March Meeting Info

We will meet Sunday March 17th at G&C's (the morning after the night before as the saying goes).
Please finish reading the current book for our discussion. Ken has scanned as a pdf an article for us to read for the April meeting and I will send it out later via email.
Have a great month everyone!

Some offerings from Bob...

Thoughts Without A Thinker

While attempting to clean up some space on my computer by reviewing a long list of accumulated documents, I ran across the two contemplations which speak to ideas we are all familiar with; be it “a little” or “a lot.” They reminded me of some aspects of our last Book Club discussion, and I want to offer them as food for thought….sans, perhaps, a Thinker.

When it comes to Impermanence, Emptiness, No-Self, and Inter-Dependence these two teachings in particular, have been of seminal importance to my philosophical understanding, as well as an everyday adaptation of Zen teachings in my life.

I hope you will find a confluence of thought in both teachings, as well as being reflected in Carolyn Tobin’s book, Recovering A Sense of the Sacred: Conversations with Thomas Berry

All conditioned phenomena

Are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, or shadows;

Like drops of dew, or flashes of lightning;

Thusly should they be contemplated.

– Diamond Sutta

Affirming Faith In Mind

3^rd Zen Patriarch, Seng Tsan

The Great Way is not difficult

for those who do not pick and choose.

a

When pref’rences are cast aside the

Way stands clear and undisguised.

But even light distinctions made,

set earth and heaven far apart.

If you would clearly see the truth,

discard opinions pro and con.

To flounder in dislike and like

is nothing but the mind’s disease.

And not to see the Way’s deep truth

disturbs the mind’s essential peace.

The way is perfect like vast space,

where there’s no lack and no excess.

Our choice to choose and to reject

prevents our seeing this simple truth.

Both striving for the outer world

as well as for the inner void

condemn us to entangled lives.

Just calmly see that all is One,

and by themselves false views will go.

Attempts to stop activity

will fill you with activity.

Remaining in duality,

you’ll never know of unity.

And not to know this unity

lets conflict lead you far astray.

When you assert that things are real

you miss their true reality.

But to assert that things are void

also misses reality.

The more you talk and think on this

the further from the truth you’ll be.

Cut off all useless thoughts and words

and there’s nowhere you cannot go.

Returning to the root itself,

you’ll find the meaning of all things.

If you pursue appearances

you overlook the primal source.

Awak’ning is to go beyond

both emptiness as well as form.

All changes in this empty world

seem real because of ignorance.

Do not go searching for the truth,

just let those fond opinions go.

Abide not in duality,

refrain from all pursuit of it

If there’s a trace of right and wrong,

true mind is lost, confused, distraught.

From One-mind comes duality

but cling not even to this One.

When this One-mind rests undisturbed,

then nothing in the world offends.

And when no thing can give offense,

then all obstructions cease to be.

If all thought-objects disappear,

the thinking subject drops away.

For things are things because of mind,

as mind is mind because of things.

These two things are merely relative,

and both at source are Emptiness.

In Emptiness these are not two,

yet in each are contained all forms.

Once coarse and fine are seen no more,

then how can there be taking sides?

The Great Way is without limit,

beyond the easy and the hard.

But those who hold to narrow views

are fearful and irresolute;

their frantic haste just slows them down.

If you’re attached to anything,

you surely will go far astray.

Just let go of clinging mind,

and all things are just as they are.

In essence nothing goes or stays.

See into the true self of things,

and you’re in step with the Great Way,

thus walking freely, undisturbed.

But live in bondage to your thoughts,

and you will be confused, unclear.

This heavy burden weighs you down-

O why keep judging good and bad?

If you would walk the highest Way,

do not reject the sense domain.

For as it is, whole and complete,

this sense world is enlightenment.

The wise do not strive after goals,

but fools themselves in bondage put.

The One Way knows no diff’rences,

the foolish cling to this and that.

To seek Great Mind with thinking mind

is certainly a grave mistake.

From small mind come rest and unrest,

but mind awakened transcends both.

Delusion spawns dualities—

these dreams are naught but flow’rs of air—

why work so hard at grasping them.

Both gain and loss, and right and wrong-

once and for all get rid of them.

When you no longer are asleep,

all dreams will vanish by themselves.

If mind does not discriminate,

all things are as they are, as One.

To go to this myster’ous Source

frees us from all entanglements.

When all is seen with “equal mind,”

to our Self-nature we return.

This single mind goes right beyond

all reasons and comparisons.

Stop movement and there’s no movement,

stop rest and no-rest comes instead.

This ultimate finality’s

beyond all laws, can’t be described.

With single mind one with the Way,

all ego-centered strivings cease;

doubts and confusion disappear,

and so true faith pervades our life.

There is no thing that clings to us’

and nothing that is left behind.

All’s self-revealing, void and clear,

without exerting power of mind.

Thought cannot reach this state of truth,

here feelings are of no avail.

In this true world of Emptiness,

both self and other are no more.

To enter this true empty world,

immediately affirm “not-two.”

In this “not-two” all is the same,

with nothing separate or outside.

The wise in all times and places

awaken to this primal truth.

The Way’s beyond all space, all time,

one instant is ten thousand years.

Not only hear, not only there,

truth’s right before your very eyes.

Distinctions such as large and small

have relevance for you no more.

The largest is the smallest too-

here limitations have no place.

What is not, what not is-

if this is not yet clear to you,

you’re still far from the inner truth.

One thing is all, all things are one-

know this and all’s whole and complete.

When faith and mind are not sep’rate,

and not sep’rate are mind and faith,

this is beyond all words, all thought.

For here is no yesterday,

no tomorrow,

no today.

Thoughts for the Intrepid

   Greetings thinkers. I offer this as a dialogic offering in cyber form to make your day an adventure.....or not! At least know that the highlighting is of my own doing. Happy thinking!

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Neurologist Oliver Sacks on Memory, Plagiarism, and the Necessary Forgettings of Creativity
by Maria Popova

“Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.”

“Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original… it is a continuing act of creation,” researcher Rosalind Cartwright reminded us in her fascinating treatise on the science of dreams. “The biggest lie of human memory is that it feels true,”Jonah Lehrer wrote shortly before being engulfed a maelstrom of escalating accusations of autoplagiarism and outright fabulation. Yet while we already know that memory is not a recording device, the exact extent of its fallibility eludes — often, quite conveniently — most of us.

In his recent New York Review of Books essay, legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks tackles precisely that, exposing the remarkable mechanisms by which we fabricate our memories, involuntarily blurring the line between the experienced and the assimilated:

It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened — or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten.

One phenomenon Sacks argues is particularly common — if not adaptive — in the creative mind is that of autoplagiarism:

Sometimes these forgettings extend to autoplagiarism, where I find myself reproducing entire phrases or sentences as if new, and this may be compounded, sometimes, by a genuine forgetfulness. Looking back through my old notebooks, I find that many of the thoughts sketched in them are forgotten for years, and then revived and reworked as new. I suspect that such forgettings occur for everyone, and they may be especially common in those who write or paint or compose, for creativity may require such forgettings, in order that one’s memories and ideas can be born again and seen in new contexts and perspectives.

Citing a number of case studies where false memories of fictitious events were “implanted” in people’s minds, Sacks explores unconscious plagiarism, something Henry Miller poetically probed and Mark Twain eloquently, if unscientifically, addressed in his famous letter to Helen Keller. Sacks writes:

What is clear in all these cases — whether of imagined or real abuse in childhood, of genuine or experimentally implanted memories, of misled witnesses and brainwashed prisoners, of unconscious plagiarism, and of the false memories we probably all have based on misattribution or source confusion — is that, in the absence of outside confirmation, there is no easy way of distinguishing a genuine memory or inspiration, felt as such, from those that have been borrowed or suggested, between what the psychoanalyst Donald Spence calls ‘historical truth’ and ‘narrative truth.’

There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true (as Helen Keller was in a very good position to note) depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected. . . . Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory, and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the human brain. The wonder is that aberrations of a gross sort are relatively rare, and that, for the most part, our memories are relatively solid and reliable.

Sacks concludes:

We, as human beings, are landed with memory systems that have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections — but also great flexibility and creativity. Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information.

Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

In a rare act of defiant reliability, my own memory brought to mind a footnoted passage in Sacks’s mind-bendingly excellent recent book,Hallucinations, where he explores memory further:

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.

In a footnote, he adds:

For [researchers] in the early twentieth century, memories were imprints in the brain (as for Socrates they were analogous to impressions made in soft wax) — imprints that could be activated by the act of recollection. It was not until the crucial studies of Frederic Bartlett at Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s that the classical view could be disputed. Whereas Ebbinghaus and other early investigators had studied rote memory — how many digits could be remembered, for instance — Bartlett presented his subjects with pictures or stories and accounts of what they had seen or heard were somewhat different (and sometimes quite transformed) on each re-remembering. These experiments convinced Bartlett to think in terms not of a static thing called ‘memory,’ but rather a dynamic process of ‘remembering.’ He wrote:

Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience. . . . It is thus hardly ever really exact.

Could it be, then, that the very fallibility of memory is essential to our combinatorial creativity and to the mechanics of the slot machine of ideation? To steal like an artist might be, after all, the default setting of the brain.

Perhaps the idea of “combinatorial creativity” might sound familiar although it comes from a familiar but different area of inquiry. Something created out of the combination of multifarious items seems to me to have much in common with the idea of “conditioned or dependent arising.”

     If this peeked your interest, this seemed like an interesting sister (or brother, if you will) article of interest. Highlighting, of course, is mine.

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How To Stay Sane: The Art of Revising Your Inner Storytelling
by Maria Popova

“Our stories give shape to our inchoate, disparate, fleeting impressions of everyday life.”

“[I] pray to Jesus to preserve my sanity,” Jack Kerouac professed in discussing his writing routine. But those of us who fall on the more secular end of the spectrum might need a slightly more potent sanity-preservation tool than prayer. That’s precisely what writer and psychotherapist Philippa Perry offers in How To Stay Sane (public library; UK), part of The School of Life’s wonderful series reclaiming the traditional self-help genre as intelligent, non-self-helpy, yet immensely helpful guides to modern living.


At the heart of Perry’s argument — in line with neurologist Oliver Sacks’s recent meditation on memory and how “narrative truth,” rather than “historical truth,” shapes our impression of the world — is the recognition that stories make us human and learning to reframe our interpretations of reality is key to our experience of life:

Our stories give shape to our inchoate, disparate, fleeting impressions of everyday life. They bring together the past and the future into the present to provide us with structures for working towards our goals. They give us a sense of identity and, most importantly, serve to integrate the feelings of our right brain with the language of our left.

We are primed to use stories. Part of our survival as a species depended upon listening to the stories of our tribal elders as they shared parables and passed down their experience and the wisdom of those who went before. As we get older it is our short-term memory that fades rather than our long-term memory. Perhaps we have evolved like this so that we are able to tell the younger generation about the stories and experiences that have formed us which may be important to subsequent generations if they are to thrive.

I worry, though, about what might happen to our minds if most of the stories we hear are about greed, war and atrocity.

Perry goes on to cite research indicating that people who watch television for more than four hours a day see themselves as far more likely to fall victim in a violent incident in the forthcoming week than their peers who watch less than two hours a day. Just like E. B. White advocated for the responsibility of the writer to “to lift people up, not lower them down,” so too is our responsibility as the writers of our own life-stories to avoid the well-documented negativity bias of modern media — because, as artist Austin Kleon wisely put it, “you are a mashup of what you let into your life.” Perry writes:

Be careful which stories you expose yourself to.

The meanings you find, and the stories you hear, will have an impact on how optimistic you are: it’s how we evolved. … If you do not know how to draw positive meaning from what happens in life, the neural pathways you need to appreciate good news will never fire up.

The trouble is, if we do not have a mind that is used to hearing good news, we do not have the neural pathways to process such news.

Yet despite the adaptive optimism bias of the human brain, Perry argues a positive outlook is a practice — and one that requires mastering the art of vulnerability and increasing our essential tolerance for uncertainty:

You may find that you have been telling yourself that practicing optimism is a risk, as though, somehow, a positive attitude will invite disaster and so if you practice optimism it may increase your feelings of vulnerability. The trick is to increase your tolerance for vulnerable feelings, rather than avoid them altogether.

Optimism does not mean continual happiness, glazed eyes and a fixed grin. When I talk about the desirability of optimism I do not mean that we should delude ourselves about reality. But practicing optimism does mean focusing more on the positive fall-out of an event than on the negative. … I am not advocating the kind of optimism that means you blow all your savings on a horse running at a hundred to one; I am talking about being optimistic enough to sow some seeds in the hope that some of them will germinate and grow into flowers.

Another key obstruction to our sanity is our chronic aversion to being wrong, entwined with our damaging fear of the unfamiliar. Perry cautions:

We all like to think we keep an open mind and can change our opinions in the light of new evidence, but most of us seem to be geared to making up our minds very quickly. Then we process further evidence not with an open mind but with a filter, only acknowledging the evidence that backs up our original impression. It is too easy for us to fall into the rap of believing that being right is more important than being open to what might be.

If we practice detachment from our thoughts we learn to observe them as though we are taking a bird’s eye view of our own thinking. When we do this, we might find that our thinking belongs to an older, and different, story to the one we are now living.

Perry concludes:

We need to look at the repetitions in the stories we tell ourselves [and] at the process of the stories rather than merely their surface content. Then we can begin to experiment with changing the filter through which we look at the world, start to edit the story and thus regain flexibility where we have been getting stuck.

Complement How To Stay Sane with radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s 1948 list of the six rules for creative sanity.

        And as long as I’ve got your attention I offer the following to assist your leaning in whatever direction the previous two offerings happen to have initiated…..or you can just nod off to sleep in front of the computer. If all else fails I’ve enjoyed the journey. 

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James, William, 1842–1910, American philosopher, b. New York City, M.D. Harvard, 1869; son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James and brother of the novelist Henry James. In 1872 he joined the Harvard faculty as lecturer on anatomy and physiology, continuing to teach until 1907, after 1880 in the department of psychology and philosophy. In 1890 he published his brilliant and epoch-making Principles of Psychology, in which the seeds of his philosophy are already discernible. James's fascinating style and his broad culture and cosmopolitan outlook made him the most influential American thinker of his day.

His philosophy has three principal aspects—voluntarism, pragmatism, and "radical empiricism." He construes consciousness as essentially active, selective, interested, teleological. We "carve out" our world from "the jointless continuity of space." Will and interest are thus primary; knowledge is instrumental. The true is "only the expedient in our way of thinking." Ideas do not reproduce objects, but prepare for, or lead the way to, them. The function of an idea is to indicate "what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it and what reactions we must prepare." This theory of knowledge James called pragmatism, a term already used by Charles S. Peirce. James's "radical empiricism" is a philosophy of "pure experience," which rejects all transcendent principles and finds experience organized by means of "conjunctive relations" that are as much a matter of direct experience as things themselves. Moreover, James regards consciousness as only one type of conjunctive relation within experience, not as an entity above, or distinct from, its experience. James's other philosophical writings include The Will to Believe (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism (1907), A Pluralistic Universe (1909), The Meaning of Truth (1909), Some Problems in Philosophy (1911), and Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912).