Saturday, December 31, 2016

Elizabeth Gilbert's 4-Question Test to Know Who to Trust

Honesty's the best policy, of course—unless someone uses it to tear you down.

By Elizabeth Gilbert

Twenty years ago, a friend and I were having dinner at a Mexican restaurant when she suddenly asked me, "Liz, can I be brutally honest with you about something?" 

Here's how dumb I was back in my 20s: I actually said, "Yes! Of course!" 

At which point my friend took a shiv out of her purse and expertly slid it right between my ribs. 

Okay, to be fair, she didn't literally stab me. She merely told me that I was selfish and lazy, and also that I would probably never be able to make a living as a writer, and moreover that nobody liked my boyfriend. Oh yeah, one last thing: My hair didn't look very good. My jaw is too big to carry off a pixie cut, apparently. Makes my face look all weird and out of balance. 

As I sat there gasping for oxygen over my half-eaten fajitas and trying to stem my internal emotional bleeding, my friend reached across the table and pushed aside the salsa so she could place her hand on mine for emphasis. 

"I'm the only person who cares about you enough to tell you the truth," she said. "That's why it's important that you keep me around. Everybody else just blows smoke up your ass." 

Here's another example of how dumb I was in my 20s: I actually believed her. Thus, I kept this friend in my life for another five years. Whenever I faced a difficult decision or needed an opinion on a sensitive issue, I would return to her and ask once more for the brutal truth—which she would happily deliver, smiling with pleasure as she donned her executioner's mask and got busy hacking me up.

Why did I keep going back for more abuse? Because I figured her honesty was keeping me honest—when in fact it was just keeping me injured. Interestingly enough, it was the progress I was making in my professional life (the one she thought I'd never have) that ultimately taught me how injurious these criticisms really were. 

See, despite my friend's prediction, I did eventually start making a living as a writer. Putting my work into the world meant I had to learn how to take criticism. But I slowly realized that I didn't have to take it from everybody. I learned, over time, how to seek out the type of readers who would actually serve my writing. I came up with four questions to help me decide who got to read my work when it was in its most vulnerable stages: 

Do I trust this person's taste and judgment?

Does this person understand what I'm trying to create here?

Does this person genuinely want me to succeed?

Is this person capable of delivering the truth to me in a sensitive and compassionate manner? 

If I could not answer yes to all four questions, then I would not let that person read my stories. And the fourth question was the most important—because here is what I learned (the hard way) about readers and editors who offered me a "brutally honest" critique of my writing: They were always more brutal than honest. Whenever somebody promises a brutally honest opinion, what they are actually saying is, "Please give me the opportunity to take you down!" The truth delivered without a dose of kindness was of no help to my work. (Cruelty only made me want to stop writing and hide.) Once I started to keep my writing away from such people and found more compassionate readers, my work improved. 

Best of all, I eventually learned that I could apply these four questions to the critics in my personal life as well. If I'm going to open myself to you, then I need to know that I can trust you, and that you understand me, and that you genuinely want me to succeed, and—most of all—that you are capable of being compassionate with your honesty. When I began surrounding myself with people like this, I was able to start coaxing my life in a better direction and creating a more wonderful story about my own existence. 

Which meant that finally a day came when my old shiv-carrying friend asked me, "Can I be brutally honest with you?" and I told her my own truth: "Oh, hell no." 

Don't worry, I said it with more kindness than that. Because that's the only way it works. 

Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of, most recently, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Michelle O'bama

"Never believe that there is a room you have no right to walk into." - Michelle O'bama

Thursday, December 29, 2016

Hogmanay

Hog·ma·nay
ˈhäɡməˌnā/
noun
  1. (in Scotland) New Year's Eve, and the celebrations that take place at this time.


School's out! Well, they've been out for over a week, but I gave my folk a wee Hogmanay present and we left the office a couple of hours early.” - Roy McPhail

Solar Panels


The new solar panels on the top of the Copley-Price YMCA parking garage.

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

La Mesa Kitties

Pictures of Bubba, Spanky, and Stella from cat sitting various times at Villa De Fanta this fall.













The Grinch




Monday, the 26th, I ushered the last performance of The Grinch at The Old Globe this year. It's the third Grinch I ushered this year. Just like last year, the cast was every bit as fresh and fun on the last show as the first. I enjoyed it each time and the audience came out after the show with big smiles on their face each time. Plus, the other ushers and The Globe staff Mary, Angela, and Mike are all so great to work with.

Friday, December 23, 2016

Only Parts of Us

Only parts of us will ever
touch only parts of others —
one’s own truth is just that really — one’s own truth.
We can only share the part that is within another’s knowing
so one is for the most part 
alone.
- Marilyn Monroe

Diamonds in the Filth

“A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerged, and will be able to discover the diamonds in the filth.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Sunday, December 18, 2016

Bruce Lee's Philosophy

  “One should be in harmony with, and not rebellion against, the strength of the opponent.”
  “Yielding will overcome anything superior to itself; its strength is boundless.”
  “Discard all thoughts of reward, all hopes of praise and all fears of blame, all awareness of one’s bodily self. And, finally, close the avenues of sense perception and let the spirit out as it will.”
   “The highest skill operates on an unconscious level.”
  “Wishing to cultivate oneself, one first rectifies his heart.
   Wishing to rectify his heart, one seeks to be sincere in his thoughts.
   Wishing to be sincere in his thoughts, one first extends to the utmost of his knowledge—such extension of knowledge lies in the investigation of things.”
- Bruce Lee

Friday, December 16, 2016

The Physics of Vulnerability

“If we are brave enough often enough we will fail; this is the physics of vulnerability.”   - Brene Brown

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Sweet Darkness

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.

- David Whyte, Sweet Darkness

Quondam

ˈkwändəm,-ˌdam/
adjective; formal
that once was; former.
"quondam dissidents joined the establishment"

"The simple father was beginning to submit that he hoped his son, the quondam Grinder, huffed and cuffed, and flogged and badged, and taught, as parrots are, by a brute jobbed into his place of schoolmaster with as much fitness for it as a hound, might not have been educated on quite a right plan in some undiscovered respect, when Mr. Dombey angrily repeating “The usual return!” led the Major away." - Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Auntie Mame


Tonight Steve went with me to Filmout San Diego's presentation of “Auntie Mame". It's Steve's favorite movie and he'd never seen it on the big screen. For that matter I'm not sure if I had either. It's great on the big screen and more fun in a theater full of gay men and fans of the film.


Monday, December 12, 2016

Keep the Channel Open

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening,
That is translated through you in action.

And because there is only one of you in all time,
This expression is unique, and if you block it, 
It will never exist through any other medium and be lost.
The world will not have it.

It is not your business to determine how good it is,
Nor how valuable, nor how it compares to other expressions.
It is your business to keep the channel open.

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.
You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges
that activate you.

Keep the channel open.

 - Martha Graham

   I would add that it is also not anyone else's business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares to other expressions.

Sunday, December 11, 2016

Lovely Days

"Lovely days don't come to you. You should walk to them." - Rumi


Saturday, December 10, 2016

Peacemaking


Beethoven's Ninth


Tonight the San Diego Symphony performed Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It was a thrilling performance and a very fun night. I got to help them scan tickets at the door. I did pretty well heading everybody in the right direction for my first time, I think. It was a big crowd, the Hall was nearly full. And everybody was so very nice and excited to be there, many for the first time. I just really had a lot of fun.

Wednesday, December 07, 2016

10 LEARNINGS FROM 10 YEARS OF BRAIN PICKINGS ANIMATED (MARIA POPOVA)

10 Learnings from 10 Years of Brain Pickings

Fluid reflections on keeping a solid center.

BY MARIA POPOVA

I remember my first awareness of mortality as a child in Bulgaria. I was nine and my father was relaying an anecdote from his youth. I asked him when it had taken place. With unconcerned casualness, he replied: “About a decade ago.” I was astonished that people could segment their lives into blocks this big — my own life hadn’t yet lasted a decade. In realizing that “a decade ago” I hadn’t existed — the self I now so vividly experienced daily was then a nonentity — I also realized that in several more of those ten-year blocks, my dad, and eventually I, will cease to exist.

With dad, year 0

After one such time-block, I left Bulgaria for America, lured by the liberal arts education promise of being taught how to live. As the reality fell short of that promise, I began keeping my own record of what I was reading and learning outside the classroom in mapping this academically unaddressed terra incognita of being.

All the while, I was working numerous jobs to pay my way through school. What I was learning at night and on weekends, at the library and on the internet — from Plato to pop art — felt too uncontainably interesting to keep to myself, so I decided to begin sharing these private adventures with my colleagues at one of my jobs. On October 23, 2006, Brain Pickings was born as a plain-text email to seven friends. Halfway through my senior year of college, juggling my various jobs and academic course load, I took a night class to learn coding and turned the short weekly email into a sparse website, which I updated manually every Friday, then, eventually, every weekday.

The site grew as I grew — an unfolding record of my intellectual, creative, and spiritual development. At the time, I had no idea that this small labor of love and learning would animate me with a sense of purpose and become both my life and my living, nor that its seven original readers would swell into several million. I had no idea that this eccentric personal record, which I began keeping in the city where Benjamin Franklin founded the first subscription library in America, would one day be included in the Library of Congress archive of “materials of historical importance.”

And now, somehow, a decade has elapsed.

Because I believe that our becoming, like the synthesis of meaning itself, is an ongoing and dynamic process, I’ve been reluctant to stultify it and flatten its ongoing expansiveness in static opinions and fixed personal tenets of living. But I do find myself continually discovering, then returning to, certain core values. While they may be refined and enriched in the act of living, their elemental substance remains a center of gravity for what I experience as myself.

I first set down some of these core beliefs, written largely as notes to myself that may or may not be useful to others, when Brain Pickings turned seven (which kindred spirits later adapted into a beautiful poster inspired by the aesthetic of vintage children’s books and a cinematic short film). I expanded upon them to mark year nine. Today, as I round the first decade of Brain Pickings, I feel half-compelled, half-obliged to add a tenth learning, a sort of crowning credo drawn from a constellation of life-earned beliefs I distilled in a commencement address I delivered in the spring of 2016.

Here are all ten, in the order that they were written.

From year seven:

Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.

Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking momentdictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?

When people tell you who they are, Maya Angeloufamously advised, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”“Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. As I’ve reflected elsewhere, the flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.


From year nine:

Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.


And as I round the decade:

Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lays dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis — in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.

Tuesday, December 06, 2016

Sunday in the Park

A photographer recreated George Seurat's painting with real people. This was done by Beloit Wisconsin's Friends of the Riverfront as a promotion for an event, but I'm not sure who the photographer is: https://www.facebook.com/BeloitRiverfront/photos/a.107853319236093.10653.107842622570496/1166455993375815/?type=3&theater


Bruce Lee on Willpower, Emotion, Reason, Memory, Imagination, and Confidence

“You will never get any more out of life than you expect.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

Although Bruce Lee(November 27, 1940–July 20, 1973) is best known for his legendary legacy in martial arts and film, he was also one of the most underappreciated philosophers of the twentieth century, instrumental in introducing Eastern traditions to Western audiences. A philosophy major in college, he fused ancient ideas with his own singular ethos informed by the intersection of physical and psychological discipline, the most famous manifestation of which is his water metaphor for resilience.

Early in his career, Lee was systematically sidelined by Hollywood’s studio system, which operated with extreme racial bias and still used white actors in yellowface to portray Asian characters based on flat stereotypes. Over and over, Lee was told in no uncertain terms that white audiences simply wouldn’t accept an Asian man as a lead character in a movie.

Bruce Lee (Photograph courtesy of the Bruce Lee Foundation archive)

Even when he finally broke through and was cast as a lead, the studios continued to treat him as a brainless robot, there to entertain with his kung-fu skills. When they tried to cut all the philosophy out of Enter the Dragon because they wanted a vacantly entertaining action movie, Lee refused to go on set for two weeks, insisting that the kung-fu and the philosophy were inextricably entwined, each the vehicle for the other. Hollywood eventually had to relent and it was precisely the philosophical dimension that rendered the movie — just before the release of which Lee met his untimely death — a cultural icon and a beacon of racial empowerment associated with the Black Power movement, later acquired by the Library of Congress as a “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” artifact.

Lee saw philosophy as inseparable from everyday life, just as he saw the mind as inseparable from the body, each end of the battery constantly charging the other. He recorded his rigorous workout routine alongside his philosophical meditations, which he fleshed out in the course of living. Like Oliver Sacks, who carried a notebook everywhere, Lee always had a tiny 2×3″ pocketbook with him, which he filled with everything from training regimens to the phone numbers of his pupils (who included trainees like Chuck Norris and Steve McQueen) to poems, affirmations, and philosophical reflections. Even his handwriting, meticulously neat and measured to fit the tiny page, radiates Lee’s formidable discipline and orderliness.

Bruce Lee (Photograph courtesy of the Bruce Lee Foundation archive)

But perhaps the most notable portion of his pocketbooks — or day timers, as they were called — were his affirmations, reminiscent of the rules of conduct Nobel laureate André Gide penned in his youthful journal and of artist Eugène Delacroix’s diaristic self-counsel. In these notes to himself, Lee articulated his personal philosophies aimed concretely at his own growth but resonating with universally applicable insight into our common psychology, behavior, and human nature.

With special permission from the Bruce Lee estate, here is an exclusive look at several pages from his 1968 pocketbook, penned shortly before Lee’s twenty-eighth birthday, each transcribed below, beginning with Napoleon Hill’s “Daily Success Creed,” which Lee copied into his notebooks:

Archival material with exclusive permission from the Bruce Lee Foundation archive

WILL POWER: —

Recognizing that the power of will is the supreme court over all other departments of my mind, I will exercise it daily, when I need the urge to action for any purpose; and I will form HABIT designed to bring the power of my will into action at least once daily.

EMOTION: —

Realizing that my emotions are both POSITIVE and negative I will form daily HABITS which will encourage the development of the POSITIVE EMOTIONS, and aid me in converting the negative emotions into some form of useful action.

REASON: —

Recognizing that both my positive & negative emotions may be dangerous if they are not controlled and guided to desirable ends, I will submit all my desires, aims and purposes to my faculties of reason, and I will be guided by it in giving expression to these.

IMAGINATION: —

Recognizing the need for sound PLANS and IDEAS for the attainment of my desires, I will develop my imagination by calling upon it daily for help in the formation of my plans.

MEMORY: —

Recognizing the value of an alert memory, I will encourage mine to become alert by taking care to impress it clearly with all thoughts I wish to recall, and by associating those thoughts with related subjects which I may call to mind frequently.

SUBCONSCIOUS MIND: —

Recognizing the influence of my subconscious mind over my power of will, I shall take care to submit to it a clear and definite picture of my CLEAR PURPOSE in life and all minor purposes leading to my major purpose, and I shall keep this picture CONSTANTLY BEFORE my subconscious mind by REPEATING IT DAILY.

CONSCIENCE: —

Recognizing that my emotions often err in their over-enthusiasm, and my faculty of reason often is without the warmth of feeling that is necessary to enable me to combine justice with mercy in my judgments, I will encourage my conscience to guide me as to what is right & what is wrong, but I will never set aside the verdicts it renders, no matter what may be the cost of carrying them out.


When Lee felt that he had arrived at a particularly significant idea, he wrote it on the unlined back of a plain 3×5″ lined yellow notecard, which he signed, almost like a will or perhaps a contract with himself. He would often refine or copy reflections first recorded in his pocketbook onto the notecards reserved for only his firmest convictions and deepest dedications.

What makes the affirmations especially notable is that they fuse ancient philosophical and spiritual traditions (particularly Zen Buddhism’s ideas about character, the self, and the ego), questionable New Agey magical thinking, and habits of mind which contemporary psychology has since proven fruitful — a reminder that our personhood is a mashup of our era and our culture, with all their inherent knowledges and ignorances, and it is the way we combine the elements at our disposal that makes us who we are.

Archival material with exclusive permission from the Bruce Lee Foundation archive

You will never get any more out of life than you expect

Keep your mind on the things you want and off those you don’t

Things live by moving and gain strength as they go

Be a calm beholder of what is happening around you

There is a difference a) the world b) our reaction to it

Be aware of our conditioning! Drop and dissolve inner blockage

Inner to outer ~~~ we start by dissolving our attitude not by altering outer condition

See that there is no one to fight, only an illusion to see through

No one can hurt you unless you allow him to

Inwardly, psychologically, be a nobody


Archival material with exclusive permission from the Bruce Lee Foundation archive

I know that I have the ability to ACHIEVE the object of my DEFINITE PURPOSE in life; therefore I DEMAND of myself persistent, continuous action toward its attainment, and I here and now promise to render such action.

I realize the DOMINATING THOUGHTS of my mind will eventually reproduce themselves in outward, physical action, and gradually transform themselves into physical reality; therefore I will CONCENTRATE my thoughts for 30 min. daily upon the task of thinking of the person I intend to become, thereby creating in my mind a clear MENTAL PICTURE.

I know through the principle of autosuggestion, any desire that I PERSISTENTLY hold will eventually seek expression through some practical means of attaining the object back of it; therefore, I will devote 10 min. daily to DEMANDING of myself the development of SELF-CONFIDENCE.

I have clearly written down a description of my DEFINITE CHIEF AIM in life, and I will never stop trying until I shall have developed sufficient self-confidence for its attainment.


Complement with Lee on the crucial difference between pride and self-esteem, then tune into the excellent new Bruce Lee podcast, in which Lee’s daughter, Shannon, and creative director Sharon Lee unpack his philosophies and discuss how the abiding ideas behind each of his tenets apply to various aspects of our modern lives. You can help keep his legacy alive with a donation to the Bruce Lee Foundation.

Book Review

M Is for MagicM Is for Magic by Neil Gaiman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Some of the stories are included in other collections and I had read before, but new Neil Gaiman is always worth reading and previously read Neil Gaiman is always worth reading again. Especially notable are “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” and “The Witch's Headstone.” “The Witch's Headstone” is a sketch of sorts for “The Graveyard Book”. Part of the appeal of Neil Gaiman might be that he always leaves us wanting more, but I do hope he fills out and expands The Graveyard Book to include more of the story, especially more about who is chasing Bod.



View all my reviews

The Paradox of Communication: the Crucial Difference Between Discussion and Dialogue

Legendary Physicist David Bohm on the Paradox of Communication, the Crucial Difference Between Discussion and Dialogue, and What Is Keeping Us from Listening to One Another

“If we are to live in harmony with ourselves and with nature, we need to be able to communicate freely in a creative movement in which no one permanently holds to or otherwise defends his own ideas.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“Words,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her abiding meditation on the magic of real human communication“transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” But what happens in a cultural ecosystem where the hearer has gone extinct and the speaker gone rampant? Where do transformation and understanding go?

What made, for instance, James Baldwin and Margaret Mead’s superb 1970 dialogue about race and identity so powerful and so enduringly insightful is precisely the fact that it was a dialogue — not the ping-pong of opinions and co-reactivity that passes for dialogue today, but a commitment to mutual contemplation of viewpoints and considered response. That commitment is the reason why they were able to address questions we continue to confront with tenfold more depth and nuance than we are capable of today. And the dearth of this commitment in our present culture is the reason why we continue to find ourselves sundered by confrontation and paralyzed by the divisiveness of “us vs. them” narratives. “To bother to engage with problematic culture, and problematic people within that culture, is an act of love,” wrote the poet Elizabeth Alexander in contemplating power and possibility. Krista Tippett calls such engagement generous listening. And yet so much of our communication today is defined by a rather ungenerous unwillingness to listen coupled with a compulsion to speak.

The most perennially insightful and helpful remedy for this warping of communication I’ve ever encountered comes from the legendary physicist David Bohm(December 20, 1917–October 27, 1992) in On Dialogue (public library) — a slim, potent collection of Bohm’s essays and lectures from the 1970s and 1980s, exploring the alchemy of human communication, what is keeping us from listening to one another, and how we can transcend those barriers to mutual understanding.

Decades before the social web as we know it and long before Rebecca Solnit came to lament how our modern noncommunication is changing our experience of solitude and communion, Bohm cautions:

In spite of this worldwide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale… What appears [in the media] is generally at best a collection of trivial and almost unrelated fragments, while at worst, it can often be a really harmful source of confusion and misinformation.


He terms this “the problem of communication” and writes:

Different groups … are not actually able to listen to each other. As a result, the very attempt to improve communication leads frequently to yet more confusion, and the consequent sense of frustration inclines people ever further toward aggression and violence, rather than toward mutual understanding and trust.


Art by Ralph Steadman from a rare edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Suggesting that the difficulty might arise from our “crude and insensitive manner of thinking about communication and talking about it,” Bohm sets out to restore the necessary subtlety by reclaiming the true meaning of communication and its supreme mastery, dialogue:

“Communication” … is based on the Latin commun and the suffix “ie” which is similar to “fie,” in that it means “to make or to do.” So one meaning of “to communicate” is “to make something common,” i.e., to convey information or knowledge from one person to another in as accurate a way as possible.

[…]

Nevertheless, this meaning does not cover all that is signified by communication. For example, consider a dialogue. In such a dialogue, when one person says something, the other person does not in general respond with exactly the same meaning as that seen by the first person. Rather, the meanings are only similar and not identical. Thus, when the second person replies, the first person sees a difference between what he meant to say and what the other person understood. On considering this difference, he may then be able to see something new, which is relevant both to his own views and to those of the other person. And so it can go back and forth, with the continual emergence of a new content that is common to both participants. Thus, in a dialogue, each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it may be said that the two people are making something in common, i.e., creating something new together.

But of course such communication can lead to the creation of something new only if people are able freely to listen to each other, without prejudice, and without trying to influence each other. Each has to be interested primarily in truth and coherence, so that he is ready to drop his old ideas and intentions, and be ready to go on to something different, when this is called for.


Art by Sydney Pink from Overcoming Creative Block

Such communication in the service of creating something new, Bohm argues, takes place not only between people but within people. He illustrates this with an example that calls to mind Alan Lightman’s beautiful reflection on the creative sympathies of art and science, and writes:

Consider, for example, the work of an artist. Can it properly be said that the artist is expressing himself, i.e., literally “pushing outward” something that is already formed inside of him? Such a description is not in fact generally accurate or adequate. Rather, what usually happens is that the first thing the artist does is only similar in certain ways to what he may have in mind. As in a conversation between two people, he sees the similarity and the difference, and from this perception something further emerges in his next action. Thus, something new is continually created that is common to the artist and the material on which he is working.

The scientist is engaged in a similar “dialogue” with nature (as well as with his fellow human beings). Thus, when a scientist has an idea, this is tested by observation. When it is found (as generally happens) that what is observed is only similar to what he had in mind and not identical, then from a consideration of the similarities and the differences he gets a new idea which is in turn tested. And so it goes, with the continual emergence of something new that is common to the thought of scientists and what is observed in nature.


In a sentiment that affirms the importance of the uncomfortable luxury of changing one’s mind, Bohm adds:

It is clear that if we are to live in harmony with ourselves and with nature, we need to be able to communicate freely in a creative movement in which no one permanently holds to or otherwise defends his own ideas.


He observes that these ideas are rooted in assumptions we hold about various aspects of life — from politics to economics to religion — and those assumptions are what we call our “opinions.” Four centuries after Galileo admonished against the folly of believing one’s preconceptions, Bohm argues that this tendency to cling to our existing opinions is a kind of self-protective “block” we use as a hedge against our fear of uncertainty. But in blocking uncertainty, we also block our ability to listen. Fertile dialogue, he points out, requires that we first become aware of our own “blocks,” then be willing to surmount them. He writes:

When we come together to talk, or otherwise to act in common, can each one of us be aware of the subtle fear and pleasure sensations that “block” his ability to listen freely? Without this awareness, the injunction to listen to the whole of what is said will have little meaning. But if each one of us can give full attention to what is actually “blocking” communication while he is also attending properly to the content of what is communicated, then we may be able to create something new between us, something of very great significance for bringing to an end the at present insoluble problems of the individual and of society.


In a passage of swelling timeliness today, Bohm considers the crucial difference between dialogue and discussion:

“Dialogue” comes from the Greek word dialogos. Logos means “the word,” or in our case we would think of the “meaning of the word.” And dia means “through” — it doesn’t mean “two.” A dialogue can be among any number of people, not just two. Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of the dialogue is present. The picture or image that this derivation suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which may emerge some new understanding. It’s something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It’s something creative. And this shared meaning is the “glue” or “cement” that holds people and societies together.

Contrast this with the word “discussion,” which has the same root as “percussion” and “concussion.” It really means to break things up. It emphasizes the idea of analysis, where there may be many points of view, and where everybody is presenting a different one — analyzing and breaking up. That obviously has its value, but it is limited, and it will not get us very far beyond our various points of view. Discussion is almost like a ping-pong game, where people are batting the ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or to get points for yourself…

In a dialogue, however, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins. There is a different sort of spirit to it. In a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It’s a situation called win-win, whereas the other game is win-lose — if I win, you lose. But a dialogue is something more of a common participation, in which we are not playing a game against each other, but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.


Art by Salvador Dalí from a rare 1969 edition of Alice in Wonderland

True dialogue, Bohm argues, not only leads us to question the very assumptions upon which our opinions are built but invites a continual act of self-revision at the level of the thought process itself — the process of which our opinions are a product. This self-revision takes place both on the individual level and on the collective level. He considers the difficulty of rethinking thought itself:

You cannot defend something without first thinking the defense. There are those thoughts which might question the thing you want to defend, and you’ve got to push them aside. That may readily involve self-deception — you will simply push aside a lot of things you would rather not accept by saying they are wrong, by distorting the issue, and so on. Thought defends its basic assumptions against evidence that they may be wrong.


Noting that we engage in two kinds of thought, individual and collective, Bohm points out that most of our individual assumptions are the product of our cultural conditioning and our “collective background.” He writes:

Language is collective. Most of our basic assumptions come from our society, including all our assumptions about how society works, about what sort of person we are supposed to be, and about relationships, institutions, and so on. Therefore we need to pay attention to thought both individually and collectively.


Writing in the same era in which evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme,” Bohm adds:

Assumptions or opinions are like computer programs in people’s minds. Those programs take over against the best of intentions — they produce their own intentions.


Those intentions operate on what Bohm calls the “tacit level” — not the level of our conscious awareness but someplace deeper, more intuitive, and almost automatic, of which we only have a vague conscious sense. He explains:

“Tacit” means that which is unspoken, which cannot be described — like the knowledge required to ride a bicycle. It is the actual knowledge, and it may be coherent or not. I am proposing that thought is actually a subtle tacit process. The concrete process of thinking is very tacit. The meaning is basically tacit. And what we can say explicitly is only a very small part of it. I think we all realize that we do almost everything by this sort of tacit knowledge. Thought is emerging from the tacit ground, and any fundamental change in thought will come from the tacit ground. So if we are communicating at the tacit level, then maybe thought is changing.

The tacit process is common. It is shared. The sharing is not merely the explicit communication and the body language and all that, which are part of it, but there is also a deeper tacit process which is common. I think the whole human race knew this for a million years; and then in five thousand years of civilization we have lost it, because our societies got too big to carry it out. But now we have to get started again, because it has become urgent that we communicate. We have to share our consciousness and to be able to think together, in order to do intelligently whatever is necessary. If we begin to confront what’s going on in a dialogue group, we sort of have the nucleus of what’s going on in all society.


But Bohm’s most crucial point — which is also the point most disquieting to our present customs of communication — is that true dialogue must be aimed not at some immediate or practical solution but at the higher-order objective of meaning. A quarter century before physicist Sean Carroll made his beautiful case for “poetic naturalism” as our supreme source of meaning in a universe otherwise devoid of purpose, Bohm writes:

It is not an arbitrary imposition to state that we have no fixed purpose — no absolute purpose, anyway. We may set up relative purposes for investigation, but we are not wedded to a particular purpose, and are not saying that the whole group must conform to that purpose indefinitely. All of us might want the human race to survive, but even that is not our purpose. Our purpose is really to communicate coherently in truth, if you want to call that a purpose.

[…]

It is necessary to share meaning. A society is a link of relationships among people and institutions, so that we can live together. But it only works if we have a culture — which implies that we share meaning; i.e., significance, purpose, and value. Otherwise it falls apart. Our society is incoherent, and doesn’t do that very well; it hasn’t for a long time, if it ever did. The different assumptions that people have are tacitly affecting the whole meaning of what we are doing.


Echoing his magnificent conversation with philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti about intelligence and love, Bohm adds:

Love will go away if we can’t communicate and share meaning… However, if we can really communicate, then we will have fellowship, participation, friendship, and love, growing and growing. That would be the way…

And perhaps in dialogue, when we have this very high energy of coherence, it might bring us beyond just being a group that could solve social problems. Possibly it could make a new change in the individual and a change in the relation to the cosmic. Such an energy has been called “communion.” It is a kind of participation. The early Christians had a Greek word, koinonia, the root of which means “to participate” — the idea of partaking of the whole and taking part in it; not merely the whole group, but the whole.


On Dialogue remains an illuminating and acutely timely read. Complement it with Einstein on widening our circles of compassion and Carl Sagan on moving beyond “us vs. them,” then revisit Bohm on how our beliefs shape our reality.

Saturday, December 03, 2016

Home Alone

   The concert tonight was the John Williams score to the movie "Home Alone". The Symphony played the music live while the movie ran on 3 large screens set up around the stage. It was surprisingly fun and effective. The hall was sold out and the audience was fun and enthusiastic, laughing and applauding from the opening 20th Century Fox fanfare. They'd all arrived dressed nicely and looking forward to a nice evening. At the end they all stayed for the extended finale after the credits and gave the orchestra and chorus and rousing standing ovation. There's something magical about being in a full theater with an enthusiastic audience for a special screening of a movie that we don't get watching them home alone. A great night!