means to watch everything in you and around you as far as possible and watch it as if it were happening to someone else. What does that last sentence mean? It means that you do not personalize what is happening to you. It means that you look at things as if you have no connection with them whatsoever. The reason you suffer from your depression and your anxieties is that you identify with them. You say, "I’m depressed." But that is false. You are not depressed. If you want to be accurate, you might say, "I am experiencing a depression right now." But you can hardly say, "I am depressed." You are not your depression. That is but a strange kind of trick of the mind, a strange kind of illusion. You have deluded yourself into thinking—though you are not aware of it—that you are your depression, that you are your anxiety, that you are your joy or the thrills that you have. "I am delighted!" You certainly are not delighted. Delight may be in you right now, but wait around, it will change; it won’t last: it never lasts; it keeps changing: it’s always changing. Clouds come and go: some of them are black and some white, some of them are large, others small. If we want to follow the analogy, you would be the sky, observing the clouds. You are a passive, detached observer. That’s shocking, particularly to someone in the Western culture. You’re not interfering. Don’t interfere. Don’t "fix" anything. Watch! Observe! The trouble with people is that they’re busy fixing things they don’t even understand. We’re always fixing things, aren’t we? It never strikes us that things don’t need to be fixed. They really don’t. This is a great illumination. They need to be understood. If you understood them, they’d change.
Many think it is: "Is there a life after death?" Wrong! Nobody seems to be grappling with the problem of: Is there a life before death? Yet my experience is that it’s precisely the ones who don’t know what to do with this life who are all hot and bothered about what they are going to do with another life.
One sign that you’re awakened is that you don’t give a damn about what’s going to happen in the next life. You’re not bothered about it; you don’t care. You are not interested, period.
People are so distressed when I tell them to forget their past. They are so proud of their past. Or they are so ashamed of their past. They’re crazy! Just drop it!
Who’s living in you? It’s pretty horrifying when you come to know that. You think you are free, but there probably isn’t a gesture, a thought, an emotion, an attitude, a belief in you that isn’t coming from someone else. Isn’t that horrible? And you don’t know it. Talk about a mechanical life that was stamped into you. You feel pretty strongly about certain things, and you think it is you who are feeling strongly about them, but are you really? It’s going to take a lot of awareness for you to understand that perhaps this thing you call "I" is simply a conglomeration of your past experiences, of your conditioning and programming.
As I said to you before, self-observation means watching—observing whatever is going on in you and around you as if it were happening to someone else.
Say that you are afraid or desirous or anxious. When "I" does not identify with money, or name, or nationality, or persons, or friends, or any quality, the "I" is never threatened. It can be very active, but it isn’t threatened. Think of anything that caused or is causing you pain or worry or anxiety. First, can you pick up the desire under that suffering, that there’s something you desire very keenly or else you wouldn’t be suffering. What is that desire? Second, it isn’t simply a desire; there’s an identification there. You have somehow said to yourself, "The well-being of ‘I,’ almost the existence of ‘I,’ is tied up with this desire." All suffering is caused by my identifying myself with something, whether that something is within me or outside of me.
Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone, you’re living in an illusion. There’s something seriously wrong with you. You’re not seeing reality. Something inside of you has to change. But what do we generally do when we have a negative feeling? "He is to blame, she is to blame. She’s got to change." No! The world’s all right. The one who has to change is you.
Think about that. Because if you do, the next thing you will be doing, whether you’re aware of it or not, is demanding that other people contribute to your happiness. Then there will be a next step—fear, fear of loss, fear of alienation, fear of rejection, mutual control. Perfect love casts out fear. Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I do not demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you. If you were to leave me, I will not feel sorry for myself; I enjoy your company immensely, but I do not cling. I enjoy it on a nonclinging basis. What I really enjoy is not you; it’s something that’s greater than both you and me. It is something that I discovered, a kind of symphony, a kind of orchestra that plays one melody in your presence, but when you depart, the orchestra doesn’t stop. When I meet someone else, it plays another melody, which is also very delightful. And when I’m alone, it continues to play. There’s a great repertoire and it never ceases to play. That’s what awakening is all about. That’s also why we’re hypnotized, brainwashed, asleep. It seems terrifying to ask, but can you be said to love me if you cling to me and will not let me go? If you will not let me be? Can you be said to love me if you need me psychologically or emotionally for your happiness?
Come home to yourself. Observe yourself. That’s why I said earlier that self-observation is such a delightful and extraordinary thing. After a while you don’t have to make any effort, because, as illusions begin to crumble, you begin to know things that cannot be described. It’s called happiness. Everything changes and you become addicted to awareness. There’s the story of the disciple who went to the master and said, "Could you give me a word of wisdom? Could you tell me something that would guide me through my days?" It was the master’s day of silence, so he picked up a pad. It said, "Awareness." When the disciple saw it, he said, "This is too brief. Can you expand on it a bit?" So the master took back the pad and wrote, "Awareness, awareness, awareness." The disciple said, "Yes, but what does it mean?" The master took back the pad and wrote, "Awareness, awareness, awareness means—awareness." That’s what it is to watch yourself. No one can show you how to do it, because he would be giving you a technique, he would be programming you. But watch yourself. When you talk to someone, are you aware of it or are you simply identifying with it? When you got angry with somebody, were you aware that you were angry or were you simply identifying with your anger? Later, when you had the time, did you study your experience and attempt to understand it? Where did it come from? What brought it on? I don’t know of any other way to awareness. You only change what you understand. What you do not understand and are not aware of, you repress. You don’t change. But when you understand it, it changes.
If you’re lucky and the gods are gracious or if you are gifted with divine grace (use any theological expression you want), you might suddenly understand who "I" is, and you’ll never be the same again, never. Nothing will ever be able to touch you again and no one will ever be able to hurt you again. You will fear no one and you will fear nothing. Isn’t that extraordinary? You’ll live like a king, like a queen. This is what it means to live like royalty. Not rubbish like getting your picture in the newspapers or having a lot of money. That’s a lot of rot. You fear no one because you’re perfectly content to be nobody. You don’t give a damn about success or failure. They mean nothing. Honor, disgrace, they mean nothing! If you make a fool of yourself, that means nothing either. Isn’t that a wonderful state to be in! Some people arrive at this goal painstakingly, step by step, through months and weeks of self-awareness. But I’ll promise you this: I have not known a single person who gave time to being aware who didn’t see a difference in a matter of weeks. The quality of their life changes, so they don’t have to take it on faith anymore. They see it; they’re different. They react differently. In fact, they react less and act more. You see things you’ve never seen before. You’re much more energetic, much more alive. People think that if they had no cravings, they’d be like deadwood. But in fact they’d lose their tension. Get rid of your fear of failure, your tensions about succeeding, you will be yourself. Relaxed. You wouldn’t be driving with your brakes on. That’s what would happen. There’s a lovely saying of Tranxu, a great Chinese sage, that I took the trouble to learn by heart. It goes: "When the archer shoots for no particular prize, he has all his skills; when he shoots to win a brass buckle, he is already nervous; when he shoots for a gold prize, he goes blind, sees two targets, and is out of his mind.
Did you think happiness was excitement or thrills? That’s what causes the depression. Didn’t anyone tell you that? You’re thrilled, all right, but you’re just preparing the way for your next depression. You’re thrilled but you pick up the anxiety behind that: How can I make it last? That’s not happiness, that’s addiction.
As the Japanese Zen masters say, "Don’t seek the truth; just drop your opinions." Drop your theories; don’t seek the truth. Truth isn’t something you search for. If you stop being opinionated, you would know. Something similar happens here. If you drop your labels, you would know. What do I mean by labels? Every label you can conceive of except perhaps that of human being. I am a human being. Fair enough; doesn’t say very much. But when you say, "I am successful," that’s crazy. Success is not part of the "I." Success is something that comes and goes; it could be here today and gone tomorrow. That’s not "I." When you said, "I was a success," you were in error; you were plunged into darkness. You identified yourself with success. The same thing when you said, "I am a failure, a lawyer, a businessman." You know what’s going to happen to you if you identify yourself with these things. You’re going to cling to them, you’re going to be worried that they may fall apart, and that’s where your suffering comes in. That is what I meant earlier when I said to you, "If you’re suffering, you’re asleep." Do you want a sign that you’re asleep? Here it is: You’re suffering. Suffering is a sign that you’re out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there’s falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere.
Who determines what it means to be a success? This stupid society! The main preoccupation of society is to keep society sick! And the sooner you realize that, the better. Sick, every one of them. They are loony, they’re crazy. You became president of the lunatic asylum and you’re proud of it even though it means nothing. Being president of a corporation has nothing to do with being a success in life. Having a lot of money has nothing to do with being a success in life. You’re a success in life when you wake up! Then you don’t have to apologize to anyone, you don’t have to explain anything to anyone, you don’t give a damn what anybody thinks about you or what anybody says about you. You have no worries; you’re happy. That’s what I call being a success. Having a good job or being famous or having a great reputation has absolutely nothing to do with happiness or success. Nothing! It is totally irrelevant. All he’s really worried about is what his children will think about him, what the neighbors will think about him, what his wife will think about him. He should have become famous. Our society and culture drill that into our heads day and night. People who made it! Made what?! Made asses of themselves. Because they drained all their energy getting something that was worthless. They’re frightened and confused, they are puppets like the rest. Look at them strutting across the stage. Look how upset they get if they have a stain on their shirt. Do you call that a success? Look at how frightened they are at the prospect they might not be reelected. Do you call that a success? They are controlled, so manipulated. They are unhappy people, they are miserable people. They don’t enjoy life. They are constantly tense and anxious. Do you call that human? And do you know why that happens? Only one reason: They identified with some label. They identified the "I" with their money or their job or their profession. That was their error.
When you really understand this, no criticism can affect you. No flattery or praise can affect you either. When someone says, "You’re a great guy," what is he talking about? He’s talking about "me," he’s not talking about "I." "I" is neither great nor small. "I" is neither successful nor a failure. It is none of these labels. These things come and go. These things depend on the criteria society establishes. These things depend on your conditioning. These things depend on the mood of the person who happens to be talking to you right now. It has nothing to do with "I." "I" is none of these labels.
True happiness is uncaused. You cannot make me happy. You are not my happiness. You say to the awakened person, "Why are you happy?" and the awakened person replies, "Why not?" Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. To acquire happiness you don’t have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don’t you experience it? Because you’ve got to drop something. You’ve got to drop illusions. You don’t have to add anything in order to be happy; you’ve got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It’s only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels!
No event justifies a negative feeling. There is no situation in the world that justifies a negative feeling. That’s what all our mystics have been crying themselves hoarse to tell us. But nobody listens. The negative feeling is in you.
You understand suddenly that everything that happens to you is good. Think of some people you’re living with whom you want to change. You find them moody, inconsiderate, unreliable, treacherous, or whatever. But when you are different, they’ll be different. That’s an infallible and miraculous cure. The day you are different, they will become different. And you will see them differently, too. Someone who seemed terrifying will now seem frightened. Someone who seemed rude will seem frightened. All of a sudden, no one has the power to hurt you anymore. No one has the power to put pressure on you.
Put this program into action, a thousand times: (a) identify the negative feelings in you; (b) understand that they are in you, not in the world, not in external reality; (c) do not see them as an essential part of "I"; these things come and go; (d) understand that when you change, everything changes.
People get a good feeling on the basis of somebody getting a bad feeling; you win over somebody else. Isn’t that terrible? Taken for granted in a lunatic asylum!
Some people make awakening a goal. They are determined to get there; they say, "I refuse to be happy until I’m awakened." In that case, it’s better to be the way you are, simply to be aware of the way you are. Simple awareness is happiness compared with trying to react all the time. People react so quickly because they are not aware. You will come to understand that there are times when you will inevitably react, even in awareness. But as awareness grows, you react less and act more. It really doesn’t matter.
So begin to be aware of your present condition whatever that condition is. Stop being a dictator. Stop trying to push yourself somewhere. Then someday you will understand that simply by awareness you have already attained what you were pushing yourself toward.
Until people come awake, they are simply accepting or rejecting their image of you. They’ve fashioned an image of you, and they’re rejecting or accepting that. See how devastating it is to go deeply into that. It’s a bit too liberating. But how easy it is to love people when you understand this. How easy it is to love everyone when you don’t identify with what they imagine you are or they are. It becomes easy to love them, to love everybody.
It’s as if you had never tasted a green mango and you ask me, "What does it taste like?" I’d say to you, "Sour," but in giving you a word, I’ve put you off the track. Try to understand that. Most people aren’t very wise; they seize upon the word—upon the words of scripture, for example—and they get it all wrong. "Sour," I say, and you ask, "Sour like vinegar, sour like a lemon?" No, not sour like a lemon, but sour like a mango.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had a world where everybody said, "We don’t know"? One big barrier dropped. Wouldn’t that be marvelous?
That’s the terrible thing about religion. That’s what the gospels were saying, that religious people "knew," so they got rid of Jesus. The highest knowledge of God is to know God as unknowable. There is far too much God talk; the world is sick of it. There is too little awareness, too little love, too little happiness, but let’s not use those words either. There’s too little dropping of illusions, dropping of errors, dropping of attachments and cruelty, too little awareness. That’s what the world is suffering from, not from a lack of religion.
As we say in the East, "When the sage points to the moon, all the idiot sees is the finger."
The disappointment you experience when things don’t turn out as you wanted them to, watch that! Look at what it says about you. I say this without condemnation (otherwise you’re going to get caught up in self-hatred). Observe it as you would observe it in another person. Look at that disappointment, that depression you experience when you are criticized. What does that say about you?
Negative feelings, every negative feeling is useful for awareness, for understanding. They give you the opportunity to feel it, to watch it from the outside. In the beginning, the depression will still be there, but you will have cut your connection with it. Gradually you will understand the depression.
Understand another illusion, too, that happiness is not the same as excitement, it’s not the same as thrills. That’s another illusion, that a thrill comes from living a desire fulfilled. Desire breeds anxiety and sooner or later it brings its hangover. When you’ve suffered sufficiently, then you are ready to see it. You’re feeding yourself with thrills. This is like feeding a racehorse with delicacies. You’re giving it cakes and wine. You don’t feed a racehorse like that. It’s like feeding human beings with drugs. You don’t fill your stomach with drugs. You need good, solid, nutritious food and drink. You need to understand all this for yourself.
"The nature of the rain is the same and yet it produces thorns in the marsh and flowers in the garden."
There is yet another illusion, that is it important to be respectable, to be loved and appreciated, to be important. Many say we have a natural urge to be loved and appreciated, to belong. That’s false. Drop this illusion and you will find happiness. We have a natural urge to be free, a natural urge to love, but not to be loved. Sometimes in my psychotherapy sessions I encounter a very common problem: Nobody loves me; how, then, can I be happy? I explain to him or her: "You mean you never have any moments when you forget you’re not loved and you let go and are happy?" Of course they have.
Another illusion: You are all those labels that people have put on you, or that you have put on yourself. You’re not, you’re not! So you don’t have to cling to them. The day that somebody tells me I’m a genius and I take that seriously, I’m in big trouble. Can you understand why? Because now I’m going to start getting tense. I’ve got to live up to it, I’ve got to maintain it. I’ve got to find out after every lecture: "Did you like the lecture? Do you still think I’m a genius?" See? So what you need to do is smash the label! Smash it, and you’re free! Don’t identify with those labels. That’s what someone else thinks. That’s how he experienced you at that moment. Are you in fact a genius? Are you a nut? Are you a mystic? Are you crazy? What does it really matter? Provided you continue to be aware, to live life from moment to moment. How marvelously it is described in those words of the gospel: "Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns … Consider the lilies of the field … they neither toil nor spin." That’s the real mystic speaking, the awakened person.
So why are you anxious? Can you, for all your anxieties, add a single moment to your life? Why bother about tomorrow? Is there a life after death? Will I survive after death? Why bother about tomorrow? Get into today. Someone said, "Life is something that happens to us while we’re busy making other plans." That’s pathetic. Live in the present moment. This is one of the things you will notice happening to you as you come awake. You find yourself living in the present, tasting every moment as you live it. Another fairly good sign is when you hear the symphony one note after the other without wanting to stop it.
So why do I fall in love with a person really? Why is it that I fall in love with one kind of person and not another? Because I’m conditioned. I’ve got an image, subconsciously, that this particular type of person appeals to me, attracts me. So when I meet this person, I fall head over heels in love. But have I seen her? No! I’ll see her after I marry her; that’s when the awakening comes! And that’s when love may begin. But falling in love has nothing to do with love at all. It isn’t love, it’s desire, burning desire. You want, with all your heart, to be told by this adorable creature that you’re attractive to her. That gives you a tremendous sensation. Meanwhile, everybody else is saying, "What the hell does he see in her?" But it’s his conditioning—he’s not seeing. They say that love is blind. Believe me, there’s nothing so clear-sighted as true love, nothing. It’s the most clear-sighted thing in the world. Addiction is blind, attachments are blind. Clinging, craving, and desire are blind. But not true love.
The great Krishnamurti put it so well when he said, "The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again." How true! The first time the child sees that fluffy, alive, moving object, and you say to him, "Sparrow," then tomorrow when the child sees another fluffy, moving object similar to it he says, "Oh, sparrows. I’ve seen sparrows. I’m bored by sparrows." If you don’t look at things through your concepts, you’ll never be bored. Every single thing is unique. Every sparrow is unlike every other sparrow despite the similarities. It’s a great help to have similarities, so we can abstract, so that we can have a concept. It’s a great help, from the point of view of communication, education, science. But it’s also very misleading and a great hindrance to seeing this concrete individual. If all you experience is your concept, you’re not experiencing reality, because reality is concrete. The concept is a help, to lead you to reality, but when you get there, you’ve got to intuit or experience it directly.
The moment you put things into a concept, they stop flowing; they become static, dead. A frozen wave is not a wave. A wave is essentially movement, action; when you freeze it, it is not a wave. Concepts are always frozen. Reality flows. Finally, if we are to believe the mystics (and it doesn’t take too much of an effort to understand this, or even believe it, but no one can see it at once), reality is whole, but words and concepts fragment reality.
How essential it is for the human being not just to observe himself or herself, but to watch all of reality. Are you imprisoned by your concepts? Do you want to break out of your prison? Then look; observe; spend hours observing. Watching what? Anything. The faces of people, the shapes of trees, a bird in flight, a pile of stones, watch the grass grow. Get in touch with things, look at them. Hopefully you will then break out of these rigid patterns we have all developed, out of what our thoughts and our words have imposed on us. Hopefully we will see. What will we see? This thing that we choose to call reality, whatever is beyond words and concepts. This is a spiritual exercise—connected with spirituality—connected with breaking out of your cage, out of the imprisonment of the concepts and words. How sad if we pass through life and never see it with the eyes of a child. This doesn’t mean you should drop your concepts totally; they’re very precious. Though we begin without them, concepts have a very positive function. Thanks to them we develop our intelligence. We’re invited, not to become children, but to become like children. We do have to fall from a stage of innocence and be thrown out of paradise; we do have to develop an "I" and a "me" through these concepts. But then we need to return to paradise. We need to be redeemed again. We need to put off the old man, the old nature, the conditioned self, and return to the state of the child but without being a child. When we start off in life, we look at reality with wonder, but it isn’t the intelligent wonder of the mystics; it’s the formless wonder of the child. Then wonder dies and is replaced by boredom, as we develop language and words and concepts. Then hopefully, if we’re lucky, we’ll return to wonder again.
An attachment is a belief that without something you are not going to be happy. Once you get convinced of that—and it gets into our subconscious, it gets stamped into the roots of our being—you are finished. "How could I be happy unless I have good health?" you say. But I’ll tell you something. I have met people dying of cancer who were happy. But how could they be happy if they knew they were going to die? But they were. "How could I be happy if I don’t have money?" One person has a million dollars in the bank, and he feels insecure; the other person has practically no money, but he doesn’t seem to feel any insecurity at all.
Listen to this pathetic story—your story, my story, everybody’s story: "Until I get this object (money, friendship, anything) I’m not going to be happy; I’ve got to strive to get it and then when I’ve got it, I’ve got to strive to keep it. I get a temporary thrill. Oh, I’m so thrilled, I’ve got it!" But how long does that last? A few minutes, a few days at the most. When you get your brand-new car, how long does the thrill last? Until your next attachment is threatened! The truth about a thrill is that I get tired of it after a while.
There’s only one way out and that is to get deprogrammed! How do you do that? You become aware of the programming. You cannot change by an effort of the will; you cannot change through ideals; you cannot change through building up new habits. Your behavior may change, but you don’t. You only change through awareness and understanding. When you see a stone as a stone and a scrap of paper as a scrap of paper, you don’t think that the stone is a precious diamond anymore and you don’t think that that scrap of paper is a check for a billion dollars. When you see that, you change. There’s no violence anymore in your attempt to change yourself. Otherwise, what you call change is simply moving the furniture around. Your behavior is changed, but not you.
The only way to change is by changing your understanding. But what does it mean to understand? How do we go about it? Consider how we’re enslaved by various attachments; we’re striving to rearrange the world so that we can keep these attachments, because the world is a constant threat to them. I fear that a friend may stop loving me; he or she may turn to somebody else. I have to keep making myself attractive because I have to get this other person. Somebody brainwashed me into thinking I need his or her love. But I really don’t. I don’t need anybody’s love; I just need to get in touch with reality. I need to break out of this prison of mine, this programming, this conditioning, these false beliefs, these fantasies; I need to break out into reality. Reality is lovely; it is an absolute delight. Eternal life is now. We’re surrounded by it, like the fish in the ocean, but we have no notion about it at all. We’re too distracted with this attachment. Temporarily, the world rearranges itself to suit our attachment, so we say, "Yeah, great! My team won!" But hang on; it’ll change; you’ll be depressed tomorrow. Why do we keep doing this?
Do this little exercise for a few minutes: Think of something or someone you are attached to; in other words, something or someone without which or without whom you think you are not going to be happy. It could be your job, your career, your profession, your friend, your money, whatever. And say to this object or person, "I really do not need you to be happy. I’m only deluding myself in the belief that without you I will not be happy. But I…
Or you could try another exercise: Think of a time when you were heartbroken and thought you would never be happy again (your husband died, your wife died, your best friend deserted you, you lost your money). What happened? Time went on, and if you managed to pick up another attachment or managed to find somebody else you were attracted to or something else you were attracted to, what happened to the old attachment? You didn’t really need it to be happy, did you? That should have taught you, but we never learn. We’re programmed; we’re conditioned. How liberating it is not to depend emotionally on anything.…
We’ve been so blinded by everything that we have not discovered the basic truth that attachments hurt rather than help relationships. I remember how frightened I was to say to an intimate friend of mine, "I really don’t need you. I can be perfectly happy without you. And by telling you this I find I can enjoy your company thoroughly—no more anxieties, no more jealousies, no more possessiveness, no more clinging. It is a delight to be with you when I am enjoying you on a nonclinging basis. You’re free; so am I."
I’m quite amused, sometimes, to see even seemingly objective people like therapists and spiritual directors say of someone, "He’s a great guy, great guy, I really like him." I find out later that it’s because he likes me that I like him. I look into myself, and I find the same thing coming up now and again: If you’re attached to appreciation and praise, you’re going to view people in terms of their threat to your attachment or their fostering of your attachment. If you’re a politician and you want to be elected, how do you think you’re going to look at people, how will your interest in people be guided? You will be concerned for the person who’s going to get you the vote. If what you’re interested in is sex, how do you think you’re going to look at men and women? If you’re attached to power, that colors your view of human beings. An attachment destroys your capacity to love. What is love? Love is sensitivity, love is consciousness. To give you an example: I’m listening to a symphony, but if all I hear is the sound of the drums I don’t hear the symphony. What is a loving heart? A loving heart is sensitive to the whole of life, to all persons; a loving heart doesn’t harden itself to any person or thing. But the moment you become attached in my sense of the word, then you’re blocking out many other things. You’ve got eyes only for the object of your attachment; you’ve got ears only for the drums; the heart has hardened. Moreover, it’s blinded, because it no longer sees the object of its attachment objectively. Love entails clarity of perception, objectivity; there is nothing so clear-sighted as love.
The heart in love remains soft and sensitive. But when you’re hell-bent on getting this or the other thing, you become ruthless, hard, and insensitive. How can you love people when you need people? You can only use them. If I need you to make me happy, I’ve got to use you, I’ve got to manipulate you, I’ve got to find ways and means of winning you. I cannot let you be free. I can only love people when I have emptied my life of people. When I die to the need for people, then I’m right in the desert.
Mark Twain put it very nicely when he said, "It was so cold that if the thermometer had been an inch longer, we would have frozen to death."
Did you pick up the attachment there? Peace. Her attachment to peace and calm. She was saying, "Unless I’m peaceful, I won’t be happy." Did it ever occur to you that you could be happy in tension? Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed; after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed. You don’t make a goal out of relaxation and sensitivity.
In awareness you change, but you’ve got to experience it. At this point you’re just taking my word for it. Perhaps also you’ve got a plan to become aware. Your ego, in its own cunning way, is trying to push you into awareness. Watch it! You’ll meet with resistance; there will be trouble. When someone is anxious about being aware all the time, you can spot the mild anxiety. They want to be awake, to find out if they’re really awake or not. That’s part of asceticism, not awareness. It sounds strange in a culture where we’ve been trained to achieve goals, to get somewhere, but in fact there’s nowhere to go because you’re there already. The Japanese have a nice way of putting it: "The day you cease to travel, you will have arrived." Your attitude should be: "I want to be aware, I want to be in touch with whatever is and let whatever happens happen; if I’m awake, fine, and if I’m asleep, fine." The moment you make a goal out of it and attempt to get it, you’re seeking ego glorification, ego promotion. You want the good feeling that you’ve made it. When you do "make it," you won’t know.
Charity is never so lovely as when one has lost consciousness that one is practicing charity.
Till you are aware of yourself, you have no right to interfere with anyone else or with the world. Now, the danger of attempting to change others or change things when you yourself are not aware is that you may be changing things for your own convenience, your pride, your dogmatic convictions and beliefs, or just to relieve your negative feelings.
I had been thinking of another reflection, from Plato: "One cannot make a slave of a free person, for a free person is free even in prison." It’s like another gospel sentence: "If a person makes you go one mile, go two." You may think you’ve made a slave out of me by putting a load on my back, but you haven’t.
So we were given a taste of various drug addictions: approval, attention, success, making it to the top, prestige, getting your name in the paper, power, being the boss. We were given a taste of things like being the captain of the team, leading the band, etc. Having a taste for these drugs, we became addicted and began to dread losing them. Recall the lack of control you felt, the terror at the prospect of failure or of making mistakes, at the prospect of criticism by others. So you became cravenly dependent on others and you lost your freedom. Others now have the power to make you happy or miserable. You crave your drugs, but as much as you hate the suffering that this involves, you find yourself completely helpless. There is never a minute when, consciously or unconsciously, you are not aware of or attuned to the reactions of others, marching to the beat of their drums. A nice definition of an awakened person: a person who no longer marches to the drums of society, a person who dances to the tune of the music that springs up from within. When you are ignored or disapproved of, you experience a loneliness so unbearable that you crawl back to people and beg for the comforting drug called support and encouragement, reassurance. To live with people in this state involves a never-ending tension. "Hell is other people," said Sartre. How true. When you are in this state of dependency, you always have to be on your best behavior; you can never let your hair down; you’ve got to live up to expectations. To be with people is to live in tension. To be without them brings the agony of loneliness, because you miss them. You have lost your capacity to see them exactly as they are and to respond to them accurately, because your perception of them is clouded by the need to get your drugs. You see them insofar as they are a support for getting your drug or a threat to have your drug removed. You’re always looking at people, consciously or unconsciously, through these eyes. Will I get what I want from them, will I not get what I want from them? And if they can neither support nor threaten my drug, I’m not interested in them. That’s a horrible thing to say, but I wonder if there’s anyone here of whom this cannot be said.
When you have enjoyed something intensely, you need very little. It’s like people who are busy planning their vacation; they spend months planning it, and they get to the spot, and they’re all anxious about their reservations for flying back. But they’re taking pictures alright, and later they’ll show you pictures in an album, of places they never saw but only photographed. That’s a symbol of modern life. I cannot warn you enough about this kind of asceticism. Slow down and taste and smell and hear, and let your senses come alive. If you want a royal road to mysticism, sit down quietly and listen to all the sounds around you. You do not focus on any one sound; you try to hear them all. Oh, you’ll see the miracles that happen to you when your senses come unclogged.
I’ve often said to people that the way to really live is to die. The passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave. Imagine that you’re lying in your coffin. Any posture you like. In India we put them in cross-legged. Sometimes they’re carried that way to the burning ground. Sometimes, though, they’re lying flat. So imagine you’re lying flat and you’re dead. Now look at your problems from that viewpoint. Changes everything, doesn’t it? What a lovely, lovely meditation. Do it every day if you have the time. It’s unbelievable, but you’ll come alive.
But to come to the land of love, you must pass through the pains of death, for to love persons means to die to the need for persons, and to be utterly alone. How would you ever get there? By a ceaseless awareness, by the infinite patience and compassion you would have for a drug addict. By developing a taste for the good things in life to counter the craving for your drug. What good things? The love of work which you enjoy doing for the love of itself; the love of laughter and intimacy with people to whom you do not cling and on whom you do not depend emotionally but whose company you enjoy. It will also help if you take on activities that you can do with your whole being, activities that you so love to do that while you’re engaged in them success, recognition, and approval simply do not mean a thing to you. It will help, too, if you return to nature. Send the crowds away, go up to the mountains, and silently commune with trees and flowers and animals and birds, with sea and clouds and sky and stars. I’ve told you what a spiritual exercise it is to gaze at things, to be aware of things around you. Hopefully, the words will drop, the concepts will drop, and you will see, you will make contact with reality. That is the cure for loneliness. Generally, we seek to cure our loneliness through emotional dependence on people, through gregariousness and noise. That is no cure. Get back to things, get back to nature, go up in the mountains. Then you will know that your heart has brought you to the vast desert of solitude, there is no one there at your side, absolutely no one. At first this will seem unbearable. But it is only because you are unaccustomed to aloneness. If you manage to stay there for a while, the desert will suddenly blossom into love. Your heart will burst into song. And it will be springtime forever; the drug will be out; you’re free.
As I told you earlier, first, psychological insight is a great help, not analysis, however; analysis is paralysis. Insight is not necessarily analysis. One of your great American therapists put it very well: "It’s the ‘Aha’ experience that counts." Merely analyzing gives no help; it just gives information. But if you could produce the "Aha" experience, that’s insight. That is change. Second, the understanding of your addiction is important. You need time.
First step: I don’t identify. Here comes a low feeling. Instead of getting tense about it, instead of getting irritated with myself about it, I understand I’m feeling depressed, disappointed, or whatever. Second step: I admit the feeling is in me, not in the other person, e.g., in the person who didn’t write me a letter, not in the exterior world; it’s in me. Because as long as I think it’s outside me, I feel justified in holding on to my feelings. I can’t say everybody would feel this way; in fact, only idiotic people would feel this way, only sleeping people. Third step: I don’t identify with the feeling. "I" is not that feeling. "I" am not lonely, "I" am not depressed, "I" am not disappointed. Disappointment is there, one watches it. You’d be amazed how quickly it glides away.
What kind of feeling comes upon you when you’re in touch with nature, or when you’re absorbed in work that you love? Or when you’re really conversing with someone whose company you enjoy in openness and intimacy without clinging? What kind of feelings do you have? Compare those feelings with the feelings you have when you win an argument, or when you win a race, or when you become popular, or when everybody’s applauding you. The latter feelings I call worldly feelings; the former feelings I call soul feelings. Lots of people gain the world and lose their soul. Lots of people live empty, soulless lives because they’re feeding themselves on popularity, appreciation, and praise, on "I’m O.K., you’re O.K.," look at me, attend to me, support me, value me, on being the boss, on having power, on winning the race. Do you feed yourself on that? If you do, you’re dead. You’ve lost your soul. Feed yourself on other, more nourishing material. Then you’ll see the transformation.
Updated: Apr 08, 2023
Tony de Mello on an occasion among friends was asked to say a few words about the nature of his work. He stood up, told a story which he repeated later in conferences, and which you will recognize from his book Song of the Bird. To my astonishment, he said this story applied to me. A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air. Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who’s that?" he asked. "That’s the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbor. "He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth—we’re chickens." So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.
Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up.
You know, all mystics—Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion—are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.
Most people tell you they want to get out of kindergarten, but don’t believe them. Don’t believe them! All they want you to do is to mend their broken toys. "Give me back my wife. Give me back my job. Give me back my money. Give me back my reputation, my success." This is what they want; they want their toys replaced. That’s all. Even the best psychologist will tell you that, that people don’t really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful.
Waking up is unpleasant, you know. You are nice and comfortable in bed. It’s irritating to be woken up. That’s the reason the wise guru will not attempt to wake people up.
Do you know one sign that you’ve woken up? It’s when you are asking yourself, "Am I crazy, or are all of them crazy?" It really is. Because we are crazy. The whole world is crazy. Certifiable lunatics! The only reason we’re not locked up in an institution is that there are so many of us.
I said to you that the first thing you need to do is wake up, to face the fact that you don’t like being woken up. You’d much rather have all of the things which you were hypnotized into believing are so precious to you, so important to you, so important for your life and your survival. Second, understand. Understand that maybe you’ve got the wrong ideas and it is these ideas that are influencing your life and making it the mess that it is and keeping you asleep. Ideas about love, ideas about freedom, ideas about happiness, and so forth. And it isn’t easy to listen to someone who would challenge those ideas of yours which have come to be so precious to you.
The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away.
She smiled at Urb. Then tapped the side of her slightly numb head with one finger. ‘I memmored th’map – ized, memmized the map. There’s towns, Urb. An’ the closer we get t’Letheras, the more of them. Wha’s in towns, Urb? Taverns. Bars. So, we’re not takin’ a straight, pre-dic-table route.’ ‘We’re invading Lether from tavern to tavern?’ ‘Aye.’ ‘Hellian, I hate to say this, but that’s kind of clever.’
‘The slower your path, the muddier your boots?’ ‘Even so,’ Icarium said, nodding. ‘Time is nothing like that.’ ‘Are you so certain? When we must wait, our minds fill with sludge, random thoughts like so much refuse. When we are driven to action, our current is swift, the water seemingly clear, cold and sharp.’
‘Things? To which things are you referring, old man?’ ‘Why, that everything of true value is, in fact, free.’
Then he sneered at the man. ‘I am here to arrest your manservant. The one named Bugg.’ ‘Oh, now really, his cooking isn’t that bad.’ ‘As it turns out, it seems I have stumbled upon another crime in progress.’ Tehol sighed, then bent to retrieve a pillow. Into which he reached, dragging out a live chicken. Mostly plucked, only a few tufts remaining here and there. The creature tried flapping flabby pink wings, its head bobbing this way and that atop a scrawny neck. Tehol held the chicken out. ‘Here, then. We never really expected the ransom in any case.’ Behind Tanal a guard grunted a quickly choked-off laugh.
Corabb Bhilan Thenu’alas had collected almost more weapons than he could carry. Four of the better spears, two javelins. A single-edged sword something like a scimitar; a nice long, straight Letherii longsword with a sharply tapered point, filed down from what had been a blunted end; two sticker knives and a brace of gutters as well. Strapped to his back was a Letherii shield, wood, leather and bronze. He also carried a crossbow and twenty-seven quarrels. And one sharper. They were headed, he well knew, to their last stand, and it would be heroic. Glorious. It would be as it should have been with Leoman of the Flails. They would stand side by side, shoulder to shoulder, until not one was left alive. And years from now, songs would be sung of this dawning day. And there would be, among the details, a tale of one soldier, wielding spears and javelins and swords and knives and heaps of bodies at his feet. A warrior who had come from Seven Cities, yes, from thousands of leagues away, to finally give the proper ending to the Great Uprising of his homeland. A rebel once more, in the outlawed, homeless Fourteenth Army who were now called the Bonehunters, and whose own bones would be hunted, yes, for their magical properties, and sold for stacks of gold in markets. Especially Corabb’s own skull, larger than all the others, once home to a vast brain filled with genius and other brilliant thoughts. A skull not even a king could afford, yes, especially with the sword blade or spear clove right through it as lasting memento to Corabb’s spectacular death, the last marine standing— ‘For Hood’s sake, Corabb,’ snapped Cuttle behind him, ‘I’m dodging more spear butts now than I will in a bell’s time! Get rid of some of them, will you?’ ‘I cannot,’ Corabb replied. ‘I shall need them all.’
Tehol wagged a broken finger. ‘People with no sense or appreciation of humour, Invigilator, always take money too seriously. Its possession, anyway. Which is why they spend all their time stacking coins, counting this and that, gazing lovingly over their hoards and so on. They’re compensating for the abject penury everywhere else in their lives. Nice rings, by the way.’
‘I feel much better.’ Brys Beddict smiled across at his brother. ‘You look it. So, Tehol, your manservant is an Elder God.’ ‘I’ll take anybody I can find.’ ‘Why are your eyes two different colours now?’
Brys Beddict smiled across at his brother. ‘You look it. So, Tehol, your manservant is an Elder God.’ ‘I’ll take anybody I can find.’
‘I do apologize, Commander. I admit I have been somewhat taken aback.’ The Adjunct slowly nodded. ‘By this popular acclaim, yes, I imagine—’ ‘No, not that. She said I was not half bad in bed. I am crushed by the other half, the “half good” bit—’
The crowd was noisome this night at the Phoenix Inn, as more and more drunks stumbled back in after their pleasing foray in the dusty, grimy streets. Kruppe, of course, felt magnanimous towards them all, as suited his naturally magnanimous nature.
She stepped out from the shadowed alcove where she’d been standing. ‘And what does your master imagine I desire?’ ‘Negotiable.’ ‘Does he know I’m dead?’ ‘Of course. And sends his regrets.’ ‘Does he?’ ‘No, I made that up.’
Sprawled across Ublala, Tehol stared up at her. ‘Expensive?’ ‘All those spices, of course. Tell me, Ublala, what did you see when you walked across the bottom of the canal?’ ‘Mud.’ ‘What else?’ ‘Junk.’ ‘What else? What were you walking on?’ ‘Bodies. Bones. Crayfish, crabs. Old nets. Broken pots, furniture—’ ‘Furniture?’ Tehol asked. ‘Serviceable furniture?’ ‘Well, there was a chair. But I didn’t sit in it.’ ‘Bodies,’ Shurq said. ‘Yes. Lots of bodies. How deep was the canal originally?’ Bugg had arrived, and with this question Tehol looked over at his manservant. ‘Well? You must know, being an engineer and all that.’ ‘But I’m only pretending to be an engineer,’ Bugg pointed out. ‘So pretend to know the answer to Shurq’s question!’ ‘It was said seven tall men could stand, foot to shoulder, and the last would be able to reach up with his hands and find the surface. Used to be big trader ships could make their way the entire length.’ ‘I wasn’t far from the surface,’ Ublala said, rolling over, unmindful of Tehol who yelped as he was tumbled to one side with a thump. ‘I could almost reach,’ he added as he stood, brushing himself off. ‘That’s a lot of rubbish,’ Bugg commented. ‘I’m not lying,’ Ublala said. ‘I didn’t say you were,’ Bugg said.
‘None the less, Brys—oh, what are you doing here, by the way?’ ‘I have come seeking your advice.’ ‘Oh. Well, shall we retire to a more private section of my rooftop? Here, follow me—that far corner is ideal.’
‘You poked him in the eyes?’ Tehol asked. ‘I judged it useful in getting his attention.’ ‘I’m pleased, although somewhat alarmed.’ ‘The circumstances warranted extreme action on my part.’ ‘Does that happen often?’ ‘I’m afraid it does.’
Tehol’s smile broadened. ‘Ah, I have your fullest attention now. Excellent.’ ‘That’s an absurd amount,’ spoke Ormly for the first time. ‘What would you have us do, conquer Kolanse?’ ‘Could you?’ Ormly scowled. ‘Why would you want us to, Tehol Beddict?’ ‘It’d be difficult,’ Glisten said worriedly. ‘The strain on our human resources—’ ‘Difficult,’ cut in Scint, ‘but not impossible. We’d need to recruit from our island cells—’ ‘Wait!’ Tehol said. ‘I’m not interested in conquering Kolanse!’ ‘You’re the type who’s always changing his mind,’ Onyx said. She leaned back and with a squeak a rat plummeted from her hair to thump on the floor somewhere behind her. ‘I can’t stand working with people like that.’ ‘I haven’t changed my mind. It wasn’t me who brought up the whole Kolanse thing. In fact, it was Champion Ormly—’ ‘Well, he can’t make up his mind neither. You two are made for each other.’ Tehol swung to Bugg. ‘I’m not indecisive, am I? Tell them, Bugg. When have you ever seen me indecisive?’ Bugg frowned. ‘Bugg!’ ‘I’m thinking!’ Glisten’s voice came from behind a particularly large heap of rats. ‘I can’t see the point of any of this.’ ‘That’s quite understandable,’ Tehol said evenly. ‘Describe your contract offer,’ Ormly demanded. ‘But he advised, we don’t do private functions.’ ‘What does that mean?’ ‘I won’t waste my breath on explaining…unless it turns out to be relevant. Is it?’ ‘I don’t know. How can I tell?’ ‘Well, that’s my point exactly. Now, about the contract?’ ‘All right,’ Tehol said, ‘but be warned, it’s complicated.’
‘That was exhausting,’ Tehol said. ‘I think I’ll go to bed.’ ‘Don’t you want to eat first, master?’ ‘You scrounged something?’ ‘No.’ ‘So we have nothing to eat.’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘Then why did you ask me if I wanted to eat?’ ‘I was curious.’
‘Now, that is indeed unfortunate.’ ‘Accordingly, you are at risk.’ ‘Arrest?’ ‘No, more likely assassination. All in the name of patriotism.’ Tehol set his bowl down. ‘It occurs to me, Brys, that you are more at risk than I am.’ ‘I am well guarded, brother, whilst you are not.’ ‘Nonsense! I have Bugg!’ The manservant looked up at Brys with a bland smile. ‘Tehol, this is not time for jokes—’ ‘Bugg resents that!’ ‘I do?’ ‘Well, don’t you? I would, if I were you—’ ‘It seems you just were.’ ‘My apologies for making you speak out of turn, then.’ ‘Speaking on your behalf, master, I accept.’ ‘You are filled with relief—’ ‘Will you two stop it!’ Brys shouted, throwing up his hands. He began pacing the small confines of the room. ‘The threat is very real. Agents of the queen will not hesitate. You are both in very grave danger.’
Do not mistake skin in the game as defined here and used in this book for just an incentive problem, just having a share of the benefits (as it is commonly understood in finance). No. It is about symmetry, more like having a share of the harm, paying a penalty if something goes wrong.
For I just don’t like reading books that inform me of the obvious. I like to be surprised. So as a skin-in-the-game-style reciprocity, I will not not drive the reader into a dull college-lecture-type predictable journey, but rather into the type of adventure I’d like to have. Accordingly, the book is organized in the following manner. It doesn’t take more than about sixty pages for the reader to get the importance, prevalence, and ubiquity of skin in the game (that is, symmetry) in most of its aspects.
To figure out why ethics, moral obligations, and skills cannot be easily separable in real life, consider the following. When you tell someone in a position of responsibility, say your bookkeeper, “I trust you,” do you mean that 1) you trust his ethics (he will not divert money to Panama), 2) you trust his accounting precision, or 3) both? The entire point of the book is that in the real world it is hard to disentangle ethics on one hand from knowledge and competence on the other.
We retain from this first vignette that, just like Antaeus, you cannot separate knowledge from contact with the ground. Actually, you cannot separate anything from contact with the ground. And the contact with the real world is done via skin in the game—having an exposure to the real world, and paying a price for its consequences, good or bad.
I have shown in Antifragile that most things that we believe were “invented” by universities were actually discovered by tinkering and later legitimized by some type of formalization. The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.
The first flaw is that they are incapable of thinking in second steps and unaware of the need for them—and about every peasant in Mongolia, every waiter in Madrid, and every car-service operator in San Francisco knows that real life happens to have second, third, fourth, nth steps. The second flaw is that they are also incapable of distinguishing between multidimensional problems and their single-dimensional representations—like multidimensional health and its stripped, cholesterol-reading reduction. They can’t get the idea that, empirically, complex systems do not have obvious one-dimensional cause-and-effect mechanisms, and that under opacity, you do not mess with such a system. An extension of this defect: they compare the actions of the “dictator” to those of the prime minister of Norway or Sweden, not to those of the local alternative. The third flaw is that they can’t forecast the evolution of those one helps by attacking, or the magnification one gets from feedback.
The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do no harm (primum non nocere); even more, we will argue, those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions.
And the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologus, was last seen when he removed his purple toga, then joined Ioannis Dalmatus and his cousin Theophilus Palaeologus to charge Turkish troops with their swords above their heads, proudly facing certain death. Yet legend has it that Constantine had been offered a deal in the event of a surrender. Such deals are not for self-respecting kings. These are not isolated anecdotes. The statistical reasoner in this author is quite convinced: less than a third of Roman emperors died in their beds—and one can argue that given that only few of these died of really old age, had they lived longer, they would have fallen either to a coup or in battle. Even today, monarchs derive their legitimacy from a social contract that requires physical risk-taking. The British Royal family made sure that one of its scions, Prince Andrew, took more risks than “commoners” during the Falkland war of 1982, his helicopter being in the front line. Why? Because noblesse oblige; the very status of a lord has been traditionally derived from protecting others, trading personal risk for prominence—and they happened to still remember that contract. You can’t be a lord if you aren’t a lord.
Some think that freeing ourselves from having warriors at the top means civilization and progress. It does not. Meanwhile, Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions. And, one may ask, what can we do since a centralized system will necessarily need people who are not directly exposed to the cost of errors? Well, we have no choice but to decentralize or, more politely, to localize; to have fewer of these immune decision makers. Decentralization is based on the simple notion that it is easier to macrobull***t than microbull***t. Decentralization reduces large structural asymmetries.
For instance, bank blowups came in 2008 because of the accumulation of hidden and asymmetric risks in the system: bankers, master risk transferors, could make steady money from a certain class of concealed explosive risks, use academic risk models that don’t work except on paper (because academics know practically nothing about risk), then invoke uncertainty after a blowup (that same unseen and unforecastable Black Swan and that same very, very stubborn author), and keep past income—what I have called the Bob Rubin trade. The Bob Rubin trade? Robert Rubin, a former Secretary of the United States Treasury, one of those who sign their names on the banknote you just used to pay for coffee, collected more than $120 million in compensation from Citibank in the decade preceding…
But the worst casualty has been free markets, as the public, already prone to hating financiers, started conflating free markets and higher order forms of corruption and cronyism, when in fact it is the exact opposite: it is government, not markets,…
Now, if you are going to highlight only one single section from this book, here is the one. The interventionista case is central to our story because it shows how absence of skin in the game has both ethical and epistemological effects (i.e., related to knowledge). We saw that interventionistas don’t learn because they are not the victims of their mistakes, and, as we hinted at with pathemata mathemata: The same mechanism of transferring risk also impedes learning. More practically, You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.
In biology, learning is something that, through the filter of intergenerational selection, gets imprinted at the cellular level—skin in the game, I insist, is more filter than deterrence. Evolution can only happen if risk of extinction is present. Further, There is no evolution without skin in the game.
Via negativa: the principle that we know what is wrong with more clarity than what is right, and that knowledge grows by subtraction.
The more robust Silver Rule says Do not treat others the way you would not like them to treat you.
Likewise the crux of the idea of The Black Swan was Platonification, missing central but hidden elements of a thing in the process of transforming it into an abstract construct, then causing a blowup.
Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.
The agency problem (or principal-agent problem) also manifests itself in the misalignment of interests in transactions: a vendor in a one-shot transaction does not have his interests aligned to yours—and so can hide stuff from you.
Our message is to focus on those who are professionally slanted, causing harm without being accountable for it, by the very structure of their own occupation. For the professionally asymmetric person is rare and has been so in history, and even in the present. He causes a lot of problems, but he is rare. For most people you run into in real life—bakers, cobblers, plumbers, taxi drivers, accountants, tax advisors, garbage collectors, dental cleaning assistants, carwash operators (not counting Spanish grammar specialists)—pay a price for their mistakes.
cup. The designer (who either doesn’t ride trains or rides trains but doesn’t drink coffee while reading), thinking it is an aesthetic improvement, made the ledge slightly tilted, so it is impossible to put the cup on it. This explains the more severe problems of landscaping and architecture: architects today build to impress other architects, and we end up with strange—irreversible—structures that do not satisfy the well-being of their residents; it takes time and a lot of progressive tinkering for that.
Specialization, as I will keep insisting, comes with side effects, one of which is separating labor from the fruits of labor.
Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse). There is absolutely no benefit for someone in such a position to propose something simple: when you are rewarded for perception, not results, you need to show sophistication. Anyone who has submitted a “scholarly” paper to a journal knows that you usually raise the odds of acceptance by making it more complicated than necessary.
Let us return to pathemata mathemata (learning through pain) and consider its reverse: learning through thrills and pleasure. People have two brains, one when there is skin in the game, one when there is none. Skin in the game can make boring things less boring. When you have skin in the game, dull things like checking the safety of the aircraft because you may be forced to be a passenger in it cease to be boring. If you are an investor in a company, doing ultra-boring things like reading the footnotes of a financial statement (where the real information is to be found) becomes, well, almost not boring. But there is an even more vital dimension. Many addicts who normally have a dull intellect and the mental nimbleness of a cauliflower—or a foreign policy expert—are capable of the most ingenious tricks to procure their drugs. When they undergo rehab, they are often told that should they spend half the mental energy trying to make money as they did procuring drugs, they are guaranteed to become millionaires. But, to no avail. Without the addiction, their miraculous powers go away. It was like a magical potion that gave remarkable powers to those seeking it, but not those drinking it.
A confession. When I don’t have skin in the game, I am usually dumb. My knowledge of technical matters, such as risk and probability, did not initially come from books. It did not come from lofty philosophizing and scientific hunger. It did not even come from curiosity. It came from the thrills and hormonal flush one gets while taking risks in the markets. I never thought mathematics was something interesting to me until, when I was at Wharton, a friend told me about the financial options I described earlier (and their generalization, complex derivatives).
When there was risk on the line, suddenly a second brain in me manifested itself, and the probabilities of intricate sequences became suddenly effortless to analyze and map. When there is fire, you will run faster than in any competition. When you ski downhill some movements become effortless. Then I became dumb again when there was no real action.
But if you muster the strength to weight-lift a car to save a child, above your current abilities, the strength gained will stay after things calm down. So, unlike the drug addict who loses his resourcefulness, what you learn from the intensity and the focus you had when under the influence of risk stays with you. You may lose the sharpness, but nobody can take away what you’ve learned. This is the principal reason I am now fighting the conventional educational system, made by dweebs for dweebs. Many kids would learn to love mathematics if they had some investment in it, and, more crucially, they would build an instinct to spot its misapplications.
More critically, people with good lawyers can game regulations (or, as we will see, make it known that they hire former regulators, and overpay for them, which signals a prospective bribe to those currently in office).
The other solution is to put skin in the game in transactions, in the form of legal liability, and the possibility of an efficient lawsuit. The Anglo-Saxon world has traditionally had a predilection for the legal approach instead of the regulatory one: if you harm me, I can sue you.
Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners, or squeeze more “efficiency” out of it (and out of your life) will eventually make you dislike it. Artisans have their soul in the game. Primo, artisans do things for existential reasons first, financial and commercial ones later. Their decision making is never fully financial, but it remains financial. Secundo, they have some type of “art” in their profession; they stay away from most aspects of industrialization; they combine art and business. Tertio, they put some soul in their work: they would not sell something defective or even of compromised quality because it hurts their pride. Finally, they have sacred taboos, things they would not do even if it markedly increased profitability. Compendiaria res improbitas, virtusque tarda—the villainous takes the short road, virtue the longer one. In other words, cutting corners is dishonest.
For instance, in the early 2000s, the writer Fay Weldon was paid by the jewelry chain Bulgari to advertise their brand by weaving recommendations for their great products into the plot of her novel. A nightmare ensued; there was a generalized feeling of disgust on the part of the literary community.
Now, something very practical. One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received was the recommendation by a very successful (and happy) older entrepreneur, Yossi Vardi, to have no assistant. The mere presence of an assistant suspends your natural filtering—and its absence forces you to do only things you enjoy, and progressively steer your life that way. (By assistant here I exclude someone hired for a specific task, such as grading papers, helping with accounting, or watering plants; just some guardian angel overseeing all your activities). This is a via negativa approach: you want maximal free time, not maximal activity, and you can assess your own “success” according to such metric. Otherwise, you end up assisting your assistants, or being forced to “explain” how to do things, which requires more mental effort than doing the thing itself. In fact, beyond my writing and research life, this has proved to be great financial advice as I am freer, more nimble, and have a very high benchmark for doing something, while my peers have their days filled with unnecessary “meetings” and unnecessary correspondence.
Having an assistant (except for the strictly necessary) removes your soul from the game. Think of the effect of using a handheld translator on your next trip to Mexico in place of acquiring a robust vocabulary in Spanish by contact with locals. Assistance moves you one step away from authenticity.
Companies beyond the entrepreneur stage start to rot. One of the reasons corporations have the mortality of cancer patients is the assignment of time-defined duties. Once you change assignment—or, better, company—you can now say about the deep Bob Rubin–style risks that emerge: “It’s not my problem anymore.” The same happens when you sell out, so remember that: The skills at making things diverge from those at selling things.
Eponymy indicates both a commitment to the company and a confidence in the product. A friend of mine, Paul Wilmott, is often called an egomaniac for having his name on a mathematical finance technical journal (Wilmott), which at the time of writing is undoubtedly the best. “Egomaniac” is good for the product. But if you can’t get “egomaniac,” “arrogant” will do.
By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor—and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats, those people who live vicariously in their texts. They were people of deeds and had to be endowed with the spirit of risk taking. To get into their psyches, you will need someone other than a career professor teaching stoicism.
Simply: if you can’t put your soul into something, give it up and leave that stuff to someone else.
It felt like cheating not knowing the ancient text the way it was read and recited at the time. In addition, one of my episodic hobbies is Semitic philology, so I had no excuse. So I have been distracted by an obsession to learn enough Akkadian in order to recite Hammurabi’s law with Semitic phonetics, sort of having some soul in the game. It may have delayed the completion of this book, but, at least, when I mention Hammurabi, my conscience doesn’t make me feel I am faking anything.
What I didn’t forecast is that my dream of a tranquil life lasted only a few weeks. For I exhibited no skills whatsoever in retirement activities such as contract bridge, chess, lotto, visits to the pyramids in Mexico, etc. I once, by happenstance, tried to solve a mathematical brain teaser, and it lead to five years of compulsive, time-invasive mathematical practice, with the obsessive bouts that plague people inhabited with problems.
Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park.
Beware of the person who gives advice, telling you that a certain action on your part is “good for you” while it is also good for him, while the harm to you doesn’t directly affect him.
As a trader, you learn to identify and deal with upright people, those who inform you that they have something to sell, by explaining that the transaction arises for their own benefit, with such questions as “Do you have an ax?” (meaning an inquiry whether you have a certain interest). Avoid at all costs those who call you to tout a certain product disguised with advice. In fact the story of the turtle is the archetype of the history of transactions between mortals.
The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse.
Simply, as the aim is for both parties in a transaction to have the same uncertainty facing random outcomes, an asymmetry becomes equivalent to theft. Or more robustly: No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty. Gharar,
And that is what plagues socialism: people’s individual interests do not quite work well under collectivism. But it is a critical mistake to think that people can function only under a private property system. What Ostrom found empirically is that there exists a certain community size below which people act as collectivists, protecting the commons, as if the entire unit became rational. Such a commons cannot be too large. It is like a club. Groups behave differently at a different scale.
We removed the skin in the game of journalists in order to prevent market manipulation, thinking that it would be a net gain to society. The arguments in this book are that the former (market manipulation) and conflicts of interest are more benign than impunity for bad advice. The main reason, we will see, is that in the absence of skin in the game, journalists will imitate, to be safe, the opinion of other journalists, thus creating monoculture and collective mirages.
In sum, both the doctor and the patient have skin in the game, though not perfectly, but administrators don’t—and they seem to be the cause of the troubling malfunctioning of the system. Administrators everywhere on the planet, in all businesses and pursuits, and at all times in history, have been the plague.
In promoting genetically modified food via all manner of lobbying, purchasing of congressmen, and overt scientific propaganda (with smear campaigns against such persons as yours truly, much about which later), big agricultural companies foolishly believed that all they needed was to win the majority. No, you idiots. Your snap “scientific” judgment is too naive for these types of decisions. Consider that transgenic-GMO eaters will eat non-GMOs, but not the reverse.
why some fast-food chains, such as McDonald’s, thrive. It’s not because they offer a great product, but because they are not vetoed in a certain socio-economic group—and by a small proportion of people in that group at that.
In the rivalry between the two languages, English won as commerce grew to dominate modern life; the victory has nothing to do with the prestige of France or the efforts of their civil servants in promoting their more or less beautiful Latinized and logically spelled language over the orthographically confusing one of trans-Channel meat-pie eaters.
But things work both ways, the good and the bad. While some believe that the average Pole was complicit in the liquidation of Jews, the historian Peter Fritzsche, when asked, “Why didn’t the Poles in Warsaw help their Jewish neighbors more?,” responded that they generally did. But it took seven or eight Poles to help one Jew. It took only one Pole, acting as an informer, to turn in a dozen Jews. Even if such select anti-Semitism is contestable, we can easily imagine bad outcomes stemming from a minority of bad agents.
Outcomes are paradoxically more stable under the minority rule—the variance of the results is lower and the rule is more likely to emerge independently across separate populations. What emerges from the minority rule is more likely to be black-and-white, binary rules.
Can democracy—by definition the majority—tolerate enemies? The question is as follows: “Would you agree to deny the freedom of speech to every political party that has in its charter the banning of freedom of speech?” Let’s go one step further: “Should a society that has elected to be tolerant be intolerant about intolerance?”
So we summarize this chapter and link it to hidden asymmetries, the subtitle of the book. Society doesn’t evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meetings, academic conferences, tea and cucumber sandwiches, or polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere—and someone with soul in the game. And asymmetry is present in about everything.
Understanding the genetic makeup of a unit will never allow us to understand the behavior of the unit itself. A reminder that what I am writing here isn’t an opinion. It is a straightforward mathematical property. The mean-field approach is when one uses the average interaction between, say, two people, and generalizes to the group—it is only possible if there are no asymmetries.
In short, every organization wants a certain number of people associated with it to be deprived of a certain share of their freedom. How do you own these people? First, by conditioning and psychological manipulation; second, by tweaking them to have some skin in the game, forcing them to have something significant to lose if they disobey authority—something hard to do with gyrovague beggars who flout their scorn for material possessions.
But employees are expensive. You have to pay them even when you’ve got nothing for them to do. You lose your flexibility. Talent for talent, they cost a lot more. Lovers of paychecks are lazy…but they would never let you down at times like these. So employees exist because they have significant skin in the game—and the risk is shared with them, enough risk for it to be a deterrent and a penalty for acts of undependability, such as failing to show up on time. You are buying dependability.
New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.
I mention these merely to show that New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along (whether a thousand-foot liner out of the East or a twenty-thousand-man convention out of the West) without inflicting the event on its inhabitants; so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.
The quality in New York that insulates its inhabitants from life may simply weaken them as individuals. Perhaps it is healthier to live in a community where, when a cornice falls, you feel the blow; where, when the governor passes, you see at any rate his hat.
A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.
Manhattan has been compelled to expand skyward because of the absence of any other direction in which to grow. This, more than any other thing, is responsible for its physical majesty. It is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village—the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying that the way is up.
It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible. Every time the residents brush their teeth, millions of gallons of water must be drawn from the Catskills and the hills of Westchester. When a young man in Manhattan writes a letter to his girl in Brooklyn, the love message gets blown to her through a pneumatic tube—pfft—just like that. The subterranean system of telephone cables, power lines, steam pipes, gas mains and sewer pipes is reason enough to abandon the island to the gods and the weevils. Every time an incision is made in the pavement, the noisy surgeons expose ganglia that are tangled beyond belief. By rights New York should have destroyed itself long ago, from panic or fire or rioting or failure of some vital supply line in its circulatory system or from some deep labyrinthine short circuit. Long ago the city should have experienced an insoluble traffic snarl at some impossible bottleneck. It should have perished of hunger when food lines failed for a few days. It should have been wiped out by a plague starting in its slums or carried in by ships’ rats. It should have been overwhelmed by the sea that licks at it on every side. The workers in its myriad cells should have succumbed to nerves, from the fearful pall of smoke-fog that drifts over every few days from Jersey, blotting out all light at noon and leaving the high offices suspended, men groping and depressed, and the sense of world’s end. It should have been touched in the head by the August heat and gone off its rocker.
Mass hysteria is a terrible force, yet New Yorkers seem always to escape it by some tiny margin: they sit in stalled subways without claustrophobia, they extricate themselves from panic situations by some lucky wisecrack, they meet confusion and congestion with patience and grit—a sort of perpetual muddling through. Every facility is inadequate—the hospitals and schools and playgrounds are overcrowded, the express highways are feverish, the unimproved highways and bridges are bottlenecks; there is not enough air and not enough light, and there is usually either too much heat or too little. But the city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin—the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled.
The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity. The city has to be tolerant, otherwise it would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry. If the people were to depart even briefly from the peace of cosmopolitan intercourse, the town would blow up higher than a kite. In New York smolders every race problem there is, but the noticeable thing is not the problem but the inviolate truce.
Hackmen used to drive with verve; now they sometimes seem to drive with desperation, toward the ultimate tip.
A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: “This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.” If it were to go, all would go—this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.
‘You entertain me, Captain. I understand now why you are well spoken of among the caravanserai, since you are unique among them in possessing a functioning brain. Come, we are almost there.’
Hedge pulled his scorched leather cap from his head, scratched vigorously through the few remaining wisps of hair on his pate, studied his companion for a long moment. ‘Not bad,’ he judged. ‘Noble and mysterious. I’m impressed.’ ‘You should be. Such poses are not easy to hold, you know.’
‘Tempers grow short,’ Kruppe murmured as the commander rode away. ‘But not as short as Kruppe, for whom all nasty words whiz impactless over his head, and are thus lost in the ether. And those darts aimed lower, ah, they but bounce from Kruppe’s ample equanimity—’
‘Excuse me.’ Both turned at the voice, to find that Rath’Trake had joined them. Gruntle scowled at the masked priest. ‘What?’ ‘I believe we have matters to discuss, you and I, Mortal Sword.’ ‘You believe what you like,’ the Daru replied. ‘I’ve already made it plain to the Whiskered One that I’m a bad choice—’ Rath’Trake seemed to choke. ‘The Whiskered One?’ he sputtered in indignation.
‘I’m a caravan guard captain, and damned good at it. When I’m sober, that is.’ ‘You are the master of war in the name of the Lord of Summer—’ ‘We’ll call that a hobby.’ ‘A – a what!?’
Yet all alarm subsequent to said events has grown quiet within oneself, for truths have marched out from the darkness to prostrate themselves at Kruppe’s slippered feet.’ ‘That conjures up an image of you stumbling and falling flat on your face, Daru,’ the wizard commented. ‘Carelessly constructed, Kruppe allows, yet none of you have ever seen Kruppe dance! And dance he can, with breathtaking artistry and grace – nay! He glides like an unbroken egg on a greased skillet. Stumble? Fall? Kruppe? Never!’
‘You think so? How about some more loudly uttered thoughts, Daru? The display is deliberate. The unveiling of power here is precisely intended to kick the hornet nests. Both of them! Clumsily massive, an appalling absence of subtlety. Thunder to those who had been expecting the almost soundless padding of a mouse’s feet and its whispering tail. Now, why would I do that, do you wonder?’ ‘Kruppe does not wonder at all, except, perhaps, at your insisting on explaining such admirable tactics of misdirection to these squalling seagulls.’ Quick Ben scowled down at the round little man. ‘Really? I had no idea I was that obvious. Maybe I should reconsider.’ ‘Nonsense, Wizard! Hold to your unassailable self-confidence – aye, some might well call it megalomania, but not Kruppe, for he too is in possession of unassailable self-confidence, such as only mortals are capable of and then rightfully but a mere handful the world over. You’ve singular company, Kruppe assures you!’
We humans do not understand compassion. In each moment of our lives, we betray it. Aye, we know of its worth, yet in knowing we then attach to it a value, we guard the giving of it, believing it must be earned. T’lan Imass. Compassion is priceless in the truest sense of the word. It must be given freely. In abundance.
Recall the kind of feeling you have when someone praises you, when you are approved, accepted, applauded. And contrast that with the kind of feeling that arises within you when you look at the sunset or the sunrise or Nature in general, or when you read a book or watch a movie that you thoroughly enjoy. Get the taste of this feeling and contrast it with the first, namely, the one that was generated within you when you were praised. Understand that the first type of feeling comes from self-glorification, self-promotion. It is a worldly feeling. The second comes from self-fulfillment, a soul feeling.
Here is another contrast: Recall the kind of feeling you have when you succeed, when you have made it, when you get to the top, when you win a game or a bet or an argument. And contrast it with the kind of feeling you get when you really enjoy the job you are doing, you are absorbed in, the action that you are currently engaged in. And once again notice the qualitative difference between the worldly feeling and the soul feeling.
Yet another contrast: Remember what you felt like when you had power, you were the boss, people looked up to you, took orders from you; or when you were popular. And contrast that worldly feeling with the feeling of intimacy, companionship—the times you thoroughly enjoyed yourself in the company of a friend or with a group in which there was fun and laughter. Having done this, attempt to understand the true nature of worldly feelings, namely, the feelings of self-promotion, self-glorification. They are not natural, they were invented by your society and your culture to make you productive and to make you controllable. These feelings do not produce the nourishment and happiness that is produced when one contemplates Nature or enjoys the company of one’s friends or one’s work. They were meant to produce thrills, excitement—and emptiness. Then observe yourself in the course of a day or a week and think how many…
And take a look at the people around you. Is there a single one of them who has not become addicted to these worldly feelings? A single one who is not controlled by them, hungers for them, spends every minute of his/her waking life consciously or unconsciously seeking them? When you see this you will understand how people attempt to…
And here is a parable of life for you to ponder on: A group of tourists sits in a bus that is passing through gorgeously beautiful country; lakes and mountains and green fields and rivers. But the shades of the bus are pulled down. They do not have the slightest idea of what lies beyond the windows of the bus. And all the time of their journey is spent in squabbling over who will have the seat of honor in…
There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.
Look around and see if you can find a single genuinely happy person—fearless, free from insecurities, anxieties, tensions, worries. You would be lucky if you found one in a hundred thousand. This should lead you to be suspicious of the programming and the beliefs that you and they hold in common.
And if you are not happy, you have been trained to blame yourself, not your programming, not your cultural and inherited ideas and beliefs. What makes it even worse is the fact that most people are so brainwashed that they do not even realize how unhappy…
First: You cannot be happy without the things that you are attached to and that you consider so precious. False. There is not a single moment in your life when you do not have everything that you need to be happy. Think of that for a minute. The reason why you are unhappy is because you…
Another belief: Happiness is in the future. Not true. Right here and now you are happy and you do not know it because your false beliefs and your distorted perceptions have got you caught up in fears, anxieties, attachments, conflicts, guilt and a host of games that you are programmed to play. If you…
Yet another belief: Happiness will come if you manage to change the situation you are in and the people around you. Not true. You stupidly squander so much energy trying to rearrange the world. If changing the world is your vocation in life, go right ahead and change it, but do not harbor the illusion that this is going to make you happy. What makes you happy or unhappy is not the world and the people around you, but the thinking in your head. As well search for an eagle’s nest on the bed of an ocean, as search for happiness in the world outside of you. So if it is happiness that you seek you can stop wasting your energy trying to cure your baldness or build up an attractive body or change your residence or job or community or lifestyle or even your personality. Do you realize that you could change every one of these things, you could have the finest looks and…
Another false belief: If all your desires are fulfilled you will be happy. Not true. In fact it is these very desires and attachments that make you tense,…
Make a list of all your attachments and desires and to each of them say these words: "Deep down in my heart I know that even after I have got you I will not get happiness." And ponder on the truth of those words. The fulfillment of desire can, at the most, bring…
If people want happiness so badly, why don’t they attempt to understand their false beliefs? First, because it never occurs to them to see them as false or even as beliefs. They see them as facts and reality, so deeply have they been programmed. Second, because they are scared to lose the only world they know: the world of desires, attachments, fears, social pressures, tensions, ambitions, worries, guilt, with flashes of the pleasure and relief and excitement which these things bring. Think of someone who is afraid to…
So spend some time seeing each of the things you cling to for what it really is, a nightmare that causes you excitement and pleasure on the one hand but also worry, insecurity, tension, anxiety, fear, unhappiness on the other. Father and mother: nightmare. Wife and children, brothers and sisters: nightmare. All your possessions: nightmare. Your life as it is now: nightmare. Every single thing you cling to and have convinced yourself you cannot be happy without: nightmare. Then you will hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters and even your own life. And you will so easily take leave of all your possessions, that is, you will stop clinging and thus have destroyed their capacity to hurt you. Then at last you will experience that mysterious state that cannot be described or uttered—the state of abiding…
For instance, when other people don’t live up to your computer’s expectations, it torments you with frustration or anger or bitterness. Another instance: When things are not under your control or the future is uncertain, your computer insists that you experience anxiety, tension, worry. Then you expend a lot of energy coping with these negative emotions. And you generally cope by expending more energy trying to rearrange the world around you so that the demands of your computer will be met.
And so you live a pathetic existence, constantly at the mercy of things and people, trying desperately to make them conform to your computer’s demands, so that you can enjoy the only peace you can ever know—a temporary respite from negative emotions, courtesy of your computer and your programming.
Don’t stop till you have grasped this truth: The only reason why you too are not reacting calmly and happily is your computer that is stubbornly insisting that reality be reshaped to conform to its programming. Observe all of this from the outside so to speak and see the marvelous change that comes about in you.
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Once you have understood this truth and thereby stopped your computer from generating negative emotions you may take any action you deem fit. You may avoid the situation or the person; or you may try to change them; or you may insist on your rights or the rights of others being respected; you may even resort to the use of force. But only after you have got rid of your emotional upsets, for then your action will spring from peace and love, not from the neurotic desire to appease your computer or to conform to its programming or to get rid of the negative emotions it generates. Then you will understand how profound is the wisdom of the words: "If a man wants to sue you for your shirt, let him have your coat as well. If a man in authority makes you go one mile, go with him two."
If you wish to be happy the first thing you need is not effort or even goodwill or good desires but a clear understanding of how exactly you have been programmed. This is what happened: First your society and your culture taught you to believe that you would not be happy without certain persons and certain things. Just take a look around you: Everywhere people have actually built their lives on the unquestioned belief that without certain things—money, power, success, approval, a good reputation, love, friendship, spirituality, God—they cannot be happy. What is your particular combination?
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This finally led you to abject emotional dependence so that the object of your attachment had the power to thrill you when you attained it, to make you anxious lest you be deprived of it and miserable when you lost it. Stop for a moment now and contemplate in horror the endless list of attachments that you have become a prisoner to. Think of concrete things and persons, not abstractions … Once your attachment had you in its grip you began to strive might and main, every waking minute of your life, to rearrange the world around you so that you could attain and maintain the objects of your attachment. This is an exhausting task that leaves you little energy for the business of living and enjoying life fully.
For a few fleeting moments the world does, indeed, yield to your efforts and rearranges itself to suit your desires. Then you become briefly happy. Or rather, you experience a flash of pleasure which isn’t happiness at all for it is accompanied by the underlying fear that at any moment this world of things and people that you have so painstakingly put in…
And here is something else to ponder on: Each time you are anxious and afraid, it is because you may lose or fail to get the object of your attachment, isn’t it? And each time you feel jealous, isn’t it because someone may make off with what you are attached to? And almost all your anger comes from someone standing in the way of your attachment, doesn’t it? And see how paranoid you become when your attachment is threatened—you cannot think objectively; your whole vision becomes distorted, doesn’t it? And every time you feel bored, isn’t it because you are not getting a sufficient supply of what you believe will make you happy, of what you are attached to? And when you are depressed and miserable, the cause is there…
Hardly anyone has been told the following truth: In order to be genuinely happy there is one and only one thing you need to do: get…
On the contrary, getting rid of attachments is a perfectly delightful task if the instrument you use to rid yourself of them is not willpower or renunciation but sight. All you need to do is open your eyes and see that you do not really need the object of your attachment at all; that you were programmed, brainwashed into thinking that…
Pass in review now all those attachments of yours. And to each person or object that comes to mind say: "I am not really attached to you at all. I am merely deluding myself into the belief that without you I will not be happy." Just do this honestly and see the change that comes about within you: "I am not really attached to you at all. I have merely cheated myself into the belief that without you I will not be happy."
There is only one way to win the battle of attachments: Drop them. Contrary to popular belief, dropping attachments is easy. All you have to do is see, but really see, the following truths. First truth: You are holding on to a false belief, namely, the belief that without this particular person or thing you will not be happy. Take your attachments one at a time and see the falseness of this belief. You may encounter resistance from your heart, but the moment you do see, there will be an immediate emotional result. At that very instant the attachment loses its force. Second truth: If you just enjoy things, refusing to let yourself be attached to them, that is, refusing to hold the false belief that you will not be happy without them, you are spared all the struggle and emotional strain of protecting them and guarding them for yourself.
Has it occurred to you that you can keep all the objects of your attachments without giving them up, without renouncing a single one of them and you can enjoy them even more on a nonattachment, a nonclinging basis, because you are peaceful now and relaxed and unthreatened in your enjoyment of them?
The third and final truth: If you learn to enjoy the scent of a thousand flowers you will not cling to one or suffer when you cannot get it. If you have a thousand favorite dishes, the loss of one will go unnoticed and leave your happiness unimpaired. But it is precisely your attachments that prevent you from developing a wider and more varied taste for things and people.
The rich man cannot enter the kingdom of joy not because he wants to be bad but because he chooses to be blind.
Pause now to ask yourself if it is worth paying so much for so little. Imagine you say to this person whose special love you want, "Leave me free to be myself, to think my thoughts, to indulge my taste, to follow my inclination, to behave in ways that I decide are to my liking." The moment you say those words you will understand that you are asking for the impossible. To ask to be especial to someone means essentially to be bound to the task of making yourself pleasing to this person. And therefore to lose your freedom. Take all the time you need to realize this.
Now say to this person, "I leave you free to be yourself, to think your thoughts, to indulge your taste, follow your inclinations, behave in any way that you decide is to your liking." The moment you say that you will observe one of two things: Either your heart will resist those words and you will be exposed for the clinger and exploiter that you are; so now is the time to examine your false belief that without this person you cannot live or cannot be happy. Or your heart will pronounce the words sincerely and in that very instant all control, manipulation, exploitation, possessiveness, jealousy will drop.
Test it by saying those words again: "I leave you free to be yourself …" In saying those words you have set yourself free. You are now ready to love. For when you cling, what you offer the other is not love but a chain by which both you and your beloved are bound. Love can only exist in freedom. The true lover seeks the good of his beloved which requires especially the liberation of the beloved from the lover.
Think of someone you dislike—someone you generally avoid because his/her presence generates negative feelings in you. Imagine yourself in this person’s presence now and watch the negative emotions arise … you are, quite conceivably, in the presence of someone who is poor, crippled, blind or lame. Now understand that if you invite this person, this beggar from the streets and alleys into your home, that is, into your presence, he/she will make you a gift that none of your charming, pleasant friends can make you, rich as they are. He or she is going to reveal yourself to you and reveal human nature to you—a revelation as precious as any found in Scripture, for what will it profit you to know all the Scriptures if you do not know yourself and so live the life of a robot? The revelation that this beggar is going to bring will widen your heart till there is room in it for every living creature. Can there be a finer gift than that?
Now take a look at yourself reacting negatively and ask yourself the following question: "Am I in charge of this situation or is this situation in charge of me?" That is the first revelation. With it comes the second: The way to be in charge of this situation is to be in charge of yourself, which you are not. How does one achieve this mastery? All you have to do is understand that there are people in the world who, if they were in your place, would not be negatively affected by this person. They would be in charge of the situation, above it, not subject to it as you are. Therefore, your negative feelings are caused, not by this person, as you mistakenly think, but by your programming.
Here is the third and major revelation. See what happens when you really understand this. Having received these revelations about yourself, listen to this revelation concerning human nature. This behavior, this trait in the other person that causes you to react negatively—do you realize that he or she is not responsible for it? You can hold on to your negative feelings only when you mistakenly believe that he or she is free and aware and therefore responsible. But who ever did evil in awareness? The ability to do evil or to be evil is not freedom but a sickness for it implies a lack of consciousness and sensitivity. Those who are truly free cannot sin as God cannot sin. This poor person here in front of you is crippled, blind, lame, not stubborn and malicious as you so foolishly thought. Understand this truth; look at it…
Now you will realize that this beggar came to your home with an alms for you—the widening of your heart in compassion and the release of your spirit in freedom. Where before you used to be controlled (these persons had the power to create negative emotions in you and you went out of your way to avoid them) now you have the gift of freedom to avoid no one, to go anywhere. When you see this you will notice how the feeling of compassion in your heart has been added the feeling of gratitude to this beggar who is your benefactor. And another new, unaccustomed feeling: You actually feel a desire to seek out the company of these growth-producing crippled, blind and lame people, the way someone who has learned to swim seeks water, because each time you are with them, where before you used to feel the oppression and tyranny of negative feelings, you can now actually feel an ever-expanding compassion and…
An attachment is a state of clinging that comes from the false belief that something or someone is necessary for your happiness. Do you have any attachments—people or things that you falsely believe you could not be happy without? Make a list of them right now before we go on to study how exactly they blind you.
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Who decides what will finally make its way to your conscious mind from all the material that is pouring in from the world? Three decisive filters: first your attachments, second your beliefs and third your fears. Your attachments: You will inevitably look for what fosters or threatens them and turn a blind eye to the rest. You won’t be interested in the rest any more than the avaricious businessman is interested in anything that does not involve the making of money. Your beliefs: Just take a look at a fanatic who only notices what confirms his/her belief and blocks out whatever threatens it and you will understand what your beliefs are doing to you. And then your fears: If you knew you were to be executed in a week’s time it would wonderfully concentrate your mind to the exclusion of everything else. That is what fears do; they irresistibly rivet your attention on to some things to the exclusion of others.
You falsely think that your fears protect you, your beliefs have made you what you are and your attachments make your life exciting and secure. You fail to see that they are actually a screen between you and life’s symphony.
To put it briefly, the moment you pick up an attachment, the functioning of this lovely apparatus called the human heart is destroyed.
The first truth: You must choose between your attachment and happiness. You cannot have both.
The second truth: Where did your attachment come from? You were not born with it. It sprang from a lie that your society and your culture have told you, or a lie that you have told yourself, namely, that without this or the other, without this person or the other, you can’t be happy. Just open your eyes and see how false this is. There are hundreds of persons who are perfectly happy without this thing or person or situation that you crave for and that you have convinced yourself you cannot live without. So make your choice: Do you want your attachment, or your freedom and happiness?
The third truth: If you wish to be fully alive you must develop a sense of perspective. Life is infinitely greater than this trifle your heart is attached to and which you have given the power to so upset you.
that so disturbed you in the past. And so the fourth truth brings you to the unavoidable conclusion that no thing or person outside of you has the power to make you happy or unhappy. Whether you are aware of it or not it is you and only you who decides to be happy or unhappy, whether you will cling to your attachment or not in any given situation.
And so the fourth truth brings you to the unavoidable conclusion that no thing or person outside of you has the power to make you happy or unhappy. Whether you are aware of it or not it is you and only you who decides to be happy or unhappy, whether you will cling to your attachment or not in any given situation.
What you need is not renunciation but understanding, awareness. If your attachments have caused you suffering and sorrow, that’s a help to understanding. If you have at least once in your life had the sweet taste of freedom and the delight in life that unattachment brings, that too is a help. It also helps to consciously notice the sound of the other instruments in the orchestra. But there is no substitute for the awareness that shows you the loss you suffer when you overvalue the drum and when you turn a deaf ear to the rest of the orchestra. The day that happens and your attachment to the drum drops, you will no longer say to your friend, "How happy you have made me." For in so saying you flatter his ego and manipulate him into wanting to please you again. And you give yourself the illusion that your happiness depends on your friend. Rather you will say, "When you and I met, happiness arose." That leaves the happiness uncontaminated by his ego and yours. Neither of you can take the credit for it. And that makes it possible for the two of you to part with no attachment to each other, or to the experience which your meeting generated, for you have enjoyed, not each other, but the symphony that arose in your meeting.
Think of a flabby person covered with layers of fat. That is what your mind can become—flabby, covered with layers of fat till it becomes too dull and lazy to think, to observe, to explore, to discover. It loses its alertness, its aliveness, its flexibility and goes to sleep. Look around you and you will see almost everyone with minds like that: dull, asleep, protected by layers of fat, not wanting to be disturbed or questioned into wakefulness. What are these layers? Every belief that you hold, every conclusion you have reached about persons and things, every habit and every attachment. In your formative years you should have been helped to scrape off these layers and liberate your mind. Instead your society, your culture, which put these layers on your mind in the first place, has educated you to not even notice them, to go to sleep and let other people—the experts: your politicians, your cultural and religious leaders—do your thinking for you.
Second layer: your ideas. If you hold on to an idea about someone, then you no longer love that person but your idea of that person. You see him/her do or say something or behave in a certain kind of way and you slap a label on: She is silly or he is dull or he is cruel or she is very sweet, etc. So now you have a screen, a layer of fat between you and this person because when you next meet him/her you will experience them in terms of that idea of yours even though they have changed. Observe how you have done this with almost everyone you know.
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Third layer: habits. A habit is essential to human living. How would we ever walk or speak or drive a car unless we relied on habit? But habits must be limited to things mechanical—not to love or to sight. Who wants to be loved from habit? Have you ever sat on a seashore spellbound by the majesty and the mystery of the ocean? A fisherman looks at the ocean daily and does not notice its grandeur. Why? The dulling effect of a layer of fat called habit. You have formed fixed ideas of all the things you see and, when encountering them, it is not them you see in all their changing freshness, but the same dull, thick, boring idea acquired through habit…
Fourth layer: your attachments and your fears. This layer is the easiest to see. Put a thick coating of attachment, of fear (and therefore dislike) on to anything or anyone—in that very instant you cease to see that person or thing as it really is. Just recall some of the persons…
What can you do to break out? Four things: First, realize that you are surrounded by prison walls, that your mind has gone to sleep. It does not even occur to most people to see this, so they live and die as prison inmates. Most people end up being conformists; they adapt to prison life. A few become reformers; they fight for better living conditions in the prison, better lighting, better ventilation. Hardly anyone becomes a rebel, a revolutionary who breaks down the prison walls. You can only be a revolutionary when you see the prison walls in the first place. Second, contemplate the walls, spend hours just observing your ideas, your habits, your attachments and your fears without any judgment and condemnation. Look at them and they will crumble. Third, spend some time observing the things and people around you. Look, but really look, as if for the very first time, at the face of a friend, a leaf, a tree, a bird in flight, the behavior and mannerisms of the people around you. Really see them and hopefully you will see them afresh as they are in themselves without the dulling, stupefying effect of your ideas and habits. The fourth and most important step: Sit down quietly and observe how your mind functions. There is a steady flow of thoughts and feelings and reactions there. Watch the whole of it for long stretches of time the way you watch a river or a movie. You will soon find it so much more absorbing than any river or movie. And so much more life-giving and liberating. After all can you even be said to be alive if you are not even conscious of your own thoughts and reactions? The unaware life, it is said, is not worth living. It cannot even be called life; it is a mechanical,…
It is with charity as with happiness and holiness. It is not possible for you to say that you are happy because the moment you become conscious of your happiness you cease to be happy. What you call the experience of happiness is not happiness at all but the excitement and thrill caused by some person or thing or event. True happiness is uncaused. You are happy for no reason at all. And true happiness cannot be experienced. It is not within the realm of consciousness. It is unself-consciousness.
Spend some time in becoming aware of the fact that all the virtue that you can see in yourself is no virtue at all but something that you have cunningly cultivated and produced and forced on yourself. If it were real virtue you would have enjoyed it thoroughly and would feel so natural that it wouldn’t occur to you to think of it as a virtue. So the first quality of holiness is its unself-consciousness.
Nature is not a technician. Nature is creative. You will be a creator, not a wily technician when there is abandonment in you—no greed, no ambition, no anxiety, no sense of striving, gaining, arriving, attaining. All there is, is a keen, alert, penetrating, vigilant awareness that causes the dissolution of all one’s foolishness and selfishness, all one’s attachments and fears. The changes that follow are not the result of your blueprints and efforts but the product of Nature that spurns your plans and will, thereby leaving no room for a sense of merit or achievement or even any consciousness on the part of your left hand of what Reality is doing by means of your right.
First: Think of some change that you wish to bring about in your life or in your personality. Are you attempting to force this change on your nature through effort and through the desire to become something that your ego has planned? That is the serpent fighting the dove. Or are you content to study, observe, understand, be aware of your present state and problems, without pushing, without forcing things that your ego desires, leaving Reality to effect changes according to Nature’s plans, not yours? Then you have the perfect blending of the serpent and the dove. Take a look at some of those problems of yours, those changes you desire in yourself, and observe your way of going about it. See how you attempt to bring about change—both in yourself and in others—through the use of punishment and reward, through discipline and control, through sermonizing and guilt, through greed and pride, ambition and vanity, rather than through loving acceptance and patience, painstaking understanding and vigilant awareness.
If your body could speak, what would it say to you? Observe the greed, the ambition, the vanity, the desire to show off and to please others, the guilt that drives you to ignore the voice of your body while you chase after objectives set by your ego. You have indeed lost the simplicity of the dove.
Consider your sad condition. You are always dissatisfied with yourself, always wanting to change yourself. So you are full of violence and self-intolerance which only grows with every effort that you make to change yourself. So any change you achieve is always accompanied by inner conflict. And you suffer when you see others achieve what you have not and become what you are not.
Would you be tormented by jealousy and envy if, like the rose, you were content to be what you are and never aspired to what you are not? But you are driven, are you not, to be like someone else who has more knowledge, better looks, more popularity or success than you. You want to become more virtuous, more loving, more meditative; you want to find God, to come closer to your ideals. Think of the sad history of your efforts at self-improvement, that either ended in disaster or succeeded only at the cost of struggle and pain.
Now suppose you desisted from all efforts to change yourself, and from all self-dissatisfaction, would you then be doomed to go to sleep having passively accepted everything in you and around you? There is another way besides laborious self-pushing on the one hand and stagnant acceptance on the other. It is the way of self-understanding. This is far from easy because to understand what you are requires complete freedom from all desire to change what you are into something else. You will see this if you compare the attitude of a scientist who studies the habits of ants without the slightest desire to change them with the attitude of a dog trainer who studies the habits of a dog with a view to making it learn something. If what you attempt is not to change yourself but to observe yourself, to study every one of your reactions to people and things, without judgment or condemnation or desire to reform yourself, your observation will be nonselective, comprehensive, never fixed on rigid conclusions, always open and fresh from moment to moment. Then you will notice a marvelous thing happening within you: You will be flooded with the light of awareness, you will become transparent and transformed.
Look at your life and see how you have filled its emptiness with people. As a result they have a stranglehold on you. See how they control your behavior by their approval and disapproval. They hold the power to ease your loneliness with their company, to send your spirits soaring with their praise, to bring you down to the depths with their criticism and rejection. Take a look at yourself spending almost every waking minute of your day placating and pleasing people, whether they are living or dead. You live by their norms, conform to their standards, seek their company, desire their love, dread their ridicule, long for their applause, meekly submit to the guilt they lay upon you; you are terrified to go against the fashion in the way you dress or speak or act or even think. And observe how even when you control them you depend on them and are enslaved by them. People have become so much a part of your being that you cannot even imagine living a life that is unaffected or uncontrolled by them. As a matter of fact, they have convinced you that if you ever broke free of them, you would become an island—solitary, bleak, unloving. But the exact opposite is true. How can you love someone whom you are a slave to? How can you love someone whom you cannot live without? You can only desire, need, depend and fear and be controlled. Love is to be found only in fearlessness and freedom.
How do you achieve this freedom? By means of a two-pronged attack on your dependency and slavery. First, awareness. It is next to impossible to be dependent, to be a slave, when one constantly observes the folly of one’s dependence. But awareness may not be enough for a person whose addiction is people. You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work that you do, not for its utility, but for itself. Think of something that you love to do for itself, whether it succeeds or not, whether you are praised for it or not, whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not, whether people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not.
How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out, cultivate them, for they are your passport to freedom and to love.
Here too you have probably been brainwashed into the following consumeristic way of thinking: To enjoy a poem or a landscape or a piece of music seems a waste of time; you must produce a poem or a composition or a work of art. Even to produce it is of little value in itself; your work must be known. What good is it if no one ever knows it? And even if it is known, that means nothing if it is not applauded and praised by people. Your work achieves maximum value if it becomes popular and sells! So you are back again into the arms and control of people.
Look at it this way: There have been moments in your life when you had an experience that you know you will have to carry with you to your grave because you are quite unable to find words with which to communicate the experience to anyone. As a matter of fact there simply are no words in any human language to communicate exactly what you experienced. Think of the kind of feeling that came upon you when you saw a bird fly over a lake or observed a blade of grass peeping out of a crack in the wall or heard the cry of a baby at night or sensed the loveliness of a naked human body or gazed at a corpse lying cold and rigid in a coffin. You may try to communicate the experience in music or poetry or painting. But in your heart you know that no one will ever comprehend exactly what it was you saw and sensed. This is something you are quite powerless to express, much less teach, to another human being. That is exactly how a Master feels when you ask him to teach you about life or God or reality. All he can do is give you a formula, a set of words strung together into a formula. But of what use are those words? Imagine a group of tourists in a bus. The shades of the bus are down and they don’t see or hear or touch or smell a single thing from the strange exotic country that they are passing through, while all the while their guide chatters away, giving them what he thinks is a vivid description of the smells, sounds and sights of the world outside. The only things they will experience are the images that his words create in their heads. And let’s suppose the bus stops and he sends them forth with formulas about what they can expect to see and experience. Their experience will be contaminated, conditioned, distorted by those formulas and they will perceive, not the Reality itself but Reality as filtered through the guide’s formulas.
To walk alone—that means to walk away from every formula—the ones given to you by others, the ones you learned from books, the ones that you yourself invented in the light of your own past experience. That is possibly the most terrifying thing a human being can do: move into the unknown, unprotected by any formula. To walk away from the world of human beings as the prophets and the mystics did is not to walk away from their company but from their formulas. Then, even though you are surrounded by people, you are truly and utterly alone. What an awesome solitude! That solitude, that aloneness is Silence. It is only this Silence that you will see. And the moment you see you will abandon every book and guide and guru. What is it that you will see? Anything, everything: a falling leaf, the behavior of a friend, the ripples on the surface of a lake, a pile of stones, a ruined building, a crowded street, a starry sky, whatever. After you have seen, someone may attempt to help you put your vision into words but you will shake your head—No, not that—that’s just another formula. Someone else will attempt to explain the meaning of what you saw and you will shake your head again because meaning is a formula, something that can be put into concepts and makes sense to the thinking mind, and what you saw is beyond all formula, all meaning. And a strange change will come about in you, barely perceptible at first but radically transforming. Because, having seen, you will never be the same again. You will feel the exhilarating freedom, the extraordinary confidence that comes from knowing that every formula, no matter how sacred, is worthless; and you will never again call anyone your teacher. Then you will never cease to learn as each day you observe and understand afresh the whole process and movement of life. Then every single thing will be your teacher. So put your books and formulas aside; dare to abandon your teacher whoever your teacher may be and see things for yourself. Dare to look at everything around you without fear and without formula and it won’t be long before you see.
TRULY, I SAY TO YOU, UNLESS YOU TURN AND BECOME LIKE CHILDREN, YOU WILL NEVER ENTER THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. —MATTHEW 18:3 The first quality that strikes one when one looks into the eyes of a child is its innocence: its lovely inability to lie or wear a mask or pretend to be anything other than what it is. In this the child is exactly like the rest of Nature. A dog is a dog; a rose, a rose; a star, a star; everything is quite simply what it is. Only the adult human being is able to be one thing and pretend to be another.
Contemplate the crowds of people who are striving might and main to become, not what Nature intended them to be—musicians, cooks, mechanics, carpenters, gardeners, inventors—but somebody: to become successful, famous, powerful; to become something that will bring, not quiet self-fulfillment, but self-glorification, self-expansion. You are looking at people who have lost their innocence because they have chosen not to be themselves but to promote themselves, to show off, even if it be only in their own eyes. Look at your daily life. Is there a single thought, word or action untainted by the desire to become somebody, even if all you seek to become is a spiritual success or a saint unknown to anyone except yourself?
Adults who have preserved their innocence also surrender like the child to the impulse of Nature or Destiny without a thought to become somebody or to impress others; but, unlike the child, they rely, not on instinct, but on ceaseless awareness of everything in them and around them; that awareness shields them from evil and brings about the growth that was intended for them by Nature, not designed by their ambitious egos. Here is another way that grown-ups corrupt the innocence of childhood: They teach the child to imitate someone. The moment you make the child a carbon copy you stamp out the spark of originality with which it came into the world. The moment you choose to become like someone else however great or holy, you have prostituted your being. Think sadly of the divine spark of uniqueness that lies within you, buried under layers of fear. The fear that you will be ridiculed or rejected if you dare to be yourself and refuse to conform mechanically in the way you dress and act and think. See how you conform not only in your actions and thoughts but even in your reactions, your emotions, your attitudes, your values. You dare not break out of this prostitution and reclaim your original innocence. This is the price you pay for the passport of acceptance by your society or organization. So you enter the world of the crooked and the controlled and are exiled from the kingdom that belongs to the innocence of childhood.
One final subtle way you destroy your innocence is when you compete and compare yourself with others. When you do that you exchange your simplicity for the ambition of wanting to be as good as someone else or even better. Think of this: The reason why the child is able to preserve its innocence and live like the rest of creation in the bliss of the kingdom is that it has not been sucked into what we call the world—that region of darkness inhabited by grown-ups whose lives are spent not in living but in courting applause and admiration; not in blissfully being themselves but in neurotically comparing and competing, striving for those empty things called success and fame even if they can be attained only at the expense of defeating, humiliating, destroying their neighbors. If you allow yourself to really feel the pains of this hell on earth, the utter emptiness it brings, you might experience…
Updated: Sep 07, 2021
Try this: Imagine you are in a situation or with a person that you find unpleasant and that you would ordinarily avoid. Now observe how your computer instinctively becomes active, insisting that you avoid this situation or try to change it. And if you stay on there and refuse to change the situation, observe how the computer insists that you experience irritation or anxiety or guilt or some other negative emotion. Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realize that it isn’t they that are causing the negative emotions. They are just going their way, being themselves, doing their thing whether right or wrong, good or bad. It is your computer that, thanks to your programming, insists on your reacting with negative emotions. You will see this better if you realize that someone with a different programming when faced with this same situation or person or event would react quite calmly, even happily.
nature of attachments is such, that even if you satisfy many of them in the course of a single day, the one attachment that was not satisfied will prey upon your mind and make you unhappy. There is no way to win the battle of attachments. As well search for water without wetness as for an attachment without unhappiness. No one has ever lived who has come up with a formula for keeping the objects of one’s attachments without struggle, anxiety, fear and, sooner or later, defeat.
Updated: May 23, 2022
FOR WHAT WILL IT PROFIT A MAN, IF HE GAINS THE WHOLE WORLD AND FORFEITS HIS LIFE? —MATTHEW 16:26
Here is another contrast: Recall the kind of feeling you have when you succeed, when you have made it, when you get to the top, when you win a game or a bet or an argument. And contrast it with the kind of feeling you get when you really enjoy the job you are doing, you are absorbed in, the action that you are currently engaged in. And once…
Updated: Sep 05, 2023
People have been known to be happy even in the oppressive atmosphere of a concentration camp! It is from the oppression of your programming that you need to be liberated.
The nature of attachments is such, that even if you satisfy many of them in the course of a single day, the one attachment that was not satisfied will prey upon your mind and make you unhappy. There is no way to win the battle of attachments. As well search for water without wetness as for an attachment without unhappiness. No one has ever lived who has come up with a formula for keeping the objects of one’s attachments without struggle, anxiety, fear and, sooner or later, defeat.
There is only one way to win the battle of attachments: Drop them. Contrary to popular belief, dropping attachments is easy. All you have to do is see, but really see, the following truths. First truth: You are holding on to a false belief, namely, the belief that without this particular person or thing you will not be happy. Take your attachments one at a time and see the falseness of this belief. You may encounter resistance from your heart, but the moment you do see, there will be an immediate emotional result. At that very instant the attachment loses its force.
Second truth: If you just enjoy things, refusing to let yourself be attached to them, that is, refusing to hold the false belief that you will not be happy without them, you are spared all the struggle and emotional strain of protecting them and guarding them for yourself. Has it occurred to you that you can keep all the objects of your attachments without giving them up, without renouncing a single one of them and you can enjoy them even more on a nonattachment, a nonclinging basis, because you are peaceful now and relaxed and unthreatened in your enjoyment of them?
The third and final truth: If you learn to enjoy the scent of a thousand flowers you will not cling to one or suffer when you cannot get it. If you have a thousand favorite dishes, the loss of one will go unnoticed and leave your happiness unimpaired. But it is precisely your attachments that prevent you from developing a wider and more varied taste for things and people. In the light of these three truths no attachment can survive. But the light must shine uninterruptedly if it is to be effective.
An attachment is a major killer of life. To really hear the symphony you must be sensitively attuned to every instrument in the orchestra. When you take pleasure only in the drum, you cease to hear the symphony because the sound of the drum has blotted out the other instruments. You may have your preferences for drum or violin or piano; no harm in these, for a preference does not damage your capacity to hear and enjoy the other instruments. But the moment your preference turns into an attachment, it hardens you to the other sounds, you suddenly undervalue them. And it blinds you to its particular instrument, for you give it a value out of all proportion to its merit. Now look at a person or a thing you have an attachment for: someone or something to whom you have handed over the power to make you happy or unhappy. Observe how, because of your concentration on getting this person or thing and holding on to it and enjoying it exclusively to the exclusion of other things and persons; and how, because of your obsession with this person or thing, you have less sensitivity to the rest of the world. You have become hardened. And have the courage to see how prejudiced and blind you have become in the presence of this object of your attachment.
But over a period of time, to sit in a particular posture and direct the attention in a certain way is a form of conditioning. If you do it as a game or mechanical ritual, then yes—you condition the mind. But that is a misuse of Vipassana. When it is practised correctly, it enables you to experience truth directly, for yourself. And from this experience, naturally understanding develops, which destroys all previous conditioning.
To remain happy and peaceful even when confronted by the suffering of others—isn’t that sheer insensitivity? Being sensitive to the suffering of others does not mean that you must become sad yourself. Instead you should remain calm and balanced, so that you can act to alleviate their suffering. If you also become sad, you increase the unhappiness around you; you do not help others, you do not help yourself.
You speak of being overpowered by negativity. How about being overpowered by positivity, for example, by love? What you call “positivity” is the real nature of the mind. When the mind is free of conditioning, it is always full of love—pure love—and you feel peaceful and happy. If you remove the negativity, then positivity remains, purity remains. Let the entire world be overwhelmed by this positivity!
As he examined the body, the Buddha also examined the mind and found that in broad, overall terms it consisted of four processes: consciousness (viññāṇa), perception (saññā), sensation (vedanā), and reaction (saṅkhāra). The first process, consciousness, is the receiving part of the mind, the act of undifferentiated awareness or cognition. It simply registers the occurrence of any phenomenon, the reception of any input, physical or mental. It notes the raw data of experience without assigning labels or making value judgments. The second mental process is perception, the act of recognition. This part of the mind identifies whatever has been noted by the consciousness. It distinguishes, labels, and categorizes the incoming raw data and makes evaluations, positive or negative. The next part of the mind is sensation. Actually as soon as any input is received, sensation arises, a signal that something is happening. So long as the input is not evaluated, the sensation remains neutral. But once a value is attached to the incoming data, the sensation becomes pleasant or unpleasant, depending on the evaluation given.
If the sensation is pleasant, a wish forms to prolong and intensify the experience. If it is an unpleasant sensation, the wish is to stop it, to push it away. The mind reacts with liking or disliking.1 For example, when the ear is functioning normally and one hears a sound, cognition is at work. When the sound is recognized as words, with positive or negative connotations, perception has started to function. Next sensation comes into play. If the words are praise, a pleasant sensation arises. If they are abuse, an unpleasant sensation arises. At once reaction takes place. If the sensation is pleasant, one starts liking it, wanting more words of praise. If the sensation is unpleasant, one starts disliking it, wanting to stop the abuse. The same steps occur whenever any of the other senses receives an input: consciousness, perception, sensation, reaction. These four mental functions are even more fleeting than the ephemeral particles composing the material reality. Each moment that the senses come into contact with any object, the four mental processes occur with lightning-like rapidity and repeat themselves with each subsequent moment of contact. So rapidly does this occur, however, that one is unaware of what is happening. It is only when a particular reaction has been repeated over a longer period of time and has taken a pronounced, intensified form that awareness of it develops at the conscious level.
You speak of the experience of “I” only in negative terms. Hasn’t it a positive side? Isn’t there an experience of “I” which fills a person with joy, peace, and rapture? By meditation you will find that all such sensual pleasures are im-permanent; they come and pass away. If this “I” really enjoys them, if they are “my” pleasures, then “I” must have some mastery over them. But they just arise and pass away without my control. What “I” is there?
Well, instead of “I,” let us say the experience of a person. Feeling feels; there is no one to feel it. Things are just happening, that’s all. Now it seems to you that there must be an “I” who feels, but if you practice, you will reach the stage where ego dissolves. Then your question will disappear!
I came here because I felt “I” needed to come here. Yes! Quite true. For conventional purposes, we cannot run away from “I” or “mine.” But clinging to them, taking them as real in an ultimate sense will bring only suffering.
Mind precedes all phenomena, mind matters most, everything is mind-made. If with an impure mind you speak or act, then suffering follows you as the cartwheel follows the foot of the draft animal. If with a pure mind you speak or act, then happiness follows you as a shadow that never departs.3
Whatever suffering arises has a reaction as its cause. If all reactions cease to be then there is no more suffering.
The real kamma, the real cause of suffering is the reaction of the mind. One fleeting reaction of liking or disliking may not be very strong and may not give much result, but it can have a cumulative effect. The reaction is repeated moment after moment, intensifying with each repetition, and developing into craving or aversion. This is what in his first sermon the Buddha called taṇhā, literally “thirst”: the mental habit of insatiable longing for what is not, which implies an equal and irremediable dissatisfaction with what is.5 And the stronger longing and dissatisfaction become, the deeper their influence on our thinking, our speech, and our actions—and the more suffering they will cause.
Some reactions, the Buddha said, are like lines drawn on the surface of a pool of water: as soon as they are drawn they are erased. Others are like lines traced on a sandy beach: if drawn in the morning they are gone by night, wiped away by the tide or the wind. Others are like lines cut deeply into rock with chisel and hammer. They too will be obliterated as the rock erodes, but it will take ages for them to disappear.6
QUESTION: Isn’t suffering a natural part of life? Why should we try to escape from it? S. N. GOENKA: We have become so involved in suffering that to be free from it seems unnatural. But when you experience the real happiness of mental purity, you will know that this is the natural state of the mind.
Can’t the experience of suffering ennoble people and help them to grow in character? Yes. In fact, this technique deliberately uses suffering as a tool to make one a noble person. But it will work only if you learn how to observe suffering objectively. If you are attached to your suffering, the experience will not ennoble you; you will always remain miserable.
What you call “free, spontaneous action” is really blind reaction, which is always harmful. By learning to observe yourself, you will find that whenever a difficult situation arises in life, you can keep the balance of your mind. With that balance you can choose freely how to act. You will take real action, which is always positive, always beneficial for you and for all others.
Our own mental actions have an influence on others. If we generate nothing but negativity in the mind, that negativity has a harmful effect on those who come into contact with us. If we fill the mind with positivity, with goodwill toward others, then it will have a helpful effect on those around us. You cannot control the actions, the kamma of others, but you can become master of yourself in order to have a positive influence on those around you.
Our difficulty, our ignorance is that we remain unheedful while planting seeds. We keep planting seeds of neem, but when the time comes for fruit we are suddenly alert, we want sweet mangoes. And we keep crying and praying and hoping for mangoes. This doesn’t work.7
He continued probing within himself to experience the real nature of suffering, and he found that “attachment to the five aggregates is suffering.”2 At a very deep level, suffering is the inordinate attachment that each one of us has developed toward this body and toward this mind, with its cognitions, perceptions, sensations, and reactions. People cling strongly to their identity—their mental and physical being—when actually there are only evolving processes. This clinging to an unreal idea of oneself, to something that in fact is constantly changing, is suffering.
The object is secondary; the fact is that we seek to maintain the state of craving continually, because this very craving produces in us a pleasurable sensation that we wish to prolong. Craving becomes a habit that we cannot break, an addiction.
Another great attachment is to the “I,” the ego, the image we have of ourselves. For each of us, the “I” is the most important person in the world. We behave like a magnet surrounded by iron filings: it will automatically arrange the filings in a pattern centered on itself, and with just as little reflection we all instinctively try to arrange the world according to our liking, seeking to attract the pleasant and to repel the unpleasant. But none of us is alone in the world; one “I” is bound to come into conflict with another. The pattern each seeks to create is disturbed by the magnetic fields of others, and we ourselves become subject to attraction or repulsion. The result can only be unhappiness, suffering.
What causes attachment? How does it arise? Analyzing his own nature, the future Buddha found that it develops because of the momentary mental reactions of liking and disliking. The brief, unconscious reactions of the mind are repeated and intensified moment after moment, growing into powerful attractions and repulsions, into all our attachments. Attachment is merely the developed form of the fleeting reaction. This is the immediate cause of suffering. What causes reactions of liking and disliking? Looking deeper he saw that they occur because of sensation. We feel a pleasant sensation and start liking it; we feel an unpleasant sensation and start disliking it.
Then what causes this flow of consciousness? He saw that it arises because of reaction. The mind is constantly reacting, and every reaction gives impetus to the flow of consciousness so that it continues to the next moment. The stronger a reaction, the greater the impetus that it gives. The slight reaction of one moment sustains the flow of consciousness only for a moment. But if that momentary reaction of liking and disliking intensifies into craving or aversion, it gains in strength and sustains the flow of consciousness for many moments, for minutes, for hours.
And what causes these reactions? Observing at the deepest level of reality, he understood that reaction occurs because of ignorance. We are unaware of the fact that we react, and unaware of the real nature of what we react to.
At last the truth was clear to him: suffering begins with ignorance about the reality of our true nature, about the phenomenon labelled “I”. And the next cause of suffering is saṅkhāra, the mental habit of reaction. Blinded by ignorance, we generate reactions of craving and aversion, which develop into attachment, leading to all types of unhappiness. The habit of reacting is the kamma, the shaper of our future. And the reaction arises only because of ignorance about our real nature. Ignorance, craving, and aversion are the three roots from which grow all our sufferings in life.
Nothing happens without a cause. If the cause is eradicated, there will be no effect. In this way, the process of the arising of suffering can be reversed: If ignorance is eradicated and completely ceases, reaction ceases; if reaction ceases, consciousness ceases; if consciousness ceases, mind-and-matter cease; if mind-and-matter ceases, the six senses cease; if the six senses cease, contact ceases; if contact ceases, sensation ceases; if sensation ceases, craving and aversion cease; if craving and aversion cease, attachment ceases; if attachment ceases, the process of becoming ceases; if the process of becoming ceases, birth ceases; if birth ceases, decay and death cease, together with sorrow, lamentation, physical and mental suffering and tribulations. Thus this entire mass of suffering ceases.5
We are each responsible for the reactions that cause our suffering. By accepting our responsibility we can learn how to eliminate suffering.
Saṃsāra is not the popular idea of the transmigration of a soul or self that maintains a fixed identity through repeated incarnations. This, the Buddha said, is precisely what does not happen. He insisted that there is no unchanging identity that passes from life to life: “It is just as from the cow comes milk; from milk, curds; from curds, butter; from fresh butter, clarified butter; from clarified butter, the creamy skimmings. When there is milk, it is not considered to be curds, or fresh butter, or clarified butter, or skimmings. Similarly at any time only the present state of existence is considered to be real, and not a past or future one.”7 The Buddha held neither that a fixed ego-principle is reincarnated in successive lives, nor that there is no past or future existence. Instead he realized and taught that only the process of becoming continues from one existence to another, so long as our actions give impetus to the process.
“Celestial beings… what does that mean?” “Oh, you know. Sky-dwellers. Fancy flying types. Them wot have wings and use ’em.
Morrigan glared at him. “Low-key? You promise?” “I swear to you.” Jupiter held a hand over his heart, solemnly. “I told Frank to rein himself in, then rein himself in some more, and keep reining it in until he got to what he thought was woefully understated, and then rein it in about ten times more than that.” “Yeah, but did he listen?” Her patron scoffed, looking highly offended.
They were both quiet for a moment; then the silence was suddenly broken by three of the other doors flying open at once. Anah Kahlo, Francis Fitzwilliam, and Mahir Ibrahim appeared looking equally dazed and intrigued, adjusting their unfamiliar uniforms. Within moments, they were joined by Thaddea, Archan, Lambeth, and— “How good are these BOOTS?” Hawthorne stomped dramatically onto the platform. He grinned at Morrigan and put his hands on his hips, pushing out his chest. “How cool are these clothes? I can see why you like wearing black. I feel like a SUPERHERO. Don’t you feel like a superhero?” “Not very,” admitted Morrigan. “They should give us capes! Don’t you reckon? Should we ask if they can give us capes?”
“I know tomorrow’s Saturday.” Francis glared at him. “Aunt Hester says my knife skills aren’t up to scratch so she’s making me take extra weekend lessons.” Hawthorne gasped. Morrigan had never seen him so affronted as he was by the idea of doing extra schoolwork on the weekend. He seemed to have temporarily lost the capacity for speech.
In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power. In theory, anybody can join the debate about the future of humanity, but it is so hard to maintain a clear vision. We might not even notice that a debate is going on, or what the key questions are. Most of us can’t afford the luxury of investigating, because we have more pressing things to do: we have to go to work, take care of the kids, or look after elderly parents. Unfortunately, history does not give discounts. If the future of humanity is decided in your absence, because you are too busy feeding and clothing your kids, you and they will not be exempt from the consequences. This is unfair; but who said history was fair? As a historian, I cannot give people food or clothes—but I can try to offer some clarity, thereby helping to level the global playing field. If this empowers even a handful of additional people to join the debate about the future of our species, I have done my job.
A global world puts unprecedented pressure on our personal conduct and morality. Each of us is ensnared within numerous all-encompassing spiderwebs, which on the one hand restrict our movements but on the other transmit our tiniest jiggle to faraway destinations.
Humankind is losing faith in the liberal story that dominated global politics in recent decades, exactly when the merger of biotech and infotech confronts us with the biggest challenges humankind has ever encountered.
In the past, we gained the power to manipulate the world around us and reshape the entire planet, but because we didn’t understand the complexity of the global ecology, the changes we made inadvertently disrupted the entire ecological system, and now we face an ecological collapse. In the coming century biotech and infotech will give us the power to manipulate the world inside us and reshape ourselves, but because we don’t understand the complexity of our own minds, the changes we will make might upset our mental system to such an extent that it too might break down.
In the twentieth century, the masses revolted against exploitation and sought to translate their vital role in the economy into political power. Now the masses fear irrelevance, and they are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late.
Whereas in 1940 the Dutch gave up their own independence after little more than four days of fighting, they fought for more than four long and bitter years to suppress Indonesian independence. No wonder that many national liberation movements throughout the world placed their hopes on communist Moscow and Beijing rather than on the self-proclaimed champions of liberty in the West.
Humans vote with their feet. In my travels around the world I have met numerous people in many countries who wish to immigrate to the United States, Germany, Canada, or Australia. I have met a few who want to move to China or Japan. But I have yet to meet a single person who dreams of immigrating to Russia.
But liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse and technological disruption. Liberalism traditionally relied on economic growth to magically solve difficult social and political conflicts. Liberalism reconciled the proletariat with the bourgeoisie, the faithful with atheists, natives with immigrants, and Europeans with Asians by promising everybody a larger slice of the pie. With a constantly growing pie, that was possible. However, economic growth will not save the global ecosystem; just the opposite, in fact, for economic growth is the cause of the ecological crisis. And economic growth will not solve technological disruption, for it is predicated on the invention of more and more disruptive technologies.
The first step is to tone down the prophecies of doom and switch from panic mode to bewilderment. Panic is a form of hubris. It comes from the smug feeling that one knows exactly where the world is heading: down. Bewilderment is more humble and therefore more clear-sighted. Do you feel like running down the street crying “The apocalypse is upon us”? Try telling yourself, “No, it’s not that. Truth is, I just don’t understand what’s going on in the world.”
Any story that seeks to gain humanity’s allegiance will be tested above all in its ability to deal with the twin revolutions in infotech and biotech. If liberalism, nationalism, Islam, or some novel creed wishes to shape the world of the year 2050, it will need not only to make sense of artificial intelligence, Big Data algorithms, and bioengineering but also to incorporate them into a new and meaningful narrative.
Of course, personalized art might never catch on, because people will continue to prefer common hits that everybody likes. How can you dance or sing together to a song nobody besides you knows? But algorithms could prove even more adept at producing global hits than personalized rarities. By using massive biometric databases garnered from millions of people, the algorithm could know which biochemical buttons to press in order to produce a global hit that would get everybody swinging like crazy on the dance floors.
The U.S. armed forces need thirty people to operate every unmanned Predator or Reaper drone flying over Syria, while analyzing the resulting harvest of information occupies at least eighty people more. In 2015 the U.S. Air Force lacked sufficient trained humans to fill all these positions, and therefore faced an ironic crisis in manning its unmanned aircraft.
After IBM’s chess program Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, humans did not stop playing chess. Rather, thanks to AI trainers, human chess masters became better than ever, and at least for a while human-AI teams known as “centaurs” outperformed both humans and computers in chess. AI might similarly help groom the best detectives, bankers, and soldiers in history.
Today, despite the shortage of drone operators and data analysts, the U.S. Air Force is unwilling to fill the gaps with Walmart dropouts. You wouldn’t want an inexperienced recruit to mistake an Afghan wedding party for a high-level Taliban conference. Consequently, despite the appearance of many new human jobs, we might nevertheless witness the rise of a new useless class. We might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labor.
On December 7, 2017, a critical milestone was reached, not when a computer defeated a human at chess—that’s old news—but when Google’s AlphaZero program defeated the Stockfish 8 program. Stockfish 8 was the world’s computer chess champion for 2016. It had access to centuries of accumulated human experience in chess, as well as decades of computer experience. It was able to calculate seventy million chess positions per second. In contrast, AlphaZero performed only eighty thousand such calculations per second, and its human creators had not taught it any chess strategies—not even standard openings. Rather, AlphaZero used the latest machine-learning principles to self-learn chess by playing against itself. Nevertheless, out of a hundred games the novice AlphaZero played against Stockfish, AlphaZero won twenty-eight and tied seventy-two. It didn’t lose even once. Since AlphaZero had learned nothing from any human, many of its winning moves and strategies seemed unconventional to the human eye. They may well be considered creative, if not downright genius. Can you guess how long it took AlphaZero to learn chess from scratch, prepare for the match against Stockfish, and develop its genius instincts? Four hours. That’s not a typo. For centuries, chess was considered one of the crowning glories of human intelligence. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide.18
AlphaZero is not the only imaginative software out there. Many programs now routinely outperform human chess players not just in brute calculation but even in “creativity.” In human-only chess tournaments, judges are constantly on the lookout for players who try to cheat by secretly getting help from computers. One of the ways to catch cheaters is to monitor the level of originality players display. If they play an exceptionally creative move, the judges will often suspect that it cannot possibly be a human move—it must be a computer move. At least in chess, creativity is already considered to be the trademark of computers rather than humans!
If a forty-year-old former drone pilot takes three years to reinvent herself as a designer of virtual worlds, she may well need a lot of government help to sustain herself and her family during that time. (This kind of scheme is currently being pioneered in Scandinavia, where governments follow the motto “Protect workers, not jobs.”)
The Google search algorithm has a very sophisticated taste when it comes to ranking the web pages of ice cream vendors, and the most successful ice cream vendors in the world are those that the Google algorithm ranks first—not those that produce the tastiest ice cream.
A related idea proposes to widen the range of human activities that are considered to be “jobs.” At present, billions of parents take care of children, neighbors look after one another, and citizens organize communities, without any of these valuable activities being recognized as jobs. Maybe we need to flip a switch in our minds and realize that taking care of a child is arguably the most important and challenging job in the world.
Alternatively, governments could subsidize universal basic services rather than income. Instead of giving money to people, who then shop around for whatever they want, the government might subsidize free education, free healthcare, free transportation, and so forth. This is in fact the utopian vision of communism. Though the communist plan to start a working-class revolution might well become outdated, perhaps we should still aim to realize the communist goal by other means. It is debatable whether it is better to provide people with universal basic income (the capitalist paradise) or universal basic services (the communist paradise).
American voters might conceivably agree that taxes paid by Amazon and Google for their U.S. business could be used to give stipends or free services to unemployed miners in Pennsylvania and jobless taxi drivers in New York. But would American voters also agree that these taxes should be sent to support unemployed people in places defined by President Trump as “shithole countries”?
Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including the conditions of other people. When things improve, expectations balloon, and so even dramatic improvements in conditions might leave us as dissatisfied as before. If universal basic support is aimed at improving the objective conditions of the average person in 2050, it has a fair chance of succeeding. But if it is aimed at making people subjectively more satisfied with their lot and preventing social discontent, it is likely to fail.
Although they are poor and unemployed, in survey after survey these ultra-Orthodox Jewish men report higher levels of life satisfaction than any other section of Israeli society. This is due to the strength of their community bonds, as well as to the deep meaning they find in studying scripture and performing rituals.
A small room full of Jewish men discussing the Talmud might well generate more joy, engagement, and insight than a huge textile sweatshop full of hardworking factory hands.
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” —George Bernard Shaw
“There’s what is and what ain’t, and there’s what you do about it. Regret’s just a way to make you feel okay that you’re not makin’ amends. A man can waste a life with regrets.”
“All right, we’re heading back in time to seventeenth-century France, at the court of Louis the Fourteenth.”
I know the difference between genuine affection and a robot that’s programmed to say nice things.
“Everyone thinks I have a death wish, you know? But I don’t want to die—dying is easy. No, I want to live, but getting close to death is the only way to feel alive. And once you do, it makes you realize that everything you were doing before wasn’t actually living. It was just making do. Call me crazy, but I think we do the best living when the stakes are high.”
“Then run,” she said. He stifled a laugh, but she was serious. “The thing about freedom, Kell? It doesn’t come naturally. Almost no one has it handed to them. I’m free because I fought for it. You’re supposed to be the most powerful magician in all the worlds. If you don’t want to be here, then go.”
For me, it’s how many useful things I create, whether songs, companies, articles, websites, or anything else. If I create something that’s not useful to others, it doesn’t count. But I’m also not interested in doing something useful unless it needs my creative input. How do you grade yourself? It’s important to know in advance, to make sure you’re staying focused on what’s honestly important to you, instead of doing what others think you should.
But even well-meaning companies accidentally get trapped in survival mode. A business is started to solve a problem. But if the problem were truly solved, that business would no longer be needed! So the business accidentally or unconsciously keeps the problem around so that they can keep solving it for a fee. (I don’t want to pick on anyone’s favorite pharmaceutical company or online productivity subscription tools, so let’s just say that any business that’s in business to sell you a cure is motivated not to focus on prevention.) It’s kind of like the grand tales in which the hero needs to be prepared to die to save the day. Your company should be willing to die for your customers. That’s the Tao of business: Care about your customers more than about yourself, and you’ll do well.
Banks love to lend money to those who don’t need it. Record labels love to sign musicians who don’t need their help. People fall in love with people who won’t give them the time of day. It’s a strange law of human behavior. It’s pretty universal. If you set up your business like you don’t need the money, people are happier to pay you. When someone’s doing something for the money, people can sense it, like they sense a desperate lover. It’s a turnoff. When someone’s doing something for love, being generous instead of stingy, trusting instead of fearful, it triggers this law: We want to give to those who give. It’s another Tao of business: Set up your business like you don’t need the money, and it’ll likely come your way.
so I made a policy that made us both smile: “We’ll do anything for a pizza.” If you needed a big special favor, we’d give you the number of our local pizza delivery place. If you bought us a pizza, we’d do any favor you wanted. When we’d tell people about this on the phone, they’d often laugh, not believing we were serious. But we’d get a pizza every few weeks. I’d often hear from musicians later that this was the moment they fell in love with us.
Procrastination is a habit you develop to cope with anxiety about starting or completing a task. It is your attempted solution to cope with tasks that are boring or overwhelming. When you use the Now Habit strategies to lower your anxiety, fears, and self-doubts, you can stop using procrastination as an escape and can double your productivity and, often, double your income. When you learn to work efficiently—in the Flow State or Zone, using more of your brain-cell power—you have less reason to avoid important, top-priority tasks.
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The Now Habit frees you of shame and blame and moves you to a leadership perspective in your life. From this awakened sense of a larger, stronger self, you are free of the inner conflict between the inner voices of “you have to” versus “but I don’t want to.” You begin to live your life from choice—a leadership function of your higher, human brain and your new identity as a producer.
The Now Habit exercises help you break the cycle of procrastination by removing the stigma of calling yourself “a procrastinator” who’s burdened by having to get so many things done. Instead, you become like martial artists and peak-performing athletes who can push aside distracting thoughts and focus their attention on what they can do now. You don’t have to wait until you feel confident, motivated, or until you know it all; you start now and see what comes to you. You rapidly shift from not knowing to knowing—which is the essence of creativity.
If you suffer from extreme panic and blocks when confronted by pressure to perform, this book will show you how to overcome the initial terror so you can get started. It will teach you to use empowering inner dialogue that leads to responsible choices, while avoiding ambivalent messages such as “you should” and “you have to.” The typical procrastinator completes most assignments on time, but the pressure of doing work at the last minute causes unnecessary anxiety and diminishes the quality of the end result. Procrastination is a problem that we all have in some areas of our lives, be it balancing the budget, filing a complicated legal brief, or painting the spare bedroom—anything we have delayed in favor of more pressing or pleasurable pursuits. We all have tasks and goals we attempt to delay—or totally escape.
The procrastination habit catches people in a vicious cycle: get overwhelmed, feel pressured, fear failure, try harder, work longer, feel resentful, lose motivation, and then procrastinate. The cycle starts with the pressure of being overwhelmed and ends with an attempt to escape through procrastination. As long as you’re caught in the cycle, there is no escape. You can’t even enjoy the recuperative and creative benefits of guilt-free leisure time. Suddenly, any time spent on play—and even time spent on more enjoyable work—feels like an uneasy shirking from what you should be doing. By negatively affecting the way you think and feel about work, leisure, yourself, and your chances for success, procrastination becomes a part of your identity.
Dozens of books offer pop-psychology theories about why people procrastinate. They encourage self-criticism by giving you additional negative labels, and they imply that you’re lazy by making greater demands for discipline and organization. But there’s a big difference between just diagnosing what’s wrong and providing a system that enables you to correct it. People who have been procrastinating for years on major life goals are already pretty good at self-criticism. What they need are positive, practical techniques for getting beyond the stumbling blocks and on to achieving their goals. Some books offer prosaic advice such as “break it into small pieces” or “set priorities.” You already know this. You’ve heard the advice, you have the knowledge—you may even have paid dearly for it. But this kind of advice isn’t helpful because it misses the point: you would do these things if you could, if it were that simple. People don’t procrastinate just to be ornery or because they’re irrational. They procrastinate because it makes sense, given how vulnerable they feel to criticism, failure, and their own perfectionism.
You do not procrastinate twenty-four hours a day. When you turn your attention toward what you love to do—activities that foster your spontaneity, motivation, and curiosity—you know that you are more than a procrastinator, more than just lazy. With these experiences you can begin to shed your identity as a procrastinator and reconnect with your innate human drive to produce and make a contribution.
If early training has caused you to associate work with pain and humiliation, then just approaching an intimidating or unpleasant task can bring on a reliving of criticism, not only from your current boss but from parents, previous bosses, and teachers. Every insecurity bubbles up to your consciousness as you think about working on some project you feel you’re no good at. Pain, resentment, hurt, and fear of failure have become associated with certain kinds of tasks. When life seems to hold too many of these tasks it’s as if you’re driving with the brakes on; you’ve lost your motivation and doubt your own inner drive to get things done. At this point your self-criticism seems justified. You’re likely to think of yourself as a chronic procrastinator—someone doomed to experience anxiety and self-reproach when faced with certain kinds of projects. Your first step toward breaking the procrastination habit and becoming a producer involves redefining procrastination and coming to a new understanding of how and why we use it. Procrastination is not the cause of our problems with accomplishing tasks; it is an attempt to resolve a variety of underlying issues, including low self-esteem, perfectionism, fear of failure and of success, indecisiveness, an imbalance between work and play, ineffective goal-setting, and negative concepts about work and yourself.
A complete treatment of procrastination must address the underlying blocked needs that cause a person to resort to procrastination. The Now Habit starts with a new definition: Procrastination is a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision. From this definition it follows that those most vulnerable to procrastination are those who feel the most threatened by difficulty in starting a project, criticism, failure, and the loss of other opportunities that may result from committing to one project.
Advice such as “just do it,” “try harder,” and “get organized” is based on the old definition: “Your problem is procrastination. If only you weren’t so lazy you could do it.” Well-meaning parents, teachers, writers, and friends will worsen the problem by adding: “This is a really tough job. You’re going to have to work really hard. No fooling around. No time for friends and vacations until this is completed.” The message they communicate is: “Life is dull and hard. There’s no time for fun. Work is dreadful, yet it must be
1. Creating safety will show you how to put a psychological safety net under your high-wire act so that you can lessen your fear of failure and learn how to bounce back from mistakes with renewed purpose. 2. Reprogramming negative attitudes through positive self-talk will help you to identify your negative messages to yourself and discover how they adversely affect you, while replacing them with positive phrasing that directs your energy toward task-oriented thoughts and rapid solutions. 3. Using the symptom to trigger the cure will show you how to use old habits to evoke and strengthen the formation of new, positive habits. 4. Guilt-free play will teach you how to strategically schedule your leisure time in order to shift your focus from work to play, thereby creating a subconscious urge to return to work. 5. Three-dimensional thinking and the reverse calendar will show you how to control the terror of being overwhelmed by important tasks by creating a step-by-step calendar of your path to achievement, with adequate time to rest and to fully appreciate your accomplishments. 6. Making worry work for you will show you how developing plans for coping with distractions will help you achieve your goals and strengthen your ability to face the worst that could happen. 7. The Unschedule will let you see the freedom awaiting you through prescheduled guilt-free play, will create a realistic image of the amount of time available, and will give you a built-in time clock for recording quality time on projects to let you see how much you’ve accomplished. 8. Setting realistic goals will help you to clear your mind of guilt-producing goals that cannot be worked on in the present, and will direct your energies toward the few worthwhile goals that deserve your attention now. 9. Working in the flow state will bring you beyond stress and low motivation to a state of focused energy, interest, and concentration within two minutes or less—letting you know that regardless of how you feel about your project, within moments you will be working at your most productive and creative levels. 10. Controlled setbacks will prepare you for setbacks so that you quickly turn them into opportunities, anticipate the temptation to procrastinate, and build persistence into your overall plan for achievement.
These six warning signs will help you quickly determine if you have significant difficulties with procrastination, goal achievement, or inefficient work habits. 1. Does life feel like a long series of obligations that cannot be met? Do you • keep an impossibly long “to do” list? • talk to yourself in “have to’s” and “should’s”? • feel powerless, with no sense of choice? • feel agitated, pressured, continually fearful of being caught procrastinating? • suffer from insomnia and have difficulty unwinding at night, on weekends, and on vacations (if in fact you take vacations)? 2. Are you unrealistic about time? Do you • talk about starting on projects in vague terms such as “sometime next week” or “in the fall”? • lose track of how you spend your time? • have an empty schedule without a clear sense of commitments, plans, subgoals, and deadlines? • chronically arrive late at meetings and dinners? • fail to take into account the actual time it takes to drive across town during rush hour? 3. Are you vague about your goals and values? Do you • find it difficult to stay committed to any one person or project? • have difficulty knowing what you really want for yourself, but are clear about what you should want? • get easily distracted from a goal by another plan that seems to be free of problems and obstacles? • lack the ability to distinguish between what’s the most important use of your time and what’s not? 4. Are you unfulfilled, frustrated, depressed? Do you • have life goals that you’ve never completed or even attempted? • fear always being a procrastinator? • find that you’re never satisfied with what you accomplish? • feel deprived—always working or feeling guilty about not working? • continually wonder “Why did I do that?” or “What’s wrong with me?” 5. Are you indecisive and afraid of being criticized for making a mistake? Do you • delay completing projects because you try to make them perfect? • fear taking responsibility for decisions because you’re afraid of being blamed if something goes wrong? • demand perfection even on low-priority work? • expect to be above mistakes and criticism? • worry endlessly about “what if something goes wrong”?
6. Are low self-esteem and lack of assertiveness holding you back from becoming productive? Do you • blame outside events for your failures because you’re afraid to admit to any deficiencies? • believe “I am what I do” or “I am my net worth”? • feel ineffective in controlling your life? • fear being judged and found wanting?
Early in life they learn that all they can expect from finishing a project is criticism or so-called constructive feedback on how it might be improved. What’s clearly being communicated is: “There’s no rest for you. You’ll always need to keep trying. Life and work are hard; it won’t be easy for you; you have a lot more work to do before you can rest on your laurels; you’d better get used to things getting tough because adulthood is even worse than childhood; and while you’re out having fun, some catastrophe is lurking around the corner, waiting to surprise you.”
I wanted to challenge at least two of the counterproductive assumptions Clare’s story revealed: the feeling that she had to force herself—that there needed to be an inner conflict; and that this constant conflict is normal, the way everybody lives—as if it’s part of human nature to be lazy.
In my work with thousands of procrastinators I have discovered that there is one main reason why we procrastinate: it rewards us with temporary relief from stress. In the case of Clare, who had many underlying reasons for seeking procrastination as a refuge, she learned to use procrastination because it effectively lessened her fear of being judged.
Maintaining your own record for a few days will give you a pretty good estimate of how you spend your time. As you review a typical week’s activities you can total the amount of time spent on the phone, reading the mail, eating, socializing, working, and so forth. This will reveal patterns that you may wish to change and others that you wish to encourage or start earlier in your day. You may be alarmed to find that much of what transpires in your life is not directly related to high-priority tasks. Don’t expect to find eight hours of quality work a day. Much of the legitimate activity in life is not directly related to productivity. For example, work in a large organization does involve socializing, meetings, and communication to maintain a team approach and commitment to a common vision. Simply look for areas of improvement and greater control over interruptions and lost time. With an answering machine or administrative assistant, most telephone calls can be returned at your convenience rather than handled as they come in, breaking your concentration and momentum.
Or you may find that, like many people, you take more than an hour to “settle in” before really getting started. What would happen to your efficiency level if you started on a high-priority project first thing in the morning, rather than reading the mail or making phone calls? To make changes, you’ll need to break out of automatic pilot and start making conscious choices when you first enter your office in the morning. Use your record to identify the events that precede procrastination or low-priority work. Knowing which events trigger negative habits will help you switch to more productive activities.
First, you give a task or a goal the power to determine your worth and happiness. You think, “Getting this job, passing this test, dating this person will change my life and make me happy.” When a perfect performance or the achievement of a specific goal becomes the sole measure of your self-worth, too much is at stake to just start working without some leverage, such as procrastination, to break the equation of self-worth = performance. Berkeley psychologist Rich Beery states that fear of failure stems from assuming that what you produce reflects your complete ability. You therefore use procrastination to protect your worth from being judged. Second, you use perfectionism to raise the task 100 feet above the ground, so that any mistakes would be tantamount to death, and any failure or rejection would be intolerable. You demand that you do it perfectly—without anxiety, with complete acceptance from your audience, with no criticism.
Third, you find yourself frozen with anxiety as your natural stress response produces adrenaline to deal with threats to your survival. The more issues you pile upon this task the more serious the threat if an error occurs. So in a series of “what if’s” you create a catastrophic image of a row of falling dominoes—one mistake leading to the loss of a client, leading to the loss of a job, leading to failed attempts at ever finding another job, leading to the breakup of your marriage, and so on. With such images it doesn’t take much to feel tension and stress and then to seek temporary relief through procrastination.
Fourth, you then use procrastination to escape your dilemma, which brings the deadline closer, creating time pressure, a higher level of anxiety, and a more immediate and frightening threat than even your fear of failure or of criticism for imperfect work. You might even feel more powerful at this point; after all, you balanced out your anxieties and made them work for you. You also escape the terrible equation of self-worth = performance by delaying enough so that you cannot be tested on your real ability—that is, what you could do if you had enough time.
In order to maximize your performance in a stressful world, you must create a protected and indisputable sense of worth for yourself. Until you do, energy and concentration will be drained from work and put into preparing for imagined threats to your survival, and into procrastination as a means of coping. Regardless of how you do it, or what you say, provide a safe place where you make yourself free of judgment, a place and a time where you can stop trying to perform perfectly.
If you are threatening yourself with self-hatred and a life of unhappiness unless you achieve your goal, it’s impossible to concentrate on the work in front of you now. You must have some sort of protection from these self-imposed threats. Your healthy survival response (commonly thought of as stress) will not stop until you are safe. You need a commitment to yourself and your innate worth that lets you know that, in spite of any failures, you believe in yourself enough to try again, to get back on this board—or some other board more suited to your unique talents.
The ambivalent self-talk of procrastination—“I should do it, but I don’t want to. I have to because they’re making me do it”—communicates victimhood, resistance, stress, and confusion. Of all the characteristics that separate producers from procrastinators, none is more liberating than the producer’s focus on “choice” and “choosing.” Messages of “I choose,” “I decide,” or “I will” direct energy toward a single personal goal with clear responsibility for the outcome. We often get caught in the trap of talking to ourselves in a self-pitying “have to” way about going to see the dentist, sending cards to friends, paying taxes, working, or facing the boss. These statements confirm the belief that others are making us do something against our will. The effect is to create an image of ourselves as defeated by small tasks in life, overburdened, working hard, and without joy. Repeated over and over again, a “have to” statement communicates to your subconscious mind • I don’t want to do it. • They’re making me do it against my will. • I have to do it or else!—something awful and terrible will happen. I will hate myself. • This is a no-win situation: if I don’t do it I’ll be punished; if I do it I’ll be going against myself.
I’m not saying that ideals and goals aren’t worth striving for. What I am saying is that “should’s” create negative comparisons without indicating how to get from where you are to where you’d like to be. “Have to’s” and “should’s” do not communicate to the mind and body a clear picture of: • what you choose to do • when you choose to do it • where you choose to start it • how you choose to do it
• See themselves as always burdened by incomplete work. They see themselves as always working, yet undeserving of a rest. • Think of their lives as “being on hold,” with only the faintest hope that someday they will be organized enough or successful enough to enjoy life. • View human beings as lazy and requiring pressure in order to create motivation. Both use negative self-talk and threats, but workaholics respond to this pressure with constant “busyness,” while procrastinators respond by being overwhelmed and immobilized by the anxiety. • Maintain negative attitudes toward work. They see work as infinite and insatiable, requiring deprivation and sacrifice, which workaholics are willing to make, often to avoid getting too close to anyone. Procrastinators exaggerate the sacrifice, escaping to halfhearted play out of fear of never being able to play again.
We are more likely to work productively when we can anticipate pleasure and success rather than isolation and anxiety. Demanding twenty—or even four—hours of tedious work involving confinement and struggle is hardly calculated to get us motivated, especially when there are so many more pleasurable alternatives available. Given the choice between completing your income taxes and seeing an old friend, the odds are strongly in favor of the old friend—unless you have a strategy.
When attempting to motivate yourself to start working on a goal, do you push yourself toward the goal with threats, or do you use your attraction to the goal to pull you forward? Unfortunately, most people use a “push method” of motivation and are unaware that there are alternatives. In any of a variety of sectors, including the military, business, or institutes of learning, we are subjected to threats—the “push method” of motivation—designed to stimulate action through fear of punishment. The fact is that the random action produced by punishment or fear is not directed toward a goal, but rather, like procrastination, toward escape from the fear. These punishing tactics often create a paralyzing rather than a motivating effect. Too often this harsh method is used more to exercise authority and control than to achieve positive results. The use of threats by those in authority is an example of how the attempted solution, rather than generating positive motivation for the goal, is counterproductive and contributes to procrastination by creating resistance to authority, fear of failure, and fear of success.
The “push method” of management assumes that humans are basically lazy and that scaring the hell out of them will create motivation. For example, those in authority might say: • Private Jones, if you don’t finish peeling that truckload of potatoes by 1700 hours, you’ll lose your weekend pass for the next six months. • This firm needs to generate $200,000 worth of sales this month or we’ll all be looking for jobs. • Unless you increase the number of clients you see each day to at least fifteen, we will have to close this center. • This freshman class had better learn now that you’re in for a lot of hard work. By the end of the semester you’ll have read this entire shelf of books; and by the time you graduate, this entire wall of books.
The three major fears that block action and create procrastination are the terror of being overwhelmed, the fear of failure, and the fear of not finishing. These three blocks usually interact with each other and escalate any initial fears and stresses. Overcoming any one of the three quickens the destruction of the remaining blocks because you build confidence as you face and live through any fear. Studies have confirmed that as little as thirty seconds of staying with a feared situation—a barking dog, a crowded party, giving a speech—while using positive self-talk is enough to start the process of replacing a phobic response with positive alternatives. Learning to stay with any fear will be much easier when you have weapons and tools that give your brain alternatives to running away.
Being overwhelmed by a large or important task is a form of psychological and physical terror. As an eager and productive new lawyer, Joel found great satisfaction in working on depositions and briefs that he could complete quickly. However, he shied away from more complicated cases. His fear and procrastination began to get in the way of his advancement in the firm. Whenever he was faced with an important or risky case, his physical and emotional reactions were so strong that he felt stuck, unable to do anything. His worrying resulted in insomnia, indecisiveness about small issues, and increased use of coffee and alcohol. He worried about making a mistake, about his ability to handle the case, about how much work he’d have to do to just adequately complete the case, and about his devastation if he failed. As Joel put it:
I become so intense about the possibility of losing the case that I stop myself from ever starting the necessary preparation. This makes me so anxious I can’t decide how I’m going to handle it—how I’ll approach the opposite, or where’s the best place to start. Then I become so frightened that I’ll make a mistake on my choice of what to do that I waste additional valuable time. Eventually, my nervousness and procrastination leave me less time to take depositions and meet court dates. For Joel, and many others like him, the anxiety of being overwhelmed is increased by the expectation that he should be able to start without anxiety, and by the severe self-criticism he directs toward his initial efforts (“How will I ever finish if this is all I can do at the start?”).
Conquering the feeling of being overwhelmed starts with anticipating that it is natural to experience a certain amount of anxiety as you picture all the work involved in completing a large project. It is important not to misinterpret this as a sign that you can’t do it. This normal level of anxiety will not become overwhelming unless you: 1. Insist on knowing the one right place to start. The indecision and delay in looking for the one right place keeps you from getting on to the rest of the project. The possibility that there are several adequate starting points escapes you, and you feel anxious that the one you’ve chosen leads to a devastatingly wrong conclusion. You’ve gotten yourself stuck by thinking in a right-wrong dichotomy—either you do it right the first time or you’re wrong. From this perspective each starting point seems as if it’s set in cement, dictating the succeeding steps, domino fashion, cascading you in the wrong direction. 2. Have not permitted yourself time along the course of your project for learning, building confidence with each step, and asking for help. Your two-dimensional view pressures you to be competent now at the beginning. Instead of allowing yourself to learn along the way, you expect that you should feel confident at the start. 3. Are critical of the fact that you’re only starting, and you tell yourself, “I should be finished.” Each achievement is diminished by being compared with the imagined ideal. The starting point and the path of trial and error have little legitimacy in comparison to your goal. You have little…
All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally unsolvable. . . . [they were] not solved logically in [their] own terms but fade when confronted with a new and stronger life urge. —CARL JUNG
For years you’ve been telling yourself to work harder on difficult projects, and to try to put in more time. The Unschedule and the guilt-free play system help you to put more time into your leisure and more quality into your work. It tells you to make sure you’ve scheduled enough time for high-quality, guilt-free play. It says: • Do not work more than twenty hours a week on this project. • Do not work more than five hours a day on this project. • You must exercise, play, or dance at least one hour a day. • You must take at least one day a week off from any work. • Aim for starting on thirty minutes of quality work. • Work for an imperfect, perfectly human first effort. • Start small.
By requiring you to schedule and stick to recreational time, and to limit your work activity at first to predetermined periods of thirty minutes, the Unschedule builds up a subconscious desire to work more and play less.
1. Schedule only: • previously committed time such as meals, sleep, meetings • free time, recreation, leisure reading • socializing, lunches and dinners with friends • health activities such as swimming, running, tennis, working out at the gym • routine structured events such as commuting time, classes, medical appointments It is basic to the principles of unscheduling that first you fill in your Unschedule with as many nonwork activities as possible. This will help you overcome the fantasy that you have twenty-four hours a day and forty-eight hours on the weekends to work on your projects. It will sharpen your perception of the actual time available and make you a better manager of your time.
Do not schedule work on projects. Remember, first and foremost, that the Unschedule guarantees your guilt-free play and the legitimacy of your personal time. This first step will help you avoid scaring yourself with overly ambitious, overly dictatorial plans for work that lead only to failure, disappointment, self-criticism, and procrastination.
2. Fill in your Unschedule with work on projects only after you have completed at least one-half hour. Think of the Unschedule as a time clock that you punch in as you start work and punch out when you take credit for your progress. You want to maintain an excitement about how much you’ve accomplished in a short period of time rather than anxiety about how much more there is to do. You can also use your thirty-minute commitment as your own deadline to motivate you to work more efficiently.
Students entering Harvard, for example, are brought to a special section of the library where the rough drafts of famous authors are kept. This exercise has quite an impact on young writers who previously thought that the work of geniuses arrived complete and leather-bound in a single stroke of inspiration. Here, the freshmen can examine how a successful writer often starts with an apparently random series of ideas centered around a theme; many of these ideas later proved superfluous to the final design, but were essential to the process of developing a new concept. That is, the early drafts are not discarded like mistakes, but are viewed as the initial steps in unfolding the idea. The
FOCUSING EXERCISE Start by sitting upright in your chair with your feet flat on the floor, with your hands on your thighs. Focus your attention on your breathing. If you’ve been stressed you may discover that your breathing is constricted. Breathe deeply, holding your breath for a moment, and then exhale slowly and completely. Do this three times, counting each time you exhale. With each exhalation imagine that you are letting go of any remaining tension and that you are deciding to drift to a different level of mind. Now focus your attention on the feeling of the chair against your back, buttocks, and legs. Float down into the chair. Let it support you, as you release any unnecessary muscle tension. You can now let go of those muscles. Shift your attention to the feeling of your feet resting against the floor. Now let go of those muscles. As you let go, continue to exhale away any remaining tension. Just let go and allow your body to give you the gift of relaxation and support. During the next few moments, there is nothing much for your conscious mind to do except to be curious and allow your subconscious mind to provide your body with deeper and deeper relaxation with each phrase.
Now, notice how heavy your eyelids are beginning to feel. And as you experience them getting heavier and heavier, let them float softly closed over your eyes. Or you can try to keep them open, and find that it takes so much effort to try that it’s much more comfortable to let them float down of their own accord. As your eyes close, allow relaxation to flow down over your entire body. Letting go of the past. With your next three slow, deep breaths, tell yourself to let go of all thoughts and images about work from the past. Let go of what you’ve just been doing—driving in heavy traffic, making a telephone call, cleaning the house. Let go of thoughts about what you’ve been telling yourself you should or shouldn’t have done. You may even want to let go of your old self-image—your former sense of identity and its limitations on your potential. Inhale, hold your breath, and exhale completely, freeing your mind and body of the past. Letting go of the future. And with your next three slow, deep breaths, let go of what you anticipate happening in the “future”—a constructed concept of a time that really doesn’t exist. Let go of all thoughts and images of future work and deadlines—freeing more energy for focusing in the present. Inhale, hold your breath, and exhale completely, freeing your mind and body of the future. Centering in the present. With your next three slow, deep breaths, notice—just notice—that it really doesn’t take much energy to just be in the present. Let go of trying to be in any particular time, and let go of striving to be any particular way. Just allow yourself to notice the sensations of being where you are now. Choose to be in this situation, allowing the wisdom of your body and inner mind to give you just the right level of energy and relaxation to be here, doing whatever you choose to do in this moment. Inhale, hold your breath, and exhale completely, floating down into the present moment. You can now find yourself at a deeper level of relaxation where you can give yourself any positive suggestion you wish. With your next three slow, deep breaths, you can begin to link the power of the right and left hemispheres of your brain, reaching the flow state under your conscious control. After taking about a minute to complete the first part in twelve breaths, use any one of the following three conclusions to complete your focusing on a specific issue. To overcome procrastination and stimulate interest in starting work, count up from 1 to 3, and say to yourself: With each breath I become more alert, curious, and interested. I’ll be going beyond discomfort and worry to starting with purpose and commitment in just a few seconds of clock time—1. Becoming more and more alert and ready to begin as I tap into the inner wisdom of my mind and many alternative solutions—2. Coming all the way up to full alertness, operating at a genius level with the support of my entire brain and my creative faculty, ready and eager to begin—3. …
about how much I will accomplish in such a short period of clock time. Counting up from 1 to 3, I am becoming more quietly alert and am now ready to work in a focused, concentrated way, rapidly going from not knowing to knowing how to start—1. More alert, relaxed, and energized, ready to use the superior wisdom of my subconscious mind—2. Ready to come all the way up to full alertness with my eyes open, eager to work in conjunction with the creative faculties of my mind—3. If you’ve been procrastinating out of fear of confronting a boss, employee, or loved one, the next version of the exercise will be valuable in getting unstuck from negative patterns of social interaction. Use it to establish your own safety and protection, so that nothing is taken too personally. Then give yourself time to consider the results you wish to achieve and the alternative responses that will get you there. And finally, visualize a positive outcome—that rather than confronting each other as enemies, you and this other person can become valuable allies to each other. I create the feeling of a warm, golden glow around me, an atmosphere that protects me from any distracting words and attitudes of others, and even from any negative thoughts of my own. I have all the time in the world to consider thoughts and remarks or to push them aside and to return my focus toward positive attitudes and my chosen goals. My thoughts and actions convey to others that I am their ally—not their enemy or problem. Others can only help me. I am becoming more and more…
• Choose a project on which you are likely to procrastinate (paying bills, returning letters, home repairs, starting on your income tax return). • Notice the warning signs of procrastination associated with this project (for example, being overwhelmed by all the steps involved in paying bills or income tax; feeling that life has become a long list of “have to’s”; feeling deprived and isolated from fun and friends because you have to work). • Consciously choose to procrastinate for a few hours to observe the self-statements that lead to guilt and self-criticism: “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Why can’t I finish anything? Am I going to procrastinate my life away? If I can’t even pay the bills or answer letters I really must be a mess.” • Notice how this process of self-criticism leads to guilt, depression, and resentment while keeping you from paying just one bill, putting one stamp on an envelope, finding one file for your income tax.
If you have a number of goals that remain unfulfilled and that continue to plague you with guilty “shoulds”—“I should get in shape”; “I’ve got to get organized”; “I should fix the back door”; “I have to get around to dealing with customer complaints”—chances are that, though you want the goal, you have been unwilling to make a commitment to the work required to accomplish it or, even though you really want to do it, you can’t find the time in your busy schedule. One of the best-kept secrets of successful producers is their ability to let go of goals that cannot be achieved or started in the near future. To set realistic goals you must be willing to fully commit to working on the path to that goal and be capable of investing the time and energy required to start now. If you cannot find the time or motivation to start working on that goal, let go of it, or it will keep haunting you, making you feel like a procrastinator—as if you’d failed to accomplish something important that you promised yourself you would achieve.
The second thing to know about how one performs is to know how one learns. Many first-class writers—Winston Churchill is but one example—do poorly in school. They tend to remember their schooling as pure torture. Yet few of their classmates remember it the same way. They may not have enjoyed the school very much, but the worst they suffered was boredom. The explanation is that writers do not, as a rule, learn by listening and reading. They learn by writing. Because schools do not allow them to learn this way, they get poor grades.
The first is to accept the fact that other people are as much individuals as you yourself are. They perversely insist on behaving like human beings. This means that they too have their strengths; they too have their ways of getting things done; they too have their values. To be effective, therefore, you have to know the strengths, the performance modes, and the values of your coworkers.
The first secret of effectiveness is to understand the people you work with and depend on so that you can make use of their strengths, their ways of working, and their values. Working relationships are as much based on the people as they are on the work. The second part of relationship responsibility is taking responsibility for communication. Whenever I, or any other consultant, start to work with an organization, the first thing I hear about are all the personality conflicts. Most of these arise from the fact that people do not know what other people are doing and how they do their work, or what contribution the other people are concentrating on and what results they expect. And the reason they do not know is that they have not asked and therefore have not been told.
Charles Bukowski was an alcoholic, a womanizer, a chronic gambler, a lout, a cheapskate, a deadbeat, and on his worst days, a poet. He’s probably the last person on earth you would ever look to for life advice or expect to see in any sort of self-help book. Which is why he’s the perfect place to start. Bukowski wanted to be a writer. But for decades his work was rejected by almost every magazine, newspaper, journal, agent, and publisher he submitted to. His work was horrible, they said. Crude. Disgusting. Depraved. And as the stacks of rejection slips piled up, the weight of his failures pushed him deep into an alcohol-fueled depression that would follow him for most of his life. Bukowski had a day job as a letter-filer at a post office. He got paid shit money and spent most of it on booze. He gambled away the rest at the racetrack. At night, he would drink alone and sometimes hammer out poetry on his beat-up old typewriter. Often, he’d wake up on the floor, having passed out the night before. Thirty years went by like this, most of it a meaningless blur of alcohol, drugs, gambling, and prostitutes. Then, when Bukowski was fifty, after a lifetime of failure and self-loathing, an editor at a small independent publishing house took a strange interest in him. The editor couldn’t offer Bukowski much money or much promise of sales. But he had a weird affection for the drunk loser, so he decided to take a chance on him. It was the first real shot Bukowski had ever gotten, and, he realized, probably the only one he would ever get. Bukowski wrote back to the editor: “I have one of two choices—stay in the post office and go crazy . . . or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.” Upon signing the contract, Bukowski wrote his first novel in three weeks. It was called simply Post Office. In the dedication, he wrote, “Dedicated to nobody.” Bukowski would make it as a novelist and poet. He would go on and publish six novels and hundreds of poems, selling over two million copies of his books. His popularity defied everyone’s expectations, particularly his own. Stories like Bukowski’s are the bread and butter of our cultural narrative. Bukowski’s life embodies the American Dream: a man fights for what he wants, never gives up, and eventually achieves his wildest dreams. It’s practically a movie waiting to happen. We all look at stories like Bukowski’s and say, “See? He never gave up. He never stopped trying. He always believed in himself. He persisted against all the odds and made something of himself!” It is then strange that on Bukowski’s tombstone, the epitaph reads: “Don’t try.” See, despite the book sales and the fame, Bukowski was a loser. He knew it. And his success stemmed not from some determination to be a winner, but from the fact that he knew he was a loser, accepted it, and then wrote honestly about it. He never tried to be anything other than what he was. The genius in Bukowski’s work was not in overcoming…
The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.
What’s interesting about the backwards law is that it’s called “backwards” for a reason: not giving a fuck works in reverse. If pursuing the positive is a negative, then pursuing the negative generates the positive. The pain you pursue in the gym results in better all-around health and energy. The failures in business are what lead to a better understanding of what’s necessary to be successful. Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance. Seriously, I could keep going, but you get the point. Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires.
The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.
Chances are you know somebody in your life who, at one time or another, did not give a fuck and then went on to accomplish amazing feats. Perhaps there was a time in your own life when you simply did not give a fuck and excelled to some extraordinary height. For myself, quitting my day job in finance after only six weeks to start an Internet business ranks pretty high up there in my own “didn’t give a fuck” hall of fame. Same with deciding to sell most of my possessions and move to South America. Fucks given? None. Just went and did it.
There is a subtle art to not giving a fuck. And though the concept may sound ridiculous and I may sound like an asshole, what I’m talking about here is essentially learning how to focus and prioritize your thoughts effectively—how to pick and choose what matters to you and what does not matter to you based on finely honed personal values. This is incredibly difficult. It takes a lifetime of practice and discipline to achieve. And you will regularly fail. But it is perhaps the most worthy struggle one can undertake in one’s life. It is perhaps the only struggle in one’s life.
Instead, it’s easier to dismiss what I say and persist in thinking that what you recognize as your life is “real” and that it somehow simply “happened.” You had nothing—or very little—to do with it. And THAT, I am here to tell you, is the source, the root cause of ALL of your problems. Knowing that you are living in a dreamworld is actually very liberating, because it gives you the option of waking up.
Immersed in these books I would feel the peace and the ineffable sense of well-being I sought. But the mundane demands of the world would inevitably come creeping back, and they were wonderfully effective at suffocating the freedom I experienced during such reading.
Read this book with the expectation that it will change your life. Profoundly change your life. Utterly transform it in myriad large and small ways. Expect it to have an impact on your career, your relationships, your health, your financial well-being, your spiritual development, and every other part of your existence. It can do this. The workshop on which it is based has done it for many already. The only question is—are YOU ready?
1. The author says this book can dramatically change my life. I will be open to this because I want this change in my life. 2. I will read this book carefully, using my highlighter to mark passages that strike me. Every time I come across an idea that really excites me, I will stop reading. 3. I will ponder that idea and explore its ramifications. I will keep bringing it to mind at odd moments until I feel completely comfortable with it. 4. I will start a journal as recommended and make entries regularly and frequently. 5. I will practice the exercises in the order presented. I will invest considerable emotional and psychic energy in each exercise. I will carefully observe my reactions, the reactions of others with whom I am interacting, and any results and note them in my journal. 6. I will be particularly aware of my emotional state—despondent or happy? Anxious or at ease? Angry or peaceful? I will write down these states and see how they change over time as I continue to do the exercises and ponder the ideas and concepts presented. 7. I will not talk about this journey to all and sundry. I will talk about this to selected friends or relatives who are sympathetic and may have useful insights. I will encourage them to read the book as well and do the exercises so that we have more in common to discuss. 8. I recognize that this book is merely a starting point. I am launching myself onto a path of awareness and growth that will take years, decades, maybe the rest of my life. I am comfortable with this. This is what I want.
It is a beautiful spring morning. It is radiantly sunny and warm, not hot. There is a cooling breeze and fluffy white clouds drift lazily by. A little girl skips down a path in a green, green meadow. She pauses by a fence to pet a cow. She reaches out to catch a beautiful orange butterfly but it flits out of reach. A rabbit, startled by her approach, drops the carrot it was eating and scampers away. The girl laughs, the happy sounds completely filling the air with the tinkling laughter of innocence and gaiety. Stop right now and evaluate your life. Is it filled with that effortless pleasure? Or drudgery? I want you to feel that effervescent joy. Ask yourself, are there great dollops of that in your life? If not, WHY not? Probably, many answers come to mind—work, financial obligations, family responsibilities. If you are like many of the thousands of students I have taught, you probably feel somewhat trapped—in a job you dislike, in a relationship you have outgrown, in responsibilities that feel onerous, in surroundings that suffocate.
Life is short. And uncertain. It is like a drop of water skittering around on a lotus leaf. You never know when it will drop off the edge and disappear. So each day is far too precious to waste. And each day that you are not radiantly alive and brimming with cheer is a day wasted. This book will help you stop wasting your days. It will help you discover the joy of effortless action.
IS THIS BOOK RIGHT FOR YOU? Do you sometimes wonder what you would like to do with your life or whether the career path you are charting is the right one for you? Are you troubled by ethical conflicts in the workplace and in your personal life? Do you have the nagging sense that there is a great deal you have to accomplish and that, somehow, you are not living up to even a fraction of your potential? At odd moments, does a train of thought along the lines of “Is this all there is to life?” spring up unbidden in your mind?
“Bad news, Harry. I’ve just been to see Professor McGonagall about the Firebolt. She — er — got a bit shirty with me. Told me I’d got my priorities wrong. Seemed to think I cared more about winning the Cup than I do about you staying alive.
“If she’d just get rid of that cat, I’d speak to her again!” Ron said angrily. “But she’s still sticking up for it! It’s a maniac, and she won’t hear a word against it!” “Ah, well, people can be a bit stupid abou’ their pets,” said Hagrid wisely. Behind him, Buckbeak spat a few ferret bones onto Hagrid’s pillow.
“What was there to be gained by fighting the most evil wizard who has ever existed?” said Black, with a terrible fury in his face. “Only innocent lives, Peter!” “You don’t understand!” whined Pettigrew. “He would have killed me, Sirius!” “THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE DIED!” roared Black. “DIED RATHER THAN BETRAY YOUR FRIENDS, AS WE WOULD HAVE DONE FOR YOU!”
No matter how good you get, difficult conversations will always challenge you. The authors know this from experiences in our own lives. We know what it feels like to be deeply afraid of hurting someone or of getting hurt. We know what it means to be consumed by guilt for how our actions have affected others, or for how we have let ourselves down. We know that even with the best of intentions, human relationships can corrode or become tangled, and, if we are honest, we also know that we don’t always have the best of intentions. We know just how fragile are the heart and the soul. So it is best to keep your goals realistic. Eliminating fear and anxiety is an unrealistic goal. Reducing fear and anxiety and learning how to manage that which remains are more obtainable. Achieving perfect results with no risk will not happen. Getting better results in the face of tolerable odds might. And that, for most of us, is good enough. For if we are fragile, we are also remarkably resilient.
1. The “What Happened?” Conversation. Most difficult conversations involve disagreement about what has happened or what should happen. Who said what and who did what? Who’s right, who meant what, and who’s to blame? Jack and Michael tussle over these issues, both out loud and internally. Does the chart need to be redone ? Is Michael trying to intimidate Jack? Who should have caught the error? 2. The Feelings Conversation. Every difficult conversation also asks and answers questions about feelings. Are my feelings valid? Appropriate?
Should I acknowledge or deny them, put them on the table or check them at the door? What do I do about the other person’s feelings? What if they are angry or hurt? Jack’s and Michael’s thoughts are littered with feelings. For example, “This is the thanks I get?!” signals hurt and anger, and “I’m under tremendous pressure” reveals anxiety. These feelings are not addressed directly in the conversation, but they leak in anyway. 3. The Identity Conversation. This is the conversation we each have with ourselves about what this situation means to us. We conduct an internal debate over whether this means we are competent or incompetent, a good person or bad, worthy of love or unlovable. What impact might it have on our self-image and self-esteem, our future and our well-being? Our answers to these questions determine in large part whether we feel “balanced” during the conversation, or whether we feel off-center and anxious. In the conversation between Jack and Michael, Jack is struggling with the sense that he has been incompetent, which makes him feel less balanced. And Michael is wondering whether he acted foolishly in hiring Jack.
“They run off eckeltricity, do they?” he said knowledgeably. “Ah yes, I can see the plugs. I collect plugs,” he added to Uncle Vernon. “And batteries. Got a very large collection of batteries.
“Well, I certainly don’t,” said Percy sanctimoniously. “I shudder to think what the state of my in-tray would be if I was away from work for five days.” “Yeah, someone might slip dragon dung in it again, eh, Perce?” said Fred. “That was a sample of fertilizer from Norway!” said Percy, going very red in the face. “It was nothing personal!” “It was,” Fred whispered to Harry as they got up from the table. “We sent it.”
“Homework,” said Fred vaguely. “Don’t be ridiculous, you’re still on holiday,” said Mrs. Weasley. “Yeah, we’ve left it a bit late,” said George. “You’re not by any chance writing out a new order form, are you?” said Mrs. Weasley shrewdly. “You wouldn’t be thinking of re-starting Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, by any chance?” “Now, Mum,” said Fred, looking up at her, a pained look on his face. “If the Hogwarts Express crashed tomorrow, and George and I died, how would you feel to know that the last thing we ever heard from you was an unfounded accusation?” Everyone laughed, even Mrs. Weasley.
“I just can’t justify taking more time off at the moment,” he told them. “Mr. Crouch is really starting to rely on me.” “Yeah, you know what, Percy?” said George seriously. “I reckon he’ll know your name soon.”
“As I was saying,” he said, smiling at the sea of students before him, all of whom were still gazing transfixed at Mad-Eye Moody, “we are to have the honor of hosting a very exciting event over the coming months, an event that has not been held for over a century. It is my very great pleasure to inform you that the Triwizard Tournament will be taking place at Hogwarts this year.” “You’re JOKING!” said Fred Weasley loudly. The tension that had filled the Hall ever since Moody’s arrival suddenly broke. Nearly everyone laughed, and Dumbledore chuckled appreciatively. “I am not joking, Mr. Weasley,” he said, “though now that you mention it, I did hear an excellent one over the summer about a troll, a hag, and a leprechaun who all go into a bar . . .”
He looked down at the clutch of eggs and spotted the gold one, gleaming against its cement-colored fellows, residing safely between the dragon’s front legs. “Okay,” Harry told himself, “diversionary tactics . . . let’s go. . . .” He dived. The Horntail’s head followed him; he knew what it was going to do and pulled out of the dive just in time; a jet of fire had been released exactly where he would have been had he not swerved away . . . but Harry didn’t care . . . that was no more than dodging a Bludger. . . . “Great Scott, he can fly!” yelled Bagman as the crowd shrieked and gasped. “Are you watching this, Mr. Krum?”
upholds the family’s honor, and we never speaks ill of them — though Professor Dumbledore told Dobby he does not insist upon this. Professor Dumbledore said we is free to — to —” Dobby looked suddenly nervous and beckoned Harry closer. Harry bent forward. Dobby whispered, “He said we is free to call him a — a barmy old codger if we likes, sir!” Dobby gave a frightened sort of giggle.
Completely forgetting about dinner, he walked slowly back up to Gryffindor Tower, Cho’s voice echoing in his ears with every step he took. “Cedric — Cedric Diggory.” He had been starting to quite like Cedric — prepared to overlook the fact that he had once beaten him at Quidditch, and was handsome, and popular, and nearly everyone’s favorite champion. Now he suddenly realized that Cedric was in fact a useless pretty boy who didn’t have enough brains to fill an eggcup.
For a fleeting instant, Harry thought he saw a gleam of something like triumph in Dumbledore’s eyes. But next second, Harry was sure he had imagined it, for when Dumbledore had returned to his seat behind the desk, he looked as old and weary as Harry had ever seen him.
“I will say it again,” said Dumbledore as the phoenix rose into the air and resettled itself upon the perch beside the door. “You have shown bravery beyond anything I could have expected of you tonight, Harry. You have shown bravery equal to those who died fighting Voldemort at the height of his powers. You have shouldered a grown wizard’s burden and found yourself equal to it — and you have now given us all that we have a right to expect. You will come with me to the hospital wing. I do not want you returning to the dormitory tonight. A Sleeping Potion, and some peace . . . Sirius, would you like to stay with him?”
“’Tis part of the house-elf’s enslavement, sir. We keeps their secrets and our silence, sir. We upholds the family’s honor, and we never speaks ill of them — though Professor Dumbledore told Dobby he does not insist upon this. Professor Dumbledore said we is free to — to —” Dobby looked suddenly nervous and beckoned Harry closer. Harry bent forward. Dobby whispered, “He said we is free to call him a — a barmy old codger if we likes, sir!” Dobby gave a frightened sort of giggle.
“Yes — yes, good point, Petunia! What were you doing under our window, boy?” “Listening to the news,” said Harry in a resigned voice. His aunt and uncle exchanged looks of outrage. “Listening to the news! Again?” “Well, it changes every day, you see,” said Harry. “Don’t you
“I told you — they suck all the happiness out of you,” said Harry, “and if they get the chance, they kiss you —” “Kiss you?” said Uncle Vernon, his eyes popping slightly. “Kiss you?”
“You know what these remind me of?” “No, what’s that?” “The Death Eaters’ scars. Voldemort touches one of them, and all their scars burn, and they know they’ve got to join him.” “Well . . . yes,” said Hermione quietly. “That is where I got the idea . . . but you’ll notice I decided to engrave the date on bits of metal rather than on our members’ skin . . .”
October extinguished itself in a rush of howling winds and driving rain and November arrived, cold as frozen iron, with hard frosts every morning and icy drafts that bit at exposed hands and faces. The skies and the ceiling of the Great Hall turned a pale, pearly gray, the mountains around Hogwarts became snowcapped, and the temperature in the castle dropped so far that many students wore their thick protective dragon skin gloves in the corridors between lessons.
By mid-morning enormous signs had been put up all over the school, not just on House notice boards, but in the corridors and classrooms too. ——— BY ORDER OF ——— The High Inquisitor of Hogwarts Any student found in possession of the magazine The Quibbler will be expelled. The above is in accordance with Educational Decree Number Twenty-seven.
“Ah,” said Dumbledore gently, “yes. Yes, I thought we might hit that little snag.” “Snag?” said Fudge, his voice still vibrating with joy. “I see no snag, Dumbledore!” “Well,” said Dumbledore apologetically, “I’m afraid I do.” “Oh really?” “Well — it’s just that you seem to be laboring under the delusion that I am going to — what is the phrase? ‘Come quietly.’ I am afraid I am not going to come quietly at all, Cornelius. I have absolutely no intention of being sent to Azkaban. I could break out, of course — but what a waste of time, and frankly, I can think of a whole host of things I would rather be doing.”
She said nothing, but marched Harry and Marietta to the door. As it swung closed behind them, Harry heard Phineas Nigellus’s voice. “You know, Minister, I disagree with Dumbledore on many counts . . . but you cannot deny he’s got style . . .”
“STOP THEM!” shrieked Umbridge, but it was too late. As the Inquisitorial Squad closed in, Fred and George kicked off from the floor, shooting fifteen feet into the air, the iron peg swinging dangerously below. Fred looked across the hall at the poltergeist bobbing on his level above the crowd. “Give her hell from us, Peeves.” And Peeves, whom Harry had never seen take an order from a student before, swept his belled hat from his head and sprang to a salute as Fred and George wheeled about to tumultuous applause from the students below and sped out of the open front doors into the glorious sunset.
“You might remember me, my name’s Arthur Weasley.” As Mr. Weasley had singlehandedly demolished most of the Dursleys’ living room two years previously, Harry would have been very surprised if Uncle Vernon had forgotten him. Sure enough, Uncle Vernon turned a deeper shade of puce and glared at Mr. Weasley, but chose not to say anything, partly, perhaps, because the Dursleys were outnumbered two to one. Aunt Petunia looked both frightened and embarrassed. She kept glancing around, as though terrified somebody she knew would see her in such company. Dudley, meanwhile, seemed to be trying to look small and insignificant, a feat at which he was failing extravagantly.
“Are you threatening me, sir?” he said, so loudly that passersby actually turned to stare. “Yes, I am,” said Mad-Eye, who seemed rather pleased that Uncle Vernon had grasped this fact so quickly. “And do I look like the kind of man who can be intimidated?” barked Uncle Vernon. “Well . . .” said Moody, pushing back his bowler hat to reveal his sinisterly revolving magical eye. Uncle Vernon leapt backward in horror and collided painfully with a luggage trolley. “Yes, I’d have to say you do, Dursley.”
Naturally, he had thought that the long campaign and the strain of the election had caused him to go mad. He had been utterly terrified to find a portrait talking to him, though this had been nothing to how he felt when a self-proclaimed wizard had bounced out of the fireplace and shaken his hand. He had remained speechless throughout Fudge’s kindly explanation that there were witches and wizards still living in secret all over the world and his reassurances that he was not to bother his head about them as the Ministry of Magic took responsibility for the whole Wizarding community and prevented the non-magical population from getting wind of them. It was, said Fudge, a difficult job that encompassed everything from regulations on responsible use of broomsticks to keeping the dragon population under control (the Prime Minister remembered clutching the desk for support at this point). Fudge had then patted the shoulder of the still-dumbstruck Prime Minister in a fatherly sort of way. “Not to worry,” he had said, “it’s odds-on you’ll never see me again. I’ll only bother you if there’s something really serious going on our end, something that’s likely to affect the Muggles — the non-magical population, I should say. Otherwise, it’s live and let live. And I must say, you’re taking it a lot better than your predecessor. He tried to throw me out the window, thought I was a hoax planned by the opposition.” At this, the Prime Minister had found his voice at last. “You’re — you’re not a hoax, then?” It had been his last, desperate hope.
“But for heaven’s sake — you’re wizards! You can do magic! Surely you can sort out — well — anything!” Scrimgeour turned slowly on the spot and exchanged an incredulous look with Fudge, who really did manage a smile this time as he said kindly, “The trouble is, the other side can do magic too, Prime Minister.” And with that, the two wizards stepped one after the other into the bright green fire and vanished.
Vernon Dursley said nothing at all. Harry did not doubt that speech would return to him, and soon — the vein pulsing in his uncle’s temple was reaching danger point — but something about Dumbledore seemed to have robbed him temporarily of breath. It might have been the blatant wizardishness of his appearance, but it might, too, have been that even Uncle Vernon could sense that here was a man whom it would be very difficult to bully.
“I don’t mean to be rude —” he began, in a tone that threatened rudeness in every syllable. “— yet, sadly, accidental rudeness occurs alarmingly often,” Dumbledore finished the sentence gravely. “Best to say nothing at all, my dear man. Ah, and this must be Petunia.”
“Albus Dumbledore,” said Dumbledore, when Uncle Vernon failed to effect an introduction. “We have corresponded, of course.” Harry thought this an odd way of reminding Aunt Petunia that he had once sent her an exploding letter, but Aunt Petunia did not challenge the term. “And this must be your son, Dudley?”
“I would assume that you were going to offer me refreshment,” Dumbledore said to Uncle Vernon, “but the evidence so far suggests that that would be optimistic to the point of foolishness.”
“Madam Rosmerta’s finest oak-matured mead,” said Dumbledore, raising his glass to Harry, who caught hold of his own and sipped. He had never tasted anything like it before, but enjoyed it immensely. The Dursleys, after quick, scared looks at one another, tried to ignore their glasses completely, a difficult feat, as they were nudging them gently on the sides of their heads. Harry could not suppress a suspicion that Dumbledore was rather enjoying himself.
“Good,” said Dumbledore. “Just one last thing, then.” And he turned to speak to the Dursleys once more. “As you will no doubt be aware, Harry comes of age in a year’s time —” “No,” said Aunt Petunia, speaking for the first time since Dumbledore’s arrival. “I’m sorry?” said Dumbledore politely. “No, he doesn’t. He’s a month younger than Dudley, and Dudders doesn’t turn eighteen until the year after next.” “Ah,” said Dumbledore pleasantly, “but in the Wizarding world, we come of age at seventeen.” Uncle Vernon muttered, “Preposterous,” but Dumbledore ignored him.
Dumbledore paused, and although his voice remained light and calm, and he gave no obvious sign of anger, Harry felt a kind of chill emanating from him and noticed that the Dursleys drew very slightly closer together. “You did not do as I asked. You have never treated Harry as a son. He has known nothing but neglect and often cruelty at your hands. The best that can be said is that he has at least escaped the appalling damage you have inflicted upon the unfortunate boy sitting between you.”
“Well, how have you been keeping, Horace?” Dumbledore asked. “Not so well,” said Slughorn at once. “Weak chest. Wheezy. Rheumatism too. Can’t move like I used to. Well, that’s to be expected. Old age. Fatigue.” “And yet you must have moved fairly quickly to prepare such a welcome for us at such short notice,” said Dumbledore. “You can’t have had more than three minutes’ warning?” Slughorn said, half irritably, half proudly, “Two. Didn’t hear my Intruder Charm go off, I was taking a bath. Still,” he added sternly, seeming to pull himself back together again, “the fact remains that I’m an old man, Albus. A tired old man who’s earned the right to a quiet life and a few creature comforts.”
“And so I did,” said Dumbledore placidly. “I told you everything I know. From this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundation of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork. From here on in, Harry, I may be as woefully wrong as Humphrey Belcher, who believed the time was ripe for a cheese cauldron.” “But you think you’re right?” said Harry. “Naturally I do, but as I have already proven to you, I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being — forgive me — rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.”
“And it doesn’t hurt that you’ve grown about a foot over the summer either,” Hermione finished, ignoring Ron. “I’m tall,” said Ron inconsequentially.
“Such loyalty is admirable, of course,” said Scrimgeour, who seemed to be restraining his irritation with difficulty, “but Dumbledore is gone, Harry. He’s gone.” “He will only be gone from the school when none here are loyal to him,” said Harry, smiling in spite of himself. “My dear boy . . . even Dumbledore cannot return from the —” “I am not saying he can. You wouldn’t understand. But I’ve got nothing to tell you.”
lightning if they saw him stoop; and even grownup he had still spent a deal of his time at quoits, dart-throwing, shooting at the wand, bowls, ninepins
Updated: May 23, 2022
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
love is not some eternal state, but a delight in the paradise of the imperfect. The holding of a thing is inextricable from the letting go, and to love, you must learn both.
Updated: Feb 09, 2021
Love is not something you can keep. It is something you do, every day, every moment, regardless of who is dying.
Skuzz muttered something. The police sergeant leaned over. "Don’t try to speak, son," he said. "The ambulance’ll be here soon." "Listen," croaked Skuzz. "Got something important to tell you. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse…they’re right bastards, all four of them." "He’s delirious," announced the sergeant. "I’m sodding not. I’m People Covered In Fish," croaked Skuzz, and passed out.
Okay, so Hell was down on him. So the world was ending. So the Cold War was over and the Great War was starting for real. So the odds against him were higher than a vanload of hippies on a blotterful of Owlsley’s Old Original. There was still a chance.
But, to look on the bright side, all this only went to prove that evil contains the seeds of its own destruction. Right now, across the country, people who would otherwise have been made just that little bit more tense and angry by being summoned from a nice bath, or having their names mispronounced at them, were instead feeling quite untroubled and at peace with the world. As a result of Hastur’s action a wave of low-grade goodness started to spread exponentially through the population, and millions of people who ultimately would have suffered minor bruises of the soul did not in fact do so. So that was all right.
It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met. It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, driven by a grinning lunatic in sunglasses, sitting amid the flames, trailing thick black smoke, coming straight at them through the lashing rain and the wind at eighty miles per hour. That would do it every time.
Tags: favorite
instead of a gleaming twelve-mile-long spaceship, it was an off-white twenty-year-old motor scooter. And you didn’t have the special rainbow effects. And it probably wasn’t going at more than two hundred miles an hour. And instead of a pulsing whine sliding up the octaves, it just went putputputputput… VROOOOSH. But it was exactly like that anyway.
R. P. TYLER, ONLY TEN MINUTES away from the village, paused, while Shutzi attempted another of its wide range of eliminatory functions.
It looked as if it had smoked glass windows, although this was just an effect caused by it having ordinary glass windows but a smoke-filled interior. The driver’s door opened, and a cloud of choking
Tags: blue
All over the world, people who had been wrestling with switches found that they switched. Circuit breakers opened. Computers stopped planning World War III and went back to idly scanning the stratosphere. In bunkers under Novya Zemla men found that the fuses they were frantically trying to pull out came away in their hands at last; in bunkers under Wyoming and Nebraska, men in fatigues stopped screaming and waving guns at one another, and would have had a beer if alcohol had been allowed in missile bases. It wasn’t, but they had one anyway.
Tags: blue
"So you’re not one hundred percent clear on this?" said Aziraphale. "It’s not given to us to understand the ineffable Plan," said the Metatron, "but of course the Great Plan—" "But the Great Plan can only be a tiny part of the overall ineffability," said Crowley. "You can’t be certain that what’s happening right now isn’t exactly right, from an ineffable point of view." "It izz written!" bellowed Beelzebub. "But it might be written differently somewhere else," said Crowley. "Where you can’t read it." "In bigger letters," said Aziraphale. "Underlined," Crowley added. "Twice," suggested Aziraphale. "Perhaps this isn’t just a test of the world," said Crowley. "It might be a test of you people, too. Hmm?" "God does not play games with His loyal servants," said the Metatron, but in a worried tone of voice. "Whooo-eee," said Crowley. "Where have you been?" Everyone found their eyes turning toward Adam. He seemed to be thinking very carefully. Then he said: "I don’t see why it matters what is written. Not when it’s about people. It can always be crossed out." A breeze swept across the airfield. Overhead, the assembled hosts rippled, like a mirage. There was the kind of silence there might have been on the day before Creation. Adam stood smiling at the two of them, a small figure perfectly poised exactly between Heaven and Hell.
Tags: blue
there was a spark of goodness in you." "That’s right," said Crowley bitterly. "Make my day." Aziraphale held out his hand. "Nice knowing you," he said. Crowley took it. "Here’s to the next time," he said. "And…Aziraphale?" "Yes." "Just remember I’ll have known that, deep down inside, you were just enough of a bastard to be worth liking." There was
Tags: blue
There was no plate. There was just Madame Tracy, wearing a cameo brooch, and an unfamiliar shade of lipstick. She was also standing in the center of a perfume zone.
Tags: blue
He grunted. There was a formality that had to be observed in all this. Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell took a long, deep drink of Guinness, and he popped the question. Madame Tracy giggled. "Honestly, you old silly," she said, and she blushed a deep red. "How many do you think?" He popped it again. "Two," said Madame Tracy. "Ah, weel. That’s all reet then," said Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell (retired).
Tags: blue
The point they both realized the text had wandered into its own world was in the basement of the old Gollancz books, where they’d got together to proofread the final copy, and Neil congratulated Terry on a line that Terry knew he hadn’t written, and Neil was certain he hadn’t written either. They both privately suspect that at some point the book had started to generate text on its own, but neither of them will actually admit this publicly for fear of being thought odd.
is that rarity, the kind of author who likes Writing, not Having Written, or Being a Writer, but the actual sitting there and making things up in front of a screen. At the time we met, he was still working as a press officer for the South Western Electricity board. He wrote four hundred words a night, every night: it was the only way for him to keep a real job and still write books. One night, a year later, he finished a novel, with a hundred words still to go, so he put a piece of paper into his typewriter, and wrote a hundred words of the next novel.
He exists in a blind spot, with two strikes against him: he writes funny books, in a world in which funny is synonymous with trivial, and they are fantasies—or more precisely, they are set on the Discworld, a flat world, which rests on the back of four elephants, who in turn stand on the back of a turtle, heading off through space. It’s a location in which Terry Pratchett can write anything, from hard-bitten crime dramas to vampiric political parodies, to children’s books.
He also had a very bad hat. It was a gray homburg. He was not a hat person. There was no natural unity between hat and man. That was the first and last time I saw the hat. As if subconsciously aware of the bad hatitude, he used to forget it and leave it behind in restaurants. One day, he never went back for it. I put this in for the serious fans out there: If you search really, really hard, you may find a small restaurant somewhere in London with a dusty gray homburg at the back of a shelf. Who knows what will happen if you try it on?
Updated: May 23, 2022
IT WAS A NICE DAY. All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn’t been invented yet. But clouds massing east of Eden suggested that the first thunderstorm was on its way, and it was going to be a big one.
his solid sense that if only we fully lived in the present, all the tomorrows would take care of themselves.
"My granda always told me that fall’s the time to root up something you don’t want coming back to trouble you." Kote mimicked the quaver of an old man’s voice. "‘Things are too full of life in the spring months. In the summer, they’re too strong and won’t let go. Autumn…’" He looked around at the changing leaves on the trees. "‘Autumn’s the time. In autumn everything is tired and ready to die.’"
Tags: blue
We were none of us particularly drunk. But then again, none of us were particularly sober, either. Our exact positioning between those two points is a matter of pointless conjecture, and I will waste no time on it.
" Elodin poked him in the chest with a long finger. "If I find out that Whin has been sedated or restrained I’ll ride you naked through the streets of Imre like a little pink pony." He glared. "Go."
As I lay there, counting my blessings and broken ribs, Elodin stepped into my field of vision. He looked down at me. "Congratulations," he said. "That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen." His expression was a mix of awe and disbelief. "Ever."
And there was Ambrose. To deem us simply enemies is to lose the true flavor of our relationship. It was more like the two of us entered into a business partnership in order to more efficiently pursue our mutual interest of hating each other.
And then there was advanced sympathy with Elxa Dal. Out of class, Elxa Dal was charming, soft-spoken, and even a little ridiculous when the mood was on him. But when he taught, his personality strode back and forth between mad prophet and galley-slave drummer. Every day in his class I burned another three hours of time and five hours worth of energy.
"Before I leave you to the adulation of your peers, I have to ask. Where did you learn to do that? Play missing a string, I mean." I thought for a moment. "Do you want the short or the long of it?" "I’ll take the short for now." I smiled. "Well in that case, it’s just something I picked up." I made a casual gesture as if tossing something away. "A remnant of my misspent youth."
Bast brightened at the opportunity. Straightening up in his chair he looked thoughtful for a moment then said. "She had perfect ears." He made a delicate gesture with his hands. "Perfect little ears, like they were carved out of…something." Chronicler laughed, then looked slightly taken aback, as if he’d surprised himself. "Her ears?" he asked as if he couldn’t be sure if he had heard correctly. "You know how hard it is to find a pretty girl with the right sort of ears," Bast said matter-of-factly.
IN THE FULLNESS OF TIME, and with considerable help from Deoch and Wilem, I became drunk.
"In addition to being highly corrosive," Kilvin said, "in its gaseous state the reagent is flammable. Once it warms sufficienctly, it will burn on contact with air. The heat that this produces can cause a cascading exothermic reaction." "Cascading huge Goddamn fire," Manet said.
"What flower would you bring me?" I teased, thinking to catch her off guard. "A willow blossom," she said without a second’s hesitation. I thought for a long minute. "Do willows have blossoms?"
She looked up and to the side, thinking. "I don’t think so." "A rare treat to be given one then." I chuckled. "Why a willow blossom?" "You remind me of a willow." She said easily. "Strong, deep-rooted, and hidden. You move easily when the storm comes, but never farther than you wish." I lifted my hands as if fending off a blow. "Cease these sweet words," I protested. "You seek to bend me to your will, but it will not work. Your flattery is naught to me but wind!" She watched me for a moment, as if to make sure my tirade was complete. "Beyond all other trees," she said with a curl of a smile on her elegant mouth, "the willow moves to the wind’s desire."
Wilem tapped Simmon’s shoulder. "He’s telling the truth." Simmon glanced over at him. "Why do you say that?" "He sounds more sincere than that when he lies."
"Not old really, more…" "Mature?" I suggested. He shook his head. "No. I don’t know a good word for it. It’s like if you look at a great oak tree. You don’t appreciate it because it’s older than the other trees, or because it’s taller. It just has something that other younger trees don’t. Complexity, solidity, significance." Deoch scowled, irritated. "Damn if that isn’t the worst comparison I’ve ever made."
"Well, you know what they say: Finding the right analogy is as hard as…" I put on a thoughtful expression. "As hard as…" I made an inarticulate grasping gesture.
"Master Elodin," I said, then stopped. I had no idea what I could possibly say in a situation like this. "Please, we’re all friends here. Feel free to call me by my first name: Master." He gave a lazy grin and looked back down toward the courtyard.
Still I recognized her. Denna. I must have made some noise, because she turned to look at me. Her eyes went wide and for once she was the one who was at a loss for words. "I heard you were in some trouble," I said nonchalantly. "So I thought I’d come and help." Her eyes went wide for a moment, then narrowed. "You’re lying," she said with a wry twist to her lips. "I am," I admitted. "But it’s a pretty lie." I took a step into the room and closed the door softly. "I would have come, if I’d known." "Anyone can make the trip after they get the news," she said dismissively. "It takes a special sort of man to show up when he doesn’t know there’s trouble." She sat up and turned to face me, swinging her legs over the side of the bed.
Look at the huge Goddamn dragon!" "It’s a draccus," I said. "It’s Goddamn huge," Denna said with a tinge of hysteria in her voice. "It’s a Goddamn huge dragon and it’s going to come over here and eat us."
"Then, I don’t know, we could roll rocks down onto it or something." She looked at me. "What? Is there something wrong with my idea?" "It’s not very heroic," I said dismissively. "I was expecting something with a little more flair." "Well I left my armor and warhorse at home," she said. "You’re just upset because your big University brain couldn’t think of a way, and my plan is brilliant."
"Here is the truth," I said seriously. "I think you’re going to be fine, but I don’t know for certain. I don’t know how much of that stuff you have left working its way into your system. In an hour I’ll have a better idea, but if something goes wrong I’d rather be an hour closer to Trebon. It means I won’t have to carry you as far." I looked her square in the eye. "I don’t gamble with the lives of people I care for." She listened to me, her expression somber. Then the grin blossomed back onto her face. "I like your manly bravado," she said. "Do it some more."
We crossed the same small stream that we had before, and, despite the fact that it wasn’t much more than ankle deep, Denna insisted on bathing. I washed up a little, then moved a discreet distance away and listened to her sing several rather racy songs. She also made several none-too-subtle invitations that I could join her in the water. Needless to say, I kept my distance. There are names for people who take advantage of women who are not in full control of themselves, and none of those names will ever rightfully be applied to me.
I WOKE IN A BED. In a room. In an inn. More than that was not immediately clear to me. It felt exactly like someone had hit me in the head with a church.
I was terribly disappointed that I missed the end. Distraught, in fact." "Oh it’s just the same thing you’ve heard before a hundred times before," I said. "Prince Gallant kills the dragon but loses the treasure and the girl." "Ah, a tragedy," Denna looked down. "Not the ending I’d hoped for, but no more than I expected, I suppose." "It would be something of a tragedy if it stopped there," I admitted. "But it depends on how you look at it, really. I prefer to think of it as a story that’s waiting for an appropriately uplifting sequel."
I laid my lute case down beside the bench and absentmindedly flipped open the lid, thinking my lute might enjoy the feel of a little sun on its strings. If you aren’t a musician, I don’t expect you to understand.
"You know I’m right!" Simmon pushed his hair out of his eyes, laughing boyishly. "You can’t argue your way out of this one! She’s obviously stupid for you. And you’re just plain stupid, so it’s a great match."
He laughed again. "Merciful Tehlu, it almost killed me." He shook his head. "No. You don’t get to go behind the four-plate door. But," he gave me a conspiratorial look. "Since you are a Re’lar…" He looked from side to side as if afraid that someone might overhear us. I leaned closer. "Since you are a Re’lar, I will admit that it exists." He gave me a solemn wink.
I hesitated, unsure as to how she would respond to my request. "I was wondering, Auri. Would you mind showing me the Underthing?" Auri looked away, suddenly shy. "Kvothe, I thought you were a gentleman," she said, tugging self-consciously at her ragged shirt. "Imagine, asking to see a girl’s underthing." She looked down, her hair hiding her face. I held my breath for a moment, choosing my next words carefully lest I startle her back underground. While I was thinking, Auri peeked at me through the curtain of her hair. "Auri," I asked slowly, "are you joking with me?" She looked up and grinned. "Yes I am," she said proudly. "Isn’t it wonderful?"
"Whatsoever monies I have saved at the time of my death shall go to the Widow Sage," Bast said loudly across the room. "To help in raising and dowering her three daughters, as they are soon to be of marriaging age." He gave Chronicler a troubled look. "Is ‘marriaging’ a word?"
"I leave it to Pater Leoden to distribute the remainder of my worldly goods among the parish, as, being an immoral soul, I will have no further need of them." "You mean, immortal, don’t you?" Chronicler asked uncertainly. Bast shrugged.
Every Fae child knows this, but you mortals never seem to see. We understand how dangerous a mask can be. We all become what we pretend to be." Chronicler relaxed a bit, sensing familiar ground. "That’s basic psychology. You dress a beggar in fine clothes, people treat him like a noble, and he lives up to their expectations." "That’s only the smallest piece of it," Bast said. "The truth is deeper than that. It’s…" Bast floundered for a moment. "It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.
Frowning, Chronicler opened his mouth, but Bast held up a hand to stop him. "No, listen. I’ve got it now. You meet a girl: shy, unassuming. If you tell her she’s beautiful, she’ll think you’re sweet, but she won’t believe you. She knows that beauty lies in your beholding." Bast gave a grudging shrug. "And sometimes that’s enough." His eyes brightened. "But there’s a better way. You show her she is beautiful. You make mirrors of your eyes, prayers of your hands against her body.
It looked as if an alchemist had distilled a dozen swords, and when the crucible had cooled this was lying in the bottom: a sword in its pure form. It was slender and graceful. It was deadly as a sharp stone beneath swift water.
I looked up at the owner. He held a straight face. I dipped the pen and carefully wrote the letters "D D" as if they were initials. He fanned the ink dry and slid my "receipt" across the desk toward me. "What does D stand for?" he asked with the barest hint of a smile. "Defeasance," I said. "It means to render something null and void, usually a contract. The second D is for Decrepitate. Which is the act of throwing someone into a fire." He gave me a blank look. "Decrepication is the punishment for forgery in Junpui. I think false receipts fall in that category." I made no move to touch the money or the receipt. There was a tense silence. "This isn’t Junpui," he said, his face carefully composed. "True enough," I admitted. "You have a keen sense of defalcation. Perhaps I should add a third D." He gave another sharp, barking laugh and smiled. "You’ve convinced me, young master." He pulled out a fresh slip of paper and set it in front of me. "You write me a receipt, and I will sign it."
Updated: Apr 18, 2022
A Silence of Three Parts IT WAS NIGHT AGAIN. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts. The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been a wind it would have sighed through the trees, set the inn’s sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with conversation and laughter, the clatter and clamor one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of night. If there had been music…but no, of course there was no music. In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained. Inside the Waystone a pair of men huddled at one corner of the bar. They drank with quiet determination, avoiding serious discussions of troubling news. In doing this they added a small, sullen silence to the larger, hollow one. It made an alloy of sorts, a counterpoint. The third silence was not an easy thing to notice. If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the wooden floor underfoot and in the rough, splintering barrels behind the bar. It was in the weight of the black stone hearth that held the heat of a long dead fire. It was in the slow back and forth of a white linen cloth rubbing along the grain of the bar. And it was in the hands of the man who stood there, polishing a stretch of mahogany that already gleamed in the lamplight. The man had true-red hair, red as flame. His eyes were dark and distant, and he moved with the subtle certainty that comes from knowing many things. The Waystone was his, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wrapping the others inside itself. It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.
Updated: Apr 30, 2022
Hours later, the innkeeper stood in the doorway of the Waystone and let his eyes relax to the darkness. Footprints of lamplight from the inn’s windows fell across the dirt road and the doors of the smithy across the way. It was not a large road, or well traveled. It didn’t seem to lead anywhere, as some roads do. The innkeeper drew a deep breath of autumn air and looked around restlessly, as if waiting for something to happen.
Note: This made me think of deep Halloween nights in Forest Lair. When the night seemed huge and dark and cold and alive. There was an otherness in the air. I lived on a wild planet. The night could swallow you.
Black glimmering alien night.
IT WAS ONE OF those perfect autumn days so common in stories and so rare in the real world. The weather was warm and dry, ideal for ripening a field of wheat or corn. On both sides of the road the trees were changing color. Tall poplars had gone a buttery yellow while the shrubby sumac encroaching on the road was tinged a violent red. Only the old oaks seemed reluctant to give up the summer, and their leaves remained an even mingling of gold and green. Everything said, you couldn’t hope for a nicer day to have a half dozen ex-soldiers with hunting bows relieve you of everything you owned.
Kote guessed the travelers had been together a month or so, long enough to become comfortable with each other, but not long enough to be squabbling over small things. They smelled of road dust and horses. He breathed it in like perfume. Best of all was the noise. Leather creaking. Men laughing. The fire cracked and spat. The women flirted. Someone even knocked over a chair. For the first time in a long while there was no silence in the Waystone Inn. Or if there was, it was too faint to be noticed, or too well hidden. Kote was in the middle of it all, always moving, like a man tending a large, complex machine. Ready with a drink just as a person called for it, he talked and listened in the right amounts. He laughed at jokes, shook hands, smiled, and whisked coins off the bar as if he truly needed the money. Then, when the time for songs came and everyone had sung their favorites and still wanted more, Kote led them from behind the bar, clapping to keep a beat. With the fire shining in his hair, he sang "Tinker Tanner," more verses than anyone had heard before, and no one minded in the least.
Kote nodded. "You are, in fact, in the middle of Newarre." He made a dramatic sweeping gesture with one hand. "Thriving metropolis. Home to dozens."
"What does ‘eggoliant’ mean?" Chronicler asked. "Hmmm? Oh, nothing. I made it up. I wanted to see if an unfamiliar word would slow you down." He stretched, and pulled his chair closer to Chronicler’s. "As soon as you show me how to read this, we can begin." Chronicler looked doubtful. "It’s a very complex—" Seeing Kvothe frown, he sighed. "I’ll try." Chronicler drew a deep breath and began to write a line of symbols as he spoke. "There are around fifty different sounds we use to speak. I’ve given each of them a symbol consisting of one or two pen strokes. It’s all sound. I could conceivably transcribe a language I don’t even understand." He pointed. "These are different vowel sounds." "All vertical lines," Kvothe said, looking intently at the page. Chronicler paused, thrown off his stride. "Well…yes." "The consonants would be horizontal then? And they would combine like this?" Taking the pen, Kvothe made a few marks of his own on the page. "Clever. You’d never need more than two or three for a word." Chronicler watched Kvothe quietly. Kvothe didn’t notice, his attention on the paper. "If this is ‘am’ then these must be the ah sounds," he motioned to a group of characters Chronicler had penned. "Ah, ay, aeh, auh. That would make these the ohs." Kvothe nodded to himself and pressed the pen back into Chronicler’s hand. "Show me the consonants." Chronicler penned them down numbly, reciting the sounds as he wrote. After a moment, Kvothe took the pen and completed the list himself, asking the dumbfounded Chronicler to correct him if he made a mistake. Chronicler watched and listened as Kvothe completed the list. From beginning to end the whole process took about fifteen minutes. He made no mistakes. "Wonderfully efficient system," Kvothe said appreciatively. "Very logical. Did you design it yourself?" Chronicler took a long moment before he spoke, staring at the rows of characters on the page in front of Kvothe. Finally, disregarding Kvothe’s question, Chronicler asked, "Did you really learn Tema in a day?" Kvothe gave a faint smile and looked down at the table. "That’s an old story. I’d almost forgotten. It took a day and a half, actually. A day and a half with no sleep. Why do you ask?" "I heard about it at the University. I never really believed it." He looked down at the page of his cipher in Kvothe’s neat handwriting. "All of it?" Kvothe looked puzzled. "What?" "Did you learn the whole language?" "No. Of course not," Kvothe said rather testily. "Only a portion of it. A large portion to be sure, but I don’t believe you can ever learn all of anything, let alone a language." Kvothe rubbed his hands together. "Now, are you ready?" Chronicler shook his head as if to clear it, set out a new sheet of paper, and nodded. Kvothe held up a hand to keep Chronicler from writing, and spoke, "I’ve never told this story before, and I doubt I’ll ever tell it again." Kvothe leaned forward in his chair. "Before we begin, you must remember that I am of the Edema Ruh…
"But what would my father say if he heard me telling a story this way? ‘Begin at the beginning.’ Very well, if we are to have a telling, let’s make it a proper one." Kvothe sat forward in his chair. "In the beginning, as far as I know, the world was spun out of the nameless void by Aleph, who gave everything a name. Or, depending on the version of the tale, found the names all things already possessed." Chronicler let slip a small laugh, though he did not look up from his page or pause in his writing. Kvothe continued, smiling himself. "I see you laugh. Very well, for simplicity’s sake, let us assume I am the center of creation. In doing this, let us pass over innumerable boring stories: the rise and fall of empires, sagas of heroism, ballads of tragic love. Let us hurry forward to the only tale of any real importance." His smile broadened. "Mine."
I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have heard of me.
And then there was Abenthy, my first real teacher. He taught me more than all the others set end to end. If not for him, I would never have become the man I am today. I ask that you not hold it against him. He meant well.
Only now, far after the fact, do I recognize how carefully Ben prepared me for what was to come at the University. He did it subtly. Once or twice a day, mixed in with my normal lectures, Ben would present me with a little mental exercise I would have to master before we went on to anything else. He made me play Tirani without a board, keeping track of the stones in my head. Other times he would stop in the middle of a conversation and make me repeat everything said in the last few minutes, word for word. This was levels beyond the simple memorization I had practiced for the stage. My mind was learning to work in different ways, becoming stronger. It felt the same way your body feels after a day of splitting wood, or swimming, or sex. You feel exhausted, languorous, and almost Godlike. This feeling was similar, except it was my intellect that was weary and expanded, languid and latently powerful. I could feel my mind starting to awaken.
"Seven things has Lady Lackless Keeps them underneath her black dress One a ring that’s not for wearing One a sharp word, not for swearing Right beside her husband’s candle There’s a door without a handle In a box, no lid or locks Lackless keeps her husband’s rocks There’s a secret she’s been keeping She’s been dreaming and not sleeping On a road, that’s not for traveling Lackless likes her riddle raveling."
The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.
My mother broke in softly. "I remember too, dear, but I think it was just his small hands. He was awfully young…." "I bet it didn’t stall him for long," Ben said quietly. "He does have marvelous hands; my mother would have called them magician’s fingers." My father smiled. "He gets them from his mother, delicate, but strong. Perfect for scrubbing pots, eh woman?" My mother swatted him, then caught one of his hands in her own and unfolded it for Ben to see. "He gets them from his father, graceful and gentle. Perfect for seducing young nobles’ daughters." My father started to protest, but she ignored him. "With his eyes and those hands there won’t be a woman safe in all the world when he starts hunting after the ladies." "Courting, dear," my father corrected gently. "Semantics," she shrugged. "It’s all a chase, and when the race is done, I think I pity women chaste who run." She leaned back against my father, keeping his hand in her lap.
It was quiet when I turned my attention back to them. My father was looking down at my mother, nestled under his arm. "How about it, woman? Did you happen to bed down with some wandering God a dozen years ago? That might solve our little mystery." She swatted at him playfully, and a thoughtful look crossed her face. "Come to think of it, there was a night, about a dozen years ago, a man came to me. He bound me with kisses and cords of chorded song. He robbed me of my virtue and stole me away." She paused, "But he didn’t have red hair. Couldn’t be him." She smiled wickedly at my father, who appeared a little embarrassed. Then she kissed him. He kissed her back. That’s how I like to remember them today. I snuck away with thoughts of the University dancing in my head.
My parents danced together, her head on his chest. Both had their eyes closed. They seemed so perfectly content. If you can find someone like that, someone who you can hold and close your eyes to the world with, then you’re lucky. Even if it only lasts for a minute or a day. The image of them gently swaying to the music is how I picture love in my mind even after all these years.
The Chancellor’s eyes had taken on a curious look by this point but he pushed it aside as he said, "Is there anything else you would like to say?" He had asked the question of the other applicants, but none of them had taken advantage of it. It seemed almost rhetorical, a ritual before the masters discussed the applicant’s tuition. "Yes, please," I said, surprising him. "I have a favor to ask beyond mere admission." I took a deep breath, letting their attention settle on me. "It has taken me nearly three years to get here. I may seem young, but I belong here as much, if not more, than some rich lordling who can’t tell salt from cyanide by tasting it." I paused. "However, at this moment I have two jots in my purse and nowhere in the world to get more than that. I have nothing worth selling that I haven’t already sold. "Admit me for more than two jots and I will not be able to attend. Admit me for less and I will be here every day, while every night I will do what it takes to stay alive while I study here. I will sleep in alleys and stables, wash dishes for kitchen scraps, beg pennies to buy pens. I will do whatever it takes." I said the last words fiercely, almost snarling them. "But admit me free, and give me three talents so I can live and buy what I need to learn properly, and I will be a student the likes of which you have never seen before." There was a half-breath of silence, followed by a thunderclap of a laugh from Kilvin. "HA!" he roared. "If one student in ten had half his fire I’d teach with a whip and chair instead of chalk and slate." He brought his hand down hard on the table in front of him.
Elodin poked him in the chest with a long finger. "If I find out that Whin has been sedated or restrained I’ll ride you naked through the streets of Imre like a little pink pony." He glared. "Go."
As we approached the Eolian the doorman tugged at the front of a wide-brimmed hat and made a nodding bow. He was at least six and a half feet tall, deeply tanned and muscular. "That will be one jot, young master," he smiled as Wilem handed over a coin. He turned to me next with the same sunny smile. Looking at the lute case I carried he cocked an eyebrow at me. "Good to see a new face. You know the rules?" I nodded and handed him a jot. He turned to point inside. "You see the bar?" It was hard to miss fifty feet of winding mahogany that curved through the far end of the room. "See where the far end turns toward the stage?" I nodded. "See him on the stool? If you decide to try for your pipes, he’s the one you want to talk to. Name’s Stanchion." We both turned away from the room at the same time. I shrugged my lute higher onto my shoulder. "Thank you—" I paused, not knowing his name. "Deoch." He smiled again in his relaxed way. A sudden impulse seized me, and I held out my hand. "Deoch means ‘to drink.’ Will you let me buy you one later?" He looked at me for a long second before he laughed. It was an unrestrained, happy sound that came leaping straight from his chest. He shook my hand warmly. "I just might at that." Deoch released my hand, looking behind me. "Simmon, did you bring us this one?" "He brought me, actually." Simmon seemed put out by my brief exchange with the doorman, but I couldn’t guess why. "I don’t think anyone can really take him anywhere." He handed a jot to Deoch. "I’ll believe that," Deoch said. "There’s something about him I like. He’s a little fae around the edges. I hope he plays for us tonight."
Count Threpe was one of the first to come to me. He looked shorter up close, and older. But he was bright-eyed and laughing as he talked about my song. "Then it broke!" he said, gesturing wildly. "And all I could think was, Not now! Not before the ending! But I saw the blood on your hand and my stomach knotted up. You looked up at us, then down at the strings, and it got quieter and quieter. Then you put your hands back on the lute and all I could think was, There’s a brave boy. Too brave. He doesn’t know he can’t save the end of a broken song with a broken lute. But you did!" He laughed as if I’d played a joke on the world, and danced a quick jig step.
Updated: May 04, 2022
pstscrpt—Please rest assured that I did not notice the disgraceful condition of your bed linens, and did not judge your character thereby.
"You are not wise enough to fear me as I should be feared. You do not know the first note of the music that moves me."
It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.
Updated: May 23, 2022
IT WAS FELLING NIGHT, and the usual crowd had gathered at the Waystone Inn.
you. You know how to drive, I take it?” he asked Uncle Vernon politely. “Know how to — ? Of course I ruddy well know how to drive!” spluttered Uncle Vernon. “Very clever of you, sir, very clever, I personally would be utterly bamboozled by all those buttons and knobs,” said Dedalus. He was clearly under the impression that he was flattering Vernon Dursley, who was visibly losing confidence in the plan with every word Dedalus spoke. “Can’t even drive,” he muttered under his breath, his mustache rippling indignantly, but fortunately neither Dedalus nor Hestia seemed to hear him. “You, Harry,” Dedalus continued, “will wait here for your guard. There has been a little change in the arrangements —”
Two figures had appeared in the yard, and as Harry ran toward them he realized they were Hermione, now returning to her normal appearance, and Kingsley, both clutching a bent coat hanger. Hermione flung herself into Harry’s arms, but Kingsley showed no pleasure at the sight of any of them. Over Hermione’s shoulder Harry saw him raise his wand and point it at Lupin’s chest. “The last words Albus Dumbledore spoke to the pair of us?” “‘Harry is the best hope we have. Trust him,’” said Lupin calmly. Kingsley turned his wand on Harry, but Lupin said, “It’s him, I’ve checked!
Tags: blue
“Arthur!” sobbed Mrs. Weasley. “Oh thank goodness!” “How is he?” Mr. Weasley dropped to his knees beside George. For the first time since Harry had known him, Fred seemed to be lost for words. He gaped over the back of the sofa at his twin’s wound as if he could not believe what he was seeing. Perhaps roused by the sound of Fred and their father’s arrival, George stirred. “How do you feel, Georgie?” whispered Mrs. Weasley. George’s fingers groped for the side of his head. “Saintlike,” he murmured. “What’s wrong with him?” croaked Fred, looking terrified. “Is his mind affected?” “Saintlike,” repeated George, opening his eyes and looking up at his brother. “You see . . . I’m holy. Holey, Fred, geddit?” Mrs. Weasley sobbed harder than ever. Color flooded Fred’s pale face. “Pathetic,” he told George. “Pathetic! With the whole wide world of ear-related humor before you, you go for holey?” “Ah well,” said George, grinning at his tear-soaked mother. “You’ll be able to tell us apart now, anyway, Mum.
Tags: blue
Madame Delacour glided forward and stooped to kiss Mrs. Weasley too. “Enchantée,” she said. “Your ’usband ’as been telling us such amusing stories!” Mr. Weasley gave a maniacal laugh; Mrs. Weasley threw him a look, upon which he became immediately silent and assumed an expression appropriate to the sickbed of a close friend.
“Thought wrong, then, didn’t he?” said Ron. “I always said he was mental. Brilliant and everything, but cracked. Leaving Harry an old Snitch — what the hell was that about?” “I’ve no idea,” said Hermione. “When Scrimgeour made you take it, Harry, I was so sure that something was going to happen!” “Yeah, well,” said Harry, his pulse quickening as he raised the Snitch in his fingers. “I wasn’t going to try too hard in front of Scrimgeour, was I?” “What do you mean?” asked Hermione. “The Snitch I caught in my first ever Quidditch match?” said Harry. “Don’t you remember?” Hermione looked simply bemused. Ron, however, gasped, pointing frantically from Harry to the Snitch and back again until he found his voice. “That was the one you nearly swallowed!” “Exactly,” said Harry, and with his heart beating fast, he pressed his mouth to the Snitch. It did not open. Frustration and bitter disappointment welled up inside him: He lowered the golden sphere, but then Hermione cried out. “Writing! There’s writing on it, quick, look!” He nearly dropped the Snitch in surprise and excitement. Hermione was quite right. Engraved upon the smooth golden surface, where seconds before there had been nothing, were five words written in the thin, slanting handwriting that Harry recognized as Dumbledore’s: I open at the close.
“And as for this book,” said Hermione, “The Tales of Beedle the Bard . . . I’ve never even heard of them!” “You’ve never heard of The Tales of Beedle the Bard?” said Ron incredulously. “You’re kidding, right?” “No, I’m not!” said Hermione in surprise. “Do you know them, then?” “Well, of course I do!” Harry looked up, diverted. The circumstance of Ron having read a book that Hermione had not was unprecedented. Ron, however, looked bemused by their surprise. “Oh come on! All the old kids’ stories are supposed to be Beedle’s, aren’t they? ‘The Fountain of Fair Fortune’ . . . ‘The Wizard and the Hopping Pot’ . . . ‘Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump’ . . .”
“I simply can’t dance anymore,” she panted, slipping off one of her shoes and rubbing the sole of her foot. “Ron’s gone looking to find more butterbeers. It’s a bit odd, I’ve just seen Viktor storming away from Luna’s father, it looked like they’d been arguing —” She dropped her voice, staring at him. “Harry, are you okay?” Harry did not know where to begin, but it did not matter. At that moment, something large and silver came falling through the canopy over the dance floor. Graceful and gleaming, the lynx landed lightly in the middle of the astonished dancers. Heads turned, as those nearest it froze absurdly in mid-dance. Then the Patronus’s mouth opened wide and it spoke in the loud, deep, slow voice of Kingsley Shacklebolt. “The Ministry has fallen. Scrimgeour is dead. They are coming.”
That’s when they decided there was only one way to stop me, I suppose, and they went for Gran.” “They what?” said Harry, Ron, and Hermione together. “Yeah,” said Neville, panting a little now, because the passage was climbing so steeply, “well, you can see their thinking. It had worked really well, kidnapping kids to force their relatives to behave, I s’pose it was only a matter of time before they did it the other way around. Thing was,” he faced them, and Harry was astonished to see that he was grinning, “they bit off a bit more than they could chew with Gran. Little old witch living alone, they probably thought they didn’t need to send anyone particularly powerful. Anyway,” Neville laughed, “Dawlish is still in St. Mungo’s and Gran’s on the run. She sent me a letter,” he clapped a hand to the breast pocket of his robes, “telling me she was proud of me, that I’m my parents’ son, and to keep it up.” “Cool,” said Ron. “Yeah,” said Neville
Aberforth. He’s been providing us with food, because for some reason, that’s the one thing the room doesn’t really do.” “Yeah, well, food’s one of the five exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration,” said Ron to general astonishment.
“‘Got Potter’?” said Professor McGonagall sharply. “What do you mean, ‘got Potter’?” “He told us Potter might try and get inside Ravenclaw Tower, and to send for him if we caught him!” “Why would Harry Potter try to get inside Ravenclaw Tower? Potter belongs in my House!” Beneath the disbelief and anger, Harry heard a little strain of pride in her voice, and affection for Minerva McGonagall gushed up inside him.
“Slytherin?” One of the boys sharing the compartment, who had shown no interest at all in Lily or Snape until that point, looked around at the word, and Harry, whose attention had been focused entirely on the two beside the window, saw his father: slight, black-haired like Snape, but with that indefinable air of having been well-cared-for, even adored, that Snape so conspicuously lacked.
Everything was as he had remembered it. And yet . . . “But you’re dead,” said Harry. “Oh yes,” said Dumbledore matter-of-factly. “Then . . . I’m dead too?” “Ah,” said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. “That is the question, isn’t it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not.” They looked at each other, the old man still beaming. “Not?” repeated Harry. “Not,” said Dumbledore.
“I resented it, Harry.” Dumbledore stated it baldly, coldly. He was looking now over the top of Harry’s head, into the distance. “I was gifted, I was brilliant. I wanted to escape. I wanted to shine. I wanted glory. “Do not misunderstand me,” he said, and pain crossed the face so that he looked ancient again. “I loved them. I loved my parents, I loved my brother and my sister, but I was selfish, Harry, more selfish than you, who are a remarkably selfless person, could possibly imagine.
and off, seemed to be turned toward Harry. “Why are they all staring?” demanded Albus as he and Rose craned around to look at the other students. “Don’t let it worry you,” said Ron. “It’s me. I’m extremely famous.”
And that was that. For some people, there is only one right moment for the right word. This is sad, but there seems to be nothing that can be done about it.
But…cannon! She’d seen gun drill on the Judy, and even Cox handled them with care. There was one right way of firing a cannon, and lots of wonderfully explosive ways of getting it wrong.
He nodded and headed back to his fellows, who had clustered around Cox. Mau approached her, smiling. “Their priest likes you,” he said. “Only for my brains, Mau, and even if he had them for lunch, I’d still have more than you! Didn’t you see that gun he’s got now? It’s a Pepperbox. One of Father’s friends had one! It has six barrels. That’s six shots without reloading! And he’s got an ordinary pistol, too!”
Oh, and one other thing. Those others I mentioned, who have been shown the glittering path? They all said the same thing as you did. They saw that the perfect world is a journey, not a place. I have only one choice, Mau, but I’m good at making it.
“I think…I think if you are a suckfish in a sea o’ sharks, you must swim with the biggest shark,” said Milo. This met with general approval; the island council was still learning about international politics, but they were experts on fish.
For the sake of the game she was banned from bowling after Daphne’s father explained that women should not really be allowed to play cricket because they fundamentally didn’t understand it. But it seemed to Daphne that Cahle understood it very well, and therefore tried to get it over with as quickly as possible so that they could get on with something more interesting, since in her opinion the world was overwhelmingly full of things that were more interesting than cricket.
“Strictly speaking, yes,” said Mr. Black. “You became king as soon as the last king died. At that very second. That’s how it works.” “Really?” said His Majesty. “Yes, sire,” said Mr. Black patiently, “God arranges it.” “Oh good,” said the king weakly. “That’s very clever of Him.”
“But it’s the kind of ending you get in real life,” said the old man, “and isn’t the story about being real? Though I’ve always thought he went fishing so that people wouldn’t see him cry. He must have felt very lonely. ‘If you will sacrifice,’ Mau said later, ‘then sacrifice your time on the altar of the common good. Eat the fish, or give it to someone who is hungry.’”
“Oh, indeed. And now you know the universe isn’t just a light show. They keep it running during the day, too!” The man clenched his wrinkled hands and said: “Live for those moments! They keep you alive! There is no better medicine than finding out that you are wrong! What did your mother put in your hand when you were born, young man?” “Er…a wooden telescope, sir. So that I will want to see farther,” said the boy. He was a little shaken; tears were running down the old man’s cheeks, even though he was smiling. “Good, good. And you, young lady?” “A blue hermit crab, sir. So that I won’t accept any shell.” “That’s a big totem to live up to. You must spend your life asking questions.”
“Ah, good one! I must answer, mustn’t I?” He straightened himself up. “Because you liked my blue Jupiter. Because we keep going. Because we’ve come so far and have such a long way still to go. Because there are stars and blue hermit crabs. Because you are here, and strong and clever. The joy of the moment. Those sorts of things. Do excuse me if I sit down.”
“Do you believe in Imo, sir?” asked the boy. “Ah, the usual question. We come to it at last. You know Mau said that Imo made us clever enough to work out that He does not exist?”
Thinking This book contains some. Whether you try it at home is up to you. Terry Pratchett
“My name,” she said at last, “is Miss Tick. And I am a witch. It’s a good name for a witch, of course.” “You mean blood-sucking parasite?” said Tiffany, wrinkling her forehead. “I’m sorry?” said Miss Tick, coldly. “Ticks,” said Tiffany. “Sheep get them. But if you use turpentine—” “I meant that it sounds like ‘mystic,’” said Miss Tick. “Oh, you mean a pune, or play on words,” said Tiffany.
“Well, I must go. I hope we shall meet again. I will give you some free advice, though.” “Will it cost me anything?” “What? I just said it was free!” said Miss Tick. “Yes, but my father said that free advice often turns out to be expensive,” said Tiffany. Miss Tick sniffed. “You could say this advice is priceless,” she said. “Are you listening?” “Yes,” said Tiffany. “Good. Now . . . if you trust in yourself . . .” “Yes?” “. . . and believe in your dreams . . .” “Yes?” “. . . and follow your star . . .” Miss Tick went on. “Yes?” “. . . you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Good-bye.”
“Them as can do has to do for them as can’t. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.”
The Nac Mac Feegle were real, and once again she wished they were here. There was something about the way they shouted “Crivens!” and attacked everything in sight that was so very comforting.
“The thing about witchcraft,” said Mistress Weatherwax, “is that it’s not like school at all. First you get the test, and then afterward you spend years findin’ out how you passed it. It’s a bit like life in that respect.”
Now, every day when I wake up I am grateful. I have to be. And I have to count the things that are abundant in my life. Literally count them. If I don’t they will begin to disappear. I’ve watched them disappear before. I don’t want it to happen again.
You’re definitely not going to find them reading a book. It’s a moment by moment effort in your daily life. It’s a practice that interweaves health with the tools of financial experts and a macro-level understanding of this economic shitstorm we find ourselves in today.
In fact, “the American Dream” comes from a marketing campaign developed by Fannie Mae to convince Americans newly flush with cash to start taking mortgages. Why buy a home with your own hard-earned money when you can use somebody else’s? It may be the best marketing slogan ever conceived. It was like a vacuum cleaner that sucked everyone into believing that a $15 trillion mortgage industry would lead to universal happiness. “The American Dream” quickly replaced the peace and quiet of the suburbs with the desperate need to always stay ahead.
We stood outside the door, staring at each other while the smoke billowed past. I decided to take a different tack on the problem. "I understand your hesitation, Master Elodin," I said. "Sometimes I don’t think things all the way through." "Obviously." "And I’ll admit there have been times when my actions have been …" I paused, trying to think of something more humble than "ill-considered." "Stupid beyond all mortal ken?" Elodin said helpfully.
Elodin nodded again and took a bite of his cinnas. As he chewed, he turned to look at me. By the light of the moon, I saw his eyes. They were cool, thoughtful, and perfectly, utterly sane.
Next I went to Ledgers and Lists, where I signed up for observation in the Medica along with Physiognomy and Physic. Next was Ferrous and Cupric Metallurgy with Cammar in the Fishery. Last came Adept Sympathy with Elxa Dal. It was only then I realized I didn’t know the name of Elodin’s class. I leafed through the ledger until I spotted Elodin’s name, then ran my finger back to where the title of the class was listed in fresh dark ink: "Introduction to Not Being a Stupid Jackass."
The Chandrian move from place to place, But they never leave a trace. They hold their secrets very tight, But they never scratch and they never bite. They never fight and they never fuss. In fact they are quite nice to us. They come and they go in the blink of an eye, Like a bright bolt of lightning out of the sky.
"We heard …" Sim paused and turned to look at Mola. "He’s going to be okay, right?" "He’ll be fine," Mola said. "Provided his temperature levels out." She picked up a key-gauge and stuck it in my mouth. "I know this will be hard for you, but try to keep your mouth shut for a minute." "In that case," Simmon said with a grin, "we heard Kilvin took you somewhere private and showed you something that made you faint like a little sissy girl."
"He’s not upset because you didn’t trust him, or that you tricked Sim. He’s upset because you found out what asinine lengths he is willing to go to in order to impress a woman." He looked at me. "Is ‘asinine’ the right word?" I took a deep breath and let it out. "Pretty much," I admitted. "I chose it because it sounded like ass," Wil said.
Yet fast-found for friendship fair the book-bringer Hot comes the huntress Fela, flushed with finding Breathless her breast her high blood rising To ripen the red-cheek rouge-bloom of beauty. "That sort of thing," Simmon said absently, his eyes still scanning the pages in front of him. I saw Fela turn her head to look at Simmon, almost as if she were surprised to see him sitting there. No, it was almost as if up until that point, he’d just been occupying space around her, like a piece of furniture. But this time when she looked at him, she took all of him in. His sandy hair, the line of his jaw, the span of his shoulders beneath his shirt. This time when she looked, she actually saw him. Let me say this. It was worth the whole awful, irritating time spent searching the Archives just to watch that moment happen. It was worth blood and the fear of death to see her fall in love with him. Just a little. Just the first faint breath of love, so light she probably didn’t notice it herself. It wasn’t dramatic, like some bolt of lightning with a crack of thunder following. It was more like when flint strikes steel and the
There was a burst of startled laughter from everyone except Fela and myself. I scowled. She crossed her arms in front of her chest and her flush spread down her neck until it was hidden by her shirt. Elodin turned his back to her and looked me in the eye. "Re’lar Kvothe," he said seriously. "I am trying to wake your sleeping mind to the subtle language the world is whispering. I am trying to seduce you into understanding. I am trying to teach you." He leaned forward until his face was almost touching mine. "Quit grabbing at my tits."
Before we could head out, Sim handed me a small jar. I gave it an odd look. I already had his alchemical concoction tucked away in my cloak. "What’s this?" "It’s just ointment in case you get burned," he explained. "But if you mix it with piss, it turns into candy." Sim’s expression was deadpan. "Delicious candy." I nodded seriously. "Yes sir." Mola stared in confusion. Devi pointedly ignored us and began piling wood on the fire.
"Honestly, boy," I said to him. "I don’t know what you were thinking. You’d think a member of the Arcanum would have more sense."
Sim screwed his face up into an exaggerated scowl and gestured wildly. "Listen to me, you daft bint!" he said in a fair imitation of Ambrose’s Vintish accent. "My rooms were on fire!"
cowl of the robe was nothing but blackness. Over his head were three moons, a full moon, a half moon, and one that was just a crescent. Next to him were two candles. One was yellow with a bright orange flame. The other candle sat underneath his outstretched hand: it was grey with a black flame, and the space around it was smudged and darkened.
I recognized him then. It wasn’t a leaf on his chest. It was a tower wrapped in flame. His bloody, outstretched hand wasn’t demonstrating something. It was making a gesture of rebuke toward Haliax and the rest. He was holding up his hand to stop them. This man was one of the Amyr. One of the Ciridae.
Even after all the long years, the old man remembered the way she had licked the blood from the back of her hand like a cat.
"Technically speaking, the Edema Ruh are a nomadic people," I said dryly. "I heard a story once that said the leaders of their tribes aren’t great warriors, they’re singers. Their songs can heal the sick and make the trees dance."
Almost shyly, Fela held out her hand. But Elodin shook his head. "Left hand," he said firmly. "The right means something else entirely. None of you are anywhere near ready for that."
Days passed. And I sat idle as winter slowly withdrew from the University. Frost left the corners of windowpanes, drifts of snow dwindled, and trees began to show their first greening buds. Eventually Simmon caught his first glimpse of bare leg beneath a flowing dress and declared spring had officially arrived.
Her sudden change in manner caught me off my guard. Since we had met in Severen I had courted her with wild, hopeless pageantry, and she had matched me without missing a beat. Each flattery, each witticism, each piece of playful banter she returned to me, not in an echo but a harmony. Our back-and-forth had been like a duet. But this was different. Her tone was less playful and more plain. It was so sudden a change that I was at a loss for words.
"There are a thousand girls who could walk with you along the moonlit garden paths," Denna said breathlessly. "But there’s only one who’ll hide in the shrubbery with you." She grinned at me, her voice bubbling with amusement.
I couldn’t agree more, but decided it wouldn’t be prudent to say so. "And what does he think of me?" "What?" she asked, confused. "Oh. He doesn’t know about you," she said. "Why would he?" I tried to give a nonchalant shrug, but I couldn’t have been very convincing as she burst out laughing. "Poor Kvothe. I’m teasing you. I only tell him about the ones that come prowling around, panting and sniffing like dogs. You’re not like them. You’ve always been different." "I’ve always prided myself on my lack of panting and sniffing."
Hespe reluctantly put the pieces of her scowl away. Then she looked down at her hands, frowning.
My interjection didn’t slow Dedan down the least bit. It just pointed him in my direction. "What would you know about adults?" he said. "I’m sick and tired of being talked down to by some boy who probably doesn’t even have hair on his balls yet." "I’m sure if the Maer had known how hairy your balls were, he would have put you in charge," I said with what I hoped was infuriating calmness. "Unfortunately, it seems he missed that fact and decided on me instead." Dedan drew a breath, but Tempi broke in before he could start. "Balls," the Adem said curiously. "What is balls?" All the air went out of Dedan in a rush, and he turned to look at Tempi, half irritated, half amused. The big mercenary chuckled and made a very clear motion between his legs with a cupped hand. "You know. Balls," he said without a trace of self-consciousness. Behind his back, Hespe rolled her eyes, shaking her head. "Ah," Tempi said, nodding to show his understanding. "Why is the Maer looking at hairy balls?" A pause, then a storm of laughter rolled through our camp, exploding with all the force of the pent-up tension that had been ready to boil into a fight. Hespe laughed herself breathless, clutching at her stomach. Marten wiped tears from his eyes. Dedan laughed so hard he couldn’t stand upright and ended up crouching with one hand on the ground to steady himself.
Felurian’s voice was not resonant. It did not fill the forest glade. Hers was the hush before a sudden summer storm. It was soft as a brushing feather. It made my heart step sideways in my chest.
Maybe the soft creaking of your tendons as you clench your fists is like a sweet symphony to me. Oh, yes it is. And you can be sure.
Kvothe gave a wry smile. "So after a person meets the Cthaeh, all their choices will be the wrong ones." Bast shook his head, his face pale and drawn. "Not wrong, Reshi, catastrophic. Jax spoke to the Cthaeh before he stole the moon, and that sparked the entire creation war. Lanre spoke to the Cthaeh before he orchestrated the betrayal of Myr Tariniel. The creation of the Nameless. The Scaendyne. They can all be traced back to the Cthaeh."
I gave it a questioning look. "Did you run into trouble?" I asked while the room buzzed chaotically around us. Dedan shook his head. "Hespe," he said simply. "She didn’t take too kindly to the thought of me running off after that faerie woman. She sort of…convinced me to stay." "She broke your arm?" I remembered my parting glimpse of Hespe holding him to the ground. The big man looked down at his feet. "A bit. She sort of held onto it while I tried to twist away." He gave a slightly sheepish smile. "I guess you could say we broke it together." I clapped him on his good shoulder and laughed. "That’s sweet. Truly touching." I would have continued, but the room had quieted. Everyone was watching us, watching me.
"Seven things stand before The entrance to the Lackless door. One of them a ring unworn One a word that is forsworn One a time that must be right One a candle without light One a son who brings the blood One a door that holds the flood One a thing tight-held in keeping Then comes that which comes with sleeping."
As Vashet approached, the first thing I noticed was that she didn’t wear her sword on her hip. Instead she slung it over her shoulder, just as I carried my lute. She walked with the most subtle, solid confidence I have ever seen, as if she knew she ought to swagger, but couldn’t quite be bothered.
"Or I was really trying to run you off," Vashet finished as she sat on the bench opposite me. "What if I’d been telling the truth and thumped you bloody?" I shrugged. "At least I’d have known. But it seemed like long odds that Shehyn would choose someone like that. If she’d wanted me beaten she could have let Carceret do it." I cocked my head. "Out of curiosity, which was it? Initiation or test of resolve? Does everyone go through this?" She shook her head. "Resolve. I needed to make sure of you. I wasn’t going to waste my time teaching a coward or someone afraid of a little smack or two. I also needed to know you were dedicated." I nodded. "That seemed the most likely. I thought I’d save myself several days of welts and force the issue." Vashet gave me a long look, curiosity plain on her face. "I will admit, I’ve never had a student offer himself up for a vicious beating in order to prove he’s worth my time." "This was nothing," I said nonchalantly. "Once I jumped off a roof."
With that one disappointing exception, Vashet was a sparkling font of information. She answered my endless questions quickly and clearly. As a result, I couldn’t help but feel that my skill in speaking and fighting was progressing in great leaps and bounds. Vashet did not share my enthusiasm, and was not bashful about saying so. Eloquently. In two languages.
I brought out my lute and practiced my chording a bit, all five of my clever fingers flicking up and down the long neck of the lute. But my right hand ached to strum and pick notes from the strings. It was as frustrating as trying to kiss someone using only one lip, and I soon gave up.
She only stopped when Vashet returned. I watched from a distance as Vashet stormed over and gave the girl a stern telling off. I couldn’t hear what was said, but their body language spoke volumes. Celean looked down and shuffled her feet. Vashet shook a finger and cuffed the young girl on the side of her head. It was the same scolding any child receives. Stay out of the neighbor’s garden. Don’t tease the Bentons’ sheep. Don’t play tag among the thousand spinning knives of your people’s sacred tree.
"Remember it was bandits who took them," I said as I turned to leave. "And remember it was one of the Edema Ruh who brought them back."
You couldn’t merely say "the Chancellor’s socks." Oh, no. Too simple. All ownership was oddly dual: as if the Chancellor owned his socks, but at the same time the socks somehow also gained ownership of the Chancellor. This altered the use of both words in complex grammatical ways. As if the simple act of owning socks somehow fundamentally changed the nature of a person.
I grinned at her and pulled my hand out of the water. She turned in time for the wave to hit her. It was only as high as her waist, but it was enough to unbalance her. She went under in a swirl of dress and hair and bubbles. The current carried her to me and I helped her to her feet, laughing. She came to the surface looking three-days drowned. "Not fair!" she sputtered indignantly. "Not fair!" "I disagree," I said. "You’re the fairest water-maid I hope to see today." She splashed at me. "Flatter all you like, the truth remains for God to see. You cheated. I used honest trickery."
Yet fast-found for friendship fair the book-bringer Hot comes the huntress Fela, flushed with finding Breathless her breast her high blood rising To ripen the red-cheek rouge-bloom of beauty. "That sort of thing," Simmon said absently, his eyes still scanning the pages in front of him. I saw Fela turn her head to look at Simmon, almost as if she were surprised to see him sitting there. No, it was almost as if up until that point, he’d just been occupying space around her, like a piece of furniture. But this time when she looked at him, she took all of him in. His sandy hair, the line of his jaw, the span of his shoulders beneath his shirt. This time when she looked, she actually saw him. Let me say this. It was worth the whole awful, irritating time spent searching the Archives just to watch that moment happen. It was worth blood and the fear of death to see her fall in love with him. Just a little. Just the first faint breath of love, so light she probably didn’t notice it herself. It wasn’t dramatic, like some bolt of lightning with a crack of thunder following. It was more like when flint strikes steel and the spark fades almost too fast for you to see. But still, you know it’s there, down where you can’t see, kindling.
I unrolled the paper further. There was a second man, or rather the shape of a man in a great hooded robe. Inside the cowl of the robe was nothing but blackness. Over his head were three moons, a full moon, a half moon, and one that was just a crescent. Next to him were two candles. One was yellow with a bright orange flame. The other candle sat underneath his outstretched hand: it was grey with a black flame, and the space around it was smudged and darkened.
Hespe reluctantly put the pieces of her scowl away. Then she looked down at her hands, frowning. Her mouth moved silently for a moment, then she nodded to herself and continued.
I slept and I woke. She gave me a ring made from a leaf, a cluster of golden berries, a flower that opened and closed at the stroking of a finger….
Updated: May 04, 2022
"Still," he said, "you’ve got to make hay while the sun shines."
"Has poor Threpe really been out stumping for you all this while?" I nodded. "I told him it was a lost cause." "It is if you keep thumbing your nose at folk," she said. "I swear I’ve never met a man who has your knack for lack of social grace. If you weren’t naturally charming, someone would have stabbed you by now." "You’re assuming," I muttered. Marie turned to my friends at the table. "It’s a pleasure to meet all of you." Wil nodded, and Sim smiled. Manet, however, came to his feet in a smooth motion and held out his hand. Marie took it, and Manet clasped it warmly between his own. "Marie," he said. "You intrigue me. Is there any chance I could buy you a drink and enjoy the pleasure of your conversation at some point tonight?" I was too startled to do anything but stare. Standing there, the two of them looked like badly matched bookends. Marie stood six inches taller than Manet, her boots making her long legs look even longer. Manet, on the other hand, looked as he always did, grizzled and disheveled, plus older than Marie by at least a decade. Marie blinked and cocked her head a bit, as if considering. "I’m here with some friends right now," she said. "It might be late by the time I finish up with them." "When makes no difference to me," Manet said easily. "I’m willing to lose some sleep if it comes to that. I can’t think of the last time I shared the company of a woman who speaks her mind firmly and without hesitation. Your kind are in short supply these days." Marie looked him over again. Manet met her eye and flashed a smile so confident and charming that it belonged on stage. "I’ve no desire to pull you away from your friends," he said, "but you’re the first fiddler in ten years that’s set my feet dancing. It seems a drink is the least I can do." Marie smiled back at him, half amused, half wry. "I’m on the second tier right now," she said, gesturing toward the stairway. "But I should be free in, say, two hours.…" "You’re terribly kind," he said. "Should I come and find you?" "You should," she said. Then gave him a thoughtful look as she turned to walk away. Manet reclaimed his seat and took a drink. Simmon looked as flabbergasted as we all felt. "What the hell was that?" he demanded. Manet chuckled into his beard and leaned back in his chair, cradling his mug to his chest. "That," he said smugly, "is just one more thing I understand that you pups don’t. Take note. Take heed."
Elodin strode toward the large slate mounted on the wall and began to write a list of titles. His handwriting was surprisingly tidy. "These are important books," he said. "Read one of them." After a moment, Brean raised her hand. Then she realized it was pointless as Elodin still had his back to us. "Master Elodin?" she asked hesitantly. "Which one should we read?" He looked over his shoulder, not pausing in his writing at all. "I don’t care," he said, plainly irritated. "Pick one. The others you should skim in a desultory fashion. Look at the pictures. Smell them if nothing else." He turned back to look at the slate. The seven of us looked at each other. The only sound in the room was the tapping of Elodin’s chalk. "Which one is the most important?" I asked. Elodin made a disgusted noise. "I don’t know," he said. "I haven’t read them." He wrote En Temerant Voistra on the board and circled it. "I don’t even know if this one is in the Archives at all." He put a question mark next to it and continued to write. "I will tell you this. None of them are in Tomes. I made sure of that. You’ll have to hunt for them in the Stacks. You’ll have to earn them." He finished the last title and took a step back, nodding to himself. There were twenty books in all. He drew stars next to three of them, underlined two others, and drew a sad face next to the last one on the list. Then he left, striding out of the room without another word, leaving us thinking on the nature of names and wondering what we had gotten ourselves into.
Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find.
It is not for nothing that they came to call me Kvothe the Arcane. My Alar was like a blade of Ramston steel.
"Your loss," Sim said absently as he turned a few pages. "Eld Vintic poetry is thunderous. It pounds at you." "What’s the meter like?" I asked, curious despite myself. "I don’t know anything about meter," Simmon said distractedly as he ran a finger down the page in front of him. "It’s like this: "Sought we the Scrivani word-work of Surthur Long-lost in ledger all hope forgotten. Yet fast-found for friendship fair the book-bringer Hot comes the huntress Fela, flushed with finding Breathless her breast her high blood rising To ripen the red-cheek rouge-bloom of beauty. "That sort of thing," Simmon said absently, his eyes still scanning the pages in front of him. I saw Fela turn her head to look at Simmon, almost as if she were surprised to see him sitting there. No, it was almost as if up until that point, he’d just been occupying space around her, like a piece of furniture. But this time when she looked at him, she took all of him in. His sandy hair, the line of his jaw, the span of his shoulders beneath his shirt. This time when she looked, she actually saw him. Let me say this. It was worth the whole awful, irritating time spent searching the Archives just to watch that moment happen. It was worth blood and the fear of death to see her fall in love with him. Just a little. Just the first faint breath of love, so light she probably didn’t notice it herself. It wasn’t dramatic, like some bolt of lightning with a crack of thunder following. It was more like when flint strikes steel and the spark fades almost too fast for you to see. But still, you know it’s there, down where you can’t see, kindling.
"I am Kvothe." "You seem so certain of it," he said, looking at me intently. Another pause. "They call me Puppet." "Who is ‘they’?" "Who are they?" he corrected, raising a finger. I smiled. "Who are they then?" "Who were they then?" "Who are they now?" I clarified, my smile growing wider.
"The point," Bredon said grandly, "is to play a beautiful game." He lifted his hands and shrugged, his face breaking into a beatific smile. "Why would I want to win anything other than a beautiful game?"
She shrugged and nodded. "have they the will, and know the way. there are a thousand half-cracked doors that lead between my world and yours."
Cyphus bears the blue flame. Stercus is in thrall of iron. Ferule chill and dark of eye. Usnea lives in nothing but decay. Grey Dalcenti never speaks. Pale Alenta brings the blight. Last there is the lord of seven: Hated. Hopeless. Sleepless. Sane. Alaxel bears the shadow’s hame."
"What is the heart of the Lethani?" I asked Vashet. "Success and right action." "Which is the more important, success or rightness?" "They are the same. If you act rightly success follows." "But others may succeed by doing wrong things," I pointed out. "Wrong things never lead to success," Vashet said firmly. "If a man acts wrongly and succeeds, that is not the way. Without the Lethani there is no true success."
"You were right," Meluan said softly. "He’s like a child with a midwinter’s gift." "You haven’t seen the best of it yet," Alveron replied. "Wait until he starts. The boy has a mind like an iron hammer."
If you can think for yourself while being open-minded in a clearheaded way to find out what is best for you to do, and if you can summon up the courage to do it, you will make the most of your life.
"Sir?" said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He's like one of those weird chappies in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. I've got a cousin who's what they call a Theosophist, and he says he's often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn't quite bring it off, probably owing to having fed in his boyhood on the flesh of animals slain in anger and pie.
"What ho!" I said. "What ho!" said Motty. "What ho! What ho!" "What ho! What ho! What ho!" After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.
didn't know there was enough money in poetry to support a chappie, even in the way in which Rocky lived; but it seems that, if you stick to exhortations to young men to lead the strenuous life and don't shove in any rhymes, American editors fight for the stuff. Rocky showed me one of his things once. It began: Be! Be! The past is dead. To-morrow is not born. Be to-day! To-day! Be with every nerve, With every muscle, With every drop of your red blood! Be!
Word spreads quickly in such select circles, and so begins a tradition of rêveurs attending Le Cirque des Rêves decked in black or white or grey with a single shock of red: a scarf or hat, or, if the weather is warm, a red rose tucked into a lapel or behind an ear. It is also quite helpful for spotting other rêveurs, a simple signal for those in the know.
And before he can tell her to tell Widget goodbye for him if need be, she leans forward and kisses him, not on the cheek, as she has a handful of times before, but on the lips, and Bailey knows in that moment that he will follow her anywhere.
AS SHE GREW OLDER SHE lost all remembrance of her mother, without knowing she had lost it. She belonged here, at the Place of the Tombs; she had always belonged here. Only sometimes in the long evenings of July as she watched the western mountains, dry and lion-colored in the afterglow of sunset, she would think of a fire that had burned on a hearth, long ago, with the same clear yellow light.
He shipped the oars when they were well away from shoal water, and stepped the mast. The boat looked very small, now that she was inside it and the sea was outside it. He put up the sail. All the gear had a look of long, hard use, though the dull red sail was patched with great care and the boat was as clean and trim as could be. They were like their master: they had gone far, and had not been treated gently. “Now,” he said, “now we’re away, now we’re clear, we’re clean gone, Tenar. Do you feel it?” She did feel it. A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free. What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
Certainly Arha/Tenar would better satisfy feminist idealists if she did everything all by herself. But the truth as I saw it, and as I established it in the novel, was that she couldn’t. My imagination wouldn’t provide a scenario where she could, because my heart told me incontrovertibly that neither gender could go far without the other. So, in my story, neither the woman nor the man can get free without the other. Not in that trap. Each has to ask for the other’s help and learn to trust and depend on the other. A large lesson, a new knowledge for both these strong, willful, lonely souls.
"I will go home, to see my brothers and the sister you have heard me speak of. I left her a little child and soon she’ll be having her Naming—it’s strange to think of! And so I’ll find me a job of wizardry somewhere among the little isles. Oh, I would stay and talk with you, but I can’t, my ship goes out tonight and the tide is turned already. Sparrowhawk, if ever your way lies East, come to me. And if ever you need me, send for me, call on me by my name: Estarriol." At that Ged lifted his scarred face, meeting his friend’s eyes. "Estarriol," he said, "my name is Ged."
"You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do . . ."
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Updated: Apr 25, 2021
"I saw no light," the master roared, but even as he spoke Ged flung out his arm pointing, and all saw the light gleam clear in the west over the heaving scud and tumult of the sea.
And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Éa, which is the oldest song, it is said, "Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky."
Updated: May 23, 2022
Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky. —The Creation of Éa
THE ISLAND OF GONT, A single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
Updated: Jan 08, 2023
"You want to work spells," Ogion said presently, striding along. "You’ve drawn too much water from that well. Wait. Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience. What is that herb by the path?"
"You want to work spells," Ogion said presently, striding along. "You’ve drawn too much water from that well. Wait. Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience. What is that herb by the path?"
Vetch had been three years at the School, and soon would be made sorcerer; he thought no more of performing the lesser arts of magic than a bird thinks of flying. Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.
Vetch had been three years at the School, and soon would be made sorcerer; he thought no more of performing the lesser arts of magic than a bird thinks of flying. Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.
One particular morning, Seth was commenting on a recent news story: Harvard was rescinding the admission of 119 previously soon-to-be Harvard MBA students. 1 These prospective students had discovered an ethically dubious way to hack into the Harvard admissions Web site to view their application status before the official acceptance letters went out. The story quickly became a media frenzy, devolving into a debate about whether MBA students were naturally inclined to lie, cheat, and steal, or if business schools made them that way. Instead of being outraged at the bad behavior of the applicants, Seth (unsurprisingly) had a different perspective: Harvard was giving these students a gift. By rescinding their applications, Harvard was giving these students a significant opportunity: the university was returning $150,000 and two years of their lives, which would otherwise have been spent chasing a mostly worthless piece of paper. “It’s hard for me to understand,” he wrote, “why [getting an MBA] is a better use of time and money than actual experience combined with a dedicated reading of 30 or 40 books.”
I think it’s undeniably true that the human brain works in models. The trick is to have your brain work better than the other person’s brain because it understands the most fundamental models—the ones that do the most work. —CHARLES T. MUNGER,
I’ve long believed that a certain system—which almost any intelligent person can learn—works way better than the systems most people use [to understand the world]. What you need is a latticework of mental models in your head. And, with that system, things gradually fit together in a way that enhances cognition. Just as multiple factors shape every system, multiple mental models from a variety of disciplines are necessary to understand that system… You have to realize the truth of biologist Julian Huxley’s idea that, “Life is just one damn relatedness after another.” So you must have all the models, and you must see the relatedness and the effects from the relatedness… 4 It’s kind of fun to sit here and outthink people who are way smarter than you are because you’ve trained yourself to be more objective and more multidisciplinary. Furthermore, there is a lot of money in it, as I can testify from my own personal experience. 5
Fortunately, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel: great books on finance and accounting already exist. If you’re interested in exploring these topics in more detail after completing chapter 5, I recommend the following books: Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs by Karen Berman and Joe Knight Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits! by Greg Crabtree Accounting Made Simple by Mike Piper How to Read a Financial Report by John A. Tracy In addition, online courses like MBA Math (http://mbamath.com) and Bionic Turtle (http://bionicturtle.com) are available if you want to explore these topics in even greater depth. (Many business schools and corporate finance training programs recommend or require these courses prior to enrollment.) Quantitative Analysis and Modeling. We’ll discuss the fundamentals of measurement and analysis in chapter 10, but this book won’t turn you into a Wall Street “quant” or a high-flying spreadsheet jockey. Statistics and quantitative analysis are very useful skills when used appropriately, but the actual techniques are very situational and beyond the scope of this book. If you’re interested in learning more about statistical analysis after reading chapter 10, I recommend: Thinking Statistically by Uri Bram How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff Turning Numbers into Knowledge by Jonathan G. Koomey, PhD For an examination of more advanced methods of analysis, Principles of Statistics by M. G. Bulmer is a useful reference.
all human beings have four Core Human Drives that have a profound influence on our decisions and actions: 1. The Drive to Acquire. The desire to obtain or collect physical objects, as well as immaterial qualities like status, power, and influence. Businesses built on the drive to acquire include retailers, investment brokerages, and political consulting companies. Companies that promise to make us wealthy, famous, influential, or powerful connect to this drive. 2. The Drive to Bond. The desire to feel valued and loved by forming relationships with others, either platonic or romantic. Businesses built on the drive to bond include restaurants, conferences, and dating services. Companies that promise to make us attractive, well liked, or highly regarded connect to this drive. 3. The Drive to Learn. The desire to satisfy our curiosity. Businesses built on the drive to learn include academic programs, book publishers, and training workshops. Companies that promise to make us more knowledgeable or competent connect to this drive. 4. The Drive to Defend. The desire to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our property. Businesses built on the drive to defend include home alarm systems, insurance products, martial arts training, and legal services. Companies that promise to keep us safe, eliminate a problem, or prevent bad things from happening connect to this drive. There’s a fifth core drive that Lawrence and Nohria missed: 5. The Drive to Feel. The desire for new sensory stimulus, intense emotional experiences, pleasure, excitement, entertainment, and anticipation. Businesses built on the drive to feel include restaurants, movies, games, concerts, and sporting events. Offers that promise to give us pleasure, thrill us, or give us something to look forward to connect with this drive. Whenever a group of people have an unmet need in one or more of these areas, a market will form to satisfy that need. As a result, the more drives your offer connects with, the more attractive it will be to your potential market. At the core, all successful businesses sell some combination of money, status, power, love, knowledge, protection, pleasure, and excitement. The more clearly you articulate how your product satisfies one or more of these drives, the more attractive your offer will become.
Status Seeking is a universal phenomenon: neurotypical human beings care intensely about what other people think of them, and they spend a significant amount of energy tracking their relative status compared to other members of their group. When opportunities to increase status appear, most people will seize them. When given a choice between different Alternatives (discussed later), people will typically choose the option with the highest perceived status. In general, we like to be associated with people and organizations that we think are powerful, important, or exclusive or that exhibit other high-status qualities or behaviors. We also like to ensure other people are aware of our status: for proof, examine what people post on their Facebook profiles. Status Seeking is a fact of human life: it’s not necessarily bad or something to be avoided. On the contrary: Status Seeking can motivate people to accomplish amazing things. In the words of Alain de Botton, a philosopher and social critic, “If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.”
One of the most common experiences of a first-time entrepreneur is discovering that your brilliant business idea isn’t as original as you’d thought: other businesses are already offering similar products or services. This would shake anyone’s confidence—after all, why bother when someone else is doing what you want to do? Cheer up: there are Hidden Benefits of Competition. When any two markets are equally attractive in other respects, you’re better off choosing to enter the one with competition. Here’s why: it means you know from the start there’s a market of paying customers for this idea, eliminating your biggest risk. The existence of a market means you’re already on the right side of the Iron Law of the Market, so you can spend more time developing your offer instead of proving a market exists. If there are several successful businesses serving a market, you don’t have to worry so much about investing in a dead end, since you already know that people are buying.
Even if you identify a business that will largely run itself, setting up the Systems (discussed later) necessary to run the business requires persistence and dedication. If the only thing that interests you about an opportunity is the money, you’ll probably quit well before you find the pot of gold at the bottom of the landfill.
Options are often an overlooked form of value—flexibility is one of the Three Universal Currencies (discussed later). Find a way to give people more flexibility, and you may discover a viable business model.
People are almost always willing to pay for things that they believe are too much of a pain to take care of themselves. Where there’s a hassle, there’s a business opportunity. Hassles come in many forms. The project or task in question may: Take too much time to complete. Require too much effort to ensure a good result. Distract from other, more important priorities. Involve too much confusion, uncertainty, or complexity. Require costly or intimidating prior experience. Require specialized resources or equipment that’s difficult to obtain. The more hassle a project or task involves, the more people are generally willing to pay for an easy solution or for someone to complete the job on their behalf. Here’s an example: a homeowner may be willing to pay a one-time fee of $50 for a pool cleaning kit, but they may be willing to pay a cleaning service $100 per month to have someone clean their pool for them.
I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time. —HERBERT BAYARD SWOPE,
Relative Importance Testing—a set of analysis techniques pioneered by statistician Jordan Louviere in the 1980s 3—gives you a way to determine what people actually want by asking them a series of simple questions designed to simulate real-life Trade-offs. Here’s how it works. Let’s assume we’re conducting a Relative Importance Test for the diner previously mentioned. Instead of asking the participant to rank each benefit from 0 to 10, we show the participant something like the following: A. Orders delivered to table in five minutes or less. B. Most entrée prices under $20. C. Appealing restaurant décor. D. Large variety of menu options. After this set is shown, the participant is asked the following questions: 1. Which of these items is most important? 2. Which of these items is least important? Once the participant answers the questions, another set is shown: E. Unique entrées I can’t get anywhere else. F. Knowing I can always order my favorite dishes. G. People are impressed that I dine here. H. Large portions. Random question sets containing four or five criteria are provided until there are no more possible combinations or the participant’s attention wanders, which will typically occur around the five- to ten-minute mark. It won’t take the participant long to provide a response to each of these simple questions, but the results are quite revealing. By asking the participant to make an actual choice, you’re collecting more accurate information about how the participant would respond when faced with a similar choice in the real world. When the results are aggregated and statistically analyzed, the relative importance of each benefit becomes very clear.
If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. —REID HOFFMAN, FOUNDER OF LINKEDIN
Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else… By focusing on only a few core features in the first version, you are forced to find the true essence and value of the product. —PAUL BUCHHEIT, CREATOR OF GMAIL AND GOOGLE ADSENSE
A hundred and fifty days a year, Patrick Smith lives in the Colorado wilderness, just as he has for the past fifty years. Smith is the founder of the Colorado School of Outdoor Living and two successful hunting/backpacking companies: Mountainsmith, which he sold in 1995, and Kifaru International, which he created in 1997. Becoming a Kifaru customer is a quick way to overheat your credit card. Kifaru makes arguably the best hiking and hunting packs and shelters in the world—extremely rugged, lightweight, and well designed. Kifaru packs can carry two hundred pounds comfortably, will last for decades, and sell for hundreds of dollars. It’s not uncommon for avid sportsmen and soldiers to shell out thousands of dollars for custom-made Kifaru gear, then wait eagerly for six to eight weeks while the company makes it. Try as you might, it’s extremely difficult to find a Kifaru customer who’s disappointed in the quality of their gear. More often than not, a new Kifaru customer is a customer for life. The secret behind Kifaru’s quality is Field Testing. Smith personally creates, uses, and Iterates every single product Kifaru makes for years before offering it to customers. By the time the finished product is available, even the most demanding customers have a difficult time finding flaws. Here’s what Smith says about his personal approach to Field Testing: The backcountry is definitely both my inspiration and my laboratory. I’ve figured out how to create designs out there [in the field]. I trust this technique. I get instant feedback about designs because I’m in the backcountry doing the things the design is for, and testing it right then, in the real world arena it’s intended for… I really do think this is a better design process than sitting in front of a computer in an office in town. I think it’s a win/win situation.
Using what you make every day is the best way to improve the quality of what you’re offering. Nothing will help you find ways to make your offer better than being its most avid and demanding customer.
“Yes. Go on,” he said, and she went on, pondering the indifference of a man toward the exigencies that ruled a woman: that someone must be not far from a sleeping child, that one’s freedom meant another’s unfreedom, unless some ever-changing, moving balance were reached, like the balance of a body moving forward, as she did now, on two legs, first one then the other, in the practice of that remarkable art, walking. . . . Then the deepening colors of the sky and the soft insistence of the wind replaced her thoughts. She went on walking, without metaphors, until she came to the sandstone cliffs. There she stopped and watched the sun be lost in the serene, rosy haze.
She was silent, trying to remember what it was like to have been powerful, to be the Eaten One, the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, and then to lose that, throw it away, become only Tenar, only herself. She thought about how it was to have been a woman in the prime of life, with children and a man, and then to lose all that, becoming old and a widow, powerless. But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame.
Scholarly translations of the Tao Te Ching as a manual for rulers use a vocabulary that emphasizes the uniqueness of the Taoist “sage,” his masculinity, his authority. This language is perpetuated, and degraded, in most popular versions. I wanted a Book of the Way accessible to a present-day, unwise, unpowerful, and perhaps unmale reader, not seeking esoteric secrets, but listening for a voice that speaks to the soul. I would like that reader to see why people have loved the book for twenty-five hundred years. It is the most lovable of all the great religious texts, funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous, and inexhaustibly refreshing. Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water. To me, it is also the deepest spring. —Ursula K. Le Guin
The way you can go isn’t the real way. The name you can say isn’t the real name. Heaven and earth begin in the unnamed: name’s the mother of the ten thousand things. So the unwanting soul sees what’s hidden, and the ever-wanting soul sees only what it wants. Two things, one origin, but different in name, whose identity is mystery. Mystery of all mysteries! The door to the hidden.
Can you keep the deep water still and clear, so it reflects without blurring? Can you love people and run things, and do so by not doing?
Thirty spokes meet in the hub. Where the wheel isn’t is where it’s useful. Hollowed out, clay makes a pot. Where the pot’s not is where it’s useful. Cut doors and windows to make a room. Where the room isn’t, there’s room for you. So the profit in what is is in the use of what isn’t.
So the wise soul watches with the inner not the outward eye, letting that go, keeping this.
To be in favor or disgrace is to live in fear. To take the body seriously is to admit one can suffer. What does that mean, to be in favor or disgrace is to live in fear? Favor debases: we fear to lose it, fear to win it. So to be in favor or disgrace is to live in fear.
Stop being holy, forget being prudent, it’ll be a hundred times better for everyone. Stop being altruistic, forget being righteous, people will remember what family feeling is. Stop planning, forget making a profit, there won’t be any thieves and robbers. But even these three rules needn’t be followed; what works reliably is to know the raw silk, hold the uncut wood. Need little, want less. Forget the rules. Be untroubled.
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Not showing themselves, they shine forth. Not justifying themselves, they’re self-evident. Not praising themselves, they’re accomplished. Not competing, they have in all the world no competitor.
Give yourself to the Way and you’ll be at home on the Way. Give yourself to power and you’ll be at home in power. Give yourself to loss and when you’re lost you’ll be at home. To give no trust is to get no trust.
You can’t keep standing on tiptoe or walk in leaps and bounds. You can’t shine by showing off or get ahead by pushing. Self-satisfied people do no good, self-promoters never grow up.
Good people teach people who aren’t good yet; the less good are the makings of the good. Anyone who doesn’t respect a teacher or cherish a student may be clever, but has gone astray. There’s a deep mystery here.
The hidden light and the deep mystery seem to be signals, saying “think about this”—about care for what seems unimportant. In a teacher’s parental care for the insignificant student, and in a society’s respect for mothers, teachers, and other obscure people who educate, there is indeed illumination and a profoundly human mystery. Having replaced instinct with language, society, and culture, we are the only species that depends on teaching and learning. We aren’t human without them. In them is true power. But are they the occupations of the rich and mighty?
"Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are."
" He was silent awhile and then went on, "And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content."
Arren was silent, pondering this. Presently the mage said, speaking softly, "Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that’s the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed. On every act the Balance of the Whole depends. The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth and light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale’s sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat’s flight, all they do is done within the Balance of the Whole. But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the Balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility. Who am I—though I have the power to do it—to punish and reward, playing with men’s destinies?" "But then," the boy said, frowning at the stars, "is the Balance to be kept by doing nothing? Surely a man must act, even not knowing all the consequences of his act, if anything is to be done at all?" "Never fear. It is much easier for men to act than to refrain from acting. We will continue to do good and to do evil. . . . But if there were a king over us all again and he sought counsel of a mage, as in the days of old, and I were that mage, I would say to him: My lord, do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way."
rafts. But there was always time for swimming and for talking, and never a time by which a task must be finished. There were no hours: only whole days, whole nights. After a few such days and nights it seemed to Arren that he had lived on the raft for time uncountable, and Obehol was a dream, and behind that were fainter dreams, and in some other world he had lived on land and been a prince in Enlad.
The mage’s strong hand was still on his. "I do not," Sparrowhawk said. "Aye, I know what they think they seek. But I know it to be a lie. Listen to me, Arren. You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor anything. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose. . . . That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?
"In our minds, lad. In our minds. The traitor, the self; the self that cries I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live! The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like the worm in the apple. He talks to all of us. But only some understand him. The wizards and the sorcerers. The singers; the makers. And the heroes, the ones who seek to be themselves. To be one’s self is a rare thing and a great one. To be one’s self forever: is that not better still?"
"Aye, it was his. And it was yours. How could he speak to you, across the seas, but in your own voice? How is it that he calls to those who know how to listen, the mages and the makers and the seekers, who heed the voice within them? How is it that he does not call to me? It is because I will not listen; I will not hear that voice again. You were born to power, Arren, as I was; power over men, over men’s souls; and what is that but power over life and death? You are young, you stand on the borders of possibility, on the shadowland, in the realm of dream, and you hear the voice saying Come. But I, who am old, who have done what I must do, who stand in the daylight facing my own death, the end of all possibility, I know that there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept."
The poet Roethke said, "I learn by going where I have to go." It is a sentence that has meant a great deal to me. Sometimes it tells me that by going where it is necessary for us to go, by following our own path, we learn our way through the world. Sometimes it tells me that we can only learn our way through the world by just starting out and going. Understood either way, it describes how I learned Earthsea. When I first arrived, I knew very little about wizardry and even less about dragons. Ogion and the Masters of Roke educated me about what wizards did. But I had a lot of pictures and notions about dragons in my head that I had to work through, get rid of, or borrow from, before I could see my own dragons clearly.
People like to believe that writers know exactly what they are doing and have their story under control, thought out, plotted from beginning to end. It makes sense of the whole strange enterprise of novel writing, makes it rational. Many academic critics believe this, so do many readers, so do some writers. But not all writers have this kind of control of their material, and I wouldn’t even want to have it. There’s a difference between control and responsibility. Aesthetically and morally, I take full responsibility for what I write. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t feel free to let the material control itself to the extent I do. I’d have to manage it consciously and continuously, making everything happen as I planned it to happen. But I never wanted that kind of control. By "going where I have to go," being willing to guess that there is such a place without knowing clearly how I am to get there, trusting to my story to take me there, I know I’ve gone farther than I could ever have gone if I’d fully known my goal and the way to it before I set out. I left room for luck and chance to come and aid me, room for my narrow plans and ideas to grow and include what I didn’t know when I set out. What told me to do this—to leave room? I have no idea. Luck, chance. A kind of passive courage. A willingness to follow. Follow what? A dragon, maybe. A dragon flying on the wind.
Being an irreligious puritan and a rational mystic, I think it’s irresponsible to let a belief think for you or a chemical dream for you.
Updated: May 23, 2022
IN THE COURT OF THE fountain the sun of March shone through young leaves of ash and elm, and water leapt and fell through shadow and clear light.
Sometimes Malcolm became so interested in the latter sort of conversation that he’d rest his armful of empty glasses on the table and join in, but only after having listened intently. He was known to many of the scholars and other visitors, and was generously tipped, but becoming rich was never an aim of his; he took tips to be the generosity of providence, and came to think of himself as lucky, which did him no harm in later life. If he’d been the sort of boy who acquired a nickname, he would no doubt have been known as Professor, but he wasn’t that sort of boy. He was liked when noticed, but not noticed much, and that did him no harm either.
As Schlesinger took off his outer clothing and sat down next to the fire, Nugent explained the situation, and Hannah listened with professional admiration. An A-plus for that summary, she thought: everything there and in its right relation with everything else, not a redundant word, clarity throughout.
One paper published by a Duke University researcher in 2006 found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions, but habits.
There hadn’t been a riot since he arrived. “Understanding habits is the most important thing I’ve learned in the army,” the major told me. “It’s changed everything about how I see the world. You want to fall asleep fast and wake up feeling good? Pay attention to your nighttime patterns and what you automatically do when you get up. You want to make running easy? Create triggers to make it a routine. I drill my kids on this stuff. My wife and I write out habit plans for our marriage. This is all we talk about in command meetings. Not one person in Kufa would have told me that we could influence crowds by taking away the kebab stands, but once you see everything as a bunch of habits, it’s like someone gave you a flashlight and a crowbar and you can get to work.” The major was a small man from Georgia. He was perpetually spitting either sunflower seeds or chewing tobacco into a cup. He told me that prior to entering the military, his best career option had been repairing telephone lines, or, possibly, becoming a methamphetamine entrepreneur, a path some of his high school peers had chosen to less success. Now, he oversaw eight hundred troops in one of the most sophisticated fighting organizations on earth. “I’m telling you, if a hick like me can learn this stuff, anyone can. I tell my soldiers all the time, there’s nothing you can’t do if you get the habits right.”
Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
To deal with this uncertainty, the brain spends a lot of effort at the beginning of a habit looking for something—a cue—that offers a hint as to which pattern to use. From behind a partition, if a rat hears a click, it knows to use the maze habit. If it hears a meow, it chooses a different pattern. And at the end of the activity, when the reward appears, the brain shakes itself awake and makes sure everything unfolded as expected.
This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future:
An analogy for bodhichitta is the rawness of a broken heart. Sometimes this broken heart gives birth to anxiety and panic, sometimes to anger, resentment, and blame. But under the hardness of that armor there is the tenderness of genuine sadness. This is our link with all those who have ever loved. This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we’re arrogant and soften us when we are unkind. It awakens us when we prefer to sleep and pierces through our indifference. This continual ache of the heart is a blessing that when accepted fully can be shared with all.
Many of us prefer practices that will not cause discomfort, yet at the same time we want to be healed. But bodhichitta training doesn’t work that way. A warrior accepts that we can never know what will happen to us next. We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not knowing is part of the adventure, and it’s also what makes us afraid. Bodhichitta training offers no promise of happy endings. Rather, this "I" who wants to find security—who wants something to hold on to—can finally learn to grow up.
we can never know what will happen to us next. We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not knowing is part of the adventure, and it’s also what makes us afraid. Bodhichitta training offers no promise of happy endings. Rather, this "I" who wants to find security—who wants something to hold on to—can finally learn to grow up.
When we touch the center of sorrow, when we sit with discomfort without trying to fix it, when we stay present to the pain of disapproval or betrayal and let it soften us, these are the times that we connect with bodhichitta. Tapping into that shaky and tender place has a transformative effect. Being in this place may feel uncertain and edgy but it’s also a big relief. Just to stay there, even for a moment, feels like a genuine act of kindness to ourselves.
The first of the three lords of materialism is called the lord of form. It represents how we look to externals to give us solid ground. We can begin to pay attention to our methods of escape. What do I do when I feel anxious and depressed, bored or lonely? Is "shopping therapy" my way of coping? Or do I turn to alcohol or food? Do I cheer myself up with drugs or sex, or do I seek adventure? Do I prefer retreating into the beauty of nature or into the delicious world provided by a really good book? Do I fill
up the space by making phone calls, by surfing the net, by watching hours of TV? Some of these methods are dangerous, some are humorous, some are quite benign. The point is that we can misuse any substance or activity to run away from insecurity. When we become addicted to the lord of form, we are creating the causes and conditions for suffering to escalate. We can’t get any lasting satisfaction no matter how hard we try. Instead the very feelings we’re trying to escape from get stronger.
No matter how we get trapped, our usual reaction is not to become curious about what’s happening. We do not naturally investigate the strategies of ego. Most of us just blindly reach for something familiar that we associate with relief and then wonder why we stay dissatisfied. The radical approach of bodhichitta practice is to pay attention to what we do. Without judging it we train in kindly acknowledging whatever is going on. Eventually we might decide to stop hurting ourselves in the same old ways.
something familiar that we associate with relief and then wonder why we stay dissatisfied. The radical approach of bodhichitta practice is to pay attention to what we do. Without judging it we train in kindly acknowledging whatever is going on. Eventually we might decide to stop hurting ourselves in the same old ways.
The third lord, the lord of mind, uses the most subtle and seductive strategy of all. The lord of mind comes into play when we attempt to avoid uneasiness by seeking special states of mind. We can use drugs this way. We can use sports. We can use falling in love. We can use spiritual practices. There are many ways to obtain altered states of mind. These special states are addictive. It feels so good to break free from our mundane experience. We want more. For example, new meditators often expect that with training they can transcend the pain of ordinary life. It’s disappointing, to say the least, to be told to touch down into the thick of things, to remain open and receptive to boredom as well as bliss.
I still know men and women who are addicted to falling in love. Like Don Juan, they can’t bear it when that initial glow begins to wear off; they’re always seeking out someone new.
Each of us has a variety of habitual tactics for avoiding life as it is. In a nutshell, that’s the message of the three lords of materialism. This simple teaching is, it seems, everyone’s autobiography. When we use these strategies we become less able to enjoy the tenderness and wonder that is available in the most unremarkable of times. Connecting with bodhichitta is ordinary. When we don’t run from everyday uncertainty, we can contact bodhichitta. It’s a natural force that wants to emerge. It is, in fact, unstoppable. Once we stop blocking it with ego’s strategies, the refreshing water of bodhichitta will definitely begin to flow. We can slow it down. We can dam it up. Nevertheless, whenever there’s an opening, bodhichitta will always appear, like those weeds and flowers that pop out of the sidewalk as soon as there’s a crack.
"We are always in transition." Then he said, "If you can just relax with that, you’ll have no problem."
The Buddhist teachings aspire to set us free from this limited way of relating. They encourage us to relax gradually and wholeheartedly into the ordinary and obvious truth of change.
We have two alternatives: either we question our beliefs—or we don’t. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality—or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha’s opinion, to train in staying open and curious—to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs—is the best use of our human lives. When we train in awakening bodhichitta, we are nurturing the flexibility of our mind. In the most ordinary terms, egolessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure about who we are—or who anyone else is either.
How are we going to spend this brief lifetime? Are we going to strengthen our well-perfected ability to struggle against uncertainty, or are we going to train in letting go? Are we going to hold on stubbornly to "I’m like this and you’re like that"? Or are we going to move beyond that narrow mind? Could we start to train as a warrior, aspiring to reconnect with the natural flexibility of our being and to help others do the same? If we start to move in this direction, limitless possibilities will begin to open up.
The third mark of existence is suffering, dissatisfaction. As Suzuki Roshi put it, it is only by practicing through a continual succession of agreeable and disagreeable situations that we acquire true strength. To accept that pain is inherent and to live our lives from this understanding is to create the causes and conditions for happiness. To put it concisely, we suffer when we resist the noble and irrefutable truth of impermanence and death. We suffer, not because we are basically bad or deserve to be punished, but because of three tragic misunderstandings.
Third, we look for happiness in all the wrong places. The Buddha called this habit "mistaking suffering for happiness," like a moth flying into the flame. As we know, moths are not the only ones who will destroy themselves in order to find temporary relief. In terms of how we seek happiness, we are all like the alcoholic who drinks to stop the depression that escalates with every drink, or the junkie who shoots up in order to get relief from the suffering that increases with every fix.
In repeating our quest for instant gratification, pursuing addictions of all kinds—some seemingly benign, some obviously lethal—we continue to reinforce old patterns of suffering. We strengthen dysfunctional patterns. Thus we become less and less able to reside with even the most fleeting uneasiness or discomfort. We become habituated to reaching for something to ease the edginess of the moment. What begins as a slight shift of energy—a minor tightening of our stomach, a vague, indefinable feeling that something bad is about to happen—escalates into addiction. This is our way of trying to make life predictable. Because we mistake what always results in suffering for what will bring us happiness, we remain stuck in the repetitious habit of escalating our dissatisfaction. In Buddhist terminology this vicious cycle is called samsara.
AS A SPECIES, we should never underestimate our low tolerance for discomfort. To be encouraged to stay with our vulnerability is news that we can use. Sitting meditation is our support for learning how to do this. Sitting meditation, also known as mindfulness-awareness practice, is the foundation of bodhichitta training. It is the natural seat, the home ground of the warrior-bodhisattva.
Gradually, through meditation, we begin to notice that there are gaps in our internal dialogue. In the midst of continually talking to ourselves, we experience a pause, as if awakening from a dream. We recognize our capacity to relax with the clarity, the space, the openended awareness that already exists in our minds. We experience moments of being right here that feel simple, direct, and uncluttered. This coming back to the immediacy of our experience is training in unconditional bodhichitta. By simply staying here, we relax more and more into the open dimension of our being. It feels like stepping out of a fantasy world and discovering the simple truth.
Does not trying to change mean we have to remain angry and addicted until the day we die? This is a reasonable question. Trying to change ourselves doesn’t work in the long run because we’re resisting our own energy. Self-improvement can have temporary results, but lasting transformation occurs only when we honor ourselves as the source of wisdom and compassion. We are, as the eighth-century Buddhist master Shantideva pointed out, very much like a blind person who finds a jewel buried in a heap of garbage. Right here in what we’d like to throw away, in what we find repulsive and frightening, we discover the warmth and clarity of bodhichitta. It is only when we begin to relax with ourselves that meditation becomes a transformative process. Only when we relate with ourselves without moralizing, without harshness, without deception, can we let go of harmful patterns. Without maitri, renunciation of old habits becomes abusive. This is an important point.
relate with ourselves without moralizing, without harshness, without deception, can we let go of harmful patterns. Without maitri, renunciation of old habits becomes abusive. This is an important point.
In meditation we discover our inherent restlessness. Sometimes we get up and leave. Sometimes we sit there but our bodies wiggle and squirm and our minds go far away. This can be so uncomfortable that we feel it’s impossible to stay. Yet this feeling can teach us not just about ourselves but also about what it is to be human. All of us derive security and comfort from the imaginary world of memories and fantasies and plans. We really don’t want to stay with the nakedness of our present experience. It goes against the grain to stay present. These are the times when only gentleness and a sense of humor can give us the strength to settle down.
So whenever we wander off, we gently encourage ourselves to "stay" and settle down. Are we experiencing restlessness? Stay! Discursive mind? Stay! Are fear and loathing out of control? Stay! Aching knees and throbbing back? Stay! What’s for lunch? Stay! What am I doing here? Stay! I can’t stand this another minute! Stay! That is how to cultivate steadfastness.
Stay! What am I doing here? Stay! I can’t stand this another minute! Stay! That is how to cultivate steadfastness.
Through the process of practicing the mindfulness-awareness technique on a regular basis, we can no longer hide from ourselves. We clearly see the barriers we set up to shield us from naked experience. Although we still associate the walls we’ve erected with safety and comfort, we also begin to feel them as a restriction. This claustrophobic situation is important for a warrior. It marks the beginning of longing for an alternative to our small, familiar world. We begin to look for ventilation. We want to dissolve the barriers between ourselves and others.
restriction. This claustrophobic situation is important for a warrior. It marks the beginning of longing for an alternative to our small, familiar world. We begin to look for ventilation. We want to dissolve the barriers between ourselves and others.
To remember a slogan right in the midst of irritation—for example, "Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment"—might cause us to pause before acting out our resentment by saying something mean. Once we are familiar with it, a slogan like this will spontaneously pop into our mind and remind us to stay with the emotional energy rather than acting it out.
When the bottom is falling out we might suddenly recall the slogan "If you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained." If we can practice when we’re jealous, resentful, scornful, when we hate ourselves, then we are well trained. Again, practice means not continuing to strengthen the habitual patterns that keep us trapped, doing anything we can to shake up and ventilate our self-justification and blame. We do our best to stay with the strong energy without acting out or repressing. As we do so, our habits become more porous.
When we begin to train we see that we’ve been pretty ignorant about what we’re doing. First, we see that we are rarely able to relax into the present moment. Second, we see that we’ve fabricated all kinds of strategies to avoid staying present, particularly when we’re afraid that whatever’s happening will hurt. We also see our strong belief that if only we could do everything right, we’d be able to find a safe, comfortable, and secure place to spend the rest of our lives.
particularly when we’re afraid that whatever’s happening will hurt. We also see our strong belief that if only we could do everything right, we’d be able to find a safe, comfortable, and secure place to spend the rest of our lives.
So in all activities, not just sometimes when things are going well or are particularly bad, train with the bodhichitta slogans of Atisha. But remember, "Don’t try to be the fastest," "Abandon any hope of fruition," and "Don’t expect applause"! 1. For more information on the mind-training slogans, please refer to the appendix, where all fifty-nine slogans are listed, as well as to the list of books on slogan training in the bibliography.
As a result of compassion practice, we will start to have a deeper understanding of the roots of suffering. We wish not only that the outer manifestations of suffering will decrease but also that all of us could stop acting and thinking in ways that escalate ignorance and confusion. We aspire to be free of fixation and closed-mindedness. We wish to dissolve the myth that we are separate.
Standing in the checkout line, I might notice the defiant teenager in front of me and make the aspiration, "May he be free of suffering and its causes." In the elevator with a stranger, I might notice her shoes, her hands, the expression on her face. I contemplate the fact that just like me she doesn’t want stress in her life. Just like me she has worries. Through our hopes and fears, our pleasures and pains, we are deeply interconnected. I do this sort of thing in all kinds of situations—at the breakfast table, in the meditation hall, at the dentist’s office.
A teacher once told me that if I wanted lasting happiness, the only way to get it was to step out of my cocoon. When I asked her how to bring happiness to others, she said, "Same instruction." This is the reason that I work with these aspiration practices: the best way to serve ourselves is to love and care for others. These are powerful tools for dissolving the barriers that perpetuate not just our own unhappiness, but the suffering of all beings.
breathe in the person’s suffering and send out relief. The formal practice of tonglen has four stages. The first stage is a brief moment of stillness or openness—a moment of unconditional bodhichitta. The second stage is visualizing and working with the texture, the raw energy, of claustrophobia and spaciousness. The third stage is the essence of the practice: breathing in whatever is unwanted and breathing out a sense of relief. In the fourth stage we extend our compassion further by including others who are experiencing the same feelings.
The formal practice of tonglen has four stages. The first stage is a brief moment of stillness or openness—a moment of unconditional bodhichitta. The second stage is visualizing and working with the texture, the raw energy, of claustrophobia and spaciousness. The third stage is the essence of the practice: breathing in whatever is unwanted and breathing out a sense of relief. In the fourth stage we extend our compassion further by including others who are experiencing the same feelings. If we want, we can combine the third stage and the fourth stage, breathing in and out for self and other at the same time.
Fundamentally, experiencing openness is having trust in the living quality of basic energy. We develop the confidence to allow it to arise, to linger, and then to pass on. This energy is dynamic, ungraspable, always in a state of flux. So our training is, first of all, noticing how we block the energy or freeze it, how we tense up our bodies and minds. Then we train in softening, relaxing, and opening to the energy without interpretations or judgments. The first flash of openness reminds us that we can always let go of our fixed ideas and connect with something open, fresh, and unbiased. Then, during the following stages, when we begin to breathe in the energy of claustrophobia and unwanted feelings, we breathe them into that huge space, as vast as the clear blue sky. Then we send out whatever we can to help all of us experience the freedom of an open, flexible mind. The longer we practice, the more accessible this unconditional space will be. Sooner or later we are going to realize that we are already awake.
In the second stage of tonglen we begin to breathe in the qualities of claustrophobia: thick, heavy, and hot. We might visualize the claustrophobia as coal dust or as yellow-brown smog. Then we breathe out the qualities of spaciousness: fresh, light, and cool. We might visualize this as brilliant moonlight, as sparkling sun on water, as the colors of a rainbow. However we visualize these textures, we imagine breathing them in and out through all the pores of our body, not only through our mouth and nose. We do this until it feels synchronized with our breath and we are clear about what we are taking in and what we’re sending out. It’s fine to breathe a little more deeply than usual, but it’s important to give the inbreath and the outbreath equal time. We may find, however, that we favor the inbreath or the outbreath instead of keeping them balanced. For example, we may not want to interrupt the freshness and brightness of the outbreath by taking in what’s thick, heavy, and hot. As a result the outbreath may be long and generous, the inbreath short and stingy. Or, we may have no trouble connecting with claustrophobia on the inbreath but feel we don’t have much to send out. Then our outbreath may be nearly nonexistent. If we feel poverty-stricken like this, we can remember that what we send is not our personal possession. We are simply opening to the space that is always here and sharing it. In stage three, we start doing the exchange for a specific person. We breathe in this person’s pain and we send out relief. Traditionally, the instruction is to begin doing tonglen for the ones who spontaneously spark our compassion, such as those we put on our list. As we breathe in we visualize our hearts opening wide to accept the pain. As we breathe out we send that bravery and openness. We don’t cling to it, thinking, "Finally I have a little relief in my life; I want to keep it forever!" Instead, we share it. When we practice like this, breathing in becomes opening and accepting what is unwanted; breathing out becomes letting go and opening even further. Breathing in or breathing out, we are reversing ancient habits of closing to pain and clinging to anything comforting.
I recommend using tonglen as an on-the-spot practice. Doing tonglen throughout our day can feel more natural than doing it on the cushion. For one thing, there is never any lack of subject matter. When a strong unwanted feeling arises or we see someone hurting, there is nothing theoretical about what we’ll use to practice. There are no four stages to remember and no struggle to synchronize textures with the breath. Right there when it’s very real and immediate we breathe in and out with the pain. Daily-life practice is never abstract. As soon as uncomfortable emotions come up, we train ourselves in breathing them in and dropping the story line. At the same time, we extend our thoughts and concern to other people who feel the same discomfort, and we breathe in with the wish that all of us could be free of this particular brand of confusion. Then, as we breathe out, we send ourselves and others whatever kind of relief we think would help. We also practice like this when we encounter animals and people who are in pain. We can try to do this whenever difficult situations and feelings arise, and over time it will become more automatic.
As warrior-bodhisattvas, the more we train in cultivating this attitude, the more we uncover our capacity for joy and equanimity. Because of our bravery and willingness to work with the practice, we are more able to experience the basic goodness of ourselves and others. We’re more able to appreciate the potential of all kinds of people: those we find pleasant, those we find unpleasant, and those we don’t even know. Thus tonglen begins to ventilate our prejudices and introduce us to a more tender and open-minded world.
At the beginning joy is just a feeling that our own situation is workable. We stop looking for a more suitable place to be. We’ve discovered that the continual search for something better does not work out. This doesn’t mean that there are suddenly flowers growing where before there were only rocks. It means we have confidence that something will grow here.
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The second stage in learning to rejoice is to think of a loved one and to appreciate his or her good fortune. We start with a person we feel good about. We can imagine the loved one’s face or say the person’s name if it makes the practice more real. Then in our own words, we rejoice—that a person who was ill is now feeling healthy and cheerful, that a child who was lonely has found a friend. We are encouraged to try to keep it simple. The point is to find our spontaneous and natural capacity to be glad for another being, whether it feels unshakable or fleeting.
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Difficult people are, as usual, the greatest teachers. Aspiring to rejoice in their good fortune is a good opportunity to investigate our reactions and our strategies. How do we react to their good luck, good health, good news? With envy? With anger? With fear? What is our strategy for moving away from what we feel? Revenge, self-denigration? What stories do we tell ourselves?
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To make things as easy as possible to under stand, we can summarize the four boundless qualities in the single phrase "a kind heart." Just train yourself to have a kind heart always and in all situations. —PATRUL RINPOCHE
The essence of this practice is that when we encounter pain in our life we breathe into our heart with the recognition that others also feel this. It’s a way of acknowledging when we are closing down and of training to open up. When we encounter any pleasure or tenderness in our life, we cherish that and rejoice. Then we make the wish that others could also experience this delight or this relief. In a nutshell, when life is pleasant, think of others. When life is a burden, think of others. If this is the only training we ever remember to do, it will benefit us tremendously and everyone else as well. It’s a way of bringing whatever we encounter onto the path of awakening bodhichitta.
To cultivate equanimity we practice catching ourselves when we feel attraction or aversion, before it hardens into grasping or negativity.
The near enemy of equanimity is detachment or indifference. Especially in spiritual practice, it is easy to mistake dangling above the unkemptness of life for genuine equanimity. We are open and friendly and serene and proud that we’ve transcended emotional upheaval. If we feel distress, embarrassment, or anger, we think we’ve really blown it. Yet feeling emotional upheaval is not a spiritual faux pas; it’s the place where the warrior learns compassion. It’s where we learn to stop struggling with ourselves. It’s only when we can dwell in these places that scare us that equanimity becomes unshakable.
The first of the three lords of materialism is called the lord of form. It represents how we look to externals to give us solid ground. We can begin to pay attention to our methods of escape. What do I do when I feel anxious and depressed, bored or lonely? Is "shopping therapy" my way of coping? Or do I turn to alcohol or food? Do I cheer myself up with drugs or sex, or do I seek adventure? Do I prefer retreating into the beauty of nature or into the delicious world provided by a really good book? Do I fill up the space by making phone calls, by surfing the net, by watching hours of TV? Some of these methods are dangerous, some are humorous, some are quite benign. The point is that we can misuse any substance or activity to run away from insecurity. When we become addicted to the lord of form, we are creating the causes and conditions for suffering to escalate. We can’t get any lasting satisfaction no matter how hard we try. Instead the very feelings we’re trying to escape from get stronger.
Updated: May 23, 2022
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. —ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY
WHEN I WAS ABOUT SIX YEARS OLD I received the essential bodhichitta teaching from an old woman sitting in the sun. I was walking by her house one day feeling lonely, unloved, and mad, kicking anything I could find. Laughing, she said to me, "Little girl, don’t you go letting life harden your heart."
Near the end of his instructions on shamatha, Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey suggested to our class of about a dozen students that we meditate together. We all sat upright on our cushions, intently focusing on the meditative object. We thought it would be a short session, maybe a half hour. But the lama continued to sit, immovable as a rock, as his students began to squirm, our minds wandering and the pains in our knees and backs increasing. Finally, after three hours, he emerged from meditation, a contented smile on his face, and gently commented that this practice requires perseverance.
James also asserted that geniuses of all kinds excel in their capacity for sustained voluntary attention. Just think of the greatest musicians, mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers throughout history—all of them, it seems, have had an extraordinary capacity to focus their attention with a high degree of clarity for long periods of time. A mind settled in such a state of alert equipoise is a fertile ground for the emergence of all kinds of original associations and insights. Might “genius” be a potential we all share—each of us with our own unique capacity for creativity, requiring only the power of sustained attention to unlock it? A focused mind can help bring the creative spark to the surface of consciousness. The mind constantly caught up in one distraction after another, on the other hand, may be forever removed from its creative potential.
1. Directed attention 2. Continuous attention 3. Resurgent attention 4. Close attention 5. Tamed attention 6. Pacified attention 7. Fully pacified attention 8. Single-pointed attention 9. Attentional balance 10. Shamatha These ten stages are sequential. The stages start with a mind that cannot focus for more than a few seconds and culminates in a state of sublime stability and vividness that can be sustained for hours. One progresses through each stage by rooting out progressively more subtle forms of the two obstacles: mental agitation and dullness. The successful accomplishment of each stage is determined by specific criteria and is accompanied by a clear sign.
The faculty of mindfulness is crucial in shamatha practice. Mindfulness in this context differs somewhat from the way some contemporary meditation teachers present it. Vipassana teachers, for instance, commonly explain mindfulness as a moment-to-moment, nonjudgmental awareness of whatever arises. In the context of shamatha, however, mindfulness refers to attending continuously to a familiar object, without forgetfulness or distraction.
One of the first signs of progress in shamatha practice is simply noticing how chaotic our minds are. We try to remain attentive, but we swiftly “lose our minds,” and slip into absentmindedness. People who never sit quietly and try to focus their minds may remain under the illusion that their minds are calm and collected. Only when we try to direct the attention to a single object for minutes on end does it really become apparent how turbulent and fragmented our attention is. From a Buddhist perspective, the untrained mind is afflicted with attention deficits and hyperactivity; it is dysfunctional.
Like a wild elephant, the untamed mind can inflict enormous damage on ourselves and those around us. In addition to oscillating between an attention deficit (when we’re passive) and hyperactivity (when we’re active), the normal, untrained mind compulsively disgorges a toxic stream of wandering thoughts, then latches on to them obsessively, carried away by one story after another. Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders and obsessive/compulsive disorders are not confined to those who are diagnosed as mentally ill; the normal mind is prone to such imbalances, and that’s why normal people experience so much mental distress! Such disturbances are symptoms of an unbalanced mind.
The Posture It is generally preferable to practice meditation sitting on a cushion with your legs crossed. But if that is uncomfortable, you may either sit on a chair or lie down in the supine position (on your back), your head resting on a pillow. Whatever position you assume, let your back be straight, and settle your body with a sense of relaxation and ease. Your eyes may be closed, hooded (partially closed), or open, as you wish. My own preference when practicing mindfulness of breathing is to close my eyes partially, with just a little light coming in, and I like to meditate in a softly lit room. Wear loose, comfortable clothing that doesn’t restrict your waist or abdomen. If you are sitting, you may rest your hands on your knees or in your lap. Your head may be slightly inclined or directed straight ahead, and your tongue may lightly touch your palate. Now bring your awareness to the tactile sensations throughout your body, from the soles of your feet up to the crown of your head. Note the sensations in your shoulders and neck, and if you detect any tightness there, release it. Likewise, be aware of the muscles of your face—your jaws, temples, and forehead, as well as your eyes—and soften any area that feels constricted. Let your face relax like that of a sleeping baby, and set your entire body at ease. Throughout this session, keep as physically still as you can. Avoid all unnecessary movement, such as scratching and fidgeting. You will find that the stillness of the body helps to settle the mind. If you are sitting, assume a “posture of vigilance”: Slightly raise your sternum so that when you inhale, you feel the sensations of the respiration naturally go to your belly, which expands during the in-breath and retracts during the out-breath. During meditation sessions, breathe as if you were pouring water into a pot, filling it from the bottom up. When the breath is shallow, only the belly will expand. In the course of a deeper inhalation, first the abdomen, then the diaphragm will then expand, and when you inhale yet more deeply, the chest will finally expand after the belly and diaphragm have done so. If you are meditating in the supine position, position yourself so that you can mentally draw a straight line from the point between your heels, to your navel, and to your chin. Let your feet fall to the outside, and stretch your arms out about thirty degrees from your torso, with your palms facing up. Rest your head on a pillow. You may find it helpful to place a cushion under your knees to help relax the back. Vigilance in the supine position is mostly psychological, an attitude that regards this position as a formal meditation posture, and not simply as rest.
The Practice Be at ease. Be still. Be vigilant. These three qualities of the body are to be maintained throughout all meditation sessions. Once you have settled your body with these three qualities, take three slow, gentle, deep breaths, breathing in and out through the nostrils. Let your awareness permeate your entire body as you do so, noting any sensations that arise in relation to the respiration. Luxuriate in these breaths, as if you were receiving a gentle massage from within. Now settle your respiration in its natural flow. Continue breathing through your nostrils, noting the sensations of the respiration wherever they arise within your body. Observe the entire course of each in- and out-breath, noting whether it is long or short, deep or shallow, slow or fast. Don’t impose any rhythm on your breathing. Attend closely to the respiration, but without willfully influencing it in any way. Don’t even prefer one kind of a breath over another, and don’t assume that rhythmic breathing is necessarily better than irregular breathing. Let the body breathe as if you were fast asleep, but mindfully vigilant. Thoughts are bound to arise involuntarily, and your attention may also be pulled away by noises and other stimuli from your environment. When you note that you have become distracted, instead of tightening up and forcing your attention back to the breath, simply let go of these thoughts and distractions. Especially with each out-breath, relax your body, release extraneous thoughts, and happily let your attention settle back into the body. When you see that your mind has wandered, don’t get upset. Just be happy that you’ve noticed the distraction, and gently return to the breath. Again and again, counteract the agitation and turbulence of the mind by relaxing more deeply, not by contracting your body or mind. If any tension builds up in your shoulders, face, or eyes, release it. With each exhalation, release involuntary thoughts as if they were dry leaves blown away by a soft breeze. Relax deeply through the entire course of the exhalation, and continue to relax as the next breath flows in effortlessly like the tide. Breathe so effortlessly that you feel as if your body were being breathed by your environment. Continue practicing for one twenty-four-minute period, then mindfully emerge from meditation and reengage with the world around you.
Breathing in long, one knows, “I breathe in long.” Breathing out long, one knows, “I breathe out long.” Breathing in short, one knows, “I breathe in short.” Breathing out short, one knows, “I breathe out short.” One trains thus: “I shall breathe in, experiencing the whole body. I shall breathe out, experiencing the whole body. I shall breathe in,…
This is a “field approach” to training the attention. Instead of pinpointing the attention on a mental image, a prayer, a mantra, or a specific region of the body, open your awareness to the entire field of sensations throughout the body, especially those related to respiration. The emphasis here is on mental and physical relaxation. If you constrict your mind and your body, shamatha training will aggravate the tension you already have. By settling your awareness in the body, you diffuse the knots in the body and mind. Tightness unravels of its own accord, and this soothes the network of the body. Mindfulness of breathing is universally emphasized for those who are especially prone to compulsive thinking. As the fifth-century Buddhist master Asanga comments, “If involuntary thoughts particularly dominate your behavior, then focus the mind in mindfulness of the exhalation and inhalation of the breath.”5 Since nearly everyone living in the modern world is coping with an overload of thinking, remembering, and planning, this may be just what the doctor ordered: a general prescription for soothing and healing overworked bodies and minds.
Lying down can also be very useful for meditation if you’re physically tired but not yet ready for bed. In this case, you may not be able to rouse yourself to sit upright in a posture of vigilance, but the prospect of lying down for a while may be inviting. Surrender to your body’s need to rest, and use the supine position to calm the mind as well. This likely will be much more refreshing and soothing than watching television or reading a newspaper. The supine posture may be your only option if you are ill, injured, or frail. It may be especially useful for meditation by those in hospitals, senior care facilities, and hospices.
The next time you get angry or sad, elated or surprised, note the rhythm of your respiration. Check it out, too, when you’re hard at work, concentrating on the task at hand, or caught in a traffic jam. Compare those breathing patterns with your respiration when you’re calmly sitting at home, listening to music or watching a sunset.
When we are dreaming, all kinds of mental processes continue, even though our bodies and physical senses are dormant. Our emotional responses to dreams are just as real, and have the same impact on the body and the breath, as our emotions when we are wide awake. The only break we have from such sensory and mental input is when we are in deep, dreamless sleep.
Creating time to balance your mind requires a measure of loving-kindness for yourself. Thus, to be able to make choices that are truly conducive to your well-being, as opposed to merely providing pleasurable sensations, you may first need to cultivate loving-kindness.
With all the demands upon our time, the prospect of taking more time from the day to devote to meditation can appear to be just one more burden. But I would claim that the reason so many people find no time to meditate is not that they’re too busy. We’re all doing something each minute of every day, no matter how busy or leisurely our lives may be. How we fill our days is simply a matter of our priorities. It’s only common sense to place a high priority on our survival, making sure that we have sufficient food, shelter, clothing, and medical care, and that our children receive the best education possible. To use an educational metaphor, tasks fulfilling those basic needs are “required courses” of action, and everything else we do consists of “electives.” What elective activities fill the moments of our days depends on our values. Another way of saying this is that, after taking care of our basic needs, the rest of our time is devoted to fulfilling our heart’s desires. We may envision this as the pursuit of happiness, fulfillment, or a meaningful life. However we conceive of the purpose of our lives, it will focus on people, things, circumstances, and other more intangible qualities that bring us satisfaction. You have already been alive and pursuing happiness for decades. Pause for a moment and ask yourself: How much satisfaction has your life brought you thus far?
Genuine happiness is a symptom of a balanced, healthy mind, just as a sense of physical well-being is a sign of a healthy body. Among modern people, the notion is prevalent that suffering is inherent in life, that it is simply human nature for us to experience frustration, depression, and anxiety. But our mental suffering on many occasions serves no good purpose at all. It is an affliction with no benefit to us. It is just a symptom of an unbalanced mind.
By looking at what we work for and yearn for—what we spend our time and resources on—we can develop insight into our priorities. The term conation refers to our faculty of desire and volition. Conative balance, a crucial element of mental health, is expressed when our desires are conducive to our own and others’ genuine happiness. Conative imbalances, on the other hand, are ways that our desires lead us away from mental health and into psychological distress. Such imbalances are threefold: conative deficit, conative hyperactivity, and conative dysfunction. A conative deficit occurs when we experience apathy toward greater happiness and its causes. This apathy is normally accompanied by a lack of imagination and a kind of stagnation: we can’t imagine feeling better than we do now, so we don’t try to do anything about it. This robs us of the incentive to achieve greater mental well-being. Conative hyperactivity occurs when obsessive desires obscure the reality of the present. Fantasies about the future—unfulfilled desires—blind us to what is happening here and now. Finally, conative dysfunction is when we do desire things that are destructive to our own or others’ well-being, and don’t desire the things that lead to genuine happiness for both ourselves and others. I include “others” here because we cannot cultivate optimal mental balance in isolation from others. We do not exist independently from others, so our well-being cannot arise independently of others either. To flourish individually, we must consider the well-being of those around us. As the Buddha declared, “One who loves himself will never harm another.”8
In Buddhism, misguided desires are called craving, which here means an attraction for something whose desirable qualities we exaggerate while ignoring any undesirable qualities. If our craving is strong, we see the very possibility of our own happiness as inherent to the object on which our mind is bent. This disempowers ourselves and empowers the object of our attraction.10 When reality breaks through our fantasies, disillusionment sets in.
To bring all this back to the central theme of this book, one major impediment to training attention is not finding time to do it. And the reason we don’t find time to meditate is because we are devoting so much time to other priorities. Some of these priorities center on our basic needs, but many are wrapped up in craving in the sense described above. In desiring the symbols of the good life—wealth, transient pleasures, praise, and reputation—we may deprive ourselves of the reality of living well. The reason we don’t devote more time to balancing our minds is that we are betting our lives that we can find the happiness we seek by chasing fleeting pleasures. Psychologists have called this the hedonic treadmill,11 and the first step to escaping from this exhausting grind is to…
MEDITATION ON LOVING-KINDNESS Begin by resting your body in a comfortable position, sitting either cross-legged or on a chair. Bring your awareness to the physical sensations throughout your body, breathing into any areas that feel tense or constricted. Be still, and adopt a posture of vigilance. Then take three slow, deep breaths, breathing through your nostrils, down into your belly, expanding the diaphragm and finally the chest. Exhale effortlessly, settling your body in its resting state. Attend to the rhythm of your breath for a few moments, letting it flow unconstrained by restless thoughts and emotions. Settle your awareness in a space of relaxation, stillness, and clarity. Now, from within this serenity, arouse your imagination with three questions. The first one is, What would I love to receive from the world in order to have a happy, meaningful, and fulfilling life? Some of these things may be tangible goods, such as food, lodging, clothing, and medical care. But other requisites for your well-being may be intangible, such as harmony in your environment, the warm companionship of others, and wise counsel to guide you on your spiritual journey. Bring clearly to mind the things you desire to meet your basic needs. Then allow the yearning to arise: may these authentic desires be fulfilled! Now pursue this vision for your own happiness more deeply. Clearly see your basic needs being fulfilled, and inquire further into what more you would love to receive from the people around you and from the environment at large. What could they provide you that would help you find the happiness you seek? You may bring to mind both tangible and intangible things, whatever you feel would assist you in fulfilling your heart’s desire. Imagine that the world rises up to meet you, here and now, and provides you with all the external support that is needed to fulfill your aspirations. Each of us is constantly changing from moment to moment, day to day, as our bodies and minds are continually in a state of flux. The next question is, What kind of a person do I want to become? What personal qualities do I want to possess? You are changing all the time whether you choose to or not, so envision the changes you would love to experience in your evolution as a human being. Imagine both short-term and long-term changes. And as you envision the person you would love to evolve into…
For most people setting out on the path of attentional development, the problem that overwhelms them is excitation. There are many reasons the mind becomes agitated and distracted. Anger and fear certainly have this influence, and simply living in a noisy, hectic environment can easily destabilize the mind. But most commonly, the coherence and continuity of attention is undermined by craving, or misguided desires. The general symptoms of a mind prone to craving are dissatisfaction, restlessness, and anxiety. We can try to stifle these unpleasant feelings by immersing ourselves in work, entertainment, talking, or anything else that masks…
When coarse excitation takes over the mind, we completely lose touch with our chosen object of attention. It’s as if the mind is abducted against its will, and thrown into the trunk of a distracting thought or sensory stimulus. In the first stage of attentional development, directed attention, the level of excitation is so coarse that you experience virtually no continuity of attention on your chosen object. The mind jumps around from one object to another like a bird flitting from branch to branch, never at rest. Such turbulence is overcome only by persistent skillful practice, cultivating deeper relaxation, a sense of inner ease. Eventually, the mind will begin to calm down and you will experience brief periods of sustained attention, but then you lose it again. In a way, the practice of mindfulness of breathing is easy. It’s not hard to direct your attention to the tactile sensations associated with respiration. At the beginning of the session, you resolve to do just that, yet seconds later your mind is elsewhere. The fact that this is normal doesn’t make it any less weird. It’s as if you repeatedly lose your mind, then regain it for brief periods, only to lose it again and again. We all seem to be suffering from frequent bouts of amnesia! In the second of the nine stages, continuous attention, you experience occasional periods of continuity, but most of the time your mind is still caught up in wandering thoughts and sensory distractions. Don’t be misled by the name of this stage. Continuous attention doesn’t mean that you can maintain unbroken continuity for long stretches,…
THE PRACTICE: MINDFULNESS OF BREATHING WITH STABILITY Begin this session, as you did before, by settling your body in its rest state, imbued with the three qualities of relaxation, stillness, and vigilance. With your awareness permeating the tactile sensations throughout your body, take three slow, deep breaths, observing the sensations of the breath filling your torso from the belly up to the chest. Then let your respiration return to its natural rhythm and simply be present with the breath for several minutes, breathing as effortlessly as you can. With this preparation, you establish a basis in relaxation. Without losing this sense of ease, now shift your emphasis to the cultivation of attentional stability. This is the ability to sustain the focus of your attention without becoming fragmented or derailed by the force of distracting thoughts and sensations. With this aim, instead of being mindful of the various sensations of respiration throughout your whole body, focus your attention just on the sensations of the expansion and contraction of your abdomen with each in- and out-breath. As you did before, note the duration of each inhalation and exhalation, and observe the duration of the pauses between breaths. Out of sheer habit, unintentional thoughts are bound to cascade through your mind like a waterfall. One way of stemming this relentless stream of ideation is to count the breaths. Try that now, by counting “one” at the beginning of your first inhalation, then attending closely to the sensations of the respiration throughout the rest of the inhalation and the entire exhalation. Count “two” at the beginning of the next breath, and continue in this way for as long as you find it helpful. Let these mental counts be brief, so that your attention to the counting doesn’t override your awareness of the breath itself. The objective of counting the breath is to insert brief reminders into the practice—remembering to remember—so that you don’t get carried away by distracting thoughts. Attending to these mental markers at regular intervals in the course of the respiration is like taking note of milestones on the side of a country road, letting you know by their presence that you are on the right track, or by their absence that you have wandered off your chosen route. This phase of the practice is primarily concerned with mindfulness of breathing, not counting. It’s easy to maintain just enough continuity of attention to keep track of counting, while between counts, the mind wanders off on its own, like a dog without a leash. Let the counting remind you to keep your attention focused on the tactile sensations of the breath, which change from moment to moment. After counting the breath at the beginning of the inhalation, let your mind be as conceptually silent as possible for the remainder of the in-breath. And during the out-breath, release any involuntary thoughts that have cropped up. As mentioned before, arouse your attention (counteracting laxity…
Meditation is a balancing act between attention and relaxation. Mastering this requires working to counter the natural reflex of trying harder, or clamping down, when you see that your mind has become distracted. Instead, as soon as you see that your mind has wandered, release the effort of clinging to the distracting thought or physical sensation, return to the breath, and relax more deeply. Remember that the main point of such attentional training is not to stop thoughts from arising. Rather, it is first to relax the body and mind, then to cultivate the stability of sustaining attention continuously upon your chosen object. Thoughts are bound to arise. Simply do your best not to be carried away by them. The kind of awareness cultivated here is called bare attention, in which the mind is fully focused on the sensory impressions appearing to it, moment to moment, rather than getting caught up in conceptual and emotional responses to those stimuli. As you attend to the abdominal sensations of breathing, mental images of your body, based on visual memory, are likely to arise together with the bodily sensations themselves. Recognize the difference between the tactile sensations of the breath as they appear to bare attention, as opposed to the mental images of what you think your body looks like, which are superimposed by your conceptual mind. As soon as you note the presence of these mental images, release them and direct your attention solely to the immediate, tactile experiences of breathing.
One way to cultivate attentional stability is to direct our attention downward to the sensations in the abdomen associated with the in- and out-breath. Mindfulness of the entire body is very helpful for relaxing the mind, but this technique of focusing on the abdomen, which is commonly taught in the Burmese Theravada tradition, can be especially helpful for stabilizing the mind.
Cognitive imbalances of both types can be remedied by applying to daily life the attention skills we cultivate during meditation. In fact, if we casually let our minds succumb to excitation and laxity throughout the day, there’s little chance that our formal training during twenty-four-minute sessions is going to have much effect. This would be like eating a wholesome breakfast, then snacking on junk food for the rest of the day. However busy we may be, or think we are, no one is paying us enough to have demands on our minds every single moment of the day. Even in the midst of work, we can take off fifteen seconds here and sixty seconds there to balance the attention by quietly focusing on the breath. Our eyes can be open, and we can sit quietly for a few moments, without calling attention to ourselves. We can do this in the workplace, while standing in line at the grocery store, or while waiting at a stoplight. There are many brief occasions from the time we get up in the morning until we fall asleep at night when we can “season our day” with a sprinkling of mindfulness of breathing. And each time we do it, we may immediately feel the soothing effect on our bodies and minds. In this way, we can begin to integrate the quality of awareness that we cultivate during meditation with the awareness that we bring to our activities in the world throughout the day.
The quality of bare attention we cultivate during mindfulness of the sensations of breathing can be applied to other sensations as well. The next time you sit down for a meal, try this experiment, in which you focus bare attention on each of your five physical senses as they arise in relation to the meal set before you. Let your visual, olfactory, gustatory, auditory, and tactile senses individually experience the food by way of bare attention, with as little conceptual overlay as possible. Begin by directing your mindfulness to the visual appearance of the food—just its colors and shapes. Let go of any conceptual associations you may have regarding these visual impressions. Let go of preferences or judgments of the food. Your likes and dislikes are not present in the food itself, nor in its colors and shapes. Just be present with the shapes and colors of your meal, focusing on them with bare attention. Now close your eyes for a few moments and focus on the smells of the food. Be totally present with just those fragrances, noting how they change from moment to moment. Recognize the nuances of these aromas with discerning mindfulness, but without mixing your immediate experience with labels and concepts, likes and dislikes. Now take a mouthful of the food and, with your eyes remaining closed, direct your bare attention to the tastes that arise in your mouth. Eat slowly, mindful of the changes in flavors that rise up to meet you. As you chew the food, direct your attention to the sounds of eating. They are never the same from moment to moment, so ride the crest of the wave of the present, clinging to nothing in the past, anticipating nothing in the future. Finally, apply bare attention to the tactile sensations of the food—its warmth or coldness, firmness or fluidity, smoothness or roughness. Release any mental images of what you think the food looks like, and focus solely on the tactile qualities of the food as it is chewed and swallowed.
Wasn’t that interesting? Normally when we eat, especially if we are simultaneously involved in some other activity, such as engaging in a conversation, our conceptual overlays drown out the sensory qualities of the food we’re eating. We remember only that we liked, disliked, or were indifferent to the meal, but we commonly suffer from a cognitive deficit disorder when it comes to the five kinds of sensory impressions we were receiving from the food. Just as a meal can pass by unnoticed, so can the rest of our lives. All too often, we miss out on what was happening, imagine things that never happened at all, and recall only the assumptions, expectations, and fantasies that we projected onto reality. We can apply such bare attention at any time, taking the “fresh produce” of the world straight from the fields of the senses, without prepackaging raw experience with our old, habitual conceptual wrappings. The challenge here is to distinguish what reality is presenting to our senses from moment to moment from what we are superimposing on the…
According to Buddhist psychology, in any single moment of awareness, which may be as brief as one millisecond, attention is focused in only one sense field. But during the course of these momentary pulses of consciousness, attention jumps rapidly from one sense field to another, like a chimpanzee on amphetamines. In the blur of these shifts among the sense fields, the mind “makes sense” of the world by superimposing familiar conceptual grids on our perceptions. In this way our experience of the world is structured and appears familiar to us. This is not a bad thing. In fact, it would be very difficult to function in daily life without such conceptual structuring. But problems emerge when we fail to recognize the degree to which we are conceptually adding to reality or subtracting from it through sheer mindlessness. That’s where the cognitive hyperactivity and deficit problems arise. If this theory is valid (and cognitive scientists are exploring these issues today), then from moment to moment there’s really no such thing as mental multitasking. At any given moment, our minds are on one thing only. So the experience of attending to multiple things at once is an illusion. What’s really happening is that the attention is rapidly moving back and forth from one field of experience to another. Recent scientific research indicates that multitasking is in fact not very efficient, for the quality of awareness allotted to each task is diminished. It’s as if we have a finite quantity of attention—like a finite volume of water flowing down a gorge—and as we direct it into smaller tributaries of interest, there’s less attention available for each channel. The practice of focused attention is essentially “non-multitasking.” It’s learning how to channel the stream of awareness where we wish, for as long as we wish, without it compulsively becoming fragmented and thrown into disarray. So when you are next…
Impediment to mental balance that are especially common in the West are self-judgment, guilt, and low self-esteem. As we practice, we may do so with a certain level of expectation. Then, if we don’t progress as well as we think we should, we may grow impatient with ourselves and feel guilty when we don’t take time to practice. One more failure to add to our list! In attentional training, we are going against the grain of years of habit, let alone eons of biological evolution that have helped us survive and procreate but have done little to prepare us for such serene, focused attention. So it’s no wonder that our minds are so scattered and prone to imbalances of all kinds. But with gentle patience, we can gradually train our minds so that they provide us with an inner sense of well-being, instead of constant anxiety, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. This requires compassion for ourselves and for others. The first step is to begin identifying the real causes of our discontent. Virtually anything may catalyze unhappiness, but its true source is always in the mind. Some people feel desperately miserable even when their outer circumstances are wonderful, while others are happy and contented even in the face of dire adversity. We suffer because our minds are afflicted by various kinds of imbalances, which lead us to seek happiness in all the wrong places. But we can emerge from this hedonic treadmill by identifying what truly ails us and what truly brings us satisfaction. Buddhists refer to this shift in priorities as the arousal of a spirit of emergence, with which we move away from the sources of discontent and set out on the path to genuine happiness. This is the most compassionate thing we can do for ourselves.
MEDITATION ON COMPASSION Settle your body in its rest state, as described previously, and calm the mind for a few moments with mindfulness of breathing. Begin this session by cultivating compassion for yourself. How long have you struggled to free yourself of anxiety and dissatisfaction? What tendencies of your own mind and behavior have repeatedly gotten in your way? This is not a time for self-judgment, dismay, or apathy. It’s a time for reappraisal. How can we free ourselves of the inner causes of suffering, given that we have so little control over outer circumstances? Let the aspiration arise: May I be free of the true causes of worry and sadness. Envision your mind free of pointless cravings, free of hostility, and free of confusion. Imagine the serenity and joy of a balanced mind, closely in tune with reality. Now direct your attention to a loved one who is suffering from physical or psychological distress. The very term attention is related to the verb “to tend,” as in “to take care of” and “to watch over.” When you attend to someone fully, you are offering yourself to her. This is your most intimate gift—to attend to someone with a loving, compassionate heart. Let this person fill your heart and mind. Attend to this person’s experience, and if you know the causes of her grief or pain, be present with those causes. Imagine shifting your attention into her perspective, experiencing her difficulties. Then return to your own perspective and let the yearning arise, “May you be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.” Imagine this person finding relief and the freedom that she seeks to lead a happy and meaningful life. Bring to mind another person, one who wishes to be free of suffering but out of delusion causes his own and others’ suffering. Again, imagine taking his perspective and experiencing his difficulties. Then, return to your own perspective, and with an understanding of the consequences of this person’s behavior, wish that he be free of the mental afflictions at the root of his destructive behavior. Let the heartfelt wish arise, “May you have a clear vision of the path to freedom from suffering,” and imagine this person free of the causes of suffering. Now let the scope of your awareness rove through the world, attending to those who suffer, whether from hunger and thirst, from poverty or the miseries of war, from social injustice or the imbalances and afflictions of their own minds. We are all deserving of compassion, especially when we act out of delusion, harming ourselves and others. Let your heart embrace the world with the aspiration, “May we all be free of suffering and its true causes. May we all help ease each others’ pain.”
When you reach the third stage, resurgent attention, during each practice session your attention is fixed most of the time upon your meditative object. By now, you will have increased the duration of each session beyond the initial twenty-four minutes to perhaps twice that. As your attention gradually stabilizes, you may increase the duration of each session by increments of three minutes. At all times, though, value the quality of your meditation over the quantity of time spent in each session. If you sit for long periods but let your mind rove around unnoticed among distractions or fall into dullness, not only are you wasting your time, but also you are developing bad habits that will only get harder and harder to break.
The third stage is achieved only when your mind remains focused on the object most of the time in virtually all your sessions. For most people, the primary problem in this phase of practice is still coarse excitation, and it is with the power of mindfulness that you accomplish this third stage. From the beginning of shamatha training, however, some people are more prone to laxity, which manifests in coarse, medium, and subtle degrees. For the moment, we’ll concern ourselves only with coarse laxity, which occurs when your attention mostly disengages from the object and sinks into a spaced-out vacancy. This is like having the reception of a radio station mostly fade out, even without interference from another channel. Abiding in a state of coarse laxity can be very peaceful, with your mind relatively undisturbed by thoughts or emotional upheavals. But if you spend many hours each day in such a state of dullness, Tibetan contemplatives report that this not only has no benefit, it can actually impair your intelligence. The acuity of your mind starts to atrophy, and over the long term, this can do serious damage. During the early 1970s, I knew of one fellow who decided on his own that the whole point of meditation was to stop thinking, and he diligently applied himself to this goal for days on end. Eventually, he reached this goal by becoming vegetative, unable even to feed himself, and he needed to be hospitalized. This might be deemed an extreme case of coarse laxity!
As you continue in this practice, in order to progress through the stages of attentional development, you need to hone the ability to monitor the quality of your attention. While the main force of your awareness is directed to the meditation object with mindfulness, this needs to be supported with the faculty of introspection, which allows for the quality control of attention, enabling you to swiftly note when the mind has fallen into either excitation or laxity. As soon as you detect either imbalance, take the necessary steps to remedy it. Your first antidote to excitation is to relax more deeply; to counteract laxity, arouse your attention. Throughout all the first three stages, involuntary thoughts flow like a cascading waterfall. But over time, these currents of compulsive ideation carry you away less and less frequently. Coarse excitation gradually subsides, even though thoughts and mental images continue to crop up, as do sounds, smells, and other sensory appearances. Don’t try to block out these distractions. Simply let them go and refocus your attention as single-pointedly as you can on your chosen object of meditation.
Shamatha meditation can be very helpful even in the midst of a normal, socially active way of life, especially when it is balanced with other kinds of spiritual practice, such as the cultivation of loving-kindness and compassion. Rounded, integrated practice is like maintaining a healthy diet. While a proper diet won’t necessarily heal imbalance and illness, it is still indispensable for maintaining your vitality and resistance to disease. Likewise, a balanced meditative practice in the course of a socially…
If you are practicing for only a session or two each day, you may not progress beyond the second attentional stage. The reason for this is simple: if you are balancing your attention for an hour or so each day, but letting it become fragmented and distracted for the other fifteen hours of waking time each day, then the attentional coherence cultivated during these brief sessions is overwhelmed by the distractions of the rest of the day. The achievement of the stage of resurgent attention requires a greater commitment to practice. This will entail multiple sessions of meditation each day, practiced within a quiet, contemplative way of life that supports the…
THE PRACTICE: MINDFULNESS OF BREATHING WITH VIVIDNESS Begin this twenty-four-minute session, as always, by settling your body in its rest state, imbued with the three qualities of relaxation, stillness, and vigilance. Take three slow, deep breaths, breathing down into the abdomen and then into the chest. Let your awareness permeate your body, feeling the sensations of the respiration wherever they arise. Then let your breath flow of its own accord, settling into its natural rhythm. Mentally, the initial emphasis in shamatha practice is on relaxation, which can be induced by attending to the sensations of breathing throughout the body. The second emphasis is on stability of attention, and for this it can be helpful to observe the sensations of breathing in the region of the belly. Then, having established a foundation of relaxation and stability, we shift the emphasis to cultivating vividness of attention. It is crucially important that stability is not gained at the expense of relaxation, and that the increase of vividness does not coincide with the decrease of stability. The relationship among these three qualities can be likened to the roots, trunk, and foliage of a tree. As your practice grows, the roots of relaxation go deeper, the trunk of stability gets stronger, and the foliage of vividness reaches higher. In this practice session, shift the emphasis to vividness. You do this by elevating the focus of attention and directing it to a subtler object. Direct your attention to the tactile sensations of your breath at the apertures of your nostrils or above your upper lip, wherever you feel the in- and out-flow of your breath. Elevating the focus of attention helps to induce vividness, and attending to a subtle object enhances that further. Observe these sensations at the gateway of the respiration, even between breaths. There is an ongoing flow of tactile sensations in the area of the nostrils and upper lip, so sustain your attention there as continuously as possible. If the breath becomes so subtle that you can’t detect the sensations of its flow, quiet your mind and observe more carefully. As you arouse the vividness of attention, eventually the sensations of the breath will become evident again. On the periphery of your…
The Buddha described the practice of mindfulness of breathing with the following analogy: Just as in the last month of the hot season, when a mass of dust and dirt has swirled up, a great rain cloud out of season disperses it and quells it on the spot, so too concentration by mindfulness of breathing, when developed and cultivated, is peaceful and sublime, an ambrosial dwelling, and it disperses and quells on the spot unwholesome states whenever they arise.19 This analogy refers to the healing effect of balanced attention. When awareness is brought to rest on a neutral object, such as the breath, immediately every distressing thought disappears, and the mind becomes peaceful, sublime, and happy. These qualities do not arise from the object of awareness—the breath—but from the nature of the mind in a state of balance. This approach to healing the mind is similar to healing the physical body. The Buddha implied…
Since coarse excitation is still the predominant problem during the third stage of attentional development, you may find it helpful to continue counting the breaths. Some Theravada teachers, following the fifth-century scholar Buddhaghosa, offer two methods involving “quick counting.” In the first of these techniques, you count from one to ten with each full respiration. In the second, with each full breath cycle you count, “one, two, three, four, five; one, two, three, four, five, six; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven; …eight; …nine; …ten.”20 Asanga, on the other hand, suggested counting the breaths backward, from ten to one. After that, you may try counting two breaths as one, four as one, and so on, slowing the pace of counting to include ever larger clusters of breaths. However you choose to count the breaths, when your attention stabilizes to such an extent that you no longer experience lapses of attention but remain continuously engaged with each inhalation and exhalation, you can stop counting. That temporary crutch has served its purpose. Asanga commented, though, that the various methods for counting…
The major challenge at this stage of the practice is to adopt a lifestyle that supports the cultivation of attentional balance, rather than eroding it between sessions. To achieve stage three, the dedicated meditator will need to take up this practice as a serious avocation, spending days or weeks in this practice in the midst of a contemplative way of life in a serene, quiet environment. If we practice only a session or two each day while leading an active life, we may occasionally feel that we’ve reached the sustained attention of the third stage, but we’ll have a hard time stabilizing at that level. The busy-ness of the day intrudes, the mind becomes scattered, and the attentional coherence gained during meditation will likely be lost.
Henry David Thoreau explained why he withdrew into solitude by Walden Pond: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”22 Solitary meditation doesn’t cause mental imbalances, but uncovers them. Boredom may set in, especially when the mind succumbs to laxity, and restlessness often comes in the wake of excitation. With perseverance you can move beyond these imbalances and begin to discover the well-being that arises from a balanced mind. But this requires courage to face your own inner demons and persist in the practice despite the emotional upheavals that are bound to occur in the course of this training.
When I lead shamatha seminars, I like to think of them as “expeditions” rather than “retreats.” The word “retreat” has the connotation not only of withdrawal but also of defeat, and that certainly isn’t the spirit of such practice. The word “expedition,” on the other hand, suggests adventure, conquest, and exploration. The Latin roots of the word have to do with extricating yourself, literally “stepping out,” of some situation in which you’ve gotten stuck. In the practice of shamatha, we discover how deeply our minds are trapped in the twin ruts of excitation and laxity. In the Buddhist tradition, a mind trapped in these ruts is said to be dysfunctional, and in order to make it serviceable, it is helpful to step out of our normal activities, seek out a spacious sense of solitude, and explore the frontiers of the mind.
There are great adventures ahead, but also perils and dead ends. Sometimes the path is clear, but now and then it may seem to disappear altogether. The purpose of relying on those who know this path from their own experience is to save time.
Six prerequisites for sustained, rigorous training are set forth in many Indian and Tibetan Buddhist meditation manuals.23
1. A Supportive Environment It’s important to practice in a safe, quiet, and agreeable location, optimally with a few other like-minded people. This should be a place where food, clothing, and other necessities are easily obtained. Finding such an environment sounds simple in principle, but in practice it can be very difficult, especially if you try to devote yourself to practice for months on end.
2 & 3. Having Few Desires and Being Content The first of these two prerequisites refers to having few desires for things you don’t have, and the second refers to being content with what you do have. Without these two qualities, your mind will never settle down in the practice. You will be constantly thinking of things you want but don’t have, and you will fret that your present circumstances are inadequate in one way or another. This does not mean that you must quell your desire for happiness, but it is necessary to refocus your aspirations on transforming your own mind as the means to genuine well-being. And for this to happen, you must see the limitations of a life driven by such mundane pursuits as wealth, luxury, entertainment, and reputation. All these circumstances can give you is a temporary spurt of pleasure that tapers off as soon as the pleasurable stimulus stops. Mental balance is the gateway to finding genuine happiness, and shamatha is the key that opens that gate.
4. Having Few Activities While you are devoting yourself to shamatha training, it is important to keep other activities to a minimum, for if your behavior between meditation sessions erodes the coherence of attention that you gained during sessions, then you won’t be able to gain any ground. Given the fast pace of modern life and the general emphasis on keeping busy, it can be difficult to make this shift to simplicity. Our work can be a kind of narcotic, concealing the unrest and turbulence of our minds. And a lifestyle that alternates between hard work and hard play can keep us constantly busy, without ever gaining a clue about the meaning of life or the potentials of human consciousness.
5. Ethical Discipline A necessary foundation for balancing the mind is ethical discipline, which is far more than merely following social rules or religious commandments from an external source of authority. To live harmoniously with others, we need to practice social ethics, and to live harmoniously within our natural environment, we need to practice environmental ethics. The practice of ethics involves avoiding harm to others by means of our physical, verbal, or mental behavior, and leads to social and environmental flourishing, in which whole communities may live in harmony with each other and with their natural environment.25 A third type of ethical discipline is psychophysical ethics. To promote inner well-being, we need to practice ethical ways of treating our own bodies and minds. This includes taking good care of the body, following a healthy diet, and getting the right kind and amount of physical exercise. It also involves engaging in mental behavior that is conducive to balancing the mind and reducing disturbing mental states such as hatred, greed, confusion, fear, and jealousy. The call to ethical discipline challenges each of us to examine our own behavior carefully, noting both short-term and long-term consequences of our actions. Although an activity may yield immediate pleasure, if over time it results in unrest, conflict, and misery, it warrants the label “unwholesome.” On the other hand, while a behavior may involve difficulties in the short-term, we can regard it as “wholesome” if it eventually leads to contentment, harmony, and genuine happiness for ourselves and others. Environmental, social, and psychophysical ethics all involve living in ways that are conducive to our own and others’ well-being. An ethical way of life supports the cultivation of mental balance, and this in turn further enables us to promote our own and others’ well-being.
6. Dispensing with Compulsive Thoughts Many of us let compulsive thoughts dominate our minds. These won’t stop overnight, but as we engage in shamatha practice, both during and between sessions, it is important to observe the mind’s activities and restrain it when it falls into thought patterns that aggravate mental disturbances. Otherwise, we’ll be like the cat that thrashes around on the surface of the pond, never free from the turbulence of our own minds. The Indian Buddhist sage Atisha wrote of the importance of these prerequisites:26 As long as the prerequisites for shamatha Are incomplete, meditative stabilization Will not be accomplished, even if you meditate Strenuously for thousands of years. In our material society, even for people who are drawn to nonmaterialistic values, there’s a strong tendency to take our current way of life as the norm, and then to add meditation to fix it, like a Band-Aid applied to a festering wound. My first experience with meditation in the late 1960s is a good example. I went to a teacher who gave me a mantra and told me how to meditate on it, but in these instructions there was no reference to the way I should lead the rest of my life. Even now, decades later, meditation is often taught with little or no reference to any of the above prerequisites. It has been reduced to a kind of first aid to alleviate the symptoms of a dysfunctional life, with all its anxieties, depression, frustration, and emotional vacillations. For a mind that is assaulted with a myriad of mental afflictions such as craving, hostility, and delusion, we need more than a medic. We need long-term, intensive care. That’s what this training is all about.
We are addicted to pleasurable stimuli, and when we devote ourselves many hours each day to shamatha training, with few distractions between sessions, we begin to have withdrawal symptoms. The mind oscillates between boredom and restlessness, and at times it may descend into depression and self-doubt. At such times, we tend to fixate on ideas and memories that reinforce such gloom and doom, so it’s important to lift ourselves out of these emotional sinkholes by reflecting on other aspects of reality that inspire us. One such practice is the meditative cultivation of empathetic joy. In the practice of loving-kindness and compassion, we cultivate a yearning that others may find happiness and its causes and be free from suffering and its causes. The cultivation of the empathetic joy involves attending closely to something that is already a reality—the joys, successes, and virtues of yourself and others. Empathy is feeling with others, and in this practice we focus not on their sorrows and difficulties, but on their happiness and triumphs. This practice is a direct antidote to feelings of depression, anxiety, and hopelessness that may arise in the course of intensive, sustained meditation, or simply in the course of daily living.
MEDITATION ON EMPATHETIC JOY Find a comfortable position, keeping the spine straight. Settle your body in its rest state, imbued with the three qualities of relaxation, stillness, and vigilance. Bring to mind a person you know well who exudes a sense of good cheer and well-being. Think of this person’s physical presence, words, and actions. As you attend to this person’s joy, open your heart to that joy and take delight in it. This will be easy if you already feel close to this person. Now, bring to mind another individual. Think of someone for whom something wonderful has happened, recently or in the past. Recall the delight of this person and share in the joy. Now direct your attention to someone who inspires you with his or her virtues, such as generosity, kindness, and wisdom. Rejoice in these virtues for this person’s sake, for your own sake, and for all those who are recipients of this virtue. Now direct awareness to your own life. Empathetic joy in our own virtues is important yet often overlooked. Attend to periods in your life that have been a source of inspiration to you and perhaps to others as well. Think of occasions when you embodied your own ideals. Attend to and take delight in your own virtues. There doesn’t need to be any pompousness here, or any sense of pride or arrogance. As you recall the people and circumstances that enabled you to live well and enjoy the sweet fruits of your efforts, you may simultaneously experience a deep sense of gratitude and joy. This prevents you from slipping into a superficial sense of self-congratulation and superiority. Some practices are difficult, but the practice of empathetic joy is easy. Throughout the course of the day, when you see or hear about someone’s virtue or good fortune, empathetically take joy in it. This will raise your own spirits and help you climb out of emotional sinkholes of depression and low self-esteem.
By maintaining continuity of this training in a retreat setting, you will eventually achieve the fourth of the nine stages of attentional development, called close attention. At this point, due to the power of enhanced mindfulness, you no longer completely forget your chosen object, the tactile sensations of the breath at the nostrils. You may have experienced glimpses of this level of attentional stability intermittently before actually achieving this stage, but now it has become normal. Each of your sessions may now last an hour or longer, and throughout this time, your attention cannot be involuntarily drawn entirely away from the object. You are now free of coarse excitation. It’s as if the attention has acquired a kind of gravity such that it can’t be easily buffeted by gusts of involuntary thoughts and sensory distractions. At this stage it is said that you achieve the power of mindfulness.27 In the Indian and Tibetan Mahayana traditions, mindfulness is defined as the mental faculty of maintaining attention, without forgetfulness or distraction, on a familiar object. Since mindfulness prevents the attention from straying from one’s chosen object, it acts…
According to one psychological paper on this topic, mindfulness is “a kind of nonelaborative, nonjudgmental, present-centered awareness in which each thought, feeling, or sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged and accepted as it is.”31 The authors of this paper propose a two-component model of mindfulness, the first involving the self-regulation of attention so that it is maintained on immediate experience, and the second involving an orientation that is characterized by curiosity, openness, and acceptance. The modern psychological account of mindfulness, which is explicitly based on the descriptions of mindfulness presented in the modern Vipassana (contemplative insight) tradition of Theravada Buddhism, differs significantly from the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist version. The modern Vipassana approach views mindfulness as nondiscriminating, moment-to-moment “bare awareness”; the Indo-Tibetan tradition, however, characterizes mindfulness as bearing in mind the object of attention, the state of not forgetting, not being distracted, and not floating.32 The scholar and teacher Bhante Gunaratana gives a clear description of the Vipassana view of mindfulness in his book Mindfulness in Plain English. There he describes mindfulness as nonconceptual awareness, or “bare attention,” which does not label or categorize experiences. “Mindfulness,” he says, “is present-time awareness…It stays forever in the present…If you are remembering your second-grade teacher, that is memory. When you then become aware that you are remembering your second-grade teacher, that is mindfulness.”33 While Gunaratana’s description is representative of the current Vipassana tradition as a whole, it is oddly at variance with the Buddha’s own description of mindfulness, or sati: “And what monks, is the faculty of sati? Here, monks, the noble disciple has sati, he is endowed with perfect sati and intellect, he is one who remembers, who recollects what was done and said long before.”34 In contrast to the Vipassana tradition’s…
Questioned by King Milinda about the characteristics of sati, the monk Nagasena replies that it has both the characteristic of “calling to mind” and the characteristic of “taking hold.” He explained further, Sati, when it arises, calls to mind wholesome and unwholesome tendencies, with faults and faultless, inferior and refined, dark and pure, together with their counterparts.… Sati, when it arises, follows the courses of beneficial and unbeneficial tendencies: these tendencies are beneficial, these unbeneficial; these tendencies are helpful, these unhelpful.35 So, rather than refraining from labeling or categorizing experiences in a nonjudgmental fashion, in the earliest, most authoritative accounts, sati is said to distinguish between wholesome and unwholesome, beneficial and unbeneficial tendencies. The contrast between the ancient and modern accounts is striking. With his usual meticulous care, Buddhaghosa, the most authoritative commentator of the Theravada tradition, wrote: [Sati’s] characteristic is not floating; its property is not losing; its manifestation is guarding or the state of…
Mindfulness is cultivated in the practice of shamatha, and it is applied in the practice of contemplative insight (Pali:…
As mentioned previously, in the fourth stage of shamatha practice, you achieve the power of mindfulness, and the practice comes into its own. While your attention is no longer prone to coarse excitation, it is still flawed by a medium degree of excitation and coarse laxity. When medium excitation occurs, you don’t completely lose track of your object of attention, but involuntary thoughts occupy the center of attention and the meditative object is displaced to the periphery. To compare this with coarse excitation, let’s again take the analogy of tuning into a radio station. Coarse excitation is like losing your chosen station altogether, as your tuner slips either to another station or into mere static. Medium excitation is like drifting slightly toward another station but not so completely that you can no longer hear your chosen station at all. You still hear it, but it’s muffled by extraneous noise.
THE PRACTICE: MINDFULNESS OF BREATHING WITH THE ACQUIRED SIGN After settling your body and respiration in their natural states, continue focusing your attention on the bare sensations of the breath at the apertures of your nostrils. At this stage in the practice, your respiration will be very calm and the tactile sensations of the breath will be correspondingly very subtle. They may even become so faint that you can’t detect them at all. When that happens, it is important not to assume that there are no sensations, nor should you deliberately breathe more vigorously so that you can pick up those sensations again. Rather, observe more and more closely until you do detect the very subtle sensations of your breath. As discussed previously, this is a unique quality of the breath as a meditation object. In other methods for developing shamatha, the object is bound to become more and more evident as you progress in the practice. But with the technique of mindfulness of breathing, as your practice deepens, the breath becomes more and more subtle, which challenges you to arouse greater and greater vividness of attention. So, rise to this challenge as you simultaneously cultivate a deeper sense of relaxation, stronger stability, and brighter vividness. Allow your respiration, which represents the “air element” of lightness and movement, to carry the healing, balancing, soothing process deeper and deeper. Habitual mental images, arising involuntarily, will be superimposed on your sense impressions, including tactile sensations. In this practice, you are like a chemist separating out the impurities of superimpositions from the pure strain of the tactile sensations of the breath. As superimpositions are released, the sense of your body having definite physical borders fades and you enter deeper and deeper levels of tranquillity. In the phases of mindfulness of breathing thus far, you have been attending in various ways to the tactile sensations of the respiration. However, to continue all the way along the path of shamatha, eventually you must shift your attention from the tactile sensations of breathing to an “acquired sign” (Pali: uggaha-nimitta), a symbol of the air element that appears before the mind’s eye as you progress in shamatha practice. To different people, acquired signs associated with the breath practice may appear like a star, a cluster of gems or pearls, a wreath of flowers, a puff of smoke, a cobweb, a cloud, a lotus flower, a wheel, or the moon or sun. The various appearances of the acquired sign are related to the mental dispositions of individual meditators. If you wish to continue on the path of mindfulness of breathing—which here explicitly turns into “mindfulness with breathing”—as soon as such a sign arises, shift your attention to this sign. This will be your object of attention as you proceed along the rest of the nine stages leading to shamatha. At first your sign will arise only sporadically, so when it disappears, return to the…
While Buddhaghosa includes certain kinds of tactile sensations among the acquired signs associated with the breath practice, the Indo-Tibetan Mahayana tradition emphasizes that advanced stages along the path to shamatha can be achieved only by focusing on a mental object, not a sensory impression.40 The reason for this is that the development of shamatha entails the cultivation of an exceptionally high degree of attentional vividness. By focusing on an object of any of the physical senses, you can certainly develop stability, but vividness will not be enhanced to its full potential. For this,…
Shariputra, similarly, a Bodhisattva, a great being, mindfully breathes in and mindfully breathes out. If the inhalation is long, he knows the inhalation is long; if the exhalation is long, he knows the exhalation is long. If the inhalation is short, he knows the inhalation is short; if the exhalation is short, he knows the exhalation is short. Shariputra, thus, a Bodhisattva, a great being, by dwelling with introspection and with mindfulness, eliminates avarice and disappointment towards the world by means of nonobjectification; and he lives observing the body as the body internally.41
While the modern Vipassana tradition emphasizes that in the practice of mindfulness we must accept our faults without making any attempt to change them,42 this advice is a departure from the Buddha’s teachings and the writings of the great masters of the past. If you don’t balance your attention when it strays into either laxity or excitation, you will only reinforce these mental imbalances, and the quality of your mindfulness will remain flawed indefinitely.
The term nonobjectification in this passage refers to no longer clinging to outer objects and events as the true sources of our joys and sorrows. Rather, we see that these feelings arise from our own minds, and this insight heals the mental affliction of avarice and the disappointment that results when our desires are obstructed.
According to Buddhist psychology, when we detect something by way of any of our six senses—vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, or mental perception—there is a very brief moment before the mind projects concepts and labels onto our immediate experience. Discerning this fraction of a second of pure perception, before concepts, classifications, and emotional responses overlay it, requires a high degree of vividness.43 This brief instant is important because it is an opportunity for gaining a clearer perception of the nature of phenomena, including a subtle continuum of mental consciousness out of which all forms of sensory perception and conceptualization emerge.
A prominent school of Buddhist psychology states that about six hundred pulselike moments of cognition occur per second, and this accords roughly with modern psychology.
In Buddhism the moments of cognition that don’t knowingly engage with anything are called nonascertaining awareness. Appearances arise to the mind, but we don’t register them, and afterward we have no recollection of having witnessed them. When we listen closely to music, for example, other sensory impressions, such as extraneous sounds, shapes, colors, and bodily sensations, are still being presented to our awareness, but we note only a very small fraction of them. Attention is highly selective.
Attentional stability is a measure of how many of the ascertained impulses of awareness are focused on our desired object. For example, if we have fifty moments of ascertaining cognition per second and all fifty are focused on the tactile sensations of breathing, this indicates a relatively high degree of stability. A distracted mind, on the other hand, has a high proportion of those fifty ascertaining moments scattered in different fields of perception. Stability is coherence with regard to the chosen object. As we relax and our attention stabilizes, if vividness increases, we may experience a higher density of moments of ascertaining consciousness each second.
Many meditators emphasize vividness in their practice because they know that this brings them a kind of “high.” But the lasting achievement of vividness has two prerequisites, relaxation and stability. If you want to develop exceptional vividness, first develop relaxation, second develop stability, and then finally increase vividness. Underlying all these aspects of attention must be a foundation of equanimity, without which strong attentional and emotional vacillations will likely persist indefinitely. A general sign of spiritual progress is imperturbability in the face of the vicissitudes of life, and for this, equanimity is the key.
The cultivation of equanimity serves as an antidote to two of the primary afflictions of the mind: attachment and aversion. Attachment includes clinging to the serenity of shamatha, and aversion can arise by regarding all distractions to your practice, including other people, as disagreeable obstacles to your well-being. The essence of equanimity is impartiality. It is equanimity that allows loving-kindness, compassion, and empathetic joy to expand boundlessly. Normally, these qualities are mixed with attachment, but we grow beyond the mental affliction of attachment as we realize that every sentient being is equally worthy of finding happiness and freedom from suffering.
In Buddhism, a sense of one’s self as an immutable, unitary, independent “I” is seen as a root cause of suffering. Clinging to this illusory, autonomous ego leads to the conviction that our own well-being is more important than that of other people. Normally, we live within a set of concentric rings of affection, with ourselves at the center. The first ring out from the center includes our loved ones and dear friends, and the next ring is our circle of friendly acquaintances. Farther out there is a very large ring of people toward whom we feel indifferent. The outermost ring includes people we regard as enemies, people who we believe have obstructed or may obstruct our desires for happiness. This way of prioritizing our feelings for others perpetuates self-centeredness. Equanimity overcomes such self-centeredness and its resultant attachment to and aversion for others.
When I first moved into a meditation hut high in the mountains above Dharamsala, I went to visit the Tibetan recluse Gen Jhampa Wangdü. In the spring of 1959, shortly after the Tibetan uprising against the Communist invasion of Tibet, Jhampa Wangdü fled his homeland and resumed life as a yogi in India. The day I first dropped by his hermitage made a great impression on me. He was not in strict retreat, so I knew I would not be interfering if I came by during the noon hour. I knocked on his door. A small man who looked a bit like the character Yoda from the movie Star Wars opened the door, his face filled with a big, warm smile, as if I were his long-lost son who had finally returned home. He radiated a sense of happiness and kindness. He invited me in and offered me tea. In different circumstances, I might have felt that I was special or that he was especially fond of me. Jhampa Wangdü’s compassion and warmth were genuine, but it became obvious to me that his affection was utterly free of personal attachment. I expect anybody would have been received in the same way. But knowing this did not make this reception any less sweet. It was an experience of unconditional love, the key to happiness in any circumstances. This is how reclusive contemplatives maintain their connection to others despite the isolation and hardships of their lives.
They aren’t waiting for success, gazing longingly at their calendars, hoping for quick results. The Tibetan verb drupa, commonly translated as “to practice,” also means “to accomplish.” When asked, “What are you doing?” a contemplative might answer, “I am practicing/accomplishing shamatha.” Practice and achievement are one and the same.
MEDITATION ON EQUANIMITY After settling your body in its ground state and attending to your breath for a few moments, bring to mind a person you know well, whose background and living circumstances are familiar to you but who is neither a friend nor an enemy. Attend to this person. This person, like yourself, is striving for happiness and freedom from pain, fear, and insecurity. Focus on this person and shift your awareness to view the world from her eyes. From this point of view, look back on yourself. Regardless of the distinct defects or excellent qualities this person might have, her yearning for happiness and wish to be free from pain and grief are identical to your own. Even though she is not close to the center of your personal universe, her well-being is no less significant than that of a dear loved one whom you may regard as crucial to your happiness. Now bring to mind a person you feel is crucial to your well-being, a person for whom you have both affection and attachment. Attend closely to this loved one, and shift your awareness to the viewpoint of that person so that you perceive him as a human being like yourself, with both defects and excellent qualities. From this viewpoint, realize that although you are loved by some people, a great number of people feel indifferently toward you, and there also may be some people who don’t like you. This person for whom you feel affection and attachment feels his own desires, hopes, and fears. Now step back and attend to this person from outside. This person is not a true source of your happiness, security, or joy, which can only arise from your own heart and mind. Next bring to mind a person who may be intent on bringing you harm or depriving you of happiness, a person with whom you feel conflict. As before, imagine stepping into this person’s perspective, being this person from the inside, and experiencing her hopes and fears. Fundamentally, this person, like yourself, wishes to find happiness and freedom from suffering. Now, step back and attend to her from outside with the realization that she is not the source of your distress or anxiety. If you feel uneasy or angry in relationship to this person, the source is in your own heart, not in the other person. Realize that there is nothing inherent in the stranger, in the loved one, nor in the foe that makes the other person fall into one category or another. Circumstances change, relationships change, and it is the flux of circumstances that gives rise to the thoughts “this is my enemy” or “this is my loved one.” Expand the field of awareness to embrace everyone in your immediate environment, their hopes, fears, aspirations, and yearnings. Each person is as important as all others. Shifting circumstances bring us together and also cause us to part. Expand your field of awareness out over the whole community, reaching out in all directions, including everyone. Recognize that each person is fundamentally like yourself, and virtually everyone feels…
Through the skillful, sustained practice of settling the mind in its natural state, eventually you will achieve the fifth attentional stage, called tamed attention. At this point, you find that you can take satisfaction in your practice, even though there is still some resistance to it. You have progressed well on this path, and the results of your efforts are apparent to you. Involuntary thoughts continue to arise, but instead of their tumultuous outpouring like a cascading waterfall, they now flow like a river moving smoothly through a gorge. As you progress from the fourth to the fifth stage of attentional training, you are presented with one of the greatest challenges on the entire path to shamatha. Free of coarse excitation, you must now confront another problem that was lurking in the shadows of your mind all along: coarse laxity. As mentioned earlier, the symptom of this attentional disorder is that your attention succumbs to dullness, which causes it to largely disengage from its meditative object. The Tibetan word for laxity has the connotation of sinking. It’s as if the attention, instead of rising to the object, sinks down from it into the recesses of the mind. The attention fades, as it were, but instead of fading out, it’s more like fading in, stepping onto a slippery slope that leads down to sluggishness, lethargy, and finally sleep.
True shamatha is imbued not only with a degree of stability far beyond that achieved at this stage of attentional practice but also with an extraordinary vividness that one has hardly…
you now have the task of recognizing and counteracting a medium degree of laxity. When this degree of laxity sets in, the object of meditation appears, but without much vividness. This is subtly different from coarse laxity, and…
The way to counteract laxity is to arouse the attention, to take a greater interest in the object of meditation. Tibetan contemplatives liken this to stringing a lute. If the strings are too taut, they may easily break under the strain, but if they are too slack, the instrument is unplayable. Likewise, the task at this point is to determine the proper “pitch” of attention. If you arouse the mind too much in your efforts to…
Buddhaghosa drew this distinction between mindfulness and introspection: “Mindfulness has the characteristic of remembering. Its function is not to forget. It is manifested as guarding. Introspection has the characteristic of non-confusion. Its function is to investigate. It is manifested as scrutiny.”45 And his contemporary Asanga offers a view that is strikingly similar: “Mindfulness and introspection are taught, for the first prevents the attention from straying from the meditative object, while the second recognizes that the attention is straying.”46 Shantideva’s definition of introspection appears to reflect both these views: “In brief, this alone is the definition of introspection: the repeated examination of the state of one’s body and mind.”47 Throughout Buddhist literature, the training in shamatha is often likened to training a wild elephant, and the two primary instruments for this are the tether of mindfulness and the goad of introspection.
This phase of the path to shamatha also brings you to a major fork in the road. You may continue in the practice of mindfulness of breathing, which is so strongly recommended for overcoming excitation. Many Buddhist contemplatives have encouraged meditators who are determined to achieve shamatha to continue practicing with just one object. But Padmasambhava, the Indian master instrumental in first bringing Buddhism to Tibet, encouraged the use of multiple methods to counter the tenacious impediments to the achievement of shamatha.49 There are merits to both views. It is very easy to grow bored or dissatisfied with your meditative object in this practice and to then fish around for other more interesting, and hopefully more effective, techniques. You may easily be enticed by highly esoteric, secret practices, thinking that they will be more effective than the one you are engaging in now. Such roving from one meditation object and technique to another, always on the prowl for a greater “bang for your buck,” can undermine any sustained practice of shamatha. Repeatedly experimenting with different techniques can prevent you from achieving expertise in any of them.
I shall set forth here the option of advancing to another method after you have achieved the fourth stage by mindfulness of breathing. This is the practice of settling the mind in its natural state, a technique that directly prepares you for Mahamudra and Dzogchen practice, two traditions of contemplative practice that are focused on the realization of the nature of consciousness. A comparable practice within the Theravada tradition is called “unfastened mindfulness.”50
You can begin your shamatha practice with this method and continue with it all the way to the achievement of shamatha. You don’t need to practice mindfulness of breathing first. However, many people find this method difficult, as they are swept away time and again by their thoughts. For them, mindfulness of breathing may be the most effective way to progress along the first four stages on this path.
While many people practice meditation to achieve “altered states of consciousness,” from a Buddhist perspective, our habitual mindsets, in which we are drawn under the influence of such imbalances as craving, anxiety, stress, and frustration, are already altered states of consciousness. The practice of settling the mind in its natural state is designed to release us from these habitual perturbations of consciousness, letting the mind gradually settle in its ground state. The “natural state” of the mind, according to Buddhist contemplatives, is characterized by the three qualities of bliss, luminosity, and nonconceptuality. I believe this is one of the most remarkable discoveries ever made concerning the nature of consciousness, and that it calls for collaborative research between cognitive scientists and contemplatives.
THE PRACTICE: SETTLING THE MIND IN ITS NATURAL STATE Simply hearing your spiritual mentor’s practical instructions and knowing how to explain them to others does not liberate your own mindstream, so you must meditate. Even if you spend your whole life practicing a mere semblance of meditation—meditating in a stupor, cluttering the mind with fantasies, and taking many breaks during your sessions due to being unable to control mental scattering—no good experiences or…
In solitude sit upright on a comfortable cushion. Gently hold the “vase” breath until the vital energies converge naturally. Let your gaze be vacant. With your body and mind inwardly relaxed, and without allowing the continuum of your consciousness to fade from a state of limpidity and vivid clarity, sustain it naturally and radiantly. Do not clutter your mind with many critical judgments; do not take a shortsighted view of meditation, and avoid great hopes and fears that your meditation will turn out one way and not another. At the beginning have many daily sessions, each of them of brief duration, and focus well in each one. Whenever you meditate, bear in mind the phrase “without distraction and without grasping,” and put this into practice. As you gradually familiarize yourself with the meditation, increase the duration of your sessions. If dullness sets in, arouse your awareness. If there is excessive scattering and excitation, loosen up. Determine in terms of your own experience the optimal degree of mental arousal, as well as the healthiest diet and behavior. Excessive, imprisoning constriction of the mind, loss of clarity due to lassitude, and excessive relaxation resulting in involuntary vocalization and eye-movement are to be avoided. It does only harm to talk a lot about such things as extrasensory perception and miscellaneous dreams or to claim, “I saw a deity. I saw a ghost. I know this. I’ve realized that,” and so on. The presence or absence of any kind of pleasure or displeasure, such as a sensation of motion, is not uniform, for there are great differences in the dispositions and faculties from one individual to another. Due to maintaining the mind in its natural state, there may arise sensations such as physical and mental well-being, a sense of lucid consciousness, the appearance of empty forms, and a non-conceptual sense that nothing can harm the mind, regardless of whether or not thoughts have ceased. Whatever kinds of mental imagery occur—be they gentle or violent, subtle or coarse, of long or short duration, strong or weak, good or bad—observe their nature, and avoid any obsessive evaluation of them as being one thing and not another. Let the heart of your practice be consciousness in its natural state, limpid and vivid. Acting as your own mentor, if you can bring the essential…
The object of mindfulness in the practice of settling the mind in its natural state is no longer the subtle sensations of the breath at the nostrils, but the space of the mind and whatever events arise within that space. The object of introspection, as in the earlier practice of mindfulness of breathing, is the quality of the attention with which you are observing the mind. At the beginning have many daily sessions, each of them of brief duration, and focus well in each…
As you venture into this practice, I would encourage you to memorize these quintessential instructions: settle your mind without distraction and without grasping. Practicing “without distraction” means not allowing your mind to be carried away by thoughts and sense impressions. Be present here and now, and when thoughts arise pertaining to the past or future or ruminations about the present, don’t be abducted by them. As you hike on this trail of shamatha, don’t be a hitchhiker, catching a ride with any of the thoughts or images that whiz through your mind. Rather, be like a…
Here is the challenge at hand: be attentive to everything that comes up in the mind, but don’t grasp onto anything. In this practice, let your mind be like the sky. Whatever moves through it, the sky never reacts. It doesn’t stop anything from moving through it, it doesn’t hold onto anything that’s present, nor does it control anything. The sky doesn’t prefer rainbows to clouds, butterflies to jet…
When you are settling the mind in its natural state, occasionally falling into distraction or grasping, you experience a semblance of what it is like to fall from the state of pristine awareness (Tibetan: rigpa) into the mind of dualistic grasping. This is not something that occurred long ago in a Buddhist Garden of Eden. It happens each moment that the dualistic mind is activated and we lose sight of our own true nature. Pristine awareness is always present. But it is obscured when we become carried away by the objects that captivate our attention, and to which we respond with craving and aversion. As you gradually familiarize yourself…
While much can be learned from books about meditation—and this can be enough to get you started—for dedicated, sustained practice there is no substitute for a knowledgeable, experienced teacher.
It is possible to waste an enormous amount of time in faulty meditative practice, and there is also the possibility of damaging your mind, so it is important to find qualified instructors and to listen closely to their counsel. As the Dalai Lama responded when asked whether it is necessary to have a teacher in order to achieve enlightenment, “No, but it can save you a lot of time!”
Motionlessly relax your body in whatever way is comfortable, like an unthinking corpse in a charnel ground. Let your voice be silent like a lute with its strings cut. Rest your mind in an unmodified state, like the primordial presence of space…. Remain for a long time in [this way] of resting. This pacifies all illnesses due to disturbances of the elements and unfavorable circumstances, and your body, speech, and mind naturally calm down.
“Vase breathing” is an energizing and stabilizing breath practice. To practice “gentle vase breathing,” as you inhale, let the sensations of the breath flow down to the bottom of your abdomen, like pouring water into a vase. Then, as you exhale, instead of letting the abdomen retract completely, keep it slightly rounded, with your belly soft. In this way, you maintain a bit of a potbelly, which expands during the in-breath and contracts somewhat during the out-breath, but still retains a fullness. The goal of the vase breath is to converge the vital energies, or pranas, in the central channel in your abdomen and allow them to settle in this region. This is something you can detect from your own direct experience of your body and the movement of energies within it.
In this practice, it is important that your eyes are open, vacantly resting your gaze in the space in front of you. If you have not meditated with your eyes open, you may find this uncomfortable, but I encourage you to get used to it. Blink as often as you like and don’t strain your eyes in any way. Let them be as relaxed as if you were daydreaming with your eyes open. By leaving the eyes open, while focusing your attention on the domain of mental events, the artificial barrier between “inner” and “outer” begins to dissolve.
With your body and mind inwardly relaxed, and without allowing the continuum of your consciousness to fade from a state of limpidity and vivid clarity, sustain your awareness naturally and radiantly. On the path of shamatha, while it is crucial to enhance both the stability and vividness of attention, this must not be done at the expense of relaxation.
He responded, “Between sessions, it is fine to meditate on the value of such practice and to arouse your motivation to engage in it with great diligence. But during your meditation sessions themselves, let go of all such desires. Release your hopes and your fears, and simply devote yourself to the practice, moment by moment.”
In the practice of mindfulness of breathing, you are faced with the challenge of carefully observing, without controlling, sensations within the body associated with the breathing. Now you face a similar challenge of carefully observing events within the mind without regulating or evaluating them in any way. A Tibetan aphorism states, “Let your mind be a gracious host in the midst of unruly guests.” In the shamatha practice of mindfulness of breathing, you let go of thoughts as soon as you detect them and return your attention to the breath. But now, instead of letting thoughts go, you let them be. Don’t prefer one kind of thought to another. Avoid all kinds of attraction to and repulsion from any mental imagery. Don’t even prefer the absence of thoughts to the presence of thoughts. They are not the problem. Being distracted by and grasping onto thoughts is the problem. Recognize this crucial difference from the preceding practice.
With mindfulness of breathing, you measured the stability of your attention with respect to a continuous object—sensations of the breath. But when settling the mind in its natural state, thoughts are anything but continuous. They come and go sporadically, so the stability of attention is not in relation to a specific object. It’s a quality of your subjective awareness. Even when thoughts are on the move, because you are not distracted by them and don’t grasp onto them, your awareness remains still. This is called the fusion of stillness and movement.
During the course of this training, you will experience periods when your mind seems to be empty. Thoughts and mental images seem to have disappeared. This is a time to arouse the vividness of your attention to see if you can detect subtle mental events that have been lurking just beneath the threshold of your awareness. This is one reason for switching to this technique after you have achieved the fourth attentional stage: you are continually challenged to arouse the clarity of attention, but without losing its stability. Watch closely, but continue to breathe normally.
right. We move now to the Mahayana practice of tonglen, which literally means “giving and taking.” This one method integrates loving-kindness and compassion on a foundation of equanimity, and in so doing, it uplifts the mind that falls into depression and calms the mind that gets caught up in emotional turbulence. Just as mindfulness of a single cycle of respiration—arousing the attention during the in-breath and relaxing during the out-breath—wards off attentional laxity and excitation, so does tonglen counteract emotional imbalances of depression and excitement.
TONGLEN MEDITATION After settling your body and mind in their natural states, symbolically imagine your own pristine awareness—transcending all distortions and afflictions of the mind—as an orb of radiant white light, about a half inch in diameter, in the center of your chest. Visualize this orb as a fathomless source of loving-kindness and compassion, as a light of unlimited goodness and joy. This is the healing power of awareness. Now bring to mind the difficulties in your life, the kinds of suffering you bear, together with the inner causes of such distress. Imagine these as a dark cloud that obscures your deepest nature and obstructs your pursuit of genuine happiness. With the compassionate yearning, “May I be free of suffering and its causes,” with each in-breath, imagine drawing this darkness into the light at your heart, where it is extinguished without trace. With each breath, imagine this darkness being dispelled, and experience the relief of this burden being lightened. Now bring to mind your vision of your own flourishing as a human being. Imagine the blessings you would love to receive from the world, and imagine the ways in which you would love to become transformed so that you may experience the fulfillment you seek. Then with the aspiration, “May I find happiness and its causes,” with each out-breath, visualize light flowing from the inexhaustible source at your heart, permeating every cell of your body and every facet of your mind. Imagine this light permeating your whole being, fulfilling your heart’s longing with each exhalation. Next, invite into the field of your awareness someone you dearly love. Apply the previous practice to this person, compassionately drawing in the darkness of his suffering and its causes with each in-breath, and lovingly sending forth the light of happiness and its causes with each out-breath. As you do so, imagine this person being freed from suffering and discovering the genuine happiness that he seeks. After dissolving the appearance of your loved one back into the space of your awareness, invoke the memory of someone toward whom you feel relatively indifferent, and practice in the same way with the recognition that this person’s suffering and well-being are just as real and important as those of yourself and your loved ones. In the next phase of this practice, follow the same steps either with a person who has harmed you or those you love, or with someone whom you dislike, perhaps because of her deplorable behavior. With each in-breath, make a special point of drawing in the darkness of the causes of this person’s suffering—such as greed, hostility, and delusion—which may also indirectly harm many other people as well. With each inhalation, imagine this person becoming freed from these harmful tendencies, and with each exhalation, imagine her finding genuine happiness, while cultivating its true causes. Before you bring this meditation to a close, you may open your awareness in all directions,…
You must still be on guard against the occurrence of medium laxity, in which you are aware of the object of mindfulness, but it is not very vivid. In addition, you are now prone to and need to be able to detect subtle excitation, in which the meditative object remains at the center of attention, but involuntary thoughts emerge at the periphery. Returning to our earlier metaphor of listening to the radio, this is like being tuned to the desired station but faintly hearing another station, or simply static, at the same time. The quality of attention you are seeking here is like a clear channel, unsullied with extraneous noise.
Throughout the development of shamatha, even at this relatively advanced stage, a myriad of emotions and other mental and physical conditions may arise, many of them very unexpectedly. This practice of settling the mind in its natural state is especially known for unveiling the suppressed and repressed contents of the mind, and these vary widely from one individual to the next. There is no way to predict beforehand what kinds of experiences you may have.
One of the more common challenges in this practice is the emergence of fear. As you release your grip on the contents of the mind, you are undermining your normal sense of personal identity, which is constantly reinforced by thinking, by recalling and identifying with your personal history, hopes, and plans. Now you are disengaging from these familiar supports for substantiating your ego. As lapses between thoughts occur more and more frequently and for longer periods, your awareness hovers in a kind of empty space, a vacuum devoid of personhood. You may come into the grip of fear as your normal sense of who you are loses its footing. The teacher Gen Lamrimpa warned his students that such dread may well arise during their training. It is crucial, he counseled, not to identify with it, nor to give it any credence. Some kinds of fear are based in reality. They protect us from danger, filling the body with energy so that we can flee or protect ourselves in whatever way necessary. But this kind of dread, with no clear object, has no such basis in reality. There is no danger in the empty, luminous space of awareness. You have nothing to lose but your false sense of an independent, controlling ego. The only thing being threatened is an illusion. If you don’t identify with it, there’s nothing to fear. If you do identify with this fear, it may bring your entire practice to a grinding halt and throw you into deep emotional imbalances. So it is of the utmost importance to observe such fear without distraction and without grasping.
Another emotional imbalance that may crop up at any time throughout this training is depression, which may be related to a deep-rooted sense of guilt and low self-esteem. When any of these emotions or attitudes arise during meditation sessions, treat them like any other mental event: watch their emergence, see how they linger, then observe them disappear back into the space of the mind. Examine them with discerning intelligence, but without any emotional charge. Rather than identifying with them, or owning them, let them emerge from the space of awareness and dissolve back, without any intervention on your part—even without any preference for…
THE PRACTICE: SETTLING THE MIND IN ITS NATURAL STATE—PLUMBING THE DEPTHS When you first begin the practice of settling the mind in its natural state, you may have difficulty identifying the intangible domain of the mind. Or even if you do settle your awareness there, after some time your attention may become vague, disoriented, or spaced out. If you have difficulty identifying the domain of the mind or sustaining attention there, consciously bring up a thought such as, “What is the mind?” and attend to it. Don’t think about this question or try to answer it. Just observe the thought itself, watching it emerge in the field of consciousness and then dissolve back into that space. Once it’s gone, keep your focus right where the thought was and see what comes up next. If you slip back into a kind of lax, mindless vacuity, deliberately generate the thought again, and observe it with bare attention. When you become familiar with this practice, you will no longer need to generate such a thought to crystallize your awareness and locate your attention. That will happen by itself as thoughts arise and pass of their own accord. The practice of attending to the space of the mind and whatever events arise there is like taking a naturalist’s field trip into the wilderness of your mind. When you first embark on this inward journey, you may perceive very little. But as you grow more accustomed to the practice, you will begin to identify an increasing quantity and range of mental phenomena. Some of them are discrete, like thoughts and images, while others are nebulous, like emotions and…
In this practice, the locus of awareness gradually descends from the superficial level of the coarse mental activity that is immediately accessible through introspection down into the inner recesses of the mind that are normally below the threshold of consciousness. You discover in this training that the border between conscious and unconscious mental events shifts in relation to the degrees of relaxation, stability, and vividness of attention. Especially when you engage in this practice for many hours each day, for days, weeks, or months at a time, you dredge the depths…
What happens here is a kind of luminously clear, discerning, free association of thoughts, mental images, memories, desires, fantasies, and emotions. You are plumbing the depths of your own mind, undistracted by external diversions. Once-hidden phenomena are unmasked through the lack of suppression of whatever comes up. This is potentially an extraordinarily deep kind of therapy, and the more intensively you practice it, the more important it is to proceed under the guidance of an experienced, compassionate teacher. During your meditation sessions, internalize the wisdom of this contemplative tradition and make sure that you implement the core instructions of this practice: whatever arises in the mind, do not be carried away by it, and do not grasp onto or identify with it. Just let it be. Watch thoughts, feelings, or other mental events arise, with discerning intelligence be aware of their nature, and let them slip back into the…
It is crucial to understand that demons can appear to your mind as a result of correct practice, let alone misguided practice. If you are Tibetan, the demons you encounter may have multiple heads and arms. If you are a Westerner, your demons may arise in forms more widely accepted within our society. As you dredge the depths of your psyche, your own demons will emerge into the light of your consciousness. You can count on it. Düdjom Lingpa’s explanation of demons is that they are externalized projections of afflictive tendencies of the mind, such as hatred, greed, confusion, pride, and jealousy.
Here is a list of just some of the kinds of meditative experiences cited in this text that may arise during this training, especially when it is pursued in solitude for many hours each day, for months on end:57
In the Buddhist tradition, the primary purpose of developing shamatha is to apply the enhanced stability and vividness of attention to experiential inquiry into the nature of reality. The term buddha literally means “one who is awake,” and the implication here is that the rest of us are comparatively asleep, moving through life as if in a dream. When you’re dreaming and don’t know it, that’s called a nonlucid dream, but when you recognize that you’re dreaming in the midst of the dream, this is called a lucid dream. The overall aim of Buddhist insight practice is to “wake up” to all states of consciousness, both during the daytime and nighttime, to become lucid at all times.
Many of us believe that we directly perceive objective, physical phenomena with our five physical senses, that the mental images we perceive via our senses are accurate representations of the objects we perceive. However, neurologist Antonio Damasio refutes this assumption, which is commonly called naïve realism:62 The problem with the term representation is not its ambiguity, since everyone can guess what it means, but the implication that, somehow, the mental image or the neural pattern represents, in mind and in brain, with some degree of fidelity, the object to which the representation refers, as if the structure of the object were replicated in the representation.… When you and I look at an object outside ourselves, we form comparable images in our respective brains. We know this well because you and I can describe the object in very similar ways, down to fine details. But that does not mean that the image we see is the copy of whatever the object outside is like. Whatever it is like, in absolute terms, we do not know.
This same point was made by the physicist Werner Heisenberg: “What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”63
Like a dream, the world of waking experience does not exist independently of our experience of it. The daytime practices in preparation for lucid nighttime dreaming may help begin to wake you up to the nature of your experienced world. The most effective method of learning to achieve lucidity is to develop a “critical-reflective attitude” toward your state of consciousness by asking yourself whether or not you are dreaming while you are awake.
“WAKING UP” THROUGHOUT THE DAY The lucid dreaming daytime practices consist of (1) doing “state checks,” (2) checking for dreamsigns, and (3) anticipating dreaming lucidly at night.
So try this right now. Turn your head away for a few seconds, then look at this page again. If the words change (and of course you would need to remember what they were previously to know that), then you are almost certainly dreaming. If they remain the same, you are probably awake. If you do this a second and even a third time, and the words still remain the same, then you can conclude with greater and greater certainty that you are not dreaming. But if they change even once, then you are probably correct to conclude that you are dreaming. This exercise may seem silly since you presumably were already quite confident that you weren’t dreaming. But we commonly have that same confidence when we are dreaming. We take what we experience in the world around us to be objectively real, existing independently of our awareness of it, and we respond to events as if we were awake. By conducting state checks intermittently throughout the course of the day, you can determine whether you are awake or asleep. And as you familiarize yourself with this practice, this habit may carry over into your dream state, and when you apply it then, you will suddenly discover that you are dreaming. This is how you begin to dream lucidly.
In the practice of shamatha you develop present memory, as in the case of remembering to focus your attention on your chosen object in the ongoing flow of the present moment. You also recall prospectively how to recognize attentional imbalances and remedy them when either laxity or excitation arises. In a similar way, the daytime practice of lucid dreaming includes prospectively remembering to conduct state checks throughout the day. Also, if you at any time experience an exceptionally odd situation, pause and ask yourself, “How odd is it?” While dreaming, we experience many anomalies, such as abrupt transitions of our location and other kinds of discontinuities, such as the words in a book changing, or other weird occurrences and circumstances. But without adopting a “critical-reflective attitude” toward them, we take them in stride, without waking up to the fact that we are dreaming. Adopt such a critical stance at all times, questioning the nature of your present experience; this habit, too, may carry over into the dream state and help you to become lucid.
Dreamsigns Dreamsigns are out-of-the-ordinary events that often occur in dreams and that, when you notice them, may indicate to you that you are dreaming. In this practice, you monitor your experience for the…
Individual dreamsigns consist of activities, situations, people, objects, and mental states that you commonly experience in your dreams. In order to identify and watch for these dreamsigns, you will need to pay close attention to your dreams and keep a dream journal, noting the circumstances that are recurrent. Remember these and whenever you experience them, pause for a moment and conduct a state check to see if you might be dreaming. Strong dreamsigns consist of events that, as far as you know, can happen only in a dream. For example, if you are reading a book and it turns into a squid, that’s a strong dreamsign, and if you recognize it as such, you’ve become lucid. Many other “supernatural events” commonly occur in dreams, but if you fail to apply a critical-reflective attitude to these strong dreamsigns, you will continue to take everything you experience as being objectively real. Weak dreamsigns are events that are highly improbable but not completely impossible as far as you know. Seeing an elephant sauntering across your front lawn is one example of a weak dreamsign unless you live in the jungles of Sri Lanka or on a game reservation in Kenya. When you experience anything that’s a bit out of the ordinary, conduct a…
Anticipation Throughout the course of the day, recall that tonight you will sleep and dream, and repeatedly arouse the strong resolution, “Tonight when I’m dreaming, I will recognize the dream state for what it is.” The stability and vividness of attention that you have cultivated in your shamatha practice, together with the exercise of prospective memory,…
Once you have met the challenges of the first six stages of attentional development, you ascend to the seventh, which is called fully pacified attention. Asanga succinctly characterizes this stage of development with the statement, “Attachment, melancholy, and so on are pacified as they arise.”64 Such experiences may continue to occur from time to time, but they have lost their power to disturb the equilibrium of your mind. Involuntary thoughts continue to course through the mind like a river slowly flowing through a valley, but as your mind settles more and more deeply in its natural state,…
The power by which the seventh stage is achieved is enthusiasm: the practice itself now fills you with joy. It is this that motivates you to continue in the practice,…
Having overcome the medium degree of laxity, subtle laxity remains, in which the object of mindfulness appears vividly, but your attention is slightly slack. No one but a highly advanced meditator is even capable of recognizing such a subtle degree of laxity. It is detected only in relation to the exceptionally high degree of vividness of which the trained mind is capable. Subtle excitation also occurs from time to time. As recommended previously, when laxity sets in, you arouse your attention; and when excitation occurs, you loosen up slightly. At the seventh stage, these subtle attentional imbalances are swiftly recognized due to your finely honed faculty of introspection, and they are easily remedied. The Tibetan word gom, usually translated as “meditation,” has the connotation of familiarity, and that is the…
Upon reaching the seventh stage of fully pacified attention, the mind has been so refined that your meditation sessions may last for at least two hours with only the slightest interruptions by laxity and excitation. In each of the two shamatha methods introduced thus far—mindfulness of breathing and settling the mind in its natural state—the practices gradually involve doing less and less. When mindfully attending to the breath, there is a great deal you are not doing, but you are still releasing involuntary thoughts when they arise. You do prefer to have a conceptually silent mind, as opposed to having discursive thoughts and images arise one after the other. When settling the mind in its natural state, you are doing even less. Now you don’t even prefer thoughts to be absent. Instead of deliberately letting them…
First, accept that life is hard, and that transforming our life—or our abilities, which amount to much the same thing—is very hard. For a thousand reasons, we all have a part that wants to believe the world was made just for us, and that the pearls of existence are our birthright. In a sense, they are, but we must dive deeply to find those pearls—down past our resistance and mechanical thinking and behavior, and that always involves hard, sustained, conscious, and disciplined effort. Few stumble across those pearls by fluke or good fortune, and if they do, they typically lose them just as fast. This course will head you in the right direction and even give you a stout push that way, but you must do the work.
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general. For most of us, when it comes to meeting challenges, our own worst enemy is ourselves.
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As climbers, we think of ourselves as adventurous people, yet we often react to challenges
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dialogue. We tend to be highly goal-oriented, and arriving at a performance plateau saps our motivation. Without even noticing, we become involved in an unconscious,
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Then, as you grew older, your caregivers’ expectations became embodied in the Ego,
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"self." It is a mental construct, produced by socialization, which rewards and punishes us with feelings of self-worth. The Ego lives by comparison. It identifies with events in our past—our personal history—and then compares our history to the histories of others. This comparison leaves us feeling better than or worse than, but not equal to, others.
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Don Juan tells Castaneda that if you live by the Ego, then you can count on being offended or defensive for the rest of your life. You will constantly be tricked and trapped into doing idiotic things and wasting power. It took me until age 35 to go beyond the idea that I was better than others. I also realized we are interdependent, and each of us has a value which is not determined by comparison.
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We have been conditioned to believe that great accomplishments somehow make us more valuable.
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Does climbing 5.13 make us more valuable than an acquaintance who merely climbs 5.11? Few of us would answer yes when the question is put bluntly.
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A warrior is a realist. He realizes that, in an absolute and external sense, he is no more and no less valuable than any other human being.
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Yet achievement-motivation is tainted by the ploys of the Ego. In reality, it is the good feelings associated with achievement that inspire us. We will embark upon a process of striving indirectly for the external goals we may have. The Rock Warrior’s Way begins with breaking down our habitual, achievement-oriented mindset and placing our motivation on more solid footing.
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Some people climb at a standard far above ours with far less strength. When a climber runs out of strength, it’s usually because of the strength he’s wasted, not from an essential lack.
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The expert expects to find a way to climb through the hard sections so he quickly homes
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No. Authentic self-worth comes from an internal value system, not from simple achievement. Self-worth comes from the positive results of your effort. You may have learned something about yourself or gained the experiential confidence to attempt more difficult challenges. These effects are genuinely valuable. The achievement itself, however, is no reason for an elevated sense of self-worth. You might not have learned anything from your "success," or you could have learned something equally valuable by not meeting your objective.
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If you think about it, no matter how well you climb, tangling up your self-worth with your performance is a lose-lose situation. Instead of simply falling into this habitual self-worth mindset, analyze it. Focus your attention on it. Discover its logic, or lack thereof. In the light of consciousness, its hold on you will begin to break down. You will see that external achievement is not the root of anything really valuable that we can derive from a climbing challenge. So what is? What can we take away and really use? The answer: learning.
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If you want a more consistent and authentic source from which to draw a sense of self-worth and personal power, you will eventually need to reject external factors such as comparison and achievement. You must look inside and embrace learning.
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If, on the other hand, the self-worth you derive from your climbing is based on what you learn during the experience, then you are less concerned about the outcome of your efforts and able to focus more on the effort itself. What really matters when facing a challenge? What matters is learning. You want to test yourself, throw yourself into something outside your comfort zone and see what you’re capable of. Your true goal is not to conquer fifty feet of inanimate rock, but to expand your abilities through learning.
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To increase the power of your internal motivation and reduce your dependence on external factors, it helps to analyze what’s important to you and what you’re passionate about. Spend some time identifying the things you love about climbing. These may include the beauty of the rock and environment, the friends and companionship, and the many complex factors that relate to challenge and achievement. Beauty, friendship—these are ever-present in climbing. Our experience is improved by taking the time to appreciate them, and to remember that whatever happens, we are involved in these things we value. The last category, challenge and achievement, requires more careful analysis.
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The first power sink is self-importance. In an ordinary frame of mind, we constantly sink attention into unconscious, ineffective, Ego-promoting thoughts. The Ego’s sense of self-worth, as we have said, relies on petty comparison, being better than or worse than others. A warrior, in contrast, sees self-worth as a non-issue.
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Instead of valuing a personal identity relative to others, he values learning, growth, and situations that increase his personal power.
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The second power sink is generated by the Ego and involves self-image. The Ego goes to great pains to maintain the fiction of a constant, unchangeable self. This is a manifestation of the Ego’s hunger for security. Just as the Ego likes to brag about its achievements, showing it is better than others and thus worthy of value and survival, it likes to cling to the past and create a complex, detailed identity out of past events. The warrior literature calls this element of the Ego, personal history. Identification with personal history creates this power sink.
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These highlights add to the richness of our experience, but they come with excess baggage. Many elements of personal history are not landmark moments in our lives, but rather oft-repeated, self-limiting ways of being, frozen at some early stage of learning. These fossilized responses are the habitual you. The maintenance of a fixed self-image requires energy. We are constantly and sometimes strenuously reframing new experiences to fit our old concept of ourselves. This requires power that could be directed towards facing challenges in the present.
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That’s my personal history. That personal history makes me feel special and separate from others. Separation, however, leads away from learning and understanding.
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So how does that personal history affect me when I climb in the present? If others are watching me climb, I tend to worry that I won’t live up to the bold image I’ve identified myself with. I end up shunting energy trying to maintain an image, when I should be using that energy for problem-solving on the climb.
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Instead of acting on my negative thoughts, however, I simply watched them from the Witness position. I didn’t really do anything, like fight the thoughts or chastise myself for lack of boldness. I simply listened quietly to the negative self-talk but delayed acting it out. After the fifth pitch I began to feel more confident.
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Climbing is full of subtleties, and we constantly overlook them. Take, for example, balance and poise. Intellectually, we understand that these are important elements of technique, yet we constantly botch the subtleties. Here’s a typical scenario: A climber arrives, fairly pumped, at a clipping stance on a sport climb. He is ten feet out from his last bolt and very anxious to get clipped in. He’s tense, over-gripping, and out of balance. Gritting his teeth, close to falling, he finally makes the clip—and instantly relaxes. Immediately he finds another good handhold within reach. A sloping foothold he mistrusted suddenly feels very adequate. He shifts body position slightly and finds he can stand at the clipping stance almost effortlessly. Before he clipped the bolt, he felt he could pump out and pitch off at any instant. After clipping, he was at ease. The stance was the same, but his use of it was quite different. Does this sound familiar? It is ironic that we are least likely to demonstrate poise in the situations that demand it the most.
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They will help you turn a struggle into a dance of balance and efficiency. Photo: Jim Thornburg A friend of mine experienced the importance of subtleties during the first free ascent of a very difficult climb called Fiddler on the Roof in Fremont Canyon, Wyoming.
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Proper posture says you own the space you occupy, no more and no less. You aren’t cowering and apologizing for the space you’re using, nor are you jutting out aggressively into space you don’t need.
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Climbers often grimace during exertion, but exertion need not be painful or uncomfortable. If you grimace during exertion, you cast a mood over your effort that triggers specific reactions in the bodymind. Grimacing is defensive, a form of recoil.
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Another word that a warrior doesn’t use is worry. Worry is a passive form of fear, which comes from an old Anglo-Saxon word meaning "to choke or struggle." You don’t want to choke or struggle. So don’t worry. Be actively concerned. Better yet, be curious.
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That is the challenge: to notice these subtle details and act instantaneously with power, not simply to try. Do not hold yourself to the habitual old standard of mental effort. Instead of saying he’ll try, a warrior states he’ll do it. His intention is to give his best effort, but he doesn’t put a limit on that effort.
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Slowly but surely, we develop the unconscious conviction that our own safety is someone else’s responsibility.
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Ego, too, plays a role in our shirking of responsibility. The Ego is constantly equating our self-worth with our achievements and performances. We have an innate need to feel good about ourselves. When our Ego is in charge, we tend to protect ourselves by transferring responsibility for a poor performance to someone or something else. The Ego is shrewd and will try to appear objective and rational when it blames, but its logic serves a single goal: boosting an externally derived self-image. This defensive tactic saps our power to respond effectively to challenges.
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By not accepting the maximum amount of responsibility we reduce our ability to respond and therefore our power. Learning how to respond to tough challenges in a way that increases power is one of a warrior’s most important tasks.
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Most of us participate in some sort of justification scheme like this to excuse ourselves from the rigors of our supposed beliefs. The average person is quite creative with the little justifications he can think up to deceive himself that his actions are not out of line with his purported beliefs. If we confront ourselves point blank with our words and actions, however, we know that we are lying. Scrupulous honesty is required to realize this. Removing small lies from our day-to-day life cleanses the whole system. If you stop lying to yourself about postage stamps, you stop lying to yourself about climbing, why you aren’t stretching, or why you turned the lead over to your partner. You come to grips with reality, and reality is a more effective teacher than illusion.
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As we accept these responsibilities, we grow to accept a great truth: life is difficult. Once we fully accept difficulty as natural and normal, we cease to be offended or daunted when we encounter a struggle or a test. We can embrace these tests as opportunities. Difficult experiences are the way we learn, and they also are the way we can appreciate ease.
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In general, we are socialized to have a receiving mindset. Driven toward the imaginary American Dream, we are not encouraged to be appreciative and grateful for what we do have. We’re conditioned to think we will be happy when we obtain: that new car, that promotion, our lottery check. The same mentality appears in our climbing. We think we will really enjoy climbing when we get something: stronger forearms, more free time, the redpoint on our project.
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If we have not currently attained our goals, that is fine. We should not, however, interpret that to mean we have received less than our "entitlement." The warrior rejects the very concept of entitlement.
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If you find yourself becoming frustrated, take it as a symptom that you are out of alignment with your goals. If you really want an easy success, find an easier climb. If you want a real challenge, you’ve found it. If the Ego is asking for a trophy to use in its externally oriented game of self-worth, look the Ego dragon
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Paradoxically, taking risks actually increases our safety and comfort. Sudden danger lurks everywhere—losing our jobs, being struck by a car, contracting a mortal illness. A cowering, protective approach to life doesn’t reduce the peril. It only serves to make us slaves to fear and victims of constant anxiety.
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Choices are not right or wrong, good or bad. Life would be a bit boring if it was so simple. You never know the full, long-term ramifications of a choice. Conscious choices are more like tests of our knowledge, providing opportunities for concrete lessons on the ever-wandering path of knowledge.
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day self-rescue. A small mistake one day prevented a big mistake on another day. "Bad" choices often teach you something and become more valuable than the "good" choices. The warrior knows this and foregoes the "good" and "bad" designations altogether.
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A possibly dangerous choice should not be made carelessly. It must be aligned with a person’s innermost predilections, stripped of the dangerous and superficial trappings of the Ego and self-delusion. Love-based motivation creates a situation without regret. When you make a choice, you choose to live life the way you most want to live it. Only when you’re functioning in such a mode can you summon the near-magical power of 100-percent commitment.
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Neither of these approaches is an effective strategy for creative risk-taking. Attention is distracted, minimizing the empowering aspects of the experience while maximizing the actual danger. In contrast, the warrior’s choice-making involves impeccable use of attention.
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He falls into a destination-oriented mindset to escape the fear, fighting toward the end of the climb. Lethargy, fear, and a struggle to "get it over with" are not aligned with the true warrior goal: learning.
The following methods will help you improve receptivity to intuition while climbing:
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Early in our lives we are taught to be competitive and value achievement and results. We are encouraged to "make something of ourselves" or to "get ahead." The emphasis is on a future destination, for which we will sacrifice the satisfaction of the present. Ironically, once we arrive at a destination—landing that sought-after job, climbing that 5.12 grade—we find it’s not a final destination at all. We aren’t satisfied to stay there. We may even look back nostalgically to the passion we possessed when we considered that destination a magical promised land, before we realized it was simply the end of a journey. Inevitably we begin a new journey, and a new one after that. In fact, our entire lives are spent journeying. The warrior is the ultimate realist. He knows that life is a
journey, and rather than rushing blindly toward the next destination, he appreciates the journey itself and consciously lives within it.
Our attention has moved out of the challenge and into the future. If we could remain focused on climbing—the journey—then we wouldn’t sabotage our effort with anxiety about the distance to a destination.
In a risk situation in climbing, you constantly enter the unknown. So much new information comes in that it’s impossible to complete one task before beginning another. Most of us don’t have skills to deal well with such chaos. When our normal, step-by-step mode doesn’t work, we tend to panic or rebel. When we encounter chaos, we try to get rid of it rather than go with it. The warrior knows that’s not possible, and seeks to find internal harmony in the midst of chaos. Purposely seeking out risks allows us to practice dealing
The destination mindset is also responsible for "failure" and "success" anxieties. Success and failure are in quotation marks here because a warrior doesn’t use these terms. He doesn’t see the result of his effort as success or failure. Making it up a climb may be his provisional goal, but the higher goal is learning. The warrior does not know what end result will yield more learning.
In both success and failure anxiety, you lose focus. By over-valuing the outcome and under-valuing the process, you focus on the destination. Once you do this, climbing is pointless. You close yourself off to the present moment and you do not learn. You simply want your body to catch up with your mind, which is already in the comfort zone at the top of the climb or back on the ground basking in glory.
As I walked the last mile or so, I had a conscious realization that this experience, so rich and rewarding, was almost over. It would then drift into memory and slowly fade away. I realized then I wanted to feel all the pain, discomfort, and everything that was happening at the moment. I wanted to feel it fully without trying to escape it. The experience would be over all too soon, and I wanted to feel it in its entirety.
The goal shouldn’t be to redpoint a climb but to stay focused on the effort so that a redpoint ascent will manifest. You’ll find that your climbing makes a lot more sense. And it’s more fun.
Accept the journey. Be at peace in it. Watch it. When you can be at one with the difficulty and the chaos, then you transcend it. You simply walk your path, being observant, paying attention, learning and growing in your understanding of who you are and what is possible for you. Approached in the warrior’s way, the rock will teach you.
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Updated: Apr 19, 2021
A colossal swindle of the "New Age" movement is the notion that gaining a state of effortless being and doing requires no effort. In fact, great conscious effort, discipline, and patience are normally required to enter the "flow zone" where previously frightening challenges start taking on an aspect of relaxed ease.
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Second, the work is a process, and that process lasts a lifetime. Every time you gain a new plateau, a massif of unrealized potential soars above you. In this sense, you never "arrive," once and for all, on the mountaintop. At certain points along the way, the quality of the process changes dramatically. This is especially true for those breakthrough moments of peak performance, where months of sustained effort conspire to create a sort of wormhole of grace through which we pass—often suddenly and with little "effort"—into a higher realm of being and doing. The climb that once spanked us now seems "easy." In such moments we tend to forget the arduous run-up to the crown. It is then that we might recall all of those championship coaches who remind us that the game is won or lost on the practice field. That leads us to the third and most important point: the qualities you bring to game day will be the exact same qualities you cultivate during practice. In other words, the way you live your life is exactly the way you will climb. It’s a simple enough concept to grasp, but taking it to heart and putting it into practice is typically something only the most dedicated can manage; probably because they’re the ones whose lives might depend on doing so.
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The following are basic tenets of the Rock Warrior’s Way mental training approach: 1. Our performance is greatly affected by the subconscious, hidden parts of our minds. 2. Improved performance occurs through a process that is fundamentally one of growth, which, in the mental sphere, we also call learning. You learn best by focusing your attention on the situation, in an attitude of problem solving. 3. Motivation is a key ingredient in performance, and the quality of that motivation, not just its quantity, matters. Performance is improved by moving away from fear-based motivation and toward love-based motivation. 4. There are two types of fear: survival and illusory. The former is healthy and helpful while the latter is not. It is important to be able to distinguish between the two fears. 5. Death is our "advisor." In other words, awareness of our mortality is a helpful reality check. It reminds us that every action matters, and thus directs our actions toward what’s really important, valuable, and purposeful in our lives. Death reminds us that we have no time to waste.
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Outline of the Program: the Seven Processes 1. Becoming Conscious. In the first process, you improve observation skills to become more self-aware. You direct awareness onto your inner dialogue. You examine the grounds of your self-worth. You detect gross attention leaks. 2. Life is Subtle. Attention is collected and centered. You direct awareness onto sensations in the body (breathing, posture, etc). You speak to yourself deliberately, rather than listening to the regular chatter of the inner dialogue. 3. Accepting Responsibility. Here, you focus on being responsible for the situation, rather than assigning blame, wishing that the situation was otherwise, or hoping for magical deliverance. Blaming, wishing, and hoping take power out of your hands. Accepting responsibility comes to terms with the objective information you gather about the risk. 4. Giving. Here you adopt an attitude of power: you ask what you can give to the performance, rather than what you might receive if you "succeed." You focus your attention on options and possibilities. This process collects the subjective information about the risk and comes to terms with it. 5. Choices. This is the transition phase, the moment of truth. You choose either to direct attention away from the risk or into the risk. Declining to take the risk is not failure. Many, many risks are foolish and taking them could kill you. The key to the warrior Choices process is to be absolutely decisive. If you’re going to back off, you do it without misgiving. If you go forward, you do so with your full being, without looking back. You set an intention to act with unbending intent, which produces 100-percent commitment. 6. Listening. This process guides you as you act out the risk. It helps you stay on course, in the risk, rather than falling into a control mentality that will divert attention and rob you of power. You are in action now, in the unknown; you need to learn something. "Listening" to the situation and the route facilitates the learning process. This is a very intuitive process. In Choices, you accepted the possible outcomes of your effort and made the leap; now you must trust in the process. 7. The Journey. Once in the chaos of risk, you focus on the journey, not the destination. When you’re stressed, you are tempted to rush through the stress. Yet, if you have prepared well, this stressful situation is exactly why you came here in the first place. It holds the rhyme and reason for your climbing. When you’re stressed, you are in prime territory for learning. A journey mentality helps you align your attention forward into the climbing process instead of letting attention wander to the destination, or to self-limiting thoughts that won’t help you solve the problem and learn.
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As climbers, we think of ourselves as adventurous people, yet we often react to challenges in unadventurous ways. After we’ve been climbing for a while, we tend to lose the open-mindedness and quick learning that characterized our early climbing experiences. We fall into patterns and habits that limit our learning. When faced with a challenge, we become distracted from the immediate situation and fall into some sort of ego game or useless inner dialogue. We tend to be highly goal-oriented, and arriving at a performance plateau saps our motivation. Without even noticing, we become involved in an unconscious, repetitive, habitual spiral, and our power declines.
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You can feel pretty worthless at times because reward and punishment have molded you. When you did something that was considered good by your caregivers, you were rewarded, and when you did something that was considered bad, you were punished. Your caregivers associated your worth with your performance—your behavior. Then, as you grew older, your caregivers’ expectations became embodied in the Ego, which took over the job of rewarding and punishing. Your caregivers’ expectations were supplemented or replaced by the expectations of society at large, the expectations of a peer group, or the expectations established by a set of beliefs you adopted with little critical thought. Regardless of the source of the Ego’s expectations, the result is the same: we are slaves to externally derived influences, rather than being the masters of our internal, mental environments. We generally have adopted established beliefs rather than formulating our own. Society, of course, encourages such conformist behavior. We may be competitive or compassionate, radical or politically correct, sport climbers or trad climbers. These orientations too often derive from a deep unconscious attempt to align ourselves with people we admire or to get others to like or admire us. Though we may hold these beliefs close to our hearts, they do not come from our hearts. They come instead from that insidious mental monster called the Ego.
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The Ego is a mental entity, a crude and ruthless ghost masquerading as our "self." It is a mental construct, produced by socialization, which rewards and punishes us with feelings of self-worth. The Ego lives by comparison. It identifies with events in our past—our personal history—and then compares our history to the histories of others. This comparison leaves us feeling better than or worse than, but not equal to, others.
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In order to reclaim the energy that the Ego wastes, we must usurp its power and dethrone it. In exchange for the Ego, we call upon the Higher Self. The Higher Self isn’t competitive, defensive, or conniving, as the Ego is. It sees through such petty ploys. The Higher Self derives self-worth not from comparison with others, but from an internal focus that is based on valuing growth and learning. As you advance along the path of warriorship, you will increasingly replace Ego-based behavior with behavior that is under the guidance of the Higher Self.
The expert expects to find a way to climb through the hard sections so he quickly homes in on that way. He expects to be able to rest, and he finds rest positions. We, on the other hand, home in on the difficulties, the obstacles, and the certainty that we will become exhausted. The expert knows there may be difficult moves, but is confident he will find a way, and that he has enough reserve for a climb of this difficulty. We balk at the hard moves because we fear we won’t make it unless we do them exactly right. We fear the moves will exhaust our reserves, and we won’t be able to cope with what follows. These are mental habits produced by our image of our abilities. This image, not our lack of strength or technique, is our most limiting factor.
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That’s my personal history. That personal history makes me feel special and separate from others. Separation, however, leads away from learning and understanding. So how does that personal history affect me when I climb in the present? If others are watching me climb, I tend to worry that I won’t live up to the bold image I’ve identified myself with. I end up shunting energy trying to maintain an image, when I should be using that energy for problem-solving on the climb.
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The difference between the free ascent and countless efforts involved a three-inch shift in the position of the hips.
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If you find yourself becoming frustrated, take it as a symptom that you are out of alignment with your goals. If you really want an easy success, find an easier climb. If you want a real challenge, you’ve found it. If the Ego is asking for a trophy to use in its externally oriented game of self-worth, look the Ego dragon in the eye and draw your sword. Then pay attention, give your best, and enjoy the ride.
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A small mistake one day prevented a big mistake on another day. "Bad" choices often teach you something and become more valuable than the "good" choices. The warrior knows this and foregoes the "good" and "bad" designations altogether.
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The following methods will help you improve receptivity to intuition while climbing: • Observe yourself. By separating and observing yourself from the Witness position you will recognize intuitive messages more readily. • Breathe continuously. Breathing continuously helps dissipate anxiety and also keeps you in the moment. When you’re in the moment, intuitive information can flow more easily. • Be open and curious. If you’re closed and clinging to fixed beliefs, you don’t allow information to flow into your awareness. In The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker tells us that "curiosity is the way you answer when intuition whispers." • Find your center of gravity and keep it in balance. The average person’s center of gravity is about one inch below the navel. Keep that center in line with the arm you’re hanging from, the foot you’re standing on, or poised equally between your various points of contact. When you are out of balance, your attention is distracted by the need to deal with that unbalanced state. When your center of gravity is balanced, attention is available to notice subtle intuitive messages. • Be nonjudgmental. A judgmental attitude ignores or discredits intuitive information, making it difficult to recognize. Gavin de Becker suggests that a dog’s keen sense of intuition is partly due to its inability to judge. You can produce a nonjudgmental state by focusing on options and possibilities instead of opinions and evaluations. • If you speak to yourself, speak in questions. When you ask a question, in a sense, you send a demand to your subconscious to supply an answer. It answers through your intuition. • Finally, follow your eyes. Intuition operates through your eyes to direct your movements. In The Power of Silence, don Juan states that intent is summoned with the eyes, and in The Fire from Within, he relates that your eyes are the keys to entering into the unknown. Your body naturally wants to be in balance. Your intuition, through your eyes, will direct your movements to find a balanced position. Your body has knowledge. Pay attention to how your eyes direct your movements and trust them. (The level of balance and efficiency of this direction may depend on your level of climbing knowledge and experience.)
Tags: pink
Early in our lives we are taught to be competitive and value achievement and results. We are encouraged to "make something of ourselves" or to "get ahead." The emphasis is on a future destination, for which we will sacrifice the satisfaction of the present. Ironically, once we arrive at a destination—landing that sought-after job, climbing that 5.12 grade—we find it’s not a final destination at all. We aren’t satisfied to stay there. We may even look back nostalgically to the passion we possessed when we considered that destination a magical promised land, before we realized it was simply the end of a journey. Inevitably we begin a new journey, and a new one after that. In fact, our entire lives are spent journeying. The warrior is the ultimate realist. He knows that life is a journey, and rather than rushing blindly toward the next destination, he appreciates the journey itself and consciously lives within it.
In a risk situation in climbing, you constantly enter the unknown. So much new information comes in that it’s impossible to complete one task before beginning another. Most of us don’t have skills to deal well with such chaos. When our normal, step-by-step mode doesn’t work, we tend to panic or rebel. When we encounter chaos, we try to get rid of it rather than go with it. The warrior knows that’s not possible, and seeks to find internal harmony in the midst of chaos. Purposely seeking out risks allows us to practice dealing with chaos, but often our reaction is to mentally "leave the scene." We passively wish for the chaos to simplify and resolve itself. In fact, when we stay relaxed and stop wishing and hoping behavior, we maximize our effectiveness to function amid chaos. The key is to accept the chaotic nature of the experience and give it our full attention. We accomplish this acceptance with a journey mindset. The destination mindset is also responsible for "failure" and "success" anxieties. Success and failure are in quotation marks here because a warrior doesn’t use these terms. He doesn’t see the result of his effort as success or failure. Making it up a climb may be his provisional goal, but the higher goal is learning. The warrior does not know what end result will yield more learning.
This was one of the things he’d liked best about Nina—she savored everything, whether it was a toffee or cold water from a stream or dried reindeer meat.
That was what they meant when they called him a dreamer, and they weren’t wrong, but they missed the main point. Lazlo was a dreamer in more profound a way than they knew. That is to say, he had a dream—a guiding and abiding one, so much a part of him it was like a second soul inside his skin. The landscape of his mind was all given over to it. It was a deep and ravishing landscape, and a daring and magnificent dream. Too daring, too magnificent for the likes of him. He knew that, but the dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around.
The raven flew up and away. Shadow looked at the corpse of the baby deer. He decided that if he were a real woodsman, he would slice off a steak and grill it over a wood fire. Instead, he sat on a fallen tree and ate a Snickers bar and knew that he really wasn’t a real woodsman.
“Hey,” said Shadow. “Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are.” The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes. “Say ‘Nevermore,’” said Shadow. “Fuck you,” said the raven.
You line up when you die, and you answer for your evil deeds and for your good deeds, and if your evil deeds outweighed a feather, we’d feed your soul and your heart to Ammet, the Eater of Souls.” “He must have eaten a lot of people.” “Not as many as you’d think. It was a really heavy feather. We had it made special. You had to be pretty damn evil to tip the scales on that baby. Stop here, that gas station. We’ll put in a few gallons.”
“There could be some porridge to follow,” he said, and winked, apparently to include Mort in the world porridge conspiracy.
Some jobs offer increments. This one offered—well, quite the reverse, but at least it was in the warm and fairly easy to get the hang of.
The horse watched him from its stall, occasionally trying to eat his hair in a friendly sort of way.
THAT’S UP TO FATE, said Death, turning to the bookcase behind him and pulling out a heavy gazetteer. THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT IT. WHAT IS THAT SMELL? “Me,” said Mort, simply. AH. THE STABLES. Death paused, his hand on the spine of the book. AND WHY DO YOU THINK I DIRECTED YOU TO THE STABLES? THINK CAREFULLY, NOW. Mort hesitated. He had been thinking carefully, in between counting wheelbarrows. He’d wondered if it had been to coordinate his hand and eye, or teach him the habit of obedience, or bring home to him the importance, on the human scale, of small tasks, or make him realize that even great men must start at the bottom. None of these explanations seemed exactly right. “I think . . .” he began. YES? “Well, I think it was because you were up to your knees in horseshit, to tell you the truth.” Death looked at him for a long time. Mort shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. ABSOLUTELY CORRECT, snapped Death. CLARITY OF THOUGHT. REALISTIC APPROACH. VERY IMPORTANT IN A JOB LIKE OURS.
Death gave Mort the look he was coming to be familiar with. It started off as blank surprise, flickered briefly towards annoyance, called in for a drink at recognition and settled finally on vague forbearance.
“What’d he do it all for?” he said. Albert grunted. “Do you know what happens to lads who ask too many questions?” Mort thought for a moment. “No,” he said eventually, “what?” There was silence. Then Albert straightened up and said, “Damned if I know. Probably they get answers, and serve ’em right.”
THAT’S MORTALS FOR YOU, Death continued. THEY’VE ONLY GOT A FEW YEARS IN THIS WORLD AND THEY SPEND THEM ALL IN MAKING THINGS COMPLICATED FOR THEMSELVES. FASCINATING. HAVE A GHERKIN.
Mort tapped the stallholder in the small of the back. “Can you see me?” he demanded. The stallholder squinted critically at him. “I reckon so,” he said, “or someone very much like you.”
It is probably already apparent that The Shades was not the sort of place to have inhabitants. It had denizens.
Three men had appeared behind him, as though extruded from the stonework. They had the heavy, stolid look of those thugs whose appearance in any narrative means that it’s time for the hero to be menaced a bit, although not too much, because it’s also obvious that they’re going to be horribly surprised.
It’ll take Mort several minutes to arrive. A row of dots would fill in the time nicely, but the reader will already be noticing the strange shape of the temple—curled like a great white ammonite at the end of the valley—and will probably want an explanation.
“Has he?” said Mort gloomily. He’d been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.
I also mean moments that you might not think of as delusional, such as lying awake at night with anxiety. Or feeling hopeless, even depressed, for days on end. Or feeling bursts of hatred toward people, bursts that may actually feel good for a moment but slowly corrode your character. Or feeling bursts of hatred toward yourself. Or feeling greedy, feeling a compulsion to buy things or eat things or drink things well beyond the point where your well-being is served. Though these feelings—anxiety, despair, hatred, greed—aren’t delusional the way a nightmare is delusional, if you examine them closely, you’ll see that they have elements of delusion, elements you’d be better off without.
One of the Buddha’s main messages was that the pleasures we seek evaporate quickly and leave us thirsting for more. We spend our time looking for the next gratifying thing—the next powdered-sugar doughnut, the next sexual encounter, the next status-enhancing promotion, the next online purchase. But the thrill always fades, and it always leaves us wanting more. The old Rolling Stones lyric “I can’t get no satisfaction” is, according to Buddhism, the human condition.
So what exactly is the illusory part of pursuing doughnuts or sex or consumer goods or a promotion? There are different illusions associated with different pursuits, but for now we can focus on one illusion that’s common to these things: the overestimation of how much happiness they’ll bring. Again, by itself this is delusional only in a subtle sense. If I asked you whether you thought that getting that next promotion, or getting an A on that next exam, or eating that next powdered-sugar doughnut would bring you eternal bliss, you’d say no, obviously not. On the other hand, we do often pursue such things with, at the very least, an unbalanced view of the future. We spend more time envisioning the perks that a promotion will bring than envisioning the headaches it will bring. And there may be an unspoken sense that once we’ve achieved this long-sought goal, once we’ve reached the summit, we’ll be able to relax, or at least things will be enduringly better. Similarly, when we see that doughnut sitting there, we immediately imagine how good it tastes, not how intensely we’ll want another doughnut only moments after eating it, or how we’ll feel a bit tired or agitated later, when the sugar rush subsides.
Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.
After devoting some attention to the overcaffeinated feeling in my jaw, I suddenly had an angle on my interior life that I’d never had before. I remember thinking something like, “Yes, the grinding sensation is still there—the sensation I typically define as unpleasant. But that sensation is down there in my jaw, and that’s not where I am. I’m up here in my head.” I was no longer identifying with the feeling; I was viewing it objectively, I guess you could say. In the space of a moment it had entirely lost its grip on me. It was a very strange thing to have an unpleasant feeling cease to be unpleasant without really going away.
This is something that can happen again and again via meditation: accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the unpleasantness. In fact, one thing I occasionally do when I’m feeling very sad—and this is something you can experiment with even if you’ve never meditated—is sit down, close my eyes, and study the sadness: accept its presence and just observe how it actually makes me feel. For example, it’s kind of interesting that, though I may not be close to actually crying, the feeling of sadness does have a strong presence right around the parts of my eyes that would get active if I did start crying. I’d never noticed that before meditating on sadness. This careful observation of sadness, combined with a kind of acceptance of it, does, in my experience, make it less unpleasant.
Take powdered-sugar doughnuts. I personally have very warm feelings toward them—so warm that, if I were guided only by my feelings, I would eat them for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and between-meal snacks. Yet I’m told that, actually, eating that many doughnuts each day would be bad for me. So I guess my feeling of attraction to powdered-sugar doughnuts could be called false: these doughnuts feel good, but this is an illusion because they’re not really good for me. This is of course hard news to take; it calls to mind the plaintive lyrics of that old Luther Ingram song: “If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right.”
There are quite a few feelings like this—feelings that, back when they entered our lineage, served our ancestors’ interests but that don’t always serve our interests now.
These kinds of misperceptions are known as “false positives”; from natural selection’s point of view, they’re a feature, not a bug. Though your brief conviction that you’ve seen a rattlesnake may be wrong ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the conviction could be lifesaving the other one time in a hundred. And in natural selection’s calculus, being right 1 percent of the time in matters of life or death can be worth being wrong 99 percent of the time, even if in every one of those ninety-nine instances you’re briefly terrified. So there are actually two differences between the snake illusion, on the one hand, and the doughnut and road rage illusions, on the other: (1) in the case of the snake, the illusion is explicit—it’s an actual false perception about the physical world and, for a moment, a false belief; (2) in the case of the snake, your emotional machinery is working exactly as designed.
Conceivably. But let’s face it: though anxiety is sometimes productive in this sense, people do a lot of worrying that serves no good purpose. There are people who are beset by images of themselves projectile-vomiting while talking to a crowd—even though, come to think of it, they’ve never projectile-vomited while talking to a crowd. In a particularly perverse twist on PowerPoint-apocalypse anxiety, I’ve been known to lie awake the night before a big presentation worrying that if I don’t get to sleep I’ll do a bad job the next day.
So too with lots of other anxieties related to human social interaction: a sense of dread before going to a cocktail party that, in fact, is very unlikely to lead to anything that is worth dreading; worrying about how your child is doing at her first slumber party, something you’re powerless to influence; or worrying about your PowerPoint presentation after you’ve given it—as if fretting over whether people liked it will change whether they did.
Our feelings weren’t designed to depict reality accurately even in our “natural” environment.
The fact that we’re not living in a “natural” environment makes our feelings even less reliable guides to reality.
Underlying it all is the happiness delusion. As the Buddha emphasized, our ongoing attempts to feel better tend to involve an overestimation of how long “better” is going to last. What’s more, when “better” ends, it can be followed by “worse”—an unsettled feeling, a thirst for more. Long before psychologists were describing the hedonic treadmill, the Buddha saw it.
When, at the end of the retreat, I proudly told Michael Grady, one of the retreat’s two teachers, about my peak experience, he said, with a nonchalance that I found a bit dispiriting, “Sounds nice. But don’t get attached to it.”
Vipassana teaching puts so much emphasis on mindfulness that some people use the two terms interchangeably. But the distinction is important. Mindfulness meditation is a technique you can use for various purposes, beginning with simple stress reduction. But if you are doing mindfulness meditation within a traditional Vipassana framework, the ultimate purpose is more ambitious: to gain insight. And not just insight in the everyday sense of understanding some new stuff. The idea is to see the true nature of reality, and Buddhist texts going back more than a millennium spell out what that means. They define vipassana as apprehending what are known as “the three marks of existence.” Two of the three marks of existence sound as if, actually, they wouldn’t be too hard to apprehend. The first is impermanence. Who could deny that nothing lasts forever? The second mark of existence is dukkha—suffering, unsatisfactoriness. And who among us hasn’t suffered and felt unsatisfied? With these two marks of existence, the point of Vipassana meditation isn’t so much to comprehend them—since basic comprehension is easy enough—as to comprehend them with new subtlety, to see them at such high resolution that you deeply appreciate their pervasiveness. But the third mark of existence, “not-self,” is different. With not-self, comprehension itself is a challenge.† Yet according to Buddhist doctrine, it is crucially important to grasp not-self if your goal is vipassana: seeing reality with true clarity, such clarity as to pave the path to enlightenment.
“To understand not-self, you have to meditate,” he advised. If you try to grasp the doctrine through “intellectualizing” alone, “your head will explode.”
“According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities, and problems. It is the source of all the troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world.”
(1) the physical body (called “form” in this discourse), including such sense organs as eyes and ears; (2) basic feelings; (3) perceptions (of, say, identifiable sights or sounds); (4) “mental formations” (a big category that includes complex emotions, thoughts, inclinations, habits, decisions); and (5) “consciousness,” or awareness—notably, awareness of the contents of the other four aggregates. The Buddha runs down this list and asks which, if any, of these five aggregates seem to qualify as self. In other words, which of the aggregates evince the qualities you’d expect self to possess?
For starters, he links the idea of self to the idea of control. Listen to what he says about the aggregate of “form,” the physical body: “If form were self, then form would not lead to affliction, and it should obtain regarding form: ‘May my form be thus, may my form not be thus.’ ” But, he notes, our bodies do lead to affliction, and we can’t magically change that by saying “May my form be thus.” So form—the stuff the human body is made of—isn’t really under our control. Therefore, says the Buddha, it must be the case that “form is not-self.” We are not our bodies. He then goes through the other four aggregates, one by one. “If feeling were self, then feeling would not lead to affliction,” and you’d be able to change your feelings by saying “May my feeling be thus, may my feeling not be thus.” But, of course, we don’t ordinarily have this kind of control over our feelings—hence the tendency of unpleasant feelings to linger even though we’d rather they didn’t.† So feeling, the Buddha concludes, “is not-self.” So too with perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Are any of these things really under control—so completely under control that they never lead to suffering? And if they’re not under control, then how can we think of them as part of the self?
How can the Buddha, on the one hand, insist that the self doesn’t exist, and, on the other hand, keep using terms like I and you and he and she? One common Buddhist response to these kinds of questions is this: Though in the deepest sense the self doesn’t exist, human language isn’t very good at describing reality at the deepest level. So as a practical matter—as a linguistic convention—we have to talk about there being an I and a you and a he and a she. In other words, the self doesn’t exist in an “ultimate” sense, but it exists in a “conventional” sense. There, did that clear things up? No, right? Then how about this less formal formulation of the same basic idea from a Buddhist teacher: “You’re real. But you’re not really real.” Still confused? Then maybe you should try another approach to resolving the paradox: consider the possibility that in this famous sermon, the Buddha didn’t really mean to be denying the existence of the self. If you’re wondering why the last half of the previous sentence is italicized, it’s to underscore what a radical idea this is, at least among mainstream Buddhist thinkers. Still, it’s an idea that has been taken seriously by a few maverick scholars. It’s worth exploring.
There’s a second, related scenario that might explain where we find the “you” that is liberated after the aggregates have been abandoned: maybe not all aggregates are created equal. Maybe one of them—consciousness—is special. Maybe, after “you” let go of all five aggregates, it’s this one aggregate that is liberated, released from entanglement with the other four. And maybe that’s what “you” are after letting go of the idea of the self: a kind of purified form of consciousness.
This discourse—the Buddha’s discourse on engagement—suggests an appealingly simple model: liberation consists of changing the relationship between your consciousness and the things you normally think of as its “contents”—your feelings, your thoughts, and so on. Once you realize that these things are “not-self,” the relationship of your consciousness to them becomes more like contemplation than engagement, and your consciousness is liberated. And the “you” that remains—the you that, in that first discourse on the not-self, the Buddha depicts as liberated—is this liberated consciousness.
Besides, there’s no denying that the Buddha repeatedly, in that first not-self discourse and elsewhere, does say that consciousness is not-self, something that “you” have to let go of for liberation to happen—which seems quite at odds with the prospect that “you” can happily inhabit the consciousness aggregate once it is disengaged from the other four aggregates.
Maybe by not-self the Buddha just meant something like “not usefully considered part of your self” or “not to be identified with.” In which case he was basically saying, “Look, if there’s part of you that isn’t under your control and therefore makes you suffer, then do yourself a favor and quit identifying with it!”
So if the conscious mind isn’t in control, what is in control? As we’ll see, the answer may be: nothing in particular. The closer we look at the mind, the more it seems to consist of a lot of different players, players that sometimes collaborate but sometimes fight for control, with victory going to the one that is in some sense the strongest. In other words, it’s a jungle in there, and you’re not the king of the jungle. The good news is that, paradoxically, realizing you’re not king can be the first step toward getting some real power.
Questions about how in control the conscious mind really is have now been raised from a lot of experimental angles. In a famous series of experiments first done in the early 1980s by Benjamin Libet, researchers monitored the brains of subjects while they “chose” to initiate an action. The researchers concluded that the brain was initiating the action before the person became aware of “deciding” to initiate it. This body of research is still coalescing. Not all the findings will hold up in the long run, as the experiments are repeated. And in some cases, including the Libet studies, there are unsettled questions of interpretation. Still, at a minimum it seems fair to say that the role of our conscious selves in guiding behavior is not nearly as big as was long thought. And the reason this role was exaggerated is that the conscious mind feels so powerful; in other words, the conscious mind is naturally deluded about its own nature.
So if you’re a Buddhist philosopher, you may feel vindicated. But you may also feel puzzled. Why would natural selection design a brain that leaves people deluded about themselves? One answer is that if we believe something about ourselves, that will help us convince other people to believe it. And certainly it’s to our benefit—or, more precisely, it would have been to the benefit of the genes of our hunter-gatherer ancestors—to convince the world that we’re coherent, consistent actors who have things under control.
Of course, coherence of motivation, though a desirable quality in a friend or collaborator, isn’t by itself decisive. If someone has clear and consistent goals but always fails to reach them, or fails to contribute much to team endeavors, or doesn’t keep promises, he or she won’t be overloaded with friends and collaborators. So you would expect us to tell (and believe) not just coherent stories about ourselves but flattering stories about ourselves. And by and large we do. In 1980 the psychologist Anthony Greenwald invented the term beneffectance to describe the way people naturally present themselves to the world—as beneficial and effective. Lots of experiments since then have shown that people not only put out this kind of publicity about themselves but actually believe it. And they could be right! There are beneficial and effective people in the world. But one thing that can’t be the case is that most people are above average in these regards. Yet study after study has shown that most people do think they’re above average along various dimensions, ranging from athletic ability to social skills. And this sort of self-appraisal can firmly resist evidence. One study of fifty people found that on average they rated their driving skill toward the “expert” end of the spectrum—which would be less notable were it not for the fact that all fifty had recently been in car accidents, and two-thirds of them had been deemed responsible for the accidents by police.
One finding among many that drive this point home is that the average person believes he or she does more good things and fewer bad things than the average person. Nearly half a millennium after Montaigne died, science has validated the logic behind his perhaps too modest remark: “I consider myself an average man except for the fact that I consider myself an average man.”
When put on a very small team, we tend to convince ourselves that we’re more valuable than the average team member. In one study, academics who had worked on jointly authored research papers were asked what fraction of the team’s output their own work accounted for. On the average four-person team, the sum of the claimed credit was 140 percent. The key word in the previous sentence is credit. When team efforts fail, our perceived contribution to the outcome shrinks.
So, all told, we’re under at least two kinds of illusions. One is about the nature of the conscious self, which we see as more in control of things than it actually is. The other illusion is about exactly what kind of people we are—namely, capable and upstanding. You might call these two misconceptions the illusion about our selves and the illusion about ourselves. They work in synergy. The first illusion helps us convince the world that we are coherent, consistent actors: we don’t do things for no reason, and the reasons we do them make sense; if our behaviors merit credit or blame, there is an inner us that deserves that credit or blame. The second illusion helps convince the world that what we deserve is credit, not blame; we’re more ethical than the average person, and we’re more productive than the average teammate. We have beneffectance. In other words, if you were to build into the brain a component in charge of public relations, it would look something like the conscious self. The anthropologist Jerome Barkow has written, “It is possible to argue that the primary evolutionary function of the self is to be the organ of impression management (rather than, as our folk psychology would have it, a decision-maker).” The only thing I’d add is that the folk psychology itself may be part of the evolutionary function; our presentation of ourselves as effective, upstanding people involves believing in the power of our selves.
If the conscious self isn’t a CEO, directing all the behavior it thinks it’s directing, how does behavior get directed? How do decisions get made? An increasingly common answer within the field of psychology, especially evolutionary psychology, is that the mind is “modular.” In this view, your mind is composed of lots of specialized modules—modules for sizing up situations and reacting to them—and it’s the interplay among these modules that shapes your behavior. And much of this interplay happens without conscious awareness on your part.
It’s almost enough to make you wonder whether the thing you think of as your self deserves that label! Kurzban has written, “In the end, if it’s true that your brain consists of many, many little modules with various functions, and if only a small number of them are conscious, then there might not be any particular reason to consider some of them to be ‘you’ or ‘really you’ or your ‘self’ or maybe anything else particularly special.”
The closest thing to a self would be the algorithm that determines which circumstances put which modules in charge. And that algorithm can’t be what we mean by the “conscious self” in humans—the CEO self—because humans don’t consciously decide to go into romantic mode or fearful mode.
Feelings aren’t just little parts of the thing you had thought of as the self; they are closer to its core; they are doing what you had thought “you” were doing: calling the shots. It’s feelings that “decide” which module will be in charge for the time being, and it’s modules that then decide what you’ll actually do during that time. In this light, it becomes a bit clearer why losing attachment to feelings could help you reach a point where there seems to be no self.
The emotion of sexual jealousy constitutes an organized mode of operation specifically designed to deploy the programs governing each psychological mechanism so that each is poised to deal with the exposed infidelity. Physiological processes are prepared for such things as violence. . . . The goal of deterring, injuring, or murdering the rival emerges; the goal of punishing, deterring, or deserting the mate appears; the desire to make oneself more competitively attractive to alternative mates emerges; memory is activated to re-analyze the past; confident assessments of the past are transformed into doubts; the general estimate of the reliability and trustworthiness of the opposite sex (or indeed everyone) may decline; associated shame programs may be triggered to search for situations in which the individual can publicly demonstrate acts of violence or punishment that work to counteract an (imagined or real) social perception of weakness; and so on. That’s a lot of stuff! Indeed, it’s so much stuff—so much change in a person’s attitude, focus, disposition—that you might say a whole new self has emerged and seized control of the mind.
The feeling of jealousy is so powerful that it may be hard to imagine resisting it. But resistance, strictly speaking, isn’t the mindful way of dealing with jealousy anyway. Rather the idea would be to observe the feeling mindfully as it begins to emerge and so never become firmly attached to it. If you don’t yield to attachment—if you don’t, as the Buddha might say, let your consciousness become “engaged” with the feeling—then the jealousy module presumably won’t be activated. Observing feelings without attachment is the way you keep modules from seizing control of your consciousness.
But even subtler emotions, with less obvious effects, can bring enough little changes to usher in a whole new frame of mind. Consider, again, the experiment in which watching a romantic movie made people crowd-averse. This reaction by itself is hardly transformative, but then again, “by itself” isn’t the way it happens; it’s one of various changes ushered in by the triggering of what Kenrick and Griskevicius call the “mate-acquisition subself.” Which brings us back to the intertemporal utility function and, specifically, the fact that men who see women they consider attractive tend to discount the future more steeply than they did only moments earlier. What is going on here? Is this another part of the hypothesized mate-acquisition module?
Time discounting isn’t the only psychological feature that, in mate-acquisition mode, can turn out to be more fluid than you might imagine. You’d think that people’s career aspirations, though obviously subject to some change over time, wouldn’t do a lot of moment-by-moment fluctuating. But apparently they do. In one study, psychologists had men fill out surveys about their career plans; some filled them out in a room where women were also filling out forms, and some filled them out in an all-male room. Men placed in the presence of women, it turned out, were more inclined to rate the accumulation of wealth as an important goal. This may not have signified an actual shift in their aspirations. Maybe the mate-acquisition module wasn’t changing long-term plans but was just briefly activating a “self-advertisement” submodule. In other words, maybe the presence of women prepares the mind of a heterosexual man to wow them by sharing bold plans for future wealth, regardless of how realistic the plans are or how long the boldness will last. But if so, the men’s conscious selves don’t seem to be privy to this strategic logic. After all, these men were conveying these bold plans via a questionnaire they had no reason to believe the women would read.
We’re back to the moral of the split-brain experiments: people are capable of convincing themselves of whatever stories about their own motivation it’s in their interest (or their “interest” as defined by natural selection) to tell others.
At the same time, we should stay mindful of the mind’s messiness and not get overly enamored of the modular metaphor. And Kenrick and Griskevicius sometimes sound pretty enamored. They divide the mind neatly into seven “subselves” with the following missions: self-protection, mate attraction, mate retention, affiliation (making and keeping friends), kin care, social status, and disease avoidance.
(1) This isn’t a state of mind that the conscious “self” “chooses” to enter; rather, the state is triggered by a feeling, and the conscious “self,” though it in principle has access to the feeling, may not notice it or notice that a new state has been entered. (So much for the idea of the conscious you as CEO.) (2) You can see why the Buddha emphasized how fluid, how impermanent, the various parts of the mind are, and why he considered this flux relevant to the not-self argument; if the self is supposed to be some unchanging essence, it’s pretty hard to imagine where exactly that self would be amid the ongoing transitions from state of mind to state of mind.
Buddhist thought and modern psychology converge on this point: in human life as it’s ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns running the show—and, in a sense, seizing control of the show. If the way they seize control of the show is through feelings, it stands to reason that one way to change the show is to change the role feelings play in everyday life. I’m not aware of a better way to do that than mindfulness meditation.
(1) Psychologists who adhere to the modular model of the mind tend toward the second view—the idea that the conscious you isn’t choosing modules so much as being commandeered by modules that have prevailed over competing modules and thus, as Gazzaniga put it in chapter 6, “won the prize of conscious recognition.” (2) If you do go on a Vipassana meditation retreat and slowly, haltingly, get better at focusing on your breath, you will probably lean increasingly toward the second hypothesis: it will seem more and more like your mind isn’t wandering within its own terrain so much as being hijacked by intruders.
One way to get the idea, Goldstein said, is to “imagine that every thought that’s arising in your mind is coming from the person next to you.” How would you be relating to these thoughts then? His point was that you wouldn’t be identifying with them. “The thought itself is appearing and disappearing like a sound, but being identified with it is something we’re adding.” I asked, “So, then, in meditation there can be the sense that thoughts are just kind of coming out of nowhere, so to speak, almost like voices?” “Yeah,” he answered. I’m always happy to help sane people not sound like they’re crazy, so I added, “Although it’s not like you’re hearing things . . . literally?” “Yeah, correct.” I liked where this was heading. He seemed to be saying that thoughts, which we normally think of as emanating from the conscious self, are actually directed toward what we think of as the conscious self, after which we embrace the thoughts as belonging to that self.
“Let me see if I have this right. During meditation, you can begin to see that . . . whereas you might have thought all your life that you’re thinking thoughts—the thing you think of as ‘you’ is thinking thoughts—it’s closer to being the case that the thoughts try to capture you, the thing you think of as ‘you.’ ”
It’s just that the thoughts are arising and there’s a strong habit of mind to be identified with them. So it’s not so much they have the intent to reach out and capture us, but rather there’s this very strong habitual identification. This is how we’ve lived our lives, and it takes practice to try to break this conditioning, to be mindful of the thought rather than be lost in it.”
In fact, the modular model of the mind has led me to attribute less agency to thoughts than some meditation teachers do. Though these teachers are inclined to say that “thoughts think themselves,” strictly speaking, I’d say modules think thoughts. Or rather, modules generate thoughts, and then if those thoughts prove in some sense stronger than the creations of competing modules, they become thought thoughts—that is, they enter consciousness.
Anyway, the main point these meditation teachers are making is the same as the upshot of the modular-mind model: the conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them. And that reception, it seems, is the part of the process Goldstein had observed with much more objectivity and clarity than I’d been able to muster—the part when the thoughts enter conscious awareness, the part when they “bubble up.”
As we’ve seen, in the modular model, feelings are the things that give a module temporary control of the show. You see someone who inspires feelings of attraction, and suddenly you’re in mate-acquisition mode, seeking intimacy, being exquisitely considerate, maybe showing off, and in other ways becoming a different person. You see a bitter rival, and the ensuing feelings lead you to seek something different from intimacy (though showing off, depending on the circumstance, may still be in order). It stands to reason that if these feelings—of attraction and affection, of rivalrous dislike—didn’t get purchase in the first place, the corresponding modules wouldn’t seize control. So one of the ideas behind mindfulness meditation—that gaining a kind of critical distance from your feelings can give you more control over which you is you at any given moment—makes perfect sense in light of the modular model of the mind.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve noticed about thoughts that intrude when I’m trying to focus on my breath: they often seem to have feelings attached to them. What’s more, their ability to hold my attention—in other words, to keep me enthralled, to keep me from noticing that they’re holding my attention—seems to depend on the strength of those feelings.
Even that most cerebral of mind wanderings—wondering—seems to have feelings that accompany it. If I’ve sat down to meditate and I find myself indulging my curiosity about something—pondering some puzzle—and I pay close attention, I see that there’s something pleasant about the pondering, a kind of continuously doled-out carrot that keeps me meandering along the path of the puzzle toward a solution; and if I find that solution, I’m given a culminating burst of satisfaction as a reward. As John Ruskin put it in the nineteenth century, “Curiosity is a gift, a capacity of pleasure in knowing.”
But the main point is just that all kinds of curiosity—ranging from a driving, headlong quest to a pleasant stroll along the byways of speculation—do seem to involve feelings. It’s no surprise, then, that brain scans are showing that a curious state of mind involves activity in the dopamine system, the system involved in motivation and reward, in desire and pleasure. So this is what I take away from many hours of failing to meditate (I mean, many hours of failing to meditate and occasionally succeeding at mindfully observing this failure): thoughts that grab my mind and carry it along with them have feelings attached, however subtle those feelings may be.
After all, feelings are judgments about how various things relate to an animal’s Darwinian interests. So, from natural selection’s point of view, feelings would make great labels for thoughts, labels that say things like “high priority,” “medium priority,” “low priority.” If you’re a day away from some event that will markedly affect your social status—an important presentation, a big party you’re hosting—preparation-related thoughts are high priority, hence high anxiety. But those thoughts are lower priority, and the anxiety less acute, if you’re weeks from the event. If you and your best friend just had a huge argument, figuring out what to do and say about that is a matter of some importance—greater importance than thinking about a casual acquaintance you may have offended; hence the difference between feelings of inner turmoil and feelings of mild concern. In all of these cases, the feelings associated with the thoughts will be commensurate in strength to the importance of the thoughts as natural selection defines importance. And when the default mode takes over—when your mind isn’t focused on talking to someone or reading a book or playing a sport or some other immersive task—it is the most “important” thoughts, the ones labeled with the strongest feelings, that get priority.
But I suspect that if you pay close enough attention—which is a lot easier if you’re meditating—you’ll pretty much always sense a feeling tone, one that is on balance positive or negative, associated with a thought that suddenly enters awareness. Because if the thought didn’t have some such feeling, it wouldn’t have gotten your attention in the first place. Feelings are, among other things, your brain’s way of labeling the importance of thoughts, and importance (in natural selection’s somewhat crude sense of the term) determines which thoughts enter consciousness.
Another thing that can happen over evolutionary time is that feelings are assigned to more and more things. As our species became more complexly social, getting food and sex came to depend on navigating a social landscape, which included goals like forging alliances and being held in high esteem. So making friends and earning respect came to feel good, and being rejected came to feel bad. This in turn opened up new avenues of thought: figuring out why a friend turned on you, imagining ways to impress people, and so on. Still, this growing web of feelings and thoughts was a straightforward extension of the basic value system evolution built into us to begin with—a system that prized surviving and getting our genes spread.
Natural selection has made us want foods with certain kinds of tastes, and has also made us want to live a long, healthy life. The struggle for self-control—in this particular case, at least—is a clash between these two values and between feelings associated with these two values. If reason is to play a role in the struggle, it is only as a proxy for these values. It’s the desire to live a long, healthy life that focuses our reasoning on the link between sugar consumption and longevity, and it’s through this desire that the results of the reasoning can overpower the desire for the chocolate itself. It’s in this sense that reason remains a “slave” to the passions, as Hume put it—and thus a slave to natural selection’s overarching value system.
And, indeed, when I asked him what’s wrong with saying something like “I considered the pros and cons and decided not to eat the chocolate,” he said that, strictly speaking, you should put it more like this: “There were certain systems in your head that were designed to be motivated to eat high-calorie foods, and those systems had certain kinds of motives or beliefs or representations, and there are other systems in your head that have motivations associated with long-term health, and those systems have certain beliefs about the chocolate.” In the end, modules of the second kind, modules focused on the long term, “inhibited the behavior that was being facilitated by the short-term modules.” In other words, neither kind of module was more “rational” than the other; they just had different goals, and on this particular day, one was stronger than the other. You might ask, What exactly do we mean by “stronger”? Well, if Hume was right, and the drift of that shopping experiment was right, it comes down to a contest of feelings. A long-term module may generate a sense of guilt when you reach for that chocolate bar; it may also give you a feeling of pride when you resist the allure of chocolate. On the other side of the contest is the chocolate lust generated by the short-term module. But the short-term module may have subtler tactics as well. Is it, perhaps, the module that dredged up the memory of that article about the long-term benefits of antioxidants? It just thought the long-term module might find that article interesting? All of this highlights a puzzle: Why does our conscious mind have to spend time witnessing the presentation of reasons—that is, participating in the “deliberation”? If it’s just a show trial—if it all comes down to a contest of power between modules that have summoned whatever fortifying logic might support their cause—couldn’t the whole thing happen subconsciously, freeing up the conscious mind to do something constructive, like ponder the mind-body problem? Well, recall that the conscious mind—being the part of your mind that communicates with the world—seems to be a kind of public relations agent. “My guess,” said Kurzban, is that the reason your conscious mind observes the debate, including the winning rationale, is so that “if someone ever challenges you or asks you why you did x, y, or z,” you’ll be able to cite a plausible rationale.
Either way, one virtue of your conscious mind being in touch with the reasons generated by competing modules is that you can share the reasons with others, and get their feedback, before making your decision. Strictly speaking, though, the way I should put it is this: You can share the reasons with others, and then their feedback will recalibrate how good or bad the two options feel.
First we learned that Hume seems to have been right: our “reasoning faculty” isn’t ever really in charge; its agenda—what it reasons about—is set by feelings, and it can influence our behavior only by in turn influencing our feelings. Then we learned that, actually, even the term reasoning faculty suggests more in the way of orderly deliberation than is typical of the human mind. The view emerging here is that we don’t so much have a reasoning faculty as reasoning faculties; modules seem to have the ability to recruit reasons on behalf of their goals. This in turn suggests that “reasoning” is sometimes a euphemism for what these “reasoning faculties” do. Sure, one module may say something truly reasonable and well-documented, like “If you eat the chocolate, you’ll have trouble sleeping.” But another module may say something like “You’ll do more work if you eat the chocolate”—even if history shows that what you’ll actually do is peruse social media with unusual fervor. And it’s hard to separate the valid reasons from the invalid reasons, because sometimes the least valid reasons feel good—and feelings tend to carry the day. But cheer up! Just because feelings are critical players in this drama doesn’t mean we’re powerless to intervene. In fact, we have a tool—mindfulness meditation—that’s well suited to intervening at the level of feelings and altering their influence. So maybe there’s hope for dealing with the challenge classically associated with “self-control”—the overindulgence of various kinds of appetites.
This in turn suggests that “reasoning” is sometimes a euphemism for what these “reasoning faculties” do. Sure, one module may say something truly reasonable and well-documented, like “If you eat the chocolate, you’ll have trouble sleeping.” But another module may say something like “You’ll do more work if you eat the chocolate”—even if history shows that what you’ll actually do is peruse social media with unusual fervor. And it’s hard to separate the valid reasons from the invalid reasons, because sometimes the least valid reasons feel good—and feelings tend to carry the day. But cheer up! Just because feelings are critical players in this drama doesn’t mean we’re powerless to intervene. In fact, we have a tool—mindfulness meditation—that’s well suited to intervening at the level of feelings and altering their influence. So maybe there’s hope for dealing with the challenge classically associated with “self-control”—the overindulgence of various kinds of appetites.
Of course, in a modern environment, this dynamic works differently. A module that counsels going to a porn site can lead to sexual gratification, so this counsel will carry more weight next time around—even though spending time at porn sites isn’t doing anything to enhance your reproductive prospects, and may even have the opposite effect. Or a module counsels snorting cocaine and this gives you a self-esteem boost that, back in a hunter-gatherer environment, would have been the reward for impressing your peers—and would have strengthened not a module that urged you to snort cocaine but a module that urged you to repeat whatever behavior had impressed your peers. It’s in this way that, in a modern environment, gratification can reinforce behaviors quite different from the kinds of behaviors it was designed to reinforce.
The second virtue of conceiving the problem of self-discipline in modular terms is that it can suggest new ways of addressing the problem. There’s a difference between thinking of the goal as strengthening the self-discipline muscle and thinking of the goal as weakening a module that has grown dominant. If you take the former approach, the tendency is to fight your temptations. You feel an urge to go buy cigarettes, and you try to push the thought out of your mind. After all, there’s this thing called “self-discipline,” and you have to exercise it—you have to get it out on the battlefield to vanquish the enemy! But suppose you think of the problem as instead being this particular module that has formed a particular strong habit. How would you try to overcome the problem then? You might try something like mindfulness meditation. To see what I mean, let’s take a look at the state-of-the-art mindfulness meditation approach to overcoming addictions. This approach was explained to me by Judson Brewer, who did a study on it at Yale Medical School (and also did one of the main studies showing that meditation quiets the default mode network). Brewer said the basic idea is to not fight the urge to, say, smoke a cigarette. That doesn’t mean you succumb to the urge and light up a cigarette. It just means you don’t try to push the urge out of your mind. Rather, you follow the same mindfulness technique that you’d apply to other bothersome feelings—anxiety, resentment, melancholy, hatred. You just calmly (or as calmly as possible, under the circumstances) examine the feeling. What part of your body is the urge felt in? What is the texture of the urge? Is it sharp? Dull and heavy? The more you do that, the less the urge seems a part of you; you’ve exploited the basic irony of mindfulness meditation: getting close enough to feelings to take a good look at them winds up giving you a kind of critical distance from them. Their grip on you loosens; if it loosens enough, they’re no longer a part of you. There’s an acronym used to describe this technique: RAIN. First you Recognize the feeling. Then you Accept the feeling (rather than try to drive it away). Then you Investigate the feeling and its relationship to your body. Finally, the N stands for Nonidentification, or, equivalently, Nonattachment. Which is a nice note to end on, since not being attached to things was the Buddha’s all-purpose prescription for what ails us. Brewer described this therapy as being about not “feeding” the urge to smoke. He said, “If you don’t feed a stray cat, it quits coming to your door.”
This comparison puts a finer point on the difference between fighting the urge to smoke and addressing the urge mindfully. Fighting the urge is like pushing the rat away every time it approaches the bar. This works in the short run; if the rat can’t press the bar, no food pellet will come out, and maybe after a while the rat will even give up on approaching the bar. Still, whenever the rat is allowed to get near the bar, it will press it, because it has seen nothing to indicate that pressing the bar won’t bring food. Treating the urge mindfully, I’d say, is more like arranging it so that when the rat presses the bar, no food pellets come out. The urge—the thing that’s analogous to pressing the bar—is allowed to fully form, yet it doesn’t get reinforced, because your mindful inspection of it has deprived it of its force and so broken the connection between the impulse and the reward. Over time, after the urge has blossomed again and again without bringing gratification, the urge ceases and desists.
Though we don’t generally think of nicotine addiction and a short attention span as having much in common, both really are problems of impulse control. And in both cases, we can, in principle, weaken the impulse by not fighting it, by letting it form and observing it carefully. This deprives the module that generated the impulse of the positive reinforcement that would give it more power next time around.
In principle, you can describe much of mindfulness meditation this way—as depriving modules of the positive reinforcement that has given them power. Because often when you mindfully observe feelings, you’re keeping the module that generated them from getting some sort of reward. If you observe a feeling of hatred for someone, and just keep observing the feeling, then the feeling won’t do what it might otherwise do—like, say, get you to imagine taking revenge for whatever this person has done to earn your hatred. If you did indulge in this revenge fantasy, it would feel good, right?
It may be obvious where I’m headed: If we can turn literal noise into music, can’t we turn figurative noise—all kinds of unwelcome perceptions and thoughts and feelings—into figurative music? Or at least take the harshness out of them? And it may be obvious how I’m going to answer that question: Yes, we can (with sufficiently diligent practice).
Look again at the final line of that passage from the Samadhiraja Sutra. It says that all things are “without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.” This sutra isn’t denying the reality of the buzz-saw sound waves that were hitting my ear, the “qualities” I was observing, but it seems to be saying that the “essence” I normally see beneath the qualities—essence of buzz saw—is a matter of interpretation; it’s something I’m choosing to construct, or not, from the qualities. Essences don’t exist independent of human perception. This is the version of the emptiness doctrine that makes sense to me, and it’s the version most widely accepted by Buddhist scholars: not the absence of everything, but the absence of essence. To perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we’re naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a sense of essence. An obvious rejoinder arises: But, um, isn’t there, in fact, something at the heart of the buzz-saw sound? You know, something called a buzz saw? Something that’s not empty and does, in fact, have form? It’s wonderful that you were able to put that fact out of mind and thus turn noise into music, but if the buzz saw is really there, then your picture of reality wasn’t getting clearer, but actually was in some sense getting less clear, right? And isn’t the idea of Buddhism that you reduce your suffering by seeing the world more clearly?
“So the idea is that everything meaningful about the world is something we impose on it?” She answered, “Exactly.”
But the point Narayan was making is that, as we go about our day-to-day lives, we impart a kind of narrative meaning to things. Ultimately these narratives assume large form. We decide that something we’ve done was a huge mistake, and if we had done something else instead, everything would be wonderful. Or we decide that we must have some particular possession or achievement, and if we don’t get it, everything will be horrible. Underlying these narratives, at their foundation, are elementary narrative judgments about the goodness or badness of things in themselves.
“There are probably very few perceptions and cognitions in everyday life that do not have a significant affective component, that aren’t hot, or in the very least tepid. And perhaps all perceptions contain some affect. We do not just see ‘a house’: we see ‘a handsome house,’ ‘an ugly house,’ or ‘a pretentious house.’ We do not just read an article on attitude change, on cognitive dissonance, or on herbicides. We read an ‘exciting’ article on attitude change, an ‘important’ article on cognitive dissonance, or a ‘trivial’ article on herbicides.” Note, by the way, that Zajonc implicitly equates having feelings about things with making judgments about them. This equation is true to the Darwinian view (laid out in chapter 3) that, functionally speaking, feelings are judgments. It’s also true to the meditative technique of relaxing judgment by critically inspecting our feelings. But I digress. Zajonc continues, “And the same goes for a sunset, a lightning flash, a flower, a dimple, a hangnail, a cockroach, the taste of quinine, Saumur, the color of earth in Umbria, the sound of traffic on 42nd Street, and equally for the sound of a 1000-Hz tone and the sight of the letter Q.”
Anyway, to be clear: the claim isn’t that everything I feel positively or negatively about will actually have an accordingly positive or negative impact on my chances of spreading my genes; the claim is just that the machinery in my mind that assigns feelings to things was originally designed to maximize genetic proliferation. That it no longer reliably does so is among the absurdities of being a human.
He was saying that, yes, the perception of formlessness or emptiness is correlated with a dampened affective reaction to things. But his interpretation of this correlation seemed different from mine. Whereas I’ve been saying that the dampened affect leads to the perception of emptiness, he was saying that it’s the other way around: the perception of emptiness dampens the affect; once you see that the thing you’re accustomed to reacting strongly to isn’t much of a “thing” in the first place, it only makes sense to react less strongly.
Wine is an especially clear example of how stories inform our pleasures (“That was a very good year”), but Bloom thinks that, if you look closely enough, every pleasure has a consequential story behind it. He once said to me, “There’s no such thing as a simple pleasure. There’s no such thing as a pleasure that’s untainted by your beliefs about what you’re being pleasured by.” He used food as an example: “If you hand me something and I taste it, part of my knowledge is that it was given to me by someone I trusted, and I would taste it differently than if I found it on the floor, or if I paid a thousand dollars for it. Or take paintings. It’s true that you can look at a painting and not know who painted it . . . and just appreciate it largely based on what it looks like. At the same time, you know it’s a painting.” In other words, he continued, “it’s not a natural occurrence of paint splattered on a wall. . . . Somebody made it at some time for display, and that colors things.” So too, he said, with “the simplest of sensations: an orgasm, drinking water when you’re thirsty, stretching, anything. It’s always under some sort of description. It’s always viewed as an instance of some sort of category.” There is always, in other words, an implied narrative. The fact that pleasure is shaped by our sense of essence, and thus by the stories we tell and the beliefs we hold, suggests to Bloom that our pleasures are, in a sense, more profound than we may realize. “There is always a depth to pleasure,” he has written. But you could look at it the other way around. Given that our experience of a bottle of wine can be influenced by slapping a fake label on it, you might say that, actually, there is a superficiality to our pleasure, and that a deeper pleasure would come if we could somehow taste the wine itself, unencumbered by beliefs about it that may or may not be true. That is closer to the Buddhist view of the matter.
He says his experience involves very little in the way of the self-referential thoughts that dominate the consciousness of most of us: Why did I say that stupid thing yesterday? How can I impress these people tomorrow? Can’t wait to eat that chocolate bar! And so on. He calls these the “emotionally laden, I-me-my thoughts.”
I once tried to get Weber to elaborate on the nature of the enjoyment he gets from the world and how it differs from the enjoyment I get from the world. I said, “So you’re saying, I gather, that there is a kind of pleasure that you can derive via your senses that does not constitute emotional involvement of a problematic kind.” “That’s correct,” he said. But he hastened to add, “You haven’t lost your nerve endings. . . . Green tea still tastes like green tea, red wine still tastes like red wine. You don’t lose that. What you lose is the carry-forward of that sensation: This is a fantastic glass of wine—this was a great year.” But, I pointed out, some people would say that if you don’t at least consider it a good glass of wine—if you don’t even get emotionally involved enough to like the wine—then there’s not much point in living. He answered, “But it’s a much cleaner perception. If I’m tasting a glass of wine and I’m trying to impress some restaurant critics or some friend who’s a great wine fancier, then I may have a story going, I may have an expectation for how this wine should be and how I should expect it to taste, and so it really blocks my clear, simple perception. . . . So by getting this thought out of the way, this emotional thought out of the way, I have a much higher likelihood of directly perceiving whatever the sensation is.”
Sometimes I think there are two different ways that “essence” can impede clear perception. In one case—the “fantastic glass of wine” case—the sense of essence is strong and evokes feelings that wouldn’t be part of the “essenceless” version of the experience. But sometimes the sense of essence is weak—so weak it tends to steer you away from the experience altogether. When I’m on retreat and I get immersed in the texture of a tree’s bark, maybe that’s because I don’t have my usual essence-of-tree feeling—a feeling so devoid of power that it says, basically, “It’s just another tree, so you can walk right past it and move on to something more important.”
Another way to put it is to say that in some cases the story evoked by essence is a minimizing story: That’s just a tree or just a piece of celery. But in other cases—the fantastic glass of wine, the tape measure that belonged to JFK—the story is an amplifying story, so loud that it overwhelms intrinsic experience. Maybe essences can be labels that discourage experience altogether, or labels that encourage experience but in some sense distort it. At any rate, that Weber equates having a strong emotional reaction to something with having a “story” about it makes sense to me, and so does the idea that jettisoning both the story and the emotion would tend to leave things with a less distinctive essence than they’d otherwise project. But is this really possible—stripping away the story, the background knowledge, behind your sensory experience?
But there are also parts of the brain that play a role in pleasure and weren’t influenced by the wine’s price tag. “Importantly,” wrote the researchers, “we did not find evidence for an effect of prices on . . . the primary taste areas such as the insula cortex, the ventroposterior medial nucleus of the thalamus, or the parabrachial nuclei of the pons.” A “natural interpretation,” they continued, is that the mOFC—the part of the brain that changed in response to the price tag—is where “the top-down cognitive processes that encode the flavor expectancies are integrated with the bottom-up sensory components of the wine.” In other words, the mOFC seems to be where story, and hence expectation, mixes in with raw sensory data to modulate what the researchers called “the hedonic experience of flavor.”
A famous study published in 1973 showed as much. The study was conducted by two Princeton University psychologists, and it involved, for starters, setting up an opportunity for people to be Good Samaritans, to help a stranger in need. Here is how the psychologists described the scene they created: “When the subject passed through the alley, the victim was sitting slumped in a doorway, head down, eyes closed, not moving. As the subject went by, the victim coughed twice and groaned, keeping his head down.” Some of the experimental subjects stopped to help, and some didn’t. If you had been watching all this, you probably would have seen essence-of-good-person in the former and essence-of-bad-person in the latter. But there’s actually a different explanation for why some helped and some didn’t. The subjects of the experiment were students at Princeton Theological Seminary. They had been told that they had to go give a short, impromptu talk in a nearby building. Some had been told they were late for the talk, while others were told they had time to spare. Of the former group, 10 percent stopped to help, and of the latter group, 63 percent stopped. So seeing essence-of-good-person in that 63 percent is misleading at best; it would be more accurate to see essence-of-not-being-in-a-hurry. Aside from degree of hurriedness, there was only one other variable that the experimenters manipulated. Half of the subjects, before heading over to give their talk, were told to read the Bible story of the Good Samaritan and then give their talk on that. The other half read a passage unrelated to altruism. It turns out that even reflecting on the Good Samaritan didn’t increase the chances of being a Good Samaritan. This experiment fits into a large body of psychological literature about something called “the fundamental attribution error.” The word attribution refers to the tendency to explain people’s behavior in terms of either “dispositional” factors—in other words, the kind of person they are—or “situational” factors, like whether they happen to be late for a talk. The word error refers to the fact that these attributions are often wrong, that we tend to underestimate the role of situation and overestimate the role of disposition. In other words, we’re biased in favor of essence.
For example, it’s common to think of criminals and clergy as being two fundamentally different kinds of people. But Ross and fellow psychologist Richard Nisbett have suggested that we rethink this intuition. As they put it: “Clerics and criminals rarely face an identical or equivalent set of situational challenges. Rather, they place themselves, and are placed by others, in situations that differ precisely in ways that induce clergy to look, act, feel, and think rather consistently like clergy and that induce criminals to look, act, feel, and think like criminals.”
Still, there is no doubt that our attribution of moral essence to people—seeing them as nice, mean, friendly, unfriendly—does run ahead of the actual evidence. I have more than once seen someone in public behaving so rudely or inconsiderately that I immediately saw him as—and felt him as—bad. And I have more than once, when under great stress, behaved just as rudely and inconsiderately. Yet I did not consider myself bad—at least, not essentially bad—even on later reflection. One reason I let myself off the hook is that I understand that the stress caused my bad behavior; it wasn’t the “real me” who did the bad thing. But with other people, I’m less likely to ponder that possibility. That’s what the fundamental attribution error is: I attribute their behavior to disposition, not situation; I locate the badness in them, not in environmental factors.
From natural selection’s point of view, there’s no reason for people to give much weight to such a possibility—the possibility that niceness and goodness are largely situational, not dispositional, properties. After all, the essence model—the belief that each person has a generally good or a generally bad disposition—works pretty well. If someone is consistently nice to you, it makes sense to get into a relationship of reciprocal niceness—in other words, a friendship. And a belief that the person is essentially good does a fine job of drawing you into that friendship. What’s more, this belief will make it easy for you to go around saying that this person is good—which is handy, since speaking highly of a friend is part of the reciprocal altruism that constitutes friendship. Seeing essence-of-good in your friends lets you discharge this part of the deal effortlessly. It frees you from the nagging awareness that, for all you know, when you’re not around, your friends spend their time bilking elderly people.
It turns out that the fundamental attribution error—the tendency to overestimate the role of disposition and underestimate the role of situation—isn’t quite as simple as psychologists originally thought. Sometimes we actually downplay the role of disposition and amplify the role of situation. There are two kinds of cases in which we tend to do this: (1) if an enemy or rival does something good, we’re inclined to attribute it to circumstance—he’s just giving money to the beggar to impress a woman who happens to be standing there; (2) if a close friend or ally does something bad, then here too circumstance tends to loom large—she’s yelling at a beggar who asks for money because she’s been stressed out over her job.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Still, he does raise an interesting question about where the dharma can lead. Even if it isn’t going to lead you to where Fred was—to a point where you see so little essence that you can’t figure out who is who—is it possible that it could lead you too far? Suppose, for example, that, though you can still accurately identify your spouse as your spouse, you see less essence-of-spouse than you used to, and suppose your feelings change accordingly. Will that mean you love your spouse less deeply now? Or, to take another example, will parents who meditate intensively come to love their offspring less intensely? Indeed, doesn’t the whole Buddhist idea that you should let go of your attachments encourage, in some sense, less parental love as we’ve always known parental love? If you ask the average meditation teacher a question like this, you’ll hear something to the effect that, no, meditative practice won’t negate your love or even subdue it, but may change its nature.
There’s a second moral question lurking here: What if meditation didn’t lead you to allocate your compassion differently, and perhaps more equitably, but somehow distanced you from feelings of compassion altogether, leaving you indifferent to the welfare of people broadly? After all, if meditation can drain things like hatred and resentment of motivating force, why couldn’t it have a symmetrically subduing effect on the other side of the ledger? It could, and the fact that it tends not to is in a way puzzling. But “tends not to” doesn’t mean “never does,” and this point is worth dwelling on: Taking some of the essence out of things is likely to make you a better person, but it’s not guaranteed to make you a better person.
Another commonly raised concern about the dharma is that it could take the joy out of life.
“If one takes that too literally, one might come away with the idea that the ultimate aim of Buddhism is to become a completely unemotional, emotionally flat, emotionally deprived automaton.” At this point, one of his epic smiles erupted. He started laughing as he said, “As my mother used to say, as far as I’m concerned, between an enlightened Buddhist and a vegetable, there’s no difference.” He reared his head back and laughed for a full five seconds before continuing to quote his mother: “Is this why you become a Buddhist monk, to become a vegetable?” Then he got serious again. “But I would say that in my opinion, my experience, as one continues to practice the Buddhist path, it enriches the emotional life, so that one becomes emotionally more sensitive, more happy and joyful. And I would say that one can respond to things in the world in a freer, more happy, more delightful way.” Makes sense to me. After all, one virtue of mindfulness meditation is that experiencing your feelings with care and clarity, rather than following them reflexively and uncritically, lets you choose which ones to follow—like, say, joy, delight, and love. And this selective engagement with feelings, this weakened obedience to them, can in principle include the feelings that shape the essence we see in things and people. I pressed Bhikkhu Bodhi a bit further on this affect and essence business. I said, “Doesn’t part of the freedom come from the fact that you are not attaching these judgmental, affective connotations to things? In other words, not attributing essence so strongly to things can be a source of freedom.” Nodding his head emphatically, he said, “Definitely.”
“If you’re nothing, if you disappear, you can then be everything. But you can’t be everything unless you are nothing. It just logically follows that’s the case.” Well, I’m not sure it logically follows, but apparently it seems like inexorable logic if you’re in the state Weber is in. He continued, “If you are nothing, instead of just disappearing and becoming a void, you find out that in some strange way—you actually see this, you perceive it this way—that everything is all one thing. This is a cliché, mystical statement, but it really is perceptible: you can deeply sense that everything is all one thing. And somehow, strangely, it’s inside of you.”
In other words: nothing possesses inherent existence; nothing contains all the ingredients of ongoing existence within itself; nothing is self-sufficient. Hence the idea of emptiness: all things are empty of inherent, independent existence. This, according to Buddhist philosophy, is the fact about reality that you are intuitively apprehending if, through extended meditation, you come to feel that things lack essence. And if, at the same time, you feel the bounds of your self start to dissolve, then you’re just experiencing a larger expanse of emptiness, an emptiness that pervades not just all supposed things out there but also the supposed self in here.
Here the Buddha lays out the Four Noble Truths, which explain the cause of dukkha—of suffering, of unsatisfactoriness—and the cure. He says that the basic cause of dukkha is tanha, a word usually translated as “thirst” or “craving” and sometimes as “desire.” To put a finer point on it, the problem is the unquenchability of tanha, the fact that attaining our desires always leaves us unsatisfied, thirsting for more of the same or thirsting for something new. Albahari says that tanha is inextricably tied to the sensation of self, and that overcoming tanha is therefore tied to the experience of not-self. She’s not just talking about the interior version of the not-self experience—she’s not just saying that if you let go of a particular desire, then you have disowned it, so that part of your self disappears. She’s saying that tanha is deeply involved in your sense that the self is bounded; tanha sustains and strengthens the sense of boundedness that, during the exterior not-self experience, weakens.
Well, Albahari says, if you desire to be free of something, then you have in mind the goal of creating more distance between yourself and that something (assuming you don’t take the more straightforward approach of throwing a meditation cushion at the person generating the something). And wanting to create distance between yourself and something means having an idea of the place where your self ends. If you’re trying to dodge a rattlesnake’s lunge, you have a very precise conception of the space that you don’t want the rattlesnake to reach: the space defined by your skin. So either way, whether tanha is driving attraction or aversion, it entails defining the realm of self. As Albahari has written, emotions involving tanha “seem to point to, as a part of their content, an unspoken boundary between the identified-as self on one hand and the desired or undesired scenario on the other, as it is perceived or imagined by the witnessing subject.” Thus, tanha “will not only indicate but also help create and drive the sense of self-other boundedness.” And vice versa: the more clearly and deeply you feel that boundedness, the more tanha you’ll be inclined to have. “For unless I identified fully as a self, then how could I care particularly about whether ‘my’ desires are fulfilled?”
In the Buddha’s first discourse after his enlightenment, the sermon at Deer Park, he says that the key to liberation from dukkha is overcoming tanha. But in his second discourse, the discourse on not-self, it seems that liberation lies in recognizing that the self doesn’t exist; all the monks who hear this sermon are instantly liberated. So which is it? Does nirvana come by conquering tanha or by seeing that the self is an illusion? Well, maybe the two are one and the same.
After all, the interior version of the not-self experience involves disowning feelings and disowning thoughts laden with feelings. And feelings tend to come in the two basic flavors of positive and negative, possessing an element, respectively, of attraction or of aversion; in other words, possessing tanha.† So the interior not-self experience inherently involves letting go of some tanha. (Indeed, the Buddha said much the same thing in emphasizing that the not-self experience involves ceasing to cling to—ceasing to “lust” after—thoughts and emotions and the like.) But Albahari adds a new dimension to this argument for a kind of equivalence between the Buddha’s first two sermons by connecting the exterior not-self experience to the abandonment of tanha. When you think about it, it makes sense that tanha would be tied to our outer limits no less than to our core. From a Darwinian perspective, tanha was engineered into us so that we would take care of ourselves—which is to say, so that each of us would take care of the vehicle that contains our genes. And that vehicle stops at the skin, at the bounds of the body. It’s only natural, then, that tanha would reinforce a sense of the importance of those bounds, the bounds that define the zone of concern that natural selection assigned to it.
The refrain warns people to avoid the “three poisons” of raga, dvesha, and moha. Those three words are typically translated as “greed, hatred, and delusion,”
In other words, the first two poisons are the two sides of tanha: a craving for the pleasant, an aversion to the unpleasant. Well, if tanha is indeed tightly bound up with the sense of self, then it makes sense to see these two poisons as bound up with the third poison: delusion. After all, one of the most famous delusions in all of Buddhism is the illusion of self. So the first two poisons, you might say, are the ingredients of the third poison. Raga plus dvesha equals moha.†
So if nirvana is “the unconditioned,” then, you might think, it would involve some kind of escape from “the caused.” And you would be right! But what does that mean? The answer to that question involves one of the most important terms in Buddhism: paticca-samuppada. It is a term that has numerous applications and numerous translations.I For present purposes—when we’re using it to illuminate the logic of nirvana—a good translation is “conditioned arising.”
Or, as it is put more formally in ancient texts that spell out the twelve causal links: through the condition of the sensory faculties, contact arises. And here is the next link: Through the condition of contact, feelings arise—which makes sense, because, remember, in the Buddhist view (and in the view of many modern psychologists), the things we perceive through our sense organs tend to come with feelings attached, however subtle the feelings. Then, in the next causal link, feelings give rise to tanha, to “craving”: we crave the pleasant feelings and crave to escape the unpleasant feelings. Let’s freeze frame right here, because this is where the action is. Here is how Bhikkhu Bodhi put it in a series of lectures he recorded in 1981: “It is here in this space between feeling and craving that the battle will be fought which will determine whether bondage will continue indefinitely into the future or whether it will be replaced by enlightenment and liberation. For if instead of yielding to craving, to the driving thirst for pleasure, if a person contemplates with mindfulness and awareness the nature of feelings and understands these feelings as they are, then that person can prevent craving from crystallizing and solidifying.”
The things in your environment—the sights, the sounds, the smells, the people, the news, the videos—are pushing your buttons, activating feelings that, however subtly, set in motion trains of thought and reaction that govern your behavior, sometimes in ways that are unfortunate. And they will keep doing that unless you start paying attention to what’s going on. This has been the point of much of this book. The human brain is a machine designed by natural selection to respond in pretty reflexive fashion to the sensory input impinging on it. It is designed, in a certain sense, to be controlled by that input. And a key cog in the machinery of control is the feelings that arise in response to the input. If you interact with those feelings via tanha—via the natural, reflexive thirst for the pleasant feelings and the natural, reflexive aversion to the unpleasant feelings—you will continue to be controlled by the world around you. But if you observe those feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can in some measure escape the control; the causes that ordinarily shape your behavior can be defied, and you can get closer to the unconditioned.
But Batchelor says meditative practice can lead to the “re-enchantment” of the world, and I know what he means. After that first retreat, I felt like I was living in a zone of enchantment, a place of wonder and preternatural beauty.
But there’s good news on this front. If you would like to think of meditation practice as being a rebellion against an oppressive overlord, we can arrange that: just think of yourself as fighting your creator, natural selection. After all, natural selection, like the robot overlords, engineered the delusions that control us; it built them into our brains. If you’re willing to personify natural selection, you can carry the comparison with robot overlords a bit further: natural selection perpetrated the delusion in order to get us to adhere slavishly to its agenda.
Consider, for starters, what some would call the core experience of enlightenment: the not-self experience. More specifically, consider the subset of it that I’ve called the “exterior not-self experience.” How does this experience imply a rejection of natural selection’s values? As we’ve seen, the experience involves a diminished sense of separation between you (or “you”) and the other people and things in the world. In fact, there’s such a sense of continuity between your “inside” and the world on the “outside” that you may start to see harming others as tantamount to harming yourself. In the fullest version of this experience, you start to doubt that there’s any real difference between their interests and yours.
And what about the flip side, the interior version of the not-self experience? This version, in which you cease to “own” your thoughts and feelings, also involves a rejection of natural selection’s values. After all, the kinds of thoughts and feelings our brain is inclined to have were initially designed by natural selection to help take care of this vehicle containing our genes. So identifying with these thoughts and feelings—owning them, and thus letting them own us—is often just another way of asserting our specialness.
Then there’s the third leg of this alignment: our well-being. Happiness—the elimination or at least lessening of suffering, of unsatisfactoriness, of dukkha—tends to coincide with seeing the metaphysical truth and acting on the attendant moral truth. This too is a kind of alignment that, presumably, a universe doesn’t have to have. It’s kind of amazing, when you think about it, that the world would be set up this way: that the path you embark on to relieve yourself of suffering would, if pursued assiduously, lead you to become not just a happier person but a person with a clearer view of both metaphysical and moral reality. Yet that is the Buddhist claim, and there is substantial evidence in favor of it. This three-part alignment—the alignment of metaphysical truth and moral truth and happiness—is embodied in the richly ambiguous word that lies at the heart of Buddhist practice: dharma. This ancient word is most commonly defined as “the Buddha’s teaching.” That’s accurate insofar as it goes, but the word also refers to the core truths that are being conveyed by the Buddha’s teaching. Dharma thus denotes the reality that lies beyond our delusions and, for that matter, the reality about how those delusions give rise to suffering; and it denotes the implications of all this for our conduct. In other words, the dharma is at once the truth about the way things are and the truth about how it makes sense to behave in light of the way things are. It is both description and prescription. It is the truth and the way.
Late one day in mid-December 2012, I was at a meditation retreat and was outside doing some walking meditation. At some point I looked up at the horizon and saw that the sun had set. All that was left was its pink and purple residue, framed austerely by barren winter trees. I was already in a mildly morose state, having been mulling some personal issue or other, and now I felt a distinct wave of melancholy, as I sometimes do upon seeing a winter twilight. Then—this being a retreat and me having spent much of each day observing my feelings—I immediately, almost reflexively, examined the melancholy. And right away the feeling was drained of force. It didn’t immediately disappear, but it now seemed like nothing more than physical waves, neither good nor bad, moving slowly through my body. With the melancholy neutralized, the horizon took on a different aspect: it was stunningly beautiful. It had gone from being a reflection of sadness to being a source of delight, even awe. This beauty—and all the other beauty I’ve appreciated more deeply as a result of meditative practice—is something I don’t really understand. I mean, if meditation can give you a kind of distance from your feelings and lessen their hold on you, shouldn’t it in principle do that equally for good and bad feelings? Shouldn’t you wind up feeling more or less neutral—which is to say, feeling more or less nothing? Yet the way it seems to work is that some feelings actually get accentuated—first and foremost the sensation of beauty.
The sense of beauty feels more like something the mind just naturally relaxes into when the preoccupation with self subsides. I’m tempted to invoke John Keats’s famous verse, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Maybe when you see the world more clearly, more truthfully, you enjoy not only a measure of liberation but also a more direct and continuous perception of the world’s actual beauty.
Okay; without further ado, here are some Buddhist “truths”: 1. Human beings often fail to see the world clearly, and this can lead them to suffer and to make others suffer. This costly misapprehension of the world can assume various forms, described in various ways in different Buddhist texts. For example: 2. Humans tend to anticipate more in the way of enduring satisfaction from the attainment of goals than will in fact transpire. This illusion, and the resulting mind-set of perpetual aspiration, makes sense as a product of natural selection (see chapter 1), but it’s not exactly a recipe for lifelong happiness. 3. Dukkha is a relentlessly recurring part of life as life is ordinarily lived. This fact is less evident if you translate dukkha as it’s conventionally translated—as “suffering” pure and simple—than if you translate it as involving a big component of “unsatisfactoriness.” Organisms, including humans, are designed by natural selection to react to their environments in ways that will make things “better” (in natural selection’s sense of the term). This means they are almost always, at some level, scanning the horizon for things to be unhappy about, uncomfortable with, unsatisfied with. And since being unsatisfied, by definition, involves at least a little suffering, thinking of dukkha as entailing unsatisfactoriness winds up lending credence to the idea that dukkha in the sense of suffering is a pervasive part of life. (See chapters 1 and 3.) 4. The source of dukkha identified in the Four Noble Truths—tanha, translated as “thirst” or “craving” or “desire”—makes sense against the backdrop of evolution. Tanha, you might say, is what natural selection instilled in animals so they wouldn’t be satisfied with anything for long (see chapter 1). Seeing tanha as the source of suffering makes even more sense when it is construed broadly, as not only the desire to obtain and cling to pleasant things but also the desire to escape from unpleasant things (see chapter 13). Clearly, if you took the suffering associated with feelings of aversion out of the picture, that would take a lot of suffering out of the picture. 5. The two basic feelings that sponsor dukkha—the two sides of tanha, a clinging attraction to things and an aversion to things—needn’t enslave us as they tend to do. Meditative disciplines such as mindfulness meditation can weaken the grip they exert. People disagree on whether complete and lasting liberation—nirvana in the classic sense of the term—is attainable, but there is no doubt that lives have been transformed by meditative practice. It’s important to emphasize that becoming less enslaved by craving and aversion doesn’t mean becoming numb to feelings; it can mean developing a different relationship to them and becoming more selective about which feelings to most fully engage with. Indeed, this revised relationship can include the accentuation of certain feelings, including wonder, compassion, and the sense of beauty. (See chapters…
Wizardry is one of the most ancient and misunderstood of arts. Its public image for centuries has been one of a mysterious pursuit, practiced in occult surroundings, and usually used at the peril of one’s soul. The modern wizard, who works with tools more advanced than bat’s blood and beings more complex than medieval demons, knows how far from the truth that image is. Wizardry, though exciting and interesting, is not a glamorous business, especially these days, when a wizard must work quietly so as not to attract undue attention. For those willing to assume the Art’s responsibilities and do the work, though, wizardry has many rewards. The sight of a formerly twisted growing thing now growing straight, of a snarled motivation untangled, the satisfaction of hearing what a plant is thinking or a dog is saying, of talking to a stone or a star, is thought by most to be well worth the labor. Not everyone is suited to be a wizard. Those without enough of the necessary personality traits will never see this manual for what it is. That you have found it at all says a great deal for your potential. The reader is invited to examine the next few chapters and determine his/her wizardly potential in detail—to become familiar with the scope of the Art—and finally to decide whether to become a wizard. Good luck!
IT WAS GOING well until Count Morishita asked, “Does your family go back very far, Captain?” Josette stood thinking about it—not a good sign at all—and said, “To the beginning, I suppose. Same as everyone else’s.”
He had been first to reach the quarry by virtue of everyone in his way suffering simultaneous confusion as to whether the deer could be found at bay amidst the pack of barking shikokus, or off in some other direction entirely.
“Shall we follow the rest of the field to breakfast, or just mill about in the woods like idiots?”
“Yer just having an off night, is all. Happens to the best of us, my lord, and likewise to such as you.”
And on an avenue near the airfield, suffused with the delectable, yeasty scent of baking bread, the sun crested the adjacent rooftops to pour its warmth onto the face of Lord Bernat Hinkal, who woke to the realization that he’d gone to bed on garbage again.
She gesticulated at him. “Bernie, I don’t need weak ale to not die. I not … die … every … all of the…” She trailed off, puzzled for a way out of the grammatical maze she’d become lost in. Bernat patted her hand consolingly and said, “Some day, great men will discover how words fit together. For now, my dear, don’t trouble yourself with such inscrutable questions.”
Josette continued, “What you have is something we in the army—those of us who’ve been in the army long enough to know, I mean—it’s what we in the army call, ‘being an asshole.’” She smiled reassuringly and made an expansive gesture with her hands. “Don’t worry, it’s a common condition.”
“Why am I here?” Wukong chuckles, throwing his head back in unrestrained glee. “A philosophical question! The answer is simple: to learn and to grow.” “No, I mean, why am I here right now?” The Buddha cocks his head at me and shrugs. “The answer is the same, and will remain the same days and months and years hence.”
“Wukong,” I say, “I still do not know why I am here.” “And the answer still remains: to learn and grow.” The grin he flashes me is mischievous. He knows full well how annoying he’s being right now.
“Your comfortable assumptions. Your habits of thought. They are not merely ruts in the road keeping you on the path you’re following, they are like blindfolds, preventing you from even seeing that there are other paths.” “I know that there are other paths.” The Monkey King smirked. “You feel comfortable saying that, don’t you?”
“Why is a Buddha spending his time serving bubble tea?” He shrugs. “It is a simple pleasure that tends to make people happy. And when they see that they can be made happy by something so simple, then all their other grand desires seem silly by comparison—for indeed they are. A Buddhist wishes to point out that desires are what prevent people from achieving happiness, that materialism is the cause of discord. The simple pleasure of bubble tea gets them to a receptive place to hear that message. Or to reinforce that message, if they’ve already heard it.”
“We did see something in the divination that hinted at unexpected aid. I think a pumped-up murder sloth qualifies as unexpected.”
Michael stood firm, if somewhat wounded. His friends wrote their articles, they went to marches and listened to speeches, they debated the future of Marxism over coffee and strudel—but Michael heard an airy emptiness in their rhetoric. He didn’t accuse his friends of taking an easy road, but neither could he follow them. He was too honest a soul; he had never learned to deceive himself.
The Jinni’s eyes opened, and he grinned weakly up at his employer. “Hello, Arbeely,” he croaked. “I’ve had the most wonderful evening.”
“Helene, why are you writing like this?” I gave her a confused look—writing like what?—and she pointed out something that hadn’t occurred to me: my writing was out of step with my reading. I was a dyed-in-the-wool geek, and the books I adored most tended to be fantasy and sci-fi, or else fiction with a touch of the fantastic. So why, she repeated, wasn’t I writing that way?
Maybe not. Consider some of the puzzling data points that Robin discovered. To start with, people in developed countries consume way too much medicine—doctor visits, drugs, diagnostic tests, and so forth—well beyond what’s useful for staying healthy. Large randomized studies, for example, find that people given free healthcare consume a lot more medicine (relative to an unsubsidized control group), yet don’t end up noticeably healthier. Meanwhile, non-medical interventions—such as efforts to alleviate stress or improve diet, exercise, sleep, or air quality—have a much bigger apparent effect on health, and yet patients and policymakers are far less eager to pursue them. Patients are also easily satisfied with the appearance of good medical care, and show shockingly little interest in digging beneath the surface—for example, by getting second opinions or asking for outcome statistics from their doctors or hospitals. (One astonishing study found that only 8 percent of patients about to undergo a dangerous heart surgery were willing to pay $50 to learn the different death rates for that very surgery at nearby hospitals.) Finally, people spend exorbitantly on heroic end-of-life care even though cheap, palliative care is usually just as effective at prolonging life and even better at preserving quality of life. Altogether, these puzzles cast considerable doubt on the simple idea that medicine is strictly about health. To explain these and other puzzles, Robin took an approach unusual among health policy experts. He suggested that people might have other motives for buying medicine—motives beyond simply getting healthy—and that these motives are largely unconscious. On introspection, we see only the health motive, but when we step back and triangulate our motives from the outside, reverse-engineering them from our behaviors, a more interesting picture begins to develop.
proposing. First, we’re suggesting that key human behaviors are often driven by multiple motives—even behaviors that seem pretty single-minded, like giving and receiving medical care. This shouldn’t be too surprising; humans are complex creatures, after all. But second, and more importantly, we’re suggesting that some of these motives are unconscious; we’re less than fully aware of them. And they aren’t mere mouse-sized motives, scurrying around discreetly in the back recesses of our minds. These are elephant-sized motives large enough to leave footprints in national economic data.
An office full of software engineers soon morphed, under the flickering fluorescent lights, into a tribe of chattering primates. All-hands meetings, shared meals, and team outings became elaborate social grooming sessions. Interviews began to look like thinly veiled initiation rituals. The company logo took on the character of a tribal totem or religious symbol. But the biggest revelation from Boehm’s book concerned social status. Of course office workers, being primates, are constantly jockeying to keep or improve their position in the hierarchy, whether by dominance displays, squabbles over territory, or active confrontations. None of these behaviors is surprising to find in a species as social and political as ours. What’s interesting is how people obfuscate all this social competition by dressing it up in clinical business jargon. Richard doesn’t complain about Karen by saying, “She gets in my way”; he accuses her of “not caring enough about the customer.” Taboo topics like social status aren’t discussed openly, but are instead swaddled in euphemisms like “experience” or “seniority.” The point is, people don’t typically think or talk in terms of maximizing social status—or, in the case of medicine, showing conspicuous care. And yet we all instinctively act this way. In fact, we’re able to act quite skillfully and strategically, pursuing our self-interest without explicitly acknowledging it, even to ourselves.
Here is the thesis we’ll be exploring in this book: We, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep “us,” our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others. Self-deception is therefore strategic, a ploy our brains use to look good while behaving badly.
So what, exactly, is the elephant in the brain, this thing we’re reluctant to talk and think about? In a word, it’s selfishness—the selfish parts of our psyches. But it’s actually broader than that. Selfishness is just the heart, if you will, and an elephant has many other parts, all interconnected. So throughout the book, we’ll be using “the elephant” to refer not just to human selfishness, but to a whole cluster of related concepts: the fact that we’re competitive social animals fighting for power, status, and sex; the fact that we’re sometimes willing to lie and cheat to get ahead; the fact that we hide some of our motives—and that we do so in order to mislead others. We’ll also occasionally use “the elephant” to refer to our hidden motives themselves. To acknowledge any of these concepts is to hint at the rest of them. They’re all part of the same package, subject to the same taboo.
Box 2: Our Thesis in Plain English 1.People are judging us all the time. They want to know whether we’ll make good friends, allies, lovers, or leaders. And one of the important things they’re judging is our motives. Why do we behave the way we do? Do we have others’ best interests at heart, or are we entirely selfish? 2.Because others are judging us, we’re eager to look good. So we emphasize our pretty motives and downplay our ugly ones. It’s not lying, exactly, but neither is it perfectly honest. 3.This applies not just to our words, but also to our thoughts, which might seem odd. Why can’t we be honest with ourselves? The answer is that our thoughts aren’t as private as we imagine. In many ways, conscious thought is a rehearsal of what we’re ready to say to others. As Trivers puts it, “We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.”8 4.In some areas of life, especially polarized ones like politics, we’re quick to point out when others’ motives are more selfish than they claim. But in other areas, like medicine, we prefer to believe that almost all of us have pretty motives. In such cases, we can all be quite wrong, together, about what drives our behavior.
The logic of this isn’t particularly hard to understand, but the implications can be surprising. As Geoffrey Miller argues in The Mating Mind, “Our minds evolved not just as survival machines, but as courtship machines,” and many of our most distinctive behaviors serve reproductive rather than survival ends. There are good reasons to believe, for example, that our capacities for visual art, music, storytelling, and humor function in large part as elaborate mating displays, not unlike the peacock’s tail.
Another way to think about prestige is that it’s your “price” on the market for friendship and association (just as sexual attractiveness is your “price” on the mating market). As in all markets, price is driven by supply and demand. We all have a similar (and highly limited) supply of friendship to offer to others, but the demand for our friendship varies greatly from person to person. Highly prestigious individuals have many claims on their time and attention, many would-be friends lining up at their door. Less prestigious individuals, meanwhile, have fewer claims on their time and attention, and must therefore offer their friendship at a discount. And everyone, with an eye to raising their price, strives to make themselves more attractive as a friend or associate—by learning new skills, acquiring more and better tools, and polishing their charms. Now, our competitions for prestige often produce positive side effects such as art, science, and technological innovation.16 But the prestige-seeking itself is more nearly a zero-sum game, which helps explain why we sometimes feel pangs of envy at even a close friend’s success.
When we evaluate others, we’re trying to estimate their value as partners, and so we’re looking for certain traits or qualities. In our mates, we want those with good genes who will make good parents. In our friends and associates, we want those who have skills, resources, and compatible personalities—and the more loyal they are to us, the better. And we’re looking for similar qualities in our political allies, since they’re basically friends chosen for a specific purpose. At the same time, in order to attract partners, we need to advertise our own traits—the same ones we’re looking for in others. By displaying, accentuating, and even exaggerating these desirable traits, we raise our own value, helping to ensure that we’ll be chosen by more and/or higher-quality mates, more and/or higher-status friends, and better coalitions.
Note that we don’t always need to be conscious of the signals we’re sending and receiving. We may have evolved an instinct to make art, for example, as a means of advertising our artistic skills and free time (survival surplus)—but that’s not necessarily what we’re thinking about as we whittle a sculpture from a piece of driftwood. We may simply be thinking about the beauty of the sculpture (for more on art, see Chapter 11). Nevertheless, the deeper logic of many of our strangest and most unique behaviors may lie in their value as signals.30
However—and this was Axelrod’s great contribution—the model can be made to work in favor of the good guys with one simple addition: a norm of punishing anyone who doesn’t punish others. Axelrod called this the “meta-norm.” The meta-norm highlights how groups need to create an incentive for good citizens to punish cheaters. Whether that incentive comes by way of the stick or the carrot doesn’t really matter. Axelrod framed it in terms of the stick, in that not standing up to a cheater is itself a punishable act. But a group may fare just as well by positively rewarding people who help to punish cheaters. Many other scientists have replicated Axelrod’s results in the lab, with human subjects playing various games that allow players to cheat and punish each other. And there’s good evidence that many real communities employ a version of the meta-norm. In the United States, for example, it’s unlawful to witness a crime without reporting it.
Everybody cheats. Let’s just get that out up front; there’s no use denying it. Yes, some people cheat less than others, and we ought to admire them for it. But no one makes it through life without cutting a few corners. There are simply too many rules and norms, and to follow them all would be inhuman. Most of us honor the big, important rules, like those prohibiting robbery, arson, rape, and murder. But we routinely violate small and middling norms. We lie, jaywalk, take office supplies from work, fudge numbers on our tax returns, make illegal U-turns, suck up to our bosses, have extramarital affairs, and use recreational drugs. Your two coauthors, for example, will both confess to having committed more than half of these minor crimes.1
The most basic way to get away with something—whether you’re stealing, cheating on your spouse, or just picking your nose—is simply to avoid being seen. One of our norm-evasion adaptations, then, is to be highly attuned to the gaze of others, especially when it’s directed at us. Eyes that are looking straight at us jump out from a crowd.5 Across dozens of experiments, participants who were being watched—even just by cartoon eyes—were less likely to cheat.6 People also cheat less in full (vs. dim) light,7 or when the concept of God, the all-seeing watcher, is activated in their minds.8
The solution is a little euphemism: “Want to come up and see my etchings?” Both parties have a pretty clear idea of what’s being suggested, but crucially their knowledge doesn’t rise to the status of common knowledge. He doesn’t know that she knows that he was offering sex—at least not with certainty. Still a question lingers: If both parties understand the proposition, why does it matter whether it’s common knowledge? One way to model scenarios like this is to imagine a cast of peers waiting in the wings, eager to hear what happened on the date. This is the audience, real or imagined, in front of whom the couple is performing an act of cryptic communication, hoping to exchange a message—an offer of sex along with an answer—without its becoming common knowledge. Neither party needs to be consciously aware that they’re performing in front of this imagined cast; this is simply how people, with years of practice, learn to act in order to save face. An imagined audience—whether eavesdropping or learning about the scenario secondhand—is also a good way to model other norm-violation scenarios. When a crime boss says to one of his henchmen, “Take care of our friend over there,” he’s performing in front of a law enforcement system that might question him or his henchman at some later date. Of course, in talking this way, the boss accepts a small risk that he’ll be misunderstood. Some of his “kill” orders won’t be carried out, while other innocuous orders may be accidentally interpreted as orders to kill. This is the cost of doing business in the shadows.
We sometimes flatter ourselves that abusive CEOs and philandering presidents are a different breed of person from down-to-earth folks like us. But at least in the ways we evade norms, the difference is mostly a matter of degree. Celebrities may get away with violating big norms (occasionally even murder), but if a norm is weak enough, even everyday folks like us can violate it with impunity. So we brag and boast, shirk and slack off, gossip and badmouth people behind their backs. We undermine our supposed teammates, suck up to our bosses, ogle and flirt inappropriately, play politics, and manipulate others for our own ends. In short, we’re selfish. Not irredeemably selfish, just slightly more than our highest standards of behavior demand. But of course we don’t flaunt our selfishness; we don’t gossip and shirk completely out in the open. (Even JFK had the decency to cheat on Jackie only behind closed doors.) When we brag, for example, we try to be subtle about it. It’s crass to quote one’s IQ or salary, but if those numbers are worth bragging about, we typically find a way to let our peers know—perhaps by using big, show-offy words or by buying conspicuous luxuries. We name-drop and #humblebrag. We show off our bodies by wearing flattering clothes. Or we let others boast on our behalves, as when we’re being introduced as speakers. We show similar discretion when we play small-scale politics, maneuvering for personal advantage in settings like church, the office, or our peer groups. We try to cultivate allies and undermine those who aren’t allied with us; we angle to take credit for successes and avoid blame for failures; we lobby for policies that will benefit us, even when we have little reason to believe those policies will benefit the entire group. We tell people what they want to hear. But of course we don’t do this out in the open. We don’t say to our enemies, “I’m trying to undermine you right now.” Instead we cloak our actions in justifications that appeal to what’s best for everyone.
“Deception,” says the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, “is a very deep feature of life. It occurs at all levels—from gene to cell to individual to group—and it seems, by any and all means, necessary.” And our species, of course, is no exception. Suffice it to say that deception is simply part of human nature—a fact that makes perfect sense in light of the competitive (selfish) logic of evolution. Deception allows us to reap certain benefits without paying the full costs. And yes, all societies have norms against lying, but that just means we have to work a little harder not to get caught. Instead of telling bald-faced lies, maybe we spin or cherry-pick the truth. So far, so obvious. But here’s the puzzle: we don’t just deceive others; we also deceive ourselves. Our minds habitually distort or ignore critical information in ways that seem, on the face of it, counterproductive. Our mental processes act in bad faith, perverting or degrading our picture of the world. In common speech, we might say that someone is engaged in “wishful thinking” or is “burying her head in the sand”—or, to use a more colorful phrase, that she’s “drinking her own Kool-Aid.”
In his book The Folly of Fools, Trivers refers to self-deception as the “striking contradiction” at the heart of our mental lives. Our brains “seek out information,” he says, “and then act to destroy it”: On the one hand, our sense organs have evolved to give us a marvelously detailed and accurate view of the outside world . . . exactly as we would expect if truth about the outside world helps us to navigate it more effectively. But once this information arrives in our brains, it is often distorted and biased to our conscious minds. We deny the truth to ourselves. We project onto others traits that are in fact true of ourselves—and then attack them! We repress painful memories, create completely false ones, rationalize immoral behavior, act repeatedly to boost positive self-opinion, and show a suite of ego-defense mechanisms.3 We deceive ourselves in many different areas of life. One domain is sports. Consider how a boxer might purposely ignore an injury during a fight, or how a marathon runner might trick herself into thinking she’s less fatigued than she “really” is.4 A study of competitive swimmers found that those who were more prone to self-deception performed better during an important qualifying race.5 Another domain is personal health. You might suppose, given how important health is to our happiness (not to mention our longevity), it would be a domain to which we’d bring our cognitive A-game. Unfortunately, study after study shows that we often distort or ignore critical information about our own health in order to seem healthier than we really are.6 One study, for example, gave patients a cholesterol test, then followed up to see what they remembered months later. Patients with the worst test results—who were judged the most at-risk of cholesterol-related health problems—were most likely to misremember their test results, and they remembered their results as better (i.e., healthier) than they actually were.7 Smokers, but not nonsmokers, choose not to hear about the dangerous effects of smoking.8 People systematically underestimate their risk of contracting HIV (human immunodeficiency virus),9 and avoid taking HIV tests.10 We also deceive ourselves about our driving skills, social skills, leadership skills, and athletic ability.11
Sigmund Freud, along with his daughter Anna Freud, famously championed this school of thought. The Freuds saw self-deception as a (largely unconscious) coping strategy—a way for the ego to protect itself, especially against unwanted impulses.12 We repress painful thoughts and memories, for example, by pushing them down into the subconscious. Or we deny our worst attributes and project them onto others. Or we rationalize, substituting good motives for ugly ones (more on this in Chapter 6). According to the Freuds, the mind employs these defense mechanisms to reduce anxiety and other kinds of psychic pain. Later psychologists, following Otto Fenichel in the mid-20th century, reinterpreted the purpose of defense mechanisms as preserving one’s self-esteem.13 This has become the polite, common-sense explanation—that we deceive ourselves because we can’t handle the truth. Our egos and self-esteem are fragile and need to be shielded from distressing information, like the fact that we probably won’t win the upcoming competition, or the fact that we may be sick with some lurking cancer.
In a segment for the podcast Radiolab, Harold Sackeim—one of the first psychologists to experimentally study self-deception—explained it this way: SACKEIM: [Depressed people] see all the pain in the world, how horrible people are with each other, and they tell you everything about themselves: what their weaknesses are, what terrible things they’ve done to other people. And the problem is they’re right. And so maybe the way we help people is to help them be wrong. ROBERT KRULWICH [Radiolab host]: It might just be that hiding ideas that we know to be true, hiding those ideas from ourselves, is what we need to get by. SACKEIM: We’re so vulnerable to being hurt that we’re given the capacity to distort as a gift.14 Poetic, maybe, but this Old School perspective ignores an important objection: Why would Nature, by way of evolution,15 design our brains this way? Information is the lifeblood of the human brain; ignoring or distorting it isn’t something to be undertaken lightly. If the goal is to preserve self-esteem, a more efficient way to go about it is simply to make the brain’s self-esteem mechanism stronger, more robust to threatening information. Similarly, if the goal is to reduce anxiety, the straightforward solution is to design the brain to feel less anxiety for a given amount of stress.
Where the Old School saw self-deception as primarily inward-facing, defensive, and (like the general editing the map) largely self-defeating, the New School sees it as primarily outward-facing, manipulative, and ultimately self-serving.
Resolving this tension turns out to be straightforward. Classical decision theory has it right: there’s no value in sabotaging yourself per se. The value lies in convincing other players that you’ve sabotaged yourself. In the game of chicken, you don’t win because you’re unable to steer, but because your opponent believes you’re unable to steer. Similarly, as a kidnapping victim, you don’t suffer because you’ve seen your kidnapper’s face; you suffer when the kidnapper thinks you’ve seen his face. If you could somehow see his face without giving him any idea that you’d done so, you’d probably be better off.
The point is, our minds aren’t as private as we like to imagine. Other people have partial visibility into what we’re thinking. Faced with the translucency of our own minds, then, self-deception is often the most robust way to mislead others. It’s not technically a lie (because it’s not conscious or deliberate), but it has a similar effect. “We hide reality from our conscious minds,” says Trivers, “the better to hide it from onlookers.”25
What this means for self-deception is that it’s possible for our brains to maintain a relatively accurate set of beliefs in systems tasked with evaluating potential actions, while keeping those accurate beliefs hidden from the systems (like consciousness) involved in managing social impressions. In other words, we can act on information that isn’t available to our verbal, conscious egos. And conversely, we can believe something with our conscious egos without necessarily making that information available to the systems charged with coordinating our behavior.
Self-discretion is perhaps the most important and subtle mind game that we play with ourselves in the service of manipulating others. This is our mental habit of giving less psychological prominence to potentially damaging information. It differs from the most blatant forms of self-deception, in which we actively lie to ourselves (and believe our own lies). It also differs from strategic ignorance, in which we try our best not to learn potentially dangerous information. Picture the mind as a society of little modules, systems, and subselves chattering away among themselves. This chatter is largely what constitutes our inner mental life, both conscious and unconscious. Self-discretion, then, consists of discretion among different brain parts.
Self-discretion can be very subtle. When we push a thought “deep down” or to the “back of our minds,” it’s a way of being discreet with potentially damaging information. When we spend more time and attention dwelling on positive, self-flattering information, and less time and attention dwelling on shameful information, that’s self-discretion. Think about that time you wrote an amazing article for the school paper, or gave that killer wedding speech. Did you feel a flush of pride? That’s your brain telling you, “This information is good for us! Let’s keep it prominent, front and center.” Dwell on it, bask in its warm glow. Reward those neural pathways in the hope of resurfacing those proud memories whenever they’re relevant. Now think about the time you mistreated your significant other, or when you were caught stealing as a child, or when you botched a big presentation at work. Feel the pang of shame? That’s your brain telling you not to dwell on that particular information. Flinch away, hide from it, pretend it’s not there. Punish those neural pathways, so the information stays as discreet as possible.44
What these studies demonstrate is just how effortlessly the brain can rationalize its behavior. Rationalization, sometimes known to neuroscientists as confabulation, is the production of fabricated stories made up without any conscious intention to deceive. They’re not lies, exactly, but neither are they the honest truth. Humans rationalize about all sorts of things: beliefs, memories, statements of “fact” about the outside world. But few things seem as easy for us to rationalize as our own motives. When we make up stories about things outside our minds, we open ourselves up to fact-checking. People can argue with us: “Actually, that’s not what happened.” But when we make up stories about our own motives, it’s much harder for others to question us—outside of a psychology lab, at least. And as we saw in Chapter 3, we have strong incentives to portray our motives in a flattering light, especially when they’re the subject of norm enforcement.
Even more dramatic examples of rationalization can be elicited from patients suffering from disability denial,7 a rare disorder that occasionally results from a right-hemisphere stroke. In a typical case, the stroke will leave the patient’s left arm paralyzed, but—here’s the weird part—the patient will completely deny that anything is wrong with his arm, and will manufacture all sorts of strange (counterfeit) excuses for why it’s just sitting there, limp and lifeless. The neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran recalls some of the conceptual gymnastics his patients have undertaken in this situation: “Oh, doctor, I didn’t want to move my arm because I have arthritis in my shoulder and it hurts.” Or this is from another patient: “Oh, the medical students have been prodding me all day and I don’t really feel like moving my arm just now.” When asked to raise both hands, one man raised his right hand high into the air and said, when he detected my gaze locked onto his motionless left hand, “Um, as you can see, I’m steadying myself with my left hand in order to raise my right.”8 Apart from their bizarre denials, these patients are otherwise mentally healthy and intelligent human beings. But no amount of cross-examination can persuade them of what’s plainly true—that their left arms are paralyzed. They will confabulate and rationalize and forge counterfeit reasons until they’re blue in the face. Meanwhile, the rest of us—healthy, whole-brained people—are confronted every day with questions that ask us to explain our behavior. Why did you storm out of the meeting? Why did you break up with your boyfriend? Why haven’t you done the dishes? Why did you vote for Barack Obama? Why are you a Christian? Each of these questions demands a reason, and in most cases we dutifully oblige. But how many of our explanations are legitimate, and how many are counterfeit? Just how pervasive is our tendency to rationalize?
Box 6: “Press Secretary” When we capitalize “Press Secretary,” we’re referring to the brain module responsible for explaining our actions, typically to third parties. The lowercase version of “press secretary” refers to the job held by someone in relation to a president or prime minister. The idea here is that there’s a structural similarity between what the interpreter module does for the brain and what a traditional press secretary does for a president or prime minister. Here’s Haidt from The Righteous Mind: If you want to see post hoc reasoning [i.e., rationalization] in action, just watch the press secretary of a president or prime minister take questions from reporters. No matter how bad the policy, the secretary will find some way to praise or defend it. Reporters then challenge assertions and bring up contradictory quotes from the politician, or even quotes straight from the press secretary on previous days. Sometimes you’ll hear an awkward pause as the secretary searches for the right words, but what you’ll never hear is: “Hey, that’s a great point! Maybe we should rethink this policy.”
Above all, it’s the job of our brain’s Press Secretary to avoid acknowledging our darker motives—to tiptoe around the elephant in the brain. Just as a president’s press secretary should never acknowledge that the president is pursuing a policy in order to get reelected or to appease his financial backers, our brain’s Press Secretary will be reluctant to admit that we’re doing things for purely personal gain, especially when that gain may come at the expense of others. To the extent that we have such motives, the Press Secretary would be wise to remain strategically ignorant of them. What’s more—and this is where things might start to get uncomfortable—there’s a very real sense in which we are the Press Secretaries within our minds. In other words, the parts of the mind that we identify with, the parts we think of as our conscious selves (“I,” “myself,” “my conscious ego”), are the ones responsible for strategically spinning the truth for an external audience. This realization flies in the face of common sense. In everyday life, there’s a strong bias toward treating the self as the mind’s ultimate decision-maker—the iron-fisted monarch, or what Dennett calls the mind’s Boss or Central Executive.12 As Harry Truman said about his presidency, “The buck stops here”—and we often imagine the same is true of the self. But the conclusion from the past 40 years of social psychology is that the self acts less like an autocrat and more like a press secretary. In many ways, its job—our job—isn’t to make decisions, but simply to defend them. “You are not the king of your brain,” says Steven Kaas. “You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going, ‘A most judicious choice, sire.’ “
Wilson writes about the “adaptive unconscious,” the parts of the mind which lie outside the scope of conscious awareness, but which nevertheless give rise to many of our judgments, emotions, thoughts, and even behaviors. “To the extent that people’s responses are caused by the adaptive unconscious,” writes Wilson, “they do not have privileged access to the causes and must infer them.” He goes on: Despite the vast amount of information people have, their explanations about the causes of their responses are no more accurate than the explanations of a complete stranger who lives in the same culture.14
This, then, is the key sleight-of-hand at the heart of our psychosocial problems: We pretend we’re in charge, both to others and even to ourselves, but we’re less in charge than we think. We pose as privileged insiders, when in fact we’re often making the same kind of educated guesses that any informed outsider could make. We claim to know our own minds, when, as Wilson says, we’re more like “strangers to ourselves.”
One of the striking facts about social psychology is how many experiments rely on an element of misdirection. It’s almost as if the entire field is based on the art of distracting the Press Secretary in order to expose its rationalizations.
We, your two coauthors, can also give examples from our own lives. Robin, for example, has often said his main goal in academic life is to get his ideas “out there” in the name of intellectual progress. But then he began to realize that whenever he spotted his ideas “out there” without proper attribution, he had mixed feelings. In part, he felt annoyed and cheated. If his main goal was actually to advance the world’s knowledge, he should have been celebrating the wider circulation of his ideas, whether or not he got credit for them. But the more honest conclusion is that he wants individual prestige just as much as, if not more than, impersonal intellectual progress. Shortly after his 23rd birthday, Kevin was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. For a while he was extremely reluctant to talk about it (except among family and close friends), a reluctance he rationalized by telling himself that he’s simply a “private person” who doesn’t like sharing private medical details with the world. Later he started following a very strict diet to treat his disease—a diet that eliminates processed foods and refined carbohydrates. Eating so healthy quickly became a point of pride, and suddenly Kevin found himself perfectly happy to share his diagnosis, since it also gave him an opportunity to brag about his diet. Being a “private person” about medical details went right out the window—and now, look, here he is sharing his diagnosis (and diet!) with perfect strangers in this book. These two examples illustrate one of the most effective ways to rationalize, which is telling half-truths. In other words, we cherry-pick our most acceptable, prosocial reasons while concealing the uglier ones. Robin really does want to get his ideas out there, and Kevin really is a private person. But these two explanations aren’t the full story.
Box 8: Signals versus Cues In biology, a signal is a behavior or trait used by one animal, the “sender,” to change the behavior of another animal, the “receiver.”9 Some signals are deceptive and used to manipulate the receiver, but most are honest, providing benefit to both senders and receivers.10 A peacock’s luxurious tail, for example, conveys information about the health and fitness of the male sender to one or more female receivers, and both parties benefit by using the signal to find mates. A cue is similar to a signal, in that it conveys information, except that it benefits only the receiver.11 In other words, a cue conveys information the sender might wish to conceal. Sometimes we refer to cues in the human realm as “tells”—like in the poker movie Rounders, when one character unconsciously twists open an Oreo whenever he has a winning hand. Other cues or tells can include sweaty palms (indicating nervousness), shortness of breath (indicating windedness from exertion), and pacifying behaviors such as rubbing one’s neck (indicating anxiety or discomfort).12 Cues are important for many students of body language, especially those—like poker players or police interrogators—who are hoping to read minds and sniff out deception. In this chapter, however, we’re concerned with (honest) signals, that is, traits or behaviors that help both senders and receivers coordinate their actions.
Body language, however, is mostly not arbitrary.14 Instead, nonverbal behaviors are meaningfully, functionally related to the messages they’re conveying. We show emotional excitement, for example, by being physically excited: making noise, waving our arms, dancing up and down.
“It has always been my impression,” says Joe Navarro, a Federal Bureau of Investigation interrogator and body-language expert, “that presidents often go to Camp David to accomplish in polo shirts what they can’t seem to accomplish in business suits forty miles away at the White House. By unveiling themselves ventrally (with the removal of coats) they are saying, ‘I am open to you.’ ”37
High-status individuals are also willing to call more attention to themselves. When you’re feeling meek, you generally want to be a wallflower. But when you’re feeling confident, you want the whole world to notice. In the animal kingdom, this “Look at me!” strategy is known as aposematism.44 It’s a quintessentially honest signal. Those who call attention to themselves are more likely to get attacked—unless they’re strong enough to defend themselves. If you’re the biggest male lion on the savanna, go ahead, roar your heart out. The same principle explains why poisonous animals, like coral reef snakes and poison dart frogs, wear bright warning colors. They may not look too tough, but they’re packing heat. In the human realm, aposematism underlies a wide variety of behaviors, such as wearing bright clothes, sparkling jewelry, or shoes that clack loudly on the pavement. Wearing prominent collars, headdresses, and elaborate up-dos and swaggering down the street with a blaring boom box all imply the same thing: “I’m not afraid of calling attention to myself, because I’m powerful.”
Social status influences how we make eye contact, not just while we listen, but also when we speak. In fact, one of the best predictors of dominance is the ratio of “eye contact while speaking” to “eye contact while listening.” Psychologists call this the visual dominance ratio. Imagine yourself out to lunch with a coworker. When it’s your turn to talk, you spend some fraction of the time looking into your coworker’s eyes (and the rest of the time looking away). Similarly, when it’s your turn to listen, you spend some fraction of the time making eye contact. If you make eye contact for the same fraction of time while speaking and listening, your visual dominance ratio will be 1.0, indicative of high dominance. If you make less eye contact while speaking, however, your ratio will be less than 1.0 (typically hovering around 0.6), indicative of low dominance.53 In Subliminal, Mlodinow summarizes some of these findings:54 What is so striking about the data is not just that we subliminally adjust our gazing behavior to match our place on the hierarchy but that we do it so consistently, and with numerical precision. Here is a sample of the data: when speaking to each other, ROTC officers exhibited ratios of 1.06, while ROTC cadets speaking to officers had ratios of 0.61;55 undergraduates in an introductory psychology course scored 0.92 when talking to a person they believed to be a high school senior who did not plan to go to college but 0.59 when talking to a person they believed to be a college chemistry honor student accepted into a prestigious medical school;56 expert men speaking to women about a subject in their own field scored 0.98, while men talking to expert women about the women’s field, 0.61; expert women speaking to nonexpert men scored 1.04, and nonexpert women speaking to expert men scored 0.54.57 These studies were all performed on Americans. The numbers probably vary among cultures, but the phenomenon probably doesn’t.
In casual conversation, listeners have a mixture of these two motives. To some extent we care about the text, the information itself, but we also care about the subtext, the speaker’s value as a potential ally. In this way, every conversation is like a (mutual) job interview, where each of us is “applying” for the role of friend, lover, or leader (see Box 12.). Conversation, therefore, looks on the surface like an exercise in sharing information, but subtextually, it’s a way for speakers to show off their wit, perception, status, and intelligence, and (at the same time) for listeners to find speakers they want to team up with. These are two of our biggest hidden motives in conversation.
When William Shakespeare writes, “All the world’s a stage,” the poem tells us not just about the world and its staginess, but also about Shakespeare himself—his linguistic virtuosity and possibly, by extension, his genetic fitness. Conversational and oratorical skills are also prized attributes of leaders around the world. Of course, we also value leaders who are brave, generous, physically strong, and politically well connected—but speaking ability ranks up there in importance. We rarely join companies where the CEO is the least articulate person in the room, nor do we routinely elect mumbling, stuttering, scatter-brained politicians. We want leaders who are sharp and can prove it to us.26 “In most or all societies,” writes Robbins Burling, “those who rise to positions of leadership tend to be recognized as having high linguistic skills.”27 The competition to show off as a potential lover or leader also helps explain why language often seems more elaborate than necessary to communicate ideas—what the linguist John Locke calls “verbal plumage.”28 Plain speech just isn’t as impressive as elevated diction.
This view of talking—as a way of showing off one’s “backpack”—explains the puzzles we encountered earlier, the ones that the reciprocal-exchange theory had trouble with. For example, it explains why we see people jockeying to speak rather than sitting back and “selfishly” listening—because the spoils of conversation don’t lie primarily in the information being exchanged, but rather in the subtextual value of finding good allies and advertising oneself as an ally. And in order to get credit in this game, you have to speak up; you have to show off your “tools.” It also explains why people don’t keep track of conversational debts—because there is no debt. The act of speaking is a reward unto itself, at least insofar as your remarks are appreciated. You can share information with 10 or 100 people at once, confident that if you speak well, you’ll be rewarded at the subtextual level.
If we return to the backpack analogy, we can see why relevance is so important. If you’re interested primarily in trading, you might ask, “What do you have in your backpack that could be useful to me?” And if your partner produces a tool that you’ve never seen, you’ll be grateful to have it (and you’ll try to return the favor). But anyone can produce a curiosity or two. The real test is whether your ally can consistently produce tools that are both new to you and relevant to the situations you face. “I’m building a birdhouse,” you mention. “Oh, great,” he responds, “here’s a saw for cutting wood,” much to your delight. “But how will I fix the wood together?” you ask. “Don’t worry, I also have wood glue.” Awesome! “But now I need something to hold birdseed,” you say hopefully. Your ally thinks for a minute, rummaging through his backpack, and finally produces the perfect plastic feeding trough. Now you’re seriously impressed. He seems to have all the tools you need, right when you need them. His backpack, you infer, must be chock-full of useful stuff. And while you could—and will—continue to engage him in useful acts of trading, you’re far more eager to team up with him, to get continued access to that truly impressive backpack of his.29 We want allies who have an entire Walmart in their backpacks, not just a handful of trinkets.30
Thus, speaking well is one way to increase our prestige—but of course there are many other ways. In fact, one of the most important “tools” that people have is the respect and support of others. So you can gain prestige not just by directly showing impressive abilities yourself (e.g., by speaking well), but also by showing that other impressive people have chosen you as an ally. You might get this kind of “reflected” or second-order prestige by the fact that an impressive person is willing to talk to you, or (even more) if they’ve chosen to reveal important things to you before revealing them to others. Even listeners stand to gain prestige, then, simply by association with prestigious speakers.
There are other clues that we aren’t mainly using the news to be good citizens (despite our high-minded rhetoric). For example, voters tend to show little interest in the kinds of information most useful for voting, including details about specific policies, the arguments for and against them, and the positions each politician has taken on each policy. Instead, voters seem to treat elections more like horse races, rooting for or against different candidates rather than spending much effort to figure out who should win. (See Chapter 16 for a more detailed discussion on politics.) We also show surprisingly little interest in the accuracy of our news sources. While prices in financial and betting markets can plausibly give very timely, accurate, and unbiased information, we continue to let legal obstacles hinder such information on most topics outside of business.36 One of us (Robin) was told by a reliable source a few years ago that a major media firm based in Washington, D.C., had several people working for several months on a project to score prominent pundits on the accuracy of their predictions. The project was canceled, however, soon after results came back showing how depressingly inaccurate most pundits actually are. If consumers truly cared about pundit accuracy, there might well be more “exposés” like this—the better for us to find and pay attention to those rare pundits whose predictions tend to come true. Instead, we seem content with just the veneer of confidence and expertise, as long as our pundits are engaging, articulate, connected to us, and have respected pedigrees.
“It still seems remarkable to me how often people bypass what are more important subjects to work on less important ones.”—Robert Trivers37
Like news and personal conversations, academic “conversations” are full of people showing off to impress others.39 Even if they sometimes claim otherwise, researchers seem overwhelmingly motivated to win academic prestige. They do this by working with prestigious mentors, getting degrees from prestigious institutions, publishing articles in prestigious journals, getting proposals funded by prestigious sponsors, and then using all of these to get and keep jobs with prestigious institutions. As Miller points out, “Scientists compete for the chance to give talks at conferences, not for the chance to listen.”40 But that’s all on the supply side, to explain why academics are motivated to produce research. What of the demand for research? Here we also see a preference for prestige, rather than a strict focus on the underlying value of the research. To most sponsors and consumers of research, the “text” of the research (what it says about reality and how important and useful that information is) seems to matter less than the “subtext” (what the research says about the prestige of the researcher, and how some of that glory might reflect back on the sponsor or consumer).
In case it’s not clear by now, this chapter helps explain Kevin and Robin’s “hidden” motives for writing and publishing this book. To put it baldly, we want to impress you; we’re seeking prestige. We hope the many things we’ve said so far testify to the size and quality of our “backpacks.” As an academic, Robin will be judged by the number and influence of his publications, and we hope this book will serve as a nice line item on his resume. Meanwhile, as an academic outsider, Kevin has undertaken this book largely as a vanity project. It’s unlikely to help him much in his engineering career, and he could probably have more impact by building software—but he’s always wanted his name on the cover of a book. Of course, this project has also been fun, an excuse to read and discuss many fascinating topics. And we hope readers will enjoy and perhaps profit from the fruits of our labor. But there’s no way we would have done all this work without the hope of garnishing our reputations.48 No doubt we’ve made many trade-offs in service of this motive and at the expense of more prosocial motives like delivering maximum value to our readers. Perhaps the book is too long, for example; speakers do like to speak, after all. Certainly we could have used simpler language in many places, making the book easier to digest, though at the risk of appearing less scholarly. And of course, we could have released this as a free (or cheap) self-published e-book, but we wanted the prestige of a printed book from a respected publisher. We hope you’ll forgive us these trespasses, as we have tried hard not to moralize (too much) about the selfish motives of others.
In 1930, in an essay titled, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction. Observing the breakneck pace of innovation and economic growth during the 19th and early 20th centuries, Keynes reasoned that within the next hundred years, the economy would produce so much stuff, so cheaply and easily, that all our material needs would be satisfied. Workers in the 21st century, then, would be clocking in at less than 15 hours per week, free to dedicate the rest of their time to art, play, friends, and family—in other words, the good life.1 The year 2030 is fast approaching, but clearly we are not on track to meet Keynes’s prediction of a leisure society. In fact, many of us today work nearly as many hours as our great-great-grandparents did a hundred years ago.2 And yet, as many observers have pointed out, even some of the poorest among us live better than kings and queens of yore. So why do we continue working so hard? One of the big answers, as most people realize, is that we’re stuck in a rat race. Or to put it in the terms we’ve been using throughout the book, we’re locked in a game of competitive signaling. No matter how fast the economy grows, there remains a limited supply of sex and social status—and earning and spending money is still a good way to compete for it.3 The idea that we use purchases to flaunt our wealth is known as conspicuous consumption. It’s an accusation that we buy things not so much for purely personal enjoyment as for showing off or “keeping up with the Joneses.” This dynamic has been understood since at least 1899, when Thorstein Veblen published his landmark book The Theory of the Leisure Class.4 It remains, however, an underappreciated idea, and explains a lot more of our consumer behavior than most people realize.
Does anyone really need a 10,000-square-foot house, a $30,000 Patek Philippe watch, or a $500,000 Porsche Carrera GT? Of course not, but the same logic applies to much of your own “luxurious” lifestyle—it’s just harder for you to see.5 Consider taking the perspective of a mother of six from the slums of Kolkata. To her, your spending habits are just as flashy and grotesque as those of a Saudi prince are to you. Do you really need to spend $20(!!) at Olive Garden to have a team of chefs, servers, bussers, and dishwashers cater to your every whim? Twenty dollars may be more than the family in Kolkata spends on food in an entire week. Of course, it doesn’t feel, to you, like conspicuous consumption. But when a friend invites you out to dinner, it’s nice being able to say yes. (If you had to decline because you couldn’t afford to eat out, you might feel a twinge of shame.) And at the end of the meal, when you leave two uneaten breadsticks on the table, it doesn’t feel at all like conspicuous waste. You’re just thinking, “Why…
Discussions of conspicuous consumption often focus on how we use products to signal wealth and social status. But the expressive range is actually much wider. Hybrid owners, for example, probably aren’t trying to advertise their wealth per se. A Prius doesn’t cost much more than a standard combustion car, and doesn’t have the high-end cachet of a BMW or Lexus. Instead, what Prius owners are signaling is their prosocial attitude, that is, their good-neighborliness and responsible citizenship. They’re saying, “I’m willing to forego luxury in order to help the planet.” It’s an act of conspicuous altruism, which we’ll see much more of in Chapter 11, on charitable behavior. Other desirable traits that consumers are keen to signal include the following: •Loyalty to particular subcultures. A Boston Bruins cap says, “I support my local hockey team, and by extension, the entire community of other fans and supporters.” An AC/DC T-shirt says, “I’m aligned with fans of hard rock (and the countercultural values it stands for).” These products function as badges of social membership. •Being cool, trendy, or otherwise “in the know.” Sporting the latest fashions or owning the hottest new tech gadgets shows that you’re plugged into the zeitgeist—that you know what’s going to be popular before everyone else does. •Intelligence. A Rubik’s Cube isn’t just a cheap plastic toy; it’s often an advertisement that its owner knows how to solve it, a skill that requires an analytical mind, not to mention a lot of practice. These, again, are just a few of the many traits our purchases can signal.11 Others include athleticism, ambition, health-consciousness, conformity (or authenticity), youth (or maturity), sexual openness (or modesty), and even political attitudes. Blue jeans, for example, are a symbol of egalitarian values, in part because denim is a cheap, durable, low-maintenance fabric that make wealth and class distinctions harder to detect.12 And it’s not just the products themselves that signal our good traits, but also the stories we tell about how or why we acquired them. Depending on what kind of story we tell, the same product can send different messages about its owner. Consider three people buying the same pair of running shoes. Alice might explain that she bought them because they got excellent reviews from Runner’s World magazine, signaling her conscientiousness as well as her concern for athletic performance. Bob might explain that they were manufactured without child labor, showing his concern for the welfare of others. Carol, meanwhile, might brag about how she got them at a discount, demonstrating her thrift and nose for finding a good deal. The fact that we often discuss our purchases also explains how we’re able to use services and experiences, in addition to material goods, to advertise our desirable qualities.13 A trip to the Galápagos isn’t something we can tote around like a handbag, but by telling frequent stories about the trip, bringing home…
Buying experiences also allows us to demonstrate qualities that we can’t signal as easily with material goods, such as having a sense of adventure or being open to new experiences. A 22-year-old woman who spends six months backpacking across Asia sends a powerful message about her curiosity, open-mindedness, and even courage. Similar (if weaker) signals can be bought for less time and money simply by eating strange foods, watching foreign films, and reading widely. Now, as consumers, we’re aware of many of these signals. We know how to judge people by their purchases, and we’re mostly aware of the impressions our own purchases make on others. But we’re significantly less aware of the extent to which our purchasing decisions are driven by these signaling motives. When clothes fit well, we hardly notice them. But when anything is out of place, it suddenly makes us uncomfortable. So too when things “fit”—or don’t—with our social and self-images. Any deviation from what’s considered appropriate to our stations and subcultures is liable to raise eyebrows, and without a good reason or backstory, we’re unlikely to feel good about it. If you’re a high-powered executive, imagine wearing your old high school backpack to work. If you’re a bohemian artist, imagine bringing the Financial Times to an open-mic night. If you’re a working-class union member, imagine ordering kale salad with tofu at a restaurant. (Please forgive the contrived examples; we hope you get the point.) In cases like these, the discomfort you might feel is a clue to how carefully you’ve constructed your lifestyle to make a particular set of impressions.14
For example, when New Yorkers heard a message from one gubernatorial candidate attacking another candidate, they said it had only a small effect on their personal voting decisions, but estimated that it would have a greater effect on the average New Yorker.24 Davison dubbed this the “third-person effect,” and it goes a long way toward explaining how lifestyle advertising might influence consumers. When Corona runs its “Find Your Beach” ad campaign, it’s not necessarily targeting you directly—because you, naturally, are too savvy to be manipulated by this kind of ad. But it might be targeting you indirectly, by way of your peers.25 If you think the ad will change other people’s perceptions of Corona, then it might make sense for you to buy it, even if you know that a beer is just a beer, not a lifestyle. If you’re invited to a casual backyard barbecue, for example, you’d probably prefer to show up with a beer whose brand image will be appealing to the other guests. In this context, it makes more sense to bring a beer that says, “Let’s chill out,” rather than a beer that says, “Let’s get drunk and wild!” Unless we’re paying careful attention, the third-person effect can be hard to notice. In part, this is because we typically assume that ads are targeting us directly, as individual buyers; indirect influence can be harder to see. But it’s also a mild case of the elephant in the brain, something we’d rather not acknowledge. All else being equal, we prefer to think that we’re buying a product because it’s something we want for ourselves, not because we’re trying to manage our image or manipulate the impressions of our friends. We want to be cool, but we’d rather be seen as naturally, effortlessly cool, rather than someone who’s trying too hard.
To hazard a definition, we’re partial to Ellen Dissanayake’s characterization of art as anything “made special,” that is, not for some functional or practical purpose but for human attention and enjoyment.8 A clay pot, for example, is highly functional, and therefore not “art.” But to the extent that it’s been painted, etched, distinctively shaped, or otherwise embellished with non-functional elements, we will consider it “art.”
If we didn’t recognize its behavior as familiar to our own, the bowerbird would be one of the most astonishing creatures on the planet. Bowerbirds are a family of 20 species scattered across the forests and shrub lands of Australia and New Guinea.16 What’s distinctive about these birds are their eponymous bowers—the elaborate structures built by the males of the species to attract females. Different species build their bowers in different shapes and sizes. Some are long avenue-like walkways flanked by walls of vertically placed sticks. Others are more like a maypole, circular structures propped up against a small sapling. Perhaps most impressive are the expansive gazebo-like bowers built by the humble (10-inch long) Vogelkop bowerbird. These structures tower up to nine feet off the ground, with an opening large enough (as Miller puts it) “for David Attenborough to crawl inside.”17 The zoologists who first encountered these structures couldn’t believe they’d been built by such a tiny bird, assuming instead that the local villagers had built them for their children to play in.18
These bowers serve only a single purpose: they’re built by the males to attract females. Crucially, they aren’t used by the females for laying eggs and raising young. After mating with a male, the female flies off to build her own (much smaller) cup-shaped nest up in a tree, and she raises her chicks entirely on her own, without any help from her mate. From the perspective of the female, then, the male bowerbird exists only to provide his half of the genome. This may seem like a waste. Why doesn’t he help raise his chicks, like the males of so many other bird species? But in fact, the bowerbird male provides more than just cheap sperm; crucially, he provides battle-tested sperm. Sperm that comes with a seal of approval from Mother Nature, certifying that the male in question is physically and (by implication) genetically fit. To construct and decorate a bower, a male must spend most of his free time scouring the forest for materials and arranging them meticulously into place. When his ornaments fade, he must collect new ones. He also needs to defend his bower against attack by his rivals, who are keen to sabotage his structure and steal his more impressive ornaments.19 “During the breeding season,” writes Miller, “males spend virtually all day, every day, building and maintaining their bowers.” The reward for all this effort is more mating opportunities. A successful male bowerbird can mate with as many as 30 females in a single mating season.20 The flip side, of course, is that some males with less-impressive bowers don’t attract any females, and as a result their inferior genes don’t get passed along to the next generation.
But the bigger difference is that human art is more than just a courtship display, that is, an advertisement of the artist’s value as a potential mate. It also functions as a general-purpose fitness display, that is, an advertisement of the artist’s health, energy, vigor, coordination, and overall fitness.25 Fitness displays can be used to woo mates, of course, but they also serve other purposes like attracting allies or intimidating rivals.26 And humans use art for all of these things. In One Thousand and One Nights, for example, Scheherazade uses her artful storytelling to stave off execution and win the affections of the king. Maya Angelou, in contrast, managed not to woo Bill Clinton with her poetry, but rather to impress him—so much so that he invited her to perform at his presidential inauguration in 1993.
this motive.27 Humans, as we’ve seen many times throughout the book, are adept at acting on unconscious motives, especially when the motive in question (e.g., showing off) is antisocial and norm-violating. What’s important isn’t whether we’re aware that we’re using art as a fitness display, but rather the fact that art works as a fitness display.
The argument we’re making in this chapter is simply that “showing off” is one of the important motives we have for making art, and that many details of our artistic instincts have been shaped substantially by this motive.
In contrast, in the fitness-display theory, extrinsic properties are crucial to our experience of art. As a fitness display, art is largely a statement about the artist, a proof of his or her virtuosity. And here it’s often the extrinsic properties that make the difference between art that’s impressive, and which therefore succeeds for both artist and consumer, and art that falls flat. If a work of art is physically (intrinsically) beautiful, but was made too easily (like if a painting was copied from a photograph), we’re likely to judge it as much less valuable than a similar work that required greater skill to produce. One study, for example, found that consumers appreciate the same artwork less when they’re told it was made by multiple artists instead of a single artist—because they’re assessing the work by how much effort went into it, rather than simply by the final result.29
Imagine that one of your friends, an artist, invites you over to see her latest piece. “It’s a sculpture of sorts,” she says. “Smooth swirls punctuated by sharp spikes. Rich pinks and oranges. Pretty abstract, but I think you’ll like it.” It sounds interesting, so you drop by her workshop, and there, perched on a pedestal in the center of the room, is the sculpture. It’s a delicate seashell-looking thing, and your friend is right, it’s beautiful. But as you move in for a closer look, you begin to wonder if it might actually be a seashell. Did she just pick it up off the beach, or did she somehow make it herself? This question is now absolutely central to your appreciation of this “sculpture.” Here your perceptual experience is fixed; whatever its provenance, the thing on the pedestal is clearly pleasing to the eye. But its value as art hinges entirely on the artist’s technique. If she found it on the beach: meh. If she used a 3D printer: cool. And if she made it by manually chiseling it out of marble: whoa!
“We find attractive,” says Miller, “those things that could have been produced only by people with attractive, high-fitness qualities such as health, energy, endurance, hand–eye coordination, fine motor control, intelligence, creativity, access to rare materials, the ability to learn difficult skills, and lots of free time.”32 Artists, in turn, often respond to this incentive by using techniques that are more difficult or demanding, but which don’t improve the intrinsic properties of the final product. “From an evolutionary point of view,” writes Miller, “the fundamental challenge facing artists is to demonstrate their fitness by making something that lower-fitness competitors could not make, thus proving themselves more socially and sexually attractive.”
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, when most items were made by hand, consumers unequivocally valued technical perfection in their art objects. Paintings and sculptures, for example, were prized for their realism, that is, how accurately they depicted their subject matter. Realism did two things for the viewer: it provided a rare and enjoyable sensory experience (intrinsic properties), and it demonstrated the artist’s virtuosity (extrinsic properties). There was no conflict between these two agendas. This was true across a variety of art forms and (especially) crafts.
What’s “missing” from the forager’s experience is nowhere to be found in the spoons themselves, as physical objects. The key facts, so relevant to modern consumers, are entirely extrinsic to the spoons. We know that aluminum is common and cheap, while silver is rare and precious. And we know that factory-made goods are available to everyone, while only the wealthy can afford one-of-a-kind goods handcrafted by loving artisans. Once these key facts are known, savvy consumers—those with refinement and taste—quickly learn to value everything about the silver spoon that differentiates it from its more vulgar counterpart, imperfections and all.
“In response,” writes Miller, “painters invented new genres based on new, non-representational aesthetics: impressionism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, abstraction. Signs of handmade authenticity became more important than representational skill. The brush-stroke became an end in itself.”39
The fitness-display theory explains why. Art originally evolved to help us advertise our survival surplus and, from the consumer’s perspective, to gauge the survival surplus of others. By distilling time and effort into something non-functional, an artist effectively says, “I’m so confident in my survival that I can afford to waste time and energy.”
Discernment helps us answer a question we’re often asking ourselves as we navigate the world: “Which way is high status?” Like the female bowerbird, we use art as one of our criteria for choosing mates (and teammates). But without the ability to distinguish “good” art from “bad” art, we run the risk of admiring less fit, lower-status artists. So just as the female bowerbird needs to inspect all the local bowers to improve her discernment, humans also need to consume a lot of art in order to calibrate our judgments, to learn which things are high status.
We spend an incredible amount of our leisure time refining our critical faculties in this way. Rarely are we satisfied simply to sit back and passively enjoy art (or any other type of human achievement for that matter). Instead we lean forward and take an active role in our experiences. We’re eager to evaluate art, reflect on it, criticize it, calibrate our criticisms with others, and push ourselves to new frontiers of discernment. And we do this even in art forms we have no intention of practicing ourselves. For every novelist, there are 100 readers who care passionately about fiction, but have no plans ever to write a novel.
Overall, no more than 13 percent11 of private American charity goes to helping those who seem to need it most: the global poor.
The division of labor is economically efficient, in charity as in business. Instead, in most modern cities of the world, we can observe highly trained lawyers, doctors, and their husbands and wives giving up their time to work in soup kitchens for the homeless or to deliver meals to the elderly. Their time may be worth a hundred times the standard hourly rates for kitchen workers or delivery drivers. For every hour they spend serving soup, they could have donated an hour’s salary to pay for somebody else to serve soup for two weeks.17
In 1989, to explain some of these inefficiencies, the economist James Andreoni proposed a different model for why we donate to charity. Instead of acting strictly to improve the well-being of others,18 Andreoni theorized, we do charity in part because of a selfish psychological motive: it makes us happy. Part of the reason we give to homeless people on the street, for example, is because the act of donating makes us feel good, regardless of the results.
1.Visibility. We give more when we’re being watched. 2.Peer pressure. Our giving responds strongly to social influences. 3.Proximity. We prefer to help people locally rather than globally. 4.Relatability. We give more when the people we help are identifiable (via faces and/or stories) and give less in response to numbers and facts. 5.Mating motive. We’re more generous when primed with a mating motive.
A particularly illuminating study was carried out in 2007 by the psychologist Vladas Griskevicius along with some of his colleagues.48 Subjects, both male and female, were asked about whether they would engage in various altruistic behaviors. Before hearing the questions, however, they were divided into experimental and control groups and given different tasks to perform. The experimental subjects were primed with a mating mindset, for example, by being asked to imagine an ideal first date.49 The control subjects, meanwhile, were given a similar task, but one completely unrelated to romantic motives. Relative to subjects in the control group, subjects in the experimental group (who were primed with mating cues) were significantly more likely to report altruistic intentions.50 The thought of pursuing a romantic partner made them more eager to do good deeds. This, however, was true only of conspicuous good deeds, like teaching underprivileged kids or volunteering at a homeless shelter. When asked about inconspicuous forms of altruism, like taking shorter showers or mailing a letter someone had dropped on the way to the post office, the experimental group was no more likely than the control group to report an interest in such activities.
In light of all this evidence, the conclusion is pretty clear. We may get psychological rewards for anonymous donations, but for most people, the “warm fuzzies” just aren’t enough. We also want to be seen as charitable. Griskevicius calls this phenomenon “blatant benevolence.” Patrick West calls it “conspicuous compassion.”51 The idea is that we’re motivated to appear generous, not simply to be generous, because we get social rewards only for what others notice. In other words, charity is an advertisement, a way of showing off.
But potential mates aren’t our only intended audience. Anecdotally, both men and women are impressed when they learn about a donor’s generosity, irrespective of the donor’s gender.56
In effect, charitable behavior “says” to our audiences, “I have more resources than I need to survive; I can give them away without worry. Thus I am a hearty, productive human specimen.” This is the same logic that underlies our tendency toward conspicuous consumption, conspicuous athleticism, and other fitness displays. All else being equal, we prefer our associates—whether friends, lovers, or leaders—to be well off. Not only does some of their status “rub off” on us, but it means they have more resources and energy to focus on our mutual interests. Those who are struggling to survive don’t make ideal allies. Charity also helps us advertise our prosocial orientation, that is, the degree to which we’re aligned with others.
“Look, I’m willing to spend my resources for the benefit of others. I’m playing a positive-sum, cooperative game with society.” This helps explain why generosity is so important for those who aspire to leadership. No one wants leaders who play zero-sum, competitive games with the rest of society.
Singer may be right that there’s no moral principle that differentiates between a child drowning nearby and another one starving thousands of miles away. But there are very real social incentives that make it more rewarding to save the local boy. It’s a more visible act, more likely to be celebrated by the local community, more likely to result in getting laid or making new friends. In contrast, writing a check to feed foreign children offers fewer personal rewards. This is the perverse conclusion we must accept. The forms of charity that are most effective at helping others aren’t the most effective at helping donors signal their good traits. And when push comes to shove, donors will often choose to help themselves. If we, as a society, want more and better charity, we need to figure out how to make it more rewarding for individual donors. There are two broad approaches we can take—both of which, Robin and Kevin humbly acknowledge, are far easier said than done. One approach is to do a better job marketing the most effective charities. Given that donors use charities as ways to signal wealth, prosocial orientation, and compassion, anything that improves their value as a signal will encourage more donations. The other approach is to learn to celebrate the qualities that make someone an effective altruist. As Bloom points out, it’s easy (perhaps too easy) to celebrate empathy; for millions of years, it was one of the first things we looked for in a potential ally, and it’s still extremely important. But as we move into a world that’s increasingly technical and data-driven, where fluency with numbers is ever more important, perhaps we can develop a greater appreciation for those who calculate their way to helping others.
But if an exclusive education is so valuable, why are people like Robin allowed to steal it so easily? Apparently, so few people ever try this tactic that colleges don’t even notice a problem.
(Of course, there’s much more to life than becoming a productive worker, and school could conceivably help in these regards, e.g., by helping to make students “well-rounded” or to “broaden their horizons.” But this seems like a cop-out, and your two coauthors are extremely skeptical that schools are mostly trying to achieve such functions. We ask ourselves, “Is sitting in a classroom for six hours a day really the best way to create a broad, well-rounded human being?”)
School advocates often argue that school teaches students “how to learn” or “how to think critically.” But these claims, while comforting, don’t stand up to scrutiny. “Educational psychologists,” writes Caplan, “have measured the hidden intellectual benefits of education for over a century. Their chief discovery is that education is narrow. As a rule, students only learn the material you specifically teach them.”6 Another systems-level failure is that schools consistently fail to use better teaching methods, even methods that have been known for decades. For example, students learn worse when they’re graded, especially when graded on a curve.7 Homework helps students learn in math, but not in science, English, or history.8 And practice that’s spaced out, varied, and interleaved with other learning produces more versatility, longer retention, and better mastery. While this feels slower and harder, it works better.9 Instead, most schools grade students frequently (often on curves), give homework, and lump material together in ways that make it feel like students are learning faster, when in fact they’re learning less. Students, especially teenagers, also learn more in school when classes don’t start so early.10 In a North Carolina school district, a one-hour delay in school start time—for example, from 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m.—resulted in a 2 percentile gain in student performance.
The basic idea is that students go to school not so much to learn useful job skills as to show off their work potential to future employers. In other words, the value of education isn’t just about learning; it’s also about credentialing.
In the signaling model, each student has a hidden quality—future work productivity—that prospective employers are eager to know.15 But this quality isn’t something that can be observed easily over a short period, for example, by giving job applicants a simple test. So instead, employers use school performance as a proxy.
As Caplan argues, the best employees have a whole bundle of attributes—including intelligence, of course, but also conscientiousness, attention to detail, a strong work ethic, and a willingness to conform to expectations. These qualities are just as useful in blue-collar settings like warehouses and factories as they are in white-collar settings like design studios and cubicle farms. But whereas someone’s IQ can be measured with a simple 30-minute test, most of these other qualities can only be demonstrated by consistent performance over long periods of time.
“Higher education,” says Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire famously critical of college, sorts us all into a hierarchy. Kids at the top enjoy prestige because they’ve defeated everybody else in a competition to reach the schools that proudly exclude the most people. All the hard work at Harvard is done by the admissions officers who anoint an already-proven hypercompetitive elite. If that weren’t true—if superior instruction could explain the value of college—then why not franchise the Ivy League? Why not let more students benefit? It will never happen because the top U.S. colleges draw their mystique from zero-sum competition.18
All of this suggests that we reconsider our huge subsidies and encouragements of school. Yes, there are benefits to credentialing and sorting students—namely, the economic efficiency that results from getting higher-skilled workers into more important jobs. But the benefits seem to pale next to the enormous monetary, psychic, and social waste of the education tournament.19
And while many women throughout history have been bossed around within their families, prior to the Industrial Revolution, most men were free; outside of childhood and war, few had to regularly take direct orders from other men. In light of this, consider how an industrial-era school system prepares us for the modern workplace. Children are expected to sit still for hours upon hours; to control their impulses; to focus on boring, repetitive tasks; to move from place to place when a bell rings; and even to ask permission before going to the bathroom (think about that for a second). Teachers systematically reward children for being docile and punish them for “acting out,” that is, for acting as their own masters.
So it’s a mixed bag. Schools help prepare us for the modern workplace and perhaps for society at large. But in order to do that, they have to break our forager spirits and train us to submit to our place in a modern hierarchy. And while there are many social and economic benefits to this enterprise, one of the first casualties is learning.37 As Albert Einstein lamented, “It is . . . nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”38
Americans today spend more than $2.8 trillion a year on medicine.1 That’s 17 percent of GDP and more than the entire economic output of almost any other country.
The dangers of being abandoned when ill—both material and political dangers—explain why sick people are happy to be supported, and why others are eager to provide support. In part, it’s a simple quid pro quo: “I’ll help you this time if you’ll help me when the tables are turned.” But providing support is also an advertisement to third parties: “See how I help my friends when they’re down? If you’re my friend, I’ll do the same for you.” In this way, the conspicuous care shown in our medical behaviors is similar to the conspicuous care shown in charity; by helping people in need, we demonstrate our value as an ally.
In addition to understanding our likely evolutionary environment, it helps to take a historical view of medicine. How did humans approach medicine before it became the effective science it is today? The historical record is clear and consistent. Across all times and cultures, people have been eager for medical treatments, even without good evidence that such treatments had therapeutic benefits, and even when the treatments were downright harmful.4 But what these historical remedies lacked in scientific rigor, they more than made up for through elaborate demonstrations of caring and support from respected, high-status specialists.
After a pint and a half of blood was drawn, according to Belofsky, His Royal Majesty was forced to swallow antimony, a toxic metal. He vomited and was given a series of enemas. His hair was shaved off, and he had blistering agents applied to the scalp, to drive any bad humors downward. Plasters of chemical irritants, including pigeon droppings, were applied to the soles of the royal feet, to attract the falling humors. Another ten ounces of blood was drawn. The king was given white sugar candy, to cheer him up, then prodded with a red-hot poker. He was then given forty drops of ooze from “the skull of a man that was never buried,” who, it was promised, had died a most violent death. Finally, crushed stones from the intestines of a goat from East India were forced down the royal throat.7
But the fact that medicine is often effective doesn’t prevent us from also using it as a way to show that we care (and are cared for). So the question remains: Does modern medicine function, in part, as a conspicuous caring ritual? And if so, how important is the hidden caring motive relative to the overt healing motive?
As it happens, there are often huge differences in how the same medical conditions are treated in different regions. In the United States, for example, the surgery rates for men with enlarged prostates vary more than fourfold across different regions, and the rates of bypass surgery and angioplasty vary more than threefold. Total medical spending on people in the last six months of life varies fivefold.12 These differences in practice are largely arbitrary; medical communities in different regions have mainly just converged on different standards for how to treat each condition.13
One of the earliest of these studies was published in 1969.14 It found that variations in death rates15 across the 50 U.S. states were predicted by variations in income, education, and other variables, but not by variations in medical spending.
For each extra day in the ICU, patients were estimated to live roughly 40 fewer days.18 The same study also estimated that spending an additional $1,000 on a patient resulted in somewhere between a gain of 5 days and a loss of 20 days of life.19 In short, the researchers found “no evidence that improved survival outcomes are associated with increased levels of spending.”20
“So spill it, Star Lord,” she said. “What’s your player ranking?” “My Terra Firma ranking is too abysmal to say out loud,” I said, laying on the false modesty with a trowel. “But in the Armada rankings I’m currently sixth.” Her eyes widened, and she swiveled her head around to stare at me. “Sixth place?” she repeated. “In the world? No bullshit?” I crossed my heart, but did not hope to die. “That’s some serious bill-paying skillage,” she said. “Color me impressed, Zack-Zack Lightman.”
“Got it,” she said, as her fingers danced across one of the touchscreens in front of her. “Now I can keep an eye on you.” “I feel much better now,” I said. And I did, too. “You should,” she said. “I’ve got the skills to pay the bills.” She winked at me—all smooth, like a movie star.
A long silence. Too long, as Aileron’s heavy-lidded gaze remained bleakly on his brother’s face. The cheering had run itself down. A moment passed. Another. A stir of cold, cold wind. "Brightly woven, Diar," Aileron said. And then dazzled them all with the warmth of his smile. They began to move inside. Both ways, Shalhassan was thinking bemusedly. They knew all along and they had prepared in two hours. What sort of men were these two sons of Ailell? "Be grateful," came a voice at his side. "They are ours." He turned and received a golden wink from a lios alfar and a grin from Brock, the Dwarf next to him. Before he knew what he was doing, Shalhassan smiled.
In theory, anyway. Theory and reality began their radical bifurcation around the axis formed by the flying figure of Dave Martyniuk at precisely the point where his shoulder crashed into that of the boar.
"Supreme Lord of Cathal," Tegid repeated, a little more softly, for his mighty lungs had shaped a silence all around with that first shout, "have I your attendant ear?" "You have," her father said with grave courtesy. "Then I am bid to tell you that I am sent here by a lord of infinite nobility, whose virtues I could number until the moon rose and set and rose again. I am sent to say to you, in this place and among the people here gathered in concourse, that the sun rises in your daughter’s eyes."
Updated: Mar 04, 2022
Formally, he had promised. Even to the Interceder who was to speak for him, after the old fashion. He had also warned her in Gwen Ystrat that he would never move to the measured gait, he would always have to play. And so Tegid of Rhoden was his Intercedent. The fat man—he was truly enormous—was blessedly sober.
"We should," said Loren. "But you should know that Teyrnon is now the only mage in Fionavar." "What?" It was the Dwarf. Loren smiled sadly. "Reach for me, my friend." Slowly they saw Matt’s face drain of color. "Easy," Loren cautioned. "Be easy." He turned to the others. "Let no one grieve. When Matt died our link was broken and I ceased to be a mage. Bringing him back could not reforge what had been severed." There was a silence. "Oh, Loren," Matt said faintly. Loren wheeled on him and there was a fire in his eyes. "Hear me!" He spun again and looked at the company. "I was a man before I was a mage. I hated the Dark as a child and I do so now, and I can wield a sword!" He turned back to Matt and his voice deepened. "You left your destiny once to link it with my own and it led you far from home, my friend. Now, it seems, the circle is closing. Will you accept me? Am I a fit companion for the rightful King of Dwarves, who must go back now to Calor Diman to reclaim his Crown?" And they were humbled and abashed at what blazed forth from Loren in that moment, as he knelt on the stones before Matt.
“I liked that thing you did too. You know, ‘consider your next words carefully’ and all that,” he said, mimicking her low, angry voice. “But I reckon the only language some people understand is the language of the surprise dessert attack.”
Morrigan sat across from him. “You go to that Graypants School for Clever Boys, don’t you?” “Graysmark School for Bright Young Men,” he snapped. Morrigan smirked. She knew the real name. “What’s it like?”
The more I’d learned about Halliday’s life, the more I’d grown to idolize him. He was a god among geeks, a nerd über-deity on the level of Gygax, Garriott, and Gates. He’d left home after high school with nothing but his wits and his imagination, and he’d used them to attain worldwide fame and amass a vast fortune. He’d created an entirely new reality that now provided an escape for most of humanity. And to top it all off, he’d turned his last will and testament into the greatest videogame contest of all time.
Douglas Adams. Kurt Vonnegut. Neal Stephenson. Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny. I read every novel by every single one of Halliday’s favorite authors.
I also watched every single film he referenced in the Almanac. If it was one of Halliday’s favorites, like WarGames, Ghostbusters, Real Genius, Better Off Dead, or Revenge of the Nerds, I rewatched it until I knew every scene by heart. I devoured each of what Halliday referred to as "The Holy Trilogies": Star Wars (original and prequel trilogies, in that order), Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Mad Max, Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones.
Cameron, Gilliam, Jackson, Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Del Toro, Tarantino. And, of course, Kevin Smith. I spent three months studying every John Hughes teen movie and memorizing all the key lines of dialogue.
I could master most action titles in a few hours, and there wasn’t an adventure or role-playing game I couldn’t solve. I never needed any walkthroughs or cheat codes. Everything just clicked. And I was even better at the old arcade games. When I was in the zone on a high-speed classic like Defender, I felt like a hawk in flight, or the way I thought a shark must feel as it cruises the ocean floor. For the first time, I knew what it was to be a natural at something. To have a gift.
It looked just as it had for the past five years, with one change. My avatar’s name now appeared at the very top of the list, in first place, with a score of 10,000 points beside it. The other nine slots still contained Halliday’s initials, JDH, followed by zeros. "Holy shit," I muttered. When Anorak had handed me the Copper Key, I’d become the first gunter in history to score points in the contest. And, I realized, since the Scoreboard was viewable to the entire world, my avatar had just become famous. I checked the newsfeed headlines just to be sure. Every single one of them contained my avatar’s name. Stuff like: MYSTERIOUS AVATAR "PARZIVAL" MAKES HISTORY and PARZIVAL FINDS COPPER KEY. I stood there in a daze, forcing myself to breathe. Then Art3mis gave me a shove, which, of course, I didn’t feel. She did knock my avatar backward a few feet, though. "You beat him on your first try?" she shouted. I nodded. "He won the first game, but I won the last two. Just barely, though." "Shiiiiiit!" she screamed, clenching her fists. "How in the hell did you beat him on your first try?" I got the distinct impression she wanted to sock me in the face.
Updated: Feb 01, 2022
I didn’t think anyone would anticipate this move, because it was so clearly insane.
Updated: May 23, 2022
Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.
How does a drug stick to a protein and alter its function? Protein molecules are large, whereas drugs are much smaller than proteins. If a protein were the head of a life-size statue, a drug would be like an earplug sitting in the ear canal of the statue.
Here is the surprising fact: All of the 20,000 or so drug products that ever have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration interact with just 2% of the proteins found in human cells.3
This number of possible small molecules has been estimated to be on the order of 1060; that is “1” followed by 60 zeros. Thus, even testing a million compounds is not that many in terms of sampling a significant fraction of all possible small molecules. To get a sense of how big the number 1060 is, if all the possible drug molecules filled up the space of 10,000 different planets, then 1 million chemicals would be represented by just a single molecule on a single one of these planets. All of the remaining molecules on all of the planets would still remain to be tested.
At this point, Dennis remarked, “You are confusing two different questions. First, there is the question of what you want. Only then should you consider the second question, which is how do you find a path to get there.” He went on to say that if I loved one apartment, then I should focus on finding a way to realize that goal rather than settling for something less desirable that would leave me unhappy. First, the goal. Then, the means. This straightforward view of the world is applicable to the problems facing academia and the pharmaceutical industry in discovering new drugs.
heralded as a defining moment for drug discovery. Imatinib was the first kinase-inhibiting drug approved, and the first time that a specific protein product of a genetic lesion in a tumor was directly targeted by a small molecule drug.
All that you held most dear you will put by and leave behind you; and this is the arrow the longbow of your exile first lets fly. You will come to know how bitter as salt and stone is the bread of others, how hard the way that goes up and down stairs that never are your own.
BOTH MOONS WERE HIGH, DIMMING THE LIGHT OF ALL but the brightest stars. The campfires burned on either side of the river, stretching away into the night. Quietly flowing, the Deisa caught the moonlight and the orange of the nearer fires and cast them back in wavery, sinuous ripples. And all the lines of light led to his eyes, to where he was sitting on the riverbank, hands about his knees, thinking about dying and the life he’d lived.
There was a glory to the night, Saevar thought, breathing deeply of the mild summer air, smelling water and water flowers and grass, watching the reflection of blue moonlight and silver on the river, hearing the Deisa’s murmurous flow and the distant singing from around the fires.
The Prince called him a friend. It could not be said, Saevar thought, that he had lived a useless or an empty life. He’d had his art, the joy of it and the spur, and had lived to see it praised by the great ones of his province, indeed of the whole peninsula.
"The way we see it is," Valentin said softly, his quick mind engaged by the question. "The beauty we find is shaped, at least in part, by what we know the morning will bring."
IN THE AUTUMN SEASON OF THE WINE, WORD WENT FORTH from among the cypresses and olives and the laden vines of his country estate that Sandre, Duke of Astibar, once ruler of that city and its province, had drawn the last bitter breath of his exile and age and died.
"The Scalvaiane have submitted themselves willingly to nothing and no one in living memory or recorded history," that vulpine lord said, the texture of velvet in his voice. "I am not readily of a mind to become the first to do so."
Memory was talisman and ward for him, gateway and hearth. It was pride and love, shelter from loss: for if something could be remembered it was not wholly lost. Not dead and gone forever. Marra could live; his dour, stern father hum a cradle song to him.
She had enough of a sense of irony to find that amusing. He had evidently had a difficult night though, and not just in the obvious ways. She thought about waking him and sending him back to his own room. It would most certainly raise eyebrows if they were seen leaving here together in the morning. She discovered, though, that she didn’t really care. She also realized that she minded less than she’d expected that he’d figured out the one truth about her and had just learned another. About her father, but really more about herself. She wondered about that, why it didn’t bother her more.
"Could have been worse," Sandre said prosaically. "Oh, somewhat," Catriana said tartly. "We could all be lying dead here now." "That would indeed have been worse," Sandre agreed gravely. It took her a moment to realize he was teasing her. She surprised herself by laughing, a little wildly. Sandre, his darkened face sober, said something quite unexpected then. "You have no idea," he murmured, "how dearly I wish you were of my blood. My daughter, granddaughter. Will you allow me to take pride in what you are?"
In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone."
Bright star of Eanna, forgive me the manner of this, but you are the harbor of my soul’s journeying."
Of trials endured and trials to come, of doubt and dark and all the deep uncertainties that defined the outer boundaries of mortal life, but with love now present at the base of it all, like light, like the first stone of a rising tower.
"I hate that man down there," he said quietly. "I hate everything he stands for. There is no passion in him, no love, no pride. Only ambition. Nothing matters but that. Nothing in the world can move him to pity or grief but his own fate. Everything is a tool, an instrument. He wants the Emperor’s Tiara, everyone knows it, but he doesn’t want it for anything. He only wants. I doubt anything in his life has ever moved him to feel anything for anyone else . . . love, loss, anything."
These are ambitious elements for what was always meant to be a romantic adventure. They intimidated me as they began to emerge; even recording them now I find myself shaking my head. But beneath them all lies the idea of using the fantasy genre in just this way: letting the universality of fantasy—of once upon a time—allow escapist fiction to be more than just that, to also bring us home. I tried to imagine myself with a stiletto not a bludgeon, slipping the themes of the story in quietly while keeping a reader turning pages well past bedtime.
Updated: Feb 25, 2022
What can a flame remember? If it remembers a little less than is necessary, it goes out; if it remembers a little more than is necessary, it goes out. If only it could teach us, while it burns, to remember correctly.
"Well," said Rovigo earnestly, "all jesting aside, I could well understand if you wanted to rejoin the celebrations—they were nowhere near their peak when we left. It will go on all night, of course, but I confess I don’t like leaving the younger ones alone too late, and my unfortunate oldest, Alais, suffers from twitches and fainting spells when over-excited." "How sad," said Alessan with a straight face. "Father!" came a softly urgent protest from the cart. "Rovigo, stop that at once or I shall empty a basin on you in your sleep," her mother declared, though not, Devin judged, with any genuine anger. "You see the way of things?" the merchant said, gesturing expressively with his free hand. "I am hounded without respite even into my dreams. But, if you are not entirely put off by the grievous stridency of my women and the prospect of three more inside very nearly as unpleasant, you are all most welcome, most humbly welcome to share a late repast and a quieter drink than you are likely to find in Astibar tonight."
Devin caught Alais looking at him from the seat she’d taken next to the fire. Reflexively he smiled at her. She didn’t smile back, but her gaze, mild and serious, did not break away. He felt a small, unsettling skip to the rhythm of his heart.
Perhaps that was it, Alais thought: few people she’d met could keep up with her father, in jesting or in anything else. And this man with the sharp, quizzical features appeared to be doing so effortlessly.
Updated: May 16, 2023
Devin accepted a glass from Rovigo, savoring the icy-clean bouquet. He leaned back in his chair and prepared to be extremely content for the next little while.
Devin accepted a glass from Rovigo, savoring the icy-clean bouquet. He leaned back in his chair and prepared to be extremely content for the next little while.
Devin doubted if he’d ever seen a man so obviously happy to be where he was. It must have shown in the amused irony of his glance, for Rovigo, catching the look, shrugged. "Daughters," he lamented, sorrowfully shaking his head. "‘Ponderous cartwheels,’" Devin reminded him, looking pointedly at the merchant’s wife. Rovigo winced. Alix, laughter-lines crinkling at her temples, had overheard the exchange.
Devin doubted if he’d ever seen a man so obviously happy to be where he was. It must have shown in the amused irony of his glance, for Rovigo, catching the look, shrugged. "Daughters," he lamented, sorrowfully shaking his head. "‘Ponderous cartwheels,’" Devin reminded him, looking pointedly at the merchant’s wife. Rovigo winced. Alix, laughter-lines crinkling at her temples, had overheard the exchange.
"Not as anything that matters in the scheme of things. I only spoke a prayer of my own." Alessan’s voice was careful and very clear. "I always do. I said: Tigana, let my memory of you be like a blade in my soul."
"Not as anything that matters in the scheme of things. I only spoke a prayer of my own." Alessan’s voice was careful and very clear. "I always do. I said: Tigana, let my memory of you be like a blade in my soul."
THERE ARE at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
Otherwise, infinite and finite play stand in the sharpest possible contrast. Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care. They do not care for the reason that their game is not bounded by time. Indeed, the only purpose of the game is to prevent it from coming to an end, to keep everyone in play. There are no spatial or numerical boundaries to an infinite game. No world is marked with the barriers of infinite play, and there is no question of eligibility since anyone who wishes may play an infinite game. While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined. The time of an infinite game is not world time, but time created within the play itself. Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time. For this reason it is impossible to say how long an infinite game has been played, or even can be played, since duration can be measured only externally to that which endures. It is also impossible to say in which world an infinite game is played, though there can be any number of worlds within an infinite game.
Rules are not valid because the Senate passed them, or because heroes once played by them, or because God pronounced them through Moses or Muhammad. They are valid only if and when players freely play by them. There are no rules that require us to obey rules. If there were, there would have to be a rule for those rules, and so on.
To account for the large gap between the actual freedom of finite players to step off the field of play at any time and the experienced necessity to stay at the struggle, we can say that as finite players we somehow veil this freedom from ourselves. Some self-veiling is present in all finite games. Players must intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their play, else all competitive effort will desert them. From the outset of finite play each part or position must be taken up with a certain seriousness; players must see themselves as teacher, as light-heavyweight, as mother. In the proper exercise of such roles we positively believe we are the persons those roles portray. Even more: we make those roles believable to others. It is in the nature of acting, Shaw said, that we are not to see this woman as Ophelia, but Ophelia as this woman.
So it is with all roles. Only freely can one step into the role of mother. Persons who assume this role, however, must suspend their freedom with a proper seriousness in order to act as the role requires. A mother’s words, actions, and feelings belong to the role and not to the person—although some persons may veil themselves so assiduously that they make their performance believable even to themselves, overlooking any distinction between a mother’s feelings and their own. The issue here is not whether self-veiling can be avoided, or even should be avoided. Indeed, no finite play is possible without it. The issue is whether we are ever willing to drop the veil and openly acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we have freely chosen to face the world through a mask.
What makes this an issue is not the morality of masking ourselves. It is rather that self-veiling is a contradictory act—a free suspension of our freedom. I cannot forget that I have forgotten. I may have used the veil so successfully that I have made my performance believable to myself. I may have convinced myself I am Ophelia. But credibility will never suffice to undo the contradictoriness of self-veiling. “To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe” (Sartre). If no amount of veiling can conceal the veiling itself, the issue is how far we will go in our seriousness at self-veiling, and how far we will go to have others act in complicity with us.
Since finite games can be played within an infinite game, infinite players do not eschew the performed roles of finite play. On the contrary, they enter into finite games with all the appropriate energy and self-veiling, but they do so without the seriousness of finite players. They embrace the abstractness of finite games as abstractness, and therefore take them up not seriously, but playfully. (The term “abstract” is used here according to Hegel’s familiar definition of it as the substitution of a part of the whole for the whole, the whole being “concrete.”) They freely use masks in their social engagements, but not without acknowledging to themselves and others that they are masked. For that reason they regard each participant in finite play as that person playing and not as a role played by someone.
To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.
By relating to others as they move out of their own freedom and not out of the abstract requirements of a role, infinite players are concrete persons engaged with concrete persons. For that reason an infinite game cannot be abstracted, for it is not a part of the whole presenting itself as the whole, but the whole that knows it is the whole. We cannot say a person played this infinite game or that, as though the rules are independent of the concrete circumstances of play. It can be said only that these persons played with each other and in such a way that what they began cannot be finished.
Inasmuch as a finite game is intended for conclusion, inasmuch as its roles are scripted and performed for an audience, we shall refer to finite play as theatrical. Although script and plot do not seem to be written in advance, we are always able to look back at the path followed to victory and say of the winners that they certainly knew how to act and what to say. Inasmuch as infinite players avoid any outcome whatsoever, keeping the future open, making all scripts useless, we shall refer to infinite play as dramatic. Dramatically, one chooses to be a mother; theatrically, one takes on the role of mother.
Finite play is dramatic, but only provisionally dramatic. As soon as it is concluded we are able to look backward and see how the sequence of moves, though made freely by the competitors, could have resulted only in this outcome. We can see how every move fit into a sequence that made it inevitable that this player would win. The fact that a finite game is provisionally dramatic means that it is the intention of each player to eliminate its drama by making a preferred end inevitable. It is the desire of all finite players to be Master Players, to be so perfectly skilled in their play that nothing can surprise them, so perfectly trained that every move in the game is foreseen at the beginning. A true Master Player plays as though the game is already in the past, according to a script whose every detail is known prior to the play itself.
Surprise is a crucial element in most finite games. If we are not prepared to meet each of the possible moves of an opponent, our chances of losing are most certainly increased.
A finite player is trained not only to anticipate every future possibility, but to control the future, to prevent it from altering the past. This is the finite player in the mode of seriousness with its dread of unpredictable consequence. Infinite players, on the other hand, continue their play in the expectation of being surprised. If surprise is no longer possible, all play ceases. Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue.
Because finite players are trained to prevent the future from altering the past, they must hide their future moves. The unprepared opponent must be kept unprepared. Finite players must appear to be something other than what they are. Everything about their appearance must be concealing. To appear is not to appear.
Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised by the future, they play in complete openness. It is not an openness as in candor, but an openness as in vulnerability. It is not a matter of exposing one’s unchanging identity, the true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one’s ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be. The infinite player does not expect only to be amused by surprise, but to be transformed by it, for surprise does not alter some abstract past, but one’s own personal past. To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition. Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future.
It is a principal function of society to validate titles and to assure their perpetual recognition.
A finite game must always be won with a terminal move, a final act within the boundaries of the game that establishes the winner beyond any possibility of challenge. A terminal move results, in other words, in the death of the opposing player as player. The winner kills the opponent. The loser is dead in the sense of being incapable of further play. Properly speaking, life and death as such are rarely the stakes of a finite game. What one wins is a title; and when the loser of a finite game is declared dead to further play, it is equivalent to declaring that person utterly without title—a person to whom no attention whatsoever need be given.
Death in life is a mode of existence in which one has ceased all play; there is no further striving for titles. All competitive engagement with others has been abandoned. For some, though not for all, death in life is a misfortune, the resigned acceptance of a loser’s status, a refusal to hold any title up for recognition. For others, however, death in life can be regarded as an achievement, the result of a spiritual discipline, say, intended to extinguish all traces of struggle with the world, a liberation from the need for any title whatsoever. “Die before ye die,” declare the Sufi mystics.
Life in death concerns those who are titled and whose titles, since they are timeless, may not be extinguished by death. Immortality, in this case, is not a reward but the condition necessary to the possession of rewards. Victors live forever not because their souls are unaffected by death but because their titles must not be forgotten.
Soldiers who die fighting the enemy, however, receive the nation’s highest reward: They are declared unforgettable. Even unknown soldiers are memorialized
Perhaps a more common example of such life-or-death forms of bondage is found in those persons who resort to expensive medical strategies to be cured of life-threatening illness. They, too, seem to be giving life away in order to win it back. So also are those who observe special diets or patterns of life designed to prolong their youth and to postpone aging and death indefinitely; they hate their life in this world now in order that they may have it later. And just as with slaves, the life they receive is given to them by others: doctors, yogis, or their anonymous admirers.
Death, for finite players, is abstract, not concrete. It is not the whole person, but only an abstracted fragment of the whole, that dies in life or lives in death. So also is life abstract for finite players. It is not the whole person who lives. If life is a means to life, we must abstract ourselves, but only for the sake of winning an abstraction.
More often what one intends to preserve is a public personage, a permanently veiled selfhood. Immortality is the state of forgetting that we have forgotten—that is, overlooking the fact that we freely decided to enter into finite play, a decision in itself playful and not serious. Immortality is therefore the supreme example of the contradictoriness of finite play: It is a life one cannot live.
The death of an infinite player is dramatic. It does not mean that the game comes to an end with death; on the contrary, infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play. For that reason they do not play for their own life; they live for their own play. But since that play is always with others, it is evident that infinite players both live and die for the continuing life of others.
In infinite play one chooses to be mortal inasmuch as one always plays dramatically, that is, toward the open, toward the horizon, toward surprise, where nothing can be scripted. It is a kind of play that requires complete vulnerability. To the degree that one is protected against the future, one has established a boundary and no longer plays with but against others.
The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life is joyous. Infinite play resounds throughout with a kind of laughter. It is not a laughter at others who have come to an unexpected end, having thought they were going somewhere else. It is laughter with others with whom we have discovered that the end we thought we were coming to has unexpectedly opened. We laugh not at what has surprisingly come to be impossible for others, but over what has surprisingly come to be possible with others.
Because it is the purpose of infinite players to continue the play, they do not play for themselves. The contradiction of finite play is that the players desire to bring play to an end for themselves. The paradox of infinite play is that the players desire to continue the play in others. The paradox is precisely that they play only when others go on with the game. Infinite players play best when they become least necessary to the continuation of play. It is for this reason they play as mortals. The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.
When a person is known by title, the attention is on a completed past, on a game already concluded, and not therefore to be played again. A title effectively takes a person out of play. When a person is known only by name, the attention of others is on an open future. We simply cannot know what to expect. Whenever we address each other by name we ignore all scripts, and open the possibility that our relationship will become deeply reciprocal. That I cannot now predict your future is exactly what makes mine unpredictable. Our futures enter into each other. What is your future, and mine, becomes ours. We prepare each other for surprise.
The exercise of power always presupposes resistance. Power is never evident until two or more elements are in opposition. Whichever element can move another is the more powerful. If no one else ever strove to be a Boddhisattva or the Baton Twirling Champion of the State of Indiana, those titles would be powerless—no one would defer to them.
Power is always measured in units of comparison. In fact, it is a term of competition: How much resistance can I overcome relative to others? Power is a concept that belongs only in finite play. But power is not properly measurable until the game is completed—until the designated period of time has run out. During the course of play we cannot yet determine the power of the players, because to the degree that it is genuine play the outcome is unknown. A player who is being pushed all over the field by an apparently superior opponent may display an unsuspected burst of activity at the end and take the victory.
Inasmuch as power is determined by the outcome of a game, one does not win by being powerful; one wins to be powerful. If one has sufficient power to win before the game has begun, what follows is not a game at all.
I can be powerful only by not playing, by showing that the game is over. I can therefore have only what powers others give me. Power is bestowed by an audience after the play is complete. Power is contradictory, and theatrical.
Power is a feature only of finite games. It is not dramatic but theatrical. How then do infinite players contend with power? Infinite play is always dramatic; its outcome is endlessly open.
We need a term that will stand in contrast to “power” as it acquires its meaning in finite play. Let us say that where the finite player plays to be powerful the infinite player plays with strength. A powerful person is one who brings the past to an outcome, settling all its unresolved issues. A strong person is one who carries the past into the future, showing that none of its issues is capable of resolution. Power is concerned with what has already happened; strength with what has yet to happen. Power is finite in amount. Strength cannot be measured, because it is an opening and not a closing act. Power refers to the freedom persons have within limits, strength to the freedom persons have with limits. Power will always be restricted to a relatively small number of selected persons. Anyone can be strong. Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.
Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play coming to an end in unheard silence. Unheard silence does not necessarily mean the death of the player. Unheard silence is not the loss of the player’s voice, but the loss of listeners for that voice. It is an evil when the drama of a life does not continue in others for reason of their deafness or ignorance. There are silences that can be heard, even from the dead and from the severely oppressed. Much is recoverable from an apparently forgotten past. Sensitive and faithful historians can learn much of what has been lost, and much therefore that can be continued. There are silences, however, that will never and can never be heard. There is much evil that remains beyond redemption. When Europeans first landed on the North American continent the native population spoke as many as ten thousand distinct languages, each with its own poetry and treasury of histories and myths, its own ways of living in harmony with the spontaneities of the natural environment. All but a very few of those tongues have been silenced, their cultures forever lost to those of us who stand ignorantly in their place. Evil is not the termination of a finite game. Finite players, even those who play for their own lives, know the stakes of the games they freely choose to play. Evil is…
Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed, the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion. It is evil to act as though the past is bringing us to a specifiable end. It is evil to assume that the past will make sense only if we bring it to an issue we have clearly in view. It is evil for a nation to believe it is “the last, best hope on earth.” It is evil to think history is to end with a return to Zion, or with the classless society, or with the Islamicization of all living infidels. Your history does not belong to me. We live with each other in a common history. Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of evil. They therefore do not attempt to eliminate evil in others, for to do so is the very impulse of evil itself, and therefore a contradiction. They only…
It is this essential fluidity of our humanness that is irreconcilable with the seriousness of finite play. It is, therefore, this fluidity that presents us with an unavoidable challenge: how to contain the serious within the truly playful; that is, how to keep all our finite games in infinite play. This challenge is commonly misunderstood as the need to find room for playfulness within finite games. This is what was referred to above as playing at, or perhaps playing around, a kind of play that has no consequence. This is the sort of playfulness implied in the ordinary sense of such terms as entertainment, amusement, diversion, comic relief, recreation, relaxation. Inevitably, however, seriousness will creep back into this kind of play.
To be political in the mode of infinite play is by no means to disregard the appalling conditions under which many human beings live, the elimination of which is the professed end of much politics. We can imagine infinite players nodding thoughtfully at Rousseau’s famous declaration: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” They can see that the dream of freedom is universal, that wars are fought to win it, heroes die to protect it, and songs are written to commemorate its attainment. But in the infinite player’s vision of political affairs the element of intentionality and willfulness, so easily obscured in the exigencies of public crisis, stands out in clear relief. Therefore, even warfare and heroism are seen with their self-contradictions in full display. No nation can go to war until it has found another that can agree to the terms of the conflict.
Once under way, warfare and acts of heroism have all the appearance of necessity, but that appearance is but a veil over the often complicated maneuvers by which the antagonists have arranged their conflict with each other.
The United States did not, for example, lose its war in Southeast Asia so much as lose its audience for a war. No doubt much of the disillusion and bitterness of its warriors comes from the missing final scene—the hero’s homecoming to parades or ceremonial burial—an anticipated scene that carries many into battle.
The first man who was ever consciously a Stoic (there have been and are many unconscious ones) was he who first looked upon the world and his own nature, and observed that the things wherein he was subject to fatality and chance, which he was unable to order at his own will, were just those which either did not affect him, his real self, at all; or affected him only as he desired they should.
that among all the things which give pleasure there are some which afford a deeper, fuller, more permanent enjoyment than others; an enjoyment of such a kind that he who has felt it knows it to be more worth having than anything else in the world. The real self, then, is simply the soul delighting in these things, and to pursue them is said to be, in the words of the old, yet never outworn formula, ‘to live according to Nature’—to follow the course suggested to the conscious mind by experience (its own or others’) of the facts of life. And what does this experience tell us? Universally it tells us that in Righteousness and Love lie the paths of our peace. That this is so every man must verify for himself.
So that Epictetus starts with announcing that the business and concern of the real self is with matters absolutely subject to its own control, absolutely uninfluenced by external chance or change. How important this announcement is will only appear by meditation and realisation: that it is true there can be no doubt—there is nothing essentially good for us which we cannot have if we only desire it strongly enough.
Again, in Ench. i. ε he teaches that when we are tried by misfortune we should never let our suffering overwhelm the sense of inward mastery and freedom expressed in the thought, ‘It is nothing to me’—it has no power to close the sources of true happiness, the happiness which satisfies the real self, against me.
He merely asserts that to lose this overpowering concern in things beyond our control is possible to human nature, and is for our good; and this being so, the fact that certain men have realised this possibility in their lives and proclaimed it to the world cannot but make it easier for other men to realise it also.
I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete; I swear the earth shall remain jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.
For to do the duty at the expense of the gratification leaves, so far, our capacity for the gratification just where it was; while to indulge a gratification at the expense of a duty undoubtedly injures our capacity for duty in general, and probably, in the end, for gratification also.
Straightway then practise saying to every harsh appearance: You are an appearance, and in no manner what you appear to be. Then examine it by the rules which you possess, and by this first and chiefly, whether it relates to the things which are in our power or to things which are not in our power; and if it relates to anything which is not in our power, be ready to say that it does not concern you.
Take away then aversion from all things which are not in our power, and transfer it to the things contrary to nature which are in our power. But destroy desire completely for the present. For if you desire anything which is not in our power, you must be unfortunate; but of the things in our power, and which it would be good to desire, nothing yet is before you.
Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things;
Consequently when in the use of appearances you are conformable to nature, then be elated, for then you will be elated at something good which is your own.
Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.
If you intend to improve, throw away such thoughts as these: if I neglect my affairs, I shall not have the means of living: unless I chastise my slave, he will be bad. For it is better to die of hunger and so to be released from grief and fear than to live in abundance with perturbation; and it is better for your slave to be bad than for you to be unhappy. Begin then from little things. Is the oil spilled? Is a little wine stolen? Say on the occasion, at such price is sold freedom from perturbation; at such price is sold tranquility, but nothing is got for nothing.
If you would improve, submit to be considered without sense and foolish with respect to externals. Wish to be considered to know nothing; and if you shall seem to some to be a person of importance, distrust yourself. For you should know that it is not easy both to keep your will in a condition conformable to nature and (to secure) external things: but if a man is careful about the one, it is an absolute necessity that he will neglect the other.
Whoever then wishes to be free let him neither wish for anything nor avoid anything which depends on others: if he does not observe this rule, he must be a slave.
For this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you; but to select the part, belongs to another.
But you yourself will not wish to be a general or senator (prutanis) or consul, but a free man: and there is only one way to this, to despise (care not for) the things which are not in our power.
If it should ever happen to you to be turned to externals in order to please some person, you must know that you have lost your purpose in life.
Give then the price, if it is for your interest, for which it is sold. But if you wish both not to give the price and to obtain the things, you are insatiable and silly. Have you nothing then in place of the supper? You have indeed, you have the not flattering of him, whom you did not choose to flatter; you have the not enduring of the man when he enters the room.
In every act observe the things which come first, and those which follow it; and so proceed to the act. If you do not, at first you will approach it with alacrity, without having thought of the things which will follow; but afterwards, when certain base (ugly) things have shown themselves, you will be ashamed. A man wishes to conquer at the Olympic games. I also wish indeed, for it is a fine thing. But observe both the things which come first, and the things which follow; and then begin the act. You must do everything according to rule, eat according to strict orders, abstain from delicacies, exercise yourself as you are bid at appointed times, in heat, in cold, you must not drink cold water, nor wine as you choose; in a word, you must deliver yourself up to the exercise master as you do to the physician, and then proceed to the contest. And sometimes you will strain the hand, put the ankle out of joint, swallow much dust, sometimes be flogged, and after all this be defeated.
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You must pass sleepless nights, endure toil, go away from your kinsmen, be despised by a slave, in everything have the inferior part, in honor, in office, in the courts of justice, in every little matter. Consider these things, if you would exchange for them, freedom from passions, liberty, tranquility.
If a man has reported to you, that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make any defence (answer) to what has been told you; but reply, The man did not know the rest of my faults, for he would not have mentioned these only.
When you are going to any of those who are in great power, place before yourself that you will not find the man at home, that you will be excluded, that the door will not be opened to you, that the man will not care about you. And if with all this it is your duty to visit him, bear what happens, and never say to yourself that it was not worth the trouble. For this is silly, and marks the character of a man who is offended by externals.
Take care also not to provoke laughter; for this is a slippery way towards vulgar habits, and is also adapted to diminish the respect of your neighbors. It is a dangerous habit also to approach obscene talk.
If you have received the impression (phantasion) of any pleasure, guard yourself against being carried away by it; but let the thing wait for you, and allow yourself a certain delay on your own part. Then think of both times, of the time when you will enjoy the pleasure, and of the time after the enjoyment of the pleasure, when you will repent and will reproach yourself. And set against these things how you will rejoice, if you have abstained from the pleasure, and how you will commend yourself. But if it seem to you seasonable to undertake (do) the thing, take care that the charm of it, and the pleasure, and the attraction of it shall not conquer you; but set on the other side the consideration, how much better it is to be conscious that you have gained this victory.
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It seemed that there were still things one could not do. So one did everything else as well as one possibly could and found new things to try, to will oneself to master, and always one realized, at the kernel and heart of things, that the ends of the earth would not be far enough away.
There was a cold silence. "You realize," said Gorlaes, his voice dropping almost to a whisper, "that you offer me little choice?" The voice came up suddenly. "I must obey the commands of my King. Vart, Lagoth . . ." The two soldiers in the doorway moved forward. And pitched, half-drawn swords clattering, full-length to the floor. Behind their prone bodies stood a very calm Matt Sören, and the big, capable man named Coll. Seeing them there, Kevin Laine, whose childhood fantasies had been shaped of images like this, knew a moment of sheer delight.
And in this fashion did Paul Schafer first see one of the lios alfar. And before the ethereal, flame-like quality of the silver-haired figure that stood before him, he felt himself to have grown heavy and awkward, as a different dimension of grace was made manifest.
Of desire they spoke, and called her fair in words more strung with fire than any she had ever heard.
Turning, she watched the battle, her heart leaping into her throat, though not with fear. By the light of the setting sun, Kimberly bore witness to the first battle of Aileron dan Ailell in his war, and a stunning, a nearly debilitating grace was displayed for her then upon that lonely path. To see him with a sword in his hand was almost heartbreaking. It was a dance. It was more. Some men, it seemed, were born to do a thing; it was true.
"I told you to go," he said. "I know. I don’t always do what I’m told. I thought I warned you." He was silent, looking up at her. "A ‘little’ skill," she mimicked quite precisely. His face, she saw with delight, had suddenly gone shy. "Why," Kim Ford asked, "did that take you so long?" For the first time she heard him laugh.
"I lied," Leith said quietly. "I married you because no other man I know or can imagine could have made my heart leap so when he asked." He turned from the moon to her. "The sun rises in your eyes," he said. The formal proposal. "It always, always has, my love."
"Could you trouble yourself," the bass voice continued, "to summon this Levon person from some other locality?"
Updated: Feb 28, 2022
After the war was over, they bound him under the Mountain.
Bright One, Too long. Even the stars now speak to me of you, and the night wind knows your name. I must come. Death is a dark I seek not to find, but if I must walk within its provinces to touch the flower of your body, then I must. Promise only that should the soldiers of Cathal end my life it will be your hands that close my eyes, and perhaps—too much to ask, I know—your lips that touch my cold ones in farewell. There is a lyren tree near the northern wall of Larai Rigal. Ten nights past the full of the moon there should still be light enough at moonrise for us to find each other. I will be there. You hold my life as a small thing between the fingers of your hands. Diarmuid dan Ailell
"Do you know," Rachel said, "that you are a musician, after all." "I wish," he heard himself say. "You know I can’t even sing." "But no," she said, pursuing a conceit, playing with the hairs on his chest. "You are. You’re a harper, Paul. You have harper’s hands." "Where’s my harp, then?" Straight man. And Rachel said, "Me, of course. My heart’s your harpstring." What could he do but smile? The very light. "You know," she said, "when I play next month, the Brahms, it’ll be for you." "No. For yourself. Keep that for yourself." She smiled. He couldn’t see it, but he knew by now when Rachel smiled.
Updated: Mar 02, 2022
Deny not your own mortality. The voice was within him like a wind, one of her voices, only one, he knew, and in the sound was love, he was loved. You failed because humans fail. It is a gift as much as anything else. And then, deep within him like the low sound of a harp, which no longer hurt, this last: Go easy, and in peace. It is well.
He looked for Leith again across the ring of fire. And with a twist in his heart, Ivor saw how beautiful she was, how very beautiful still, and then he saw the tears in her eyes. Youngest child, he thought, a mother and her youngest. He had a sudden overwhelming sense of the wonder, the strangeness, the deep, deep richness of things. It filled him, it expanded within his breast. He couldn’t hold it in, it was so much, so very much.
It was with a sinking heart that the newly arrived ambassador from Seressa grasped that the Emperor Rodolfo, famously eccentric, was serious about an experiment in court protocol. The emperor liked experiments, everyone knew that.
He will probably accept that, Marin is thinking on a pleasant evening in spring. There have been times when his dreams have been more encompassing, but there are only so many ways you can fight the world as it is given to you, and his will be far—very far—from a dismal fate or future.
SORROW IS ENDURING. It can define a life. Leonora had come to understand this through the course of a year. It could be deep as any well, cold as mountain lakes or forest paths in winter. It was harder than stone walls, or her father’s face.
She was the one who was kind that first night. There were things she had learned (in joy) from the boy she’d loved and been loved by. These could be shared. It was necessary, what she did in the dark of Miucci’s room. They were to pass as husband and wife, newly wed, and their assigned servants in Dubrava would be watching them, and listening. But Leonora discovered, with surprise, that eliciting gratitude carried a different sort of pleasure, and she permitted herself to feel that, accept it, a form of mercy after a shadowed year.
“She is the spy?” “I’d say so. Nothing unusual, of course.” “Fucking Seressinis.” Marin grins. “As to that, I never did ask—how was last night?” Drago flushes crimson, which is all the reward a man ought to ever need for a clever line. Unless he’d said it to a woman, perhaps.
One of her grandchildren would talk to Danica in her mind, silently, for many years, from the first moments after her grandmother died. Another blessing granted, to both of them. This should not happen, perhaps, but it does. We live among mysteries. Love is one, there are others. We must not imagine we understand all there is to know about the world.
Weary but content, he brought his small horse to a halt in front of the cabin. Shen Tai was in a white tunic for mourning, but his loose trousers and the tunic were sweat- and dirt-stained. He was unshaven, darkened, rough-skinned like a peasant, but he was staring at Yan in flattering disbelief. Yan felt like a hero. He was a hero. He’d had a nosebleed earlier, from the altitude, but you didn’t have to talk about that. He only wished his tidings weren’t so grave. But then he wouldn’t be here, would he, if they weren’t?
It had occurred to Tai many years ago that one usually expected important decisions in life to emerge after long and complex thought. Sometimes this was so. But on other occasions one might wake in the morning (or finish drying one’s hands and face in a dusty border fort) with the abrupt, intense realization that a choice had already been made. All that was left was putting it into effect.
Some men seemed able to slide in and out of society. This man appeared to be one of them. Lin Fong knew that he himself was not, and never would be; he had too great a need for security, routines, for such uncertainty. But Shen Tai did make him aware that there were, or might be, alternative ways to live. It probably did help, he thought, to have had a Left Side Commander for a father.
In the teachings of the Path, beliefs to which he’d tried, erratically, to adhere, Tai knew that coincidence, the fortuitous encounter, was to be accepted with composure. If grim and unpleasant, such moments were properly understood as tasks, lessons one was meant to master. If benevolent, they were gifts to be humbly received.
Full moon is falling through the sky. Cranes fly through clouds. Wolves howl. I cannot find rest Because I am powerless To amend a broken world.
Sima Zian added, "I love the man who wrote that, I told you before, but there is so much burden in Chan Du. Duty, assuming all tasks, can betray arrogance. The idea we can know what must be done, and do it properly. We cannot know the future, my friend. It claims so much to imagine we can. And the world is not broken any more than it always, always is."
He felt her nodding her head. "But I don’t believe the world will let you stay by that stream all your days." "It might not. But I do not want to be lost in the dust and noise. To be what Liu became. In the Ta-Ming." "If they even reclaim the Ta-Ming." "Yes." "Do you … do you think they will?" Tai lay in darkness, thinking about it. "Yes. It may take time, but the new emperor is wiser than Roshan, and I think Roshan will die soon. This is not the end of the Ninth Dynasty." "There will be changes." He ran a hand through her hair: the unimaginable gift of his being able to do so. "This is a change, Song." "I see. You prefer me this way? Obedient and submissive?" Her hand began moving again. "Submissive? Is that like the inexperience, before?" "I have much to learn," she murmured. "I know it." And she lifted her head from his shoulder and slipped down towards where her hand had gone. A little later, Tai managed, with some effort, to say, "Did they teach you that on Stone Drum Mountain?" "No," she said, from farther down the bed. And then, in a different voice, "But I’m not a concubine, Tai." "Hardly," he murmured. He felt her head lift. "What does that mean? I lack the skills you are accustomed to?" "You could possibly acquire them," he said judiciously. "With effort and time enough to—" He made a sharp, strangled sound. "I didn’t hear that last," she murmured sweetly. He made an effort to compose himself. "Oh, Song. Will I survive a life with you?" "If you are more cautious about what you say," she said, sounding meditative, "I see no reason why not. But I’m not a concubine, Shen Tai." "I said I know that," he protested. "Before you bit me." He cleared his throat. He felt amazingly sure of himself. Sure of the world, or this small part of it. He said, "It would be a great honour if, Mistress Wei Song, before you took my horses north, I were permitted to learn your father’s name, and your mother’s, and the location of their home, that my mother might correspond with them as to possibilities for the future." She stopped moving. He had a sense she was biting her lower lip. She said, "Your servant would be pleased if your honourable mother were willing to initiate such a correspondence." Which formality, given where she was just then, and what she now resumed doing, was remarkable. He reached down and drew her up (she was so small), and laid her upon her back, and shifted above her. She began, shortly thereafter, making small sounds, and then more urgent ones, and then, some time after, with the bird still singing outside, she said, halfway between a gasp and a cry, "Did you learn that in the North District?" "Yes," he said. "Good," she said. "I like it." And twisting her body the way he’d seen her do springing up a wall in Chenyao or fighting assassins alone with two swords, she was above him again. Her mouth found his, and she did something with her teeth that made him realize, suddenly, that it hadn’t been any fox-woman he’d been dreaming about so…
Branching paths. The turning of days and seasons and years. Life offered you love sometimes, sorrow often. If you were very fortunate, true friendship. Sometimes war came. You did what you could to shape your own peace, before you crossed over to the night and left the world behind, as all men did, to be forgotten or remembered, as time or love allowed.
When choosing a bow choose a strong one, If you shoot an arrow shoot a long one, To capture the enemy capture their leader, But carry within you the knowledge That war is brought to bring peace.
They rode together under the moon, south along the river from Cho-fu-Sa. Sometimes the one life we are allowed is enough.
Updated: Sep 05, 2023
Amid the ten thousand noises and the jade-and-gold and the whirling dust of Xinan, he had often stayed awake all night among friends, drinking spiced wine in the North District with the courtesans. They would listen to flute or pipa music and declaim poetry, test each other with jibes and quotes, sometimes find a private room with a scented, silken woman, before weaving unsteadily home after the dawn drums sounded curfew’s end, to sleep away the day instead of studying. Here in the mountains, alone in hard, clear air by the waters of Kuala Nor, far to the west of the imperial city, beyond the borders of the empire, even, Tai was in a narrow bed by darkfall, under the first brilliant stars, and awake at sunrise.
There were too many. It was beyond hope to ever finish this: it was a task for gods descending from the nine heavens, not for one man. But if you couldn’t do everything, did that mean you did nothing? For two years now, Shen Tai had offered what passed for his own answer to that, in memory of his father’s voice asking quietly for another cup of wine, watching large, slow goldfish and drifting flowers in the pond.
It had been written by one teacher in the time of the First Dynasty, more than nine hundred years ago, that when a man was brought back alive from the tall doors of death, from the brink of crossing over to the dark, he had a burden laid upon him ever after: to conduct his granted life in such a manner as to be worthy of that return.
Shen Tai, the son of the late General Shen, was the sort of person Lin Fong would have wished to keep at Iron Gate for days or even weeks, such was the spark of the man’s thinking and the unusual pattern of his life. Their conversation over dinner had forced him to acknowledge, ruefully, how impoverished his daily routines and company were here.
Updated: Sep 06, 2023
You could grieve for what might drive men to be outlaws, but you couldn’t indulge it.
Song’s eyes grew wide. "What? How is …?" "We have a few days to ride. I will tell you that tale." She hesitated, and then she bit her lip. "I am acceptable to you, like this? I feel strange, not wearing black. As if I have lost … protection."
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice—they won’t hear you otherwise—“I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.
In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages, the Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success, the Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer, the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves, the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified. Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time To Reread and the Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It’s Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them. With a zigzag dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Books Whose Author Or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Not New (for you or in general) and New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new).
All this simply means that, having rapidly glanced over the titles of the volumes displayed in the bookshop, you have turned toward a stack of If on a winter’s night a traveler fresh off the press, you have grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be established.
You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don’t say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book.
The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph. In the odor of the station there is a passing whiff of station café odor. There is someone looking through the befogged glass, he opens the glass door of the bar, everything is misty, inside, too, as if seen by nearsighted eyes, or eyes irritated by coal dust. The pages of the book are clouded like the windows of an old train, the cloud of smoke rests on the sentences. It is a rainy evening; the man enters the bar; he unbuttons his damp overcoat; a cloud of steam enfolds him; a whistle dies away along tracks that are glistening with rain, as far as the eye can see.
A whistling sound, like a locomotive’s, and a cloud of steam rise from the coffee machine that the old counterman puts under pressure, as if he were sending up a signal, or at least so it seems from the series of sentences in the second paragraph, in which the players at the table close the fans of cards against their chests and turn toward the newcomer with a triple twist of their necks, shoulders, and chairs, while the customers at the counter raise their little cups and blow on the surface of the coffee, lips and eyes half shut, or suck the head of their mugs of beer, taking exaggerated care not to spill. The cat arches its back, the cashier closes her cash register and it goes pling. All these signs converge to inform us that this is a little provincial station, where anyone is immediately noticed.
But you need context. Let’s try the ending again, writ continentally. Here is a land. It is ordinary, as lands go. Mountains and plateaus and canyons and river deltas, the usual. Ordinary, except for its size and its dynamism. It moves a lot, this land. Like an old man lying restlessly abed it heaves and sighs, puckers and farts, yawns and swallows. Naturally this land’s people have named it the Stillness. It is a land of quiet and bitter irony.
Yumenes is not unique because of its size. There are many large cities in this part of the world, chain-linked along the equator like a continental girdle.
None of these places or people matter, by the way. I simply point them out for context. But here is a man who will matter a great deal. You can imagine how he looks, for now. You may also imagine what he’s thinking. This might be wrong, mere conjecture, but a certain amount of likelihood applies nevertheless.
There is an art to smiling in a way that others will believe. It is always important to include the eyes; otherwise, people will know you hate them.
The line is deep and raw, a cut to the quick of the planet. Magma wells in its wake, fresh and glowing red. The earth is good at healing itself. This wound will scab over quickly in geologic terms, and then the cleansing ocean will follow its line to bisect the Stillness into two lands. Until this happens, however, the wound will fester with not only heat but gas and gritty, dark ash—enough to choke off the sky across most of the Stillness’s face within a few weeks. Plants everywhere will die, and the animals that depend on them will starve, and the animals that eat those will starve. Winter will come early, and hard, and it will last a long, long time. It will end, of course, like every winter does, and then the world will return to its old self. Eventually. Eventually. The people of the Stillness live in a perpetual state of disaster preparedness. They’ve built walls and dug wells and put away food, and they can easily last five, ten, even twenty-five years in a world without sun. Eventually meaning in this case in a few thousand years. Look, the ash clouds are spreading already.
In a language that no longer exists except in these lingering linguistic fragments, eatiri meant “quiet.”
“Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Tell them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at these contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they’ll break themselves trying for what they’ll never achieve.”
When a comm builds atop a fault line, do you blame its walls when they inevitably crush the people inside? No; you blame whoever was stupid enough to think they could defy the laws of nature forever. Well, some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.
Having harbored two sons in the waters of her womb, my mother considers herself something of an authority on human fetuses. The normal fetus, she says, is no swimmer; it is not fish-, seal-, eel-, or even turtlelike: it is an awkward alien in the liquid environment—a groping land creature confused by its immersion and anxious to escape. My brother, she says, was such a fetus. I was not. My swimming style was no humanoid butterfly-, crawl-, back-, or breaststroking: mine were the sure, swift dartings of a deformed but hefty trout at home with the water, finning and hovering in its warm black pool.
The fisherman’s is an inexplicably privileged place in this hard world: there are people wearing straitjackets and living under lock and key for innocuous crimes such as dressing or speaking like Sherlock Holmes, Caesar, or Armstrong Custer, yet there goes my dad—famed and respected in his twenty-five-pound vest, hat full of phony insects, rubber trousertops flapping about his nipples—trudging scot free along the world’s trout streams armed with dangerous hooks and fish knives, whipping the flesh of innocent bodies of water while amusing himself with such mental marvels as his wife the dwarfish river, and his son, Gus the Fish.
My father’s name is Henning Hale-Orviston. His parents were English aristocrats, and his speech and manners derive from them. He carefully maintains his distinguished accent; he drinks Glenfiddich Single Malt Scotch; he smokes Rattray’s Highland Targe and Balkan Sobranie in meerschaums and briar perfects; he drives a Rover in the city and a Winnebago on the road; he lectures in white shirt and tie, fishes in tweeds, and sleeps in silk pajamas; his flies are constructed with a scrupulousness rivaling the Creator’s; his handwriting is like calligraphy, and when he autographs a book he writes the entire name. He is, to my chagrin, the one person in the world who calls me by my legal name, Augustine, so to his chagrin I call him H2O.
In those rarefied circles of purist anglers among whom Henning Hale-Orviston is considered the last word, Ma Orviston is considered the last laugh—for though she has never published a word on fishing, and though H2O has struggled to keep her existence under wraps, Ma has, through the medium of fish-gossip, attained to an infamy rivaling H2O’s fame. The reason? O Heresy! Lower than Low Church, lower than pariah, lower than poacher, predator, or polluter, Ma is the Flyfisherman’s Antipode: she is a bait fisherman. A fundamentalist. A plunker of worms.
You’re the one who has to explain to Tonkee that Hjarka’s decided, through whatever convoluted set of values the big woman holds dear, that an ex-commless geomest with the social skills of a rock represents the pinnacle of desirability.
“No vote,” you say. It’s so quiet that you can hear water trickling out of the pipes in the communal pool, hundreds of feet below. “Leave. Go join Rennanis if they’ll have you. But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any other part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.”
That Castrima has lasted this far, a comm of stills who have repeatedly failed to lynch the roggas openly living among them, is miraculous. Even if “hasn’t yet committed genocidal slaughter” is a low bar to hop, other communities haven’t even managed that much. You’ll give credit where it’s due.
Then Pilate took as much of the scorching air into his lungs as he could and began to shout. His broken voice carried over the thousands of heads, “In the name of the Emperor Caesar! …” His ears were immediately assailed by a choppy, metallic din, repeated several times, that came from the soldiers in the cohorts as they threw their spears and insignia up into the air and shouted out in fearsome tones, “Hail Caesar!”
Hell. He finished his porridge. It was only porridge, and Ruza had yet to meet a philosophical dilemma that could spoil his appetite.
Friends? A pair of warriors and a thief? Even now a voice within him explained that they were lowborn, incompatible with his station, and ridiculous besides. But now that voice sounded haughty and condescending, and he wanted to put it in a jar and toss it in a river, then sit and eat bacon with his ridiculous, lowborn friends.
Maybe the day would come when Thyon was no longer gobsmacked by the fact that the meek junior librarian who used to walk into walls while reading was now in possession of a massive, impregnable, interdimensional skyship that he controlled with his mind. But that day was not today.
He said, “I’m sure there are real dragons out there somewhere. You can hatch one from an egg and raise it to be your loyal steed.” Ruza’s whole face lit up. “Do you really think so?” “Out of hundreds of worlds?” said Thyon. “It would be stranger if there weren’t dragons.” Hundreds of worlds. Hundreds of worlds, and they would see them, because they were leaving Zeru, and he, Thyon Nero, was going with them. He would never go back to Zosma, where the queen wore a necklace woven of his golden hair, and some blurry outline of a future wife awaited his return. Instead he was joining a crew of gods and pirates for a mission straight out of a myth. It wasn’t even an alternate version of his life. He hadn’t gone back in time and done everything differently to get to this place. It turned out that sometimes it’s enough to start doing things differently now.
“Wishes don’t just come true. They’re only the target you paint around what you want. You still have to hit the bull’s-eye yourself.”