7 posts tagged “emotions”

“How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!”

I realize that I have reviewed Jane Austen’s Persuasion before but after reading through it again with the boys, I feel the need to add another layer of thought on it. I fear that my altogether-too-cynical-sometimes charges have affected my viewpoints on a number of matters and it may turn out that you readers will wish I had left well enough alone. Grin. I will just say that I am not sure I agree with my interpretation here when I was done but I found it interesting and so I shall leave it as is.

The psychological truth that seems to be manifesting itself upon this latest reading involves the relationship between attraction as an emotional or physiological state and observation. In short the question that arose in the context of my most recent conversations about the novel have to do with whether our observation is as much affected by our attractions as our attractions are affected by our observations? Might it be said, for example, that Anne Elliot is attracted to Captain Wentworth because she observes that he is an honorable man with impeccable integrity? Or, does she see Captain Wentworth as such because she is attracted to him? Similarly, is Captain Wentworth attracted to Anne Elliot because she has a superlative character? Or does he will her to have such a character because he is attracted?

Do Anne and Frederick Wentworth give each other “free passes” on some moral and ethical and character issues because they want the relationship to work out while refusing to give similar quarter to other suitors and debutantes who they are not attracted to? Will they, as it were, “cook the books”? Do the two of them hold to absolutes on some occasions that they quite shamelessly discard when to not do so might jeopardize their prospects with each other?

Some examples may suffice.

Captain Wentworth makes it clear to Louisa that he has no use for people who do not “stick to their guns” and act in accordance with their convictions despite social pressures. "My first wish for all, whom I am interested in, is that they should be firm,” he insists. And yet later, when speaking with Anne about why he remained so distant from her and seemingly committed to Louisa Musgrove, he explains that it was entirely on account of his concern for his reputation as an honorable man in the public. Needless to say, he laces this explanation with numerous references to Anne’s superlativeness among all the women he has ever known and she seems to accept this explanation because it is consistent with her desire to always see him as honorable and herself as irreplaceable.

“Of what he had then written, nothing was to be retracted or qualified. He persisted in having loved none but her. She had never been supplanted. He never even believed himself to see her equal. Thus much indeed he was obliged to acknowledge--that he had been constant unconsciously, nay unintentionally; that he had meant to forget her, and believed it to be done. He had imagined himself indifferent, when he had only been angry; and he had been unjust to her merits, because he had been a sufferer from them. Her character was now fixed on his mind as perfection itself, maintaining the loveliest medium of fortitude and gentleness

In his preceding attempts to attach himself to Louisa Musgrove (the attempts of angry pride), he protested that he had for ever felt it to be impossible; that he had not cared, could not care for Louisa; though, till that day, till the leisure for reflection which followed it, he had not understood the perfect excellence of the mind with which Louisa's could so ill bear a comparison

There, he had seen everything to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost, and there begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way. . . .

From that period his penance had become severe. He had no sooner been free from the horror and remorse attending the first few days of Louisa's accident, no sooner begun to feel himself alive again, than he had begun to feel himself, though alive, not at liberty.

"I found," said he, "that I was considered by Harville an engaged man! That neither Harville nor his wife entertained a doubt of our mutual attachment [speaking of Louisa and Wentworth’s]. I was startled and shocked. To a degree, I could contradict this instantly; but, when I began to reflect that others might have felt the same--her own family, nay, perhaps herself, I was no longer at my own disposal. I was hers in honour if she wished it. I had been unguarded. I had not thought seriously on this subject before. I had not considered that my excessive intimacy must have its danger of ill consequence in many ways; and that I had no right to be trying whether I could attach myself to either of the girls, at the risk of raising even an unpleasant report, were there no other ill effects. I had been grossly wrong, and must abide the consequences."

He found too late, in short, that he had entangled himself; and that precisely as he became fully satisfied of his not caring for Louisa at all, he must regard himself as bound to her, if her sentiments for him were what the Harvilles supposed.”

"You who speak languages," writes Orson Scott Card, "You are such liars." As if to say “I have always loved you Anne, but being an honorable man who would never lead someone on or be perceived to, I would have married Louisa rather than seem inconstant”. One recalls that earlier in the novel, Anne had been precisely concerned that Captain Wentworth might be stringing both Musgrove sisters along in what was perilously close to a shameful manner.  His explanation for all these attentions covered marvelously and she does not seem to mind supporting the effort. “A man does not recover from such a devotion of the heart to such a woman!--He ought not--he does not," she had once said. It simply would not do if the reality was that he really had honestly ever been attracted to Louisa Musgrove. Truly noble men never lose their unflagging devotion to the women they first fall in love with, right? And thus the narrative that allowed for those attentions and attachments to be only a matter of duty resolve the problem perfectly.

It is absolutely true that at one time, Frederick Wentworth thought quite disparagingly of Anne Elliot for the way that she had been so completely influenced by the persuasive abilities of Lady Russell and her father. And yet he later is willing to accept Anne’s explanation that though not proud of what she had done, it should at least be seen in light of character strength and not a weakness.

“I mean,” Anne explains in her defense in the last chapter,

“that I was right in submitting to her [Lady Russell], and that if I had done otherwise, I should have suffered more in continuing the engagement than I did even in giving it up, because I should have suffered in my conscience. I have now, as far as such a sentiment is allowable in human nature, nothing to reproach myself with; and if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman's portion."

In short, “I am sorry that I dumped you because Lady Russell approved but would you mind terribly incorporating what I did into the eulogetic narrative you have constructed of me? Would you, dear Frederick, be willing to see it as some sort of good thing, for my sake?” What is happening here? What is happening is a process by which two people who have determined on being with someone they wish to regard as impeccably honorable, liquidate for each other the obviously reasonable judgments that have against one another’s failings in life.

One clearly sees this in the following rather humorous exchange:

"I was six weeks with Edward," said [Wentworth], "and saw him happy. I could have no other pleasure. I deserved none. He enquired after you very particularly; asked even if you were personally altered, little suspecting that to my eye you could never alter."

Anne smiled, and let it pass. It was too pleasing a blunder for a reproach.”

She knows that his actual comment had been to the effect that she had altered almost beyond recognition. But she prefers the airbrushed version and lets it pass as the official history of his feelings towards her. And this is my point. Being attracted to Captain Wentworth, Anne Elliot will always chose to believe the best of his character, sometimes even to the detriment of accuracy. Not being attracted to her other suitors, Mr. Elliot for example; she is always inclined to suspect them to be worse than they appear and almost content to find out that they are. Other suitors have, as I sometimes say “permission to try but not to succeed” to impress her. Frederick Wentworth on the other hand, has “permission to try but to not succeed” to disillusion her.

And that is how attraction interferes with observation. But perhaps another illustration will help. When Anne considers the possibilities of marrying someone she is not attracted to, the obstacles that are created by differences of temperament, personality, or station are deemed insurmountable. She does not think that anyone should expect her to partner with someone who is obviously incompatible. But the moment that she finds out that Captain Benwick has proposed to Louisa Musgrove, her principle rival for the affections of Captain Wentworth, her core convictions about this matter alter somewhat.

“Captain Benwick and Louisa Musgrove!” she exclaims when she is told the news,

“The high-spirited, joyous, talking Louisa Musgrove, and the dejected, thinking, feeling, reading Captain Benwick, seemed each of them everything that would not suit the other. Their minds most dissimilar!”

But does she plan to go warn the poor Louisa Musgrove of the certain mistake she is making. Oh no! “ . . . He had an affectionate heart. He must love somebody” she says. And then you begin to see the rationalizing heart go to work on the struggling-to-remain-true-to-reason head:

“She saw no reason against their being happy. Louisa had fine naval fervour to begin with, and they would soon grow more alike. He would gain cheerfulness, and she would learn to be an enthusiast for Scott and Lord Byron; nay, that was probably learnt already; of course they had fallen in love over poetry. The idea of Louisa Musgrove turned into a person of literary taste, and sentimental, reflection was amusing, but she had no doubt of its being so.”

In short, her attractions have harnessed up her observations and taken them for a ride. With regard to her own affections, she will assert that no one but her heart’s perfect counterpart will do

“More than seven years were gone since this little history of sorrowful interest had reached its close; and time had softened down much, perhaps nearly all of peculiar attachment to him,--but she had been too dependent on time alone; no aid had been given in change of place, (except in one visit to Bath soon after the rupture,) or in any novelty or enlargement of society.--No one had ever come within the Kellynch circle, who could bear a comparison with Frederick Wentworth, as he stood in her memory. No second attachment, the only thoroughly natural, happy, and sufficient cure, at her time of life, had been possible to the nice tone of her mind, the fastidiousness of her taste, in the small limits of the society around them.”

 But when thinking about other people’s romances, she will allow a great deal of slack to be made:

"There is hardly any personal defect," replied Anne, "which an agreeable manner might not gradually reconcile one to."

What is perhaps most delightful, is how Jane Austen lets Anne Elliot’s self awareness peek above the surface of consciousness every once in a while. Austen will sometimes let the unconscious emotional self be spotted by her principle character in a way that one suspects she expresses through her characters. The following examples from the novel will have to suffice.

“Alas! with all her reasoning, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing.”

“But neither Charles Hayter's feelings, nor any body's feelings, could interest her, till she had a little better arranged her own. She was ashamed of herself, quite ashamed of being so nervous, so overcome by such a trifle; but so it was; and it required a long application of solitude and reflection to recover her.”

“She hoped to be wise and reasonable in time; but alas! alas! she must confess to herself that she was not wise yet.”

 “No, it was not regret which made Anne's heart beat in spite of herself, and brought the colour into her cheeks when she thought of Captain Wentworth unshackled and free. She had some feelings which she was ashamed to investigate.”

How she might have felt, had there been no Captain Wentworth in the case, was not worth enquiry; for there was a Captain Wentworth.”

It is hard to state my thesis more clearly than this last sentiment expresses it. If we are attracted to someone, it will affect the way that we see others. Our affective selves will color everything that is observed by our reflective selves, or so the theory I am prosing says. I suspect that this is what so many people find so delightfully amusing about Jane Austen’s characters sometimes. They play at the surface of consciousness, knowing and not knowing themselves at the same time and allowing some things to remain unknown for the sake of love and other things to become known for the same reason.

In the introduction to the novel that was written by Jane Austen’s brother Henry Austen, he explains how deft Jane, like Anne Elliot the character, was at being in the know and out at the same time. She had that combination of grace and wit that could intuit precisely what was going on (and had gone on) but that could help maintain the secret even from the conscious self, not to mention others. “Though the frailties, foibles, and follies of others could not escape her immediate detection,” Henry writes of his deceased sister,

“Yet even on their vices did she never trust herself to comment with unkindness. The affectation of candour is not uncommon; but she had no affectation. Faultless herself, as nearly as human nature can be, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget. Where extenuation was impossible, she had a sure refuge in silence. She never uttered either a hasty, a silly, or a severe expression. In short, her temper was as polished as her wit. Nor were her manners inferior to her temper.”

If this is so, if we all our observations are distorted by our affectations, how can any of us trust our judgments? One might well ask along with Captain Harville, "But how shall we prove any thing?" To which Anne responds,

"We never shall. We never can expect to prove anything upon such a point. It is a difference of opinion which does not admit of proof. We each begin probably with a little bias towards our own [position], and upon that bias build every circumstance in favour of it which has occurred within our own circle.”

My hat is off to Jane Austen. She seems to be someone who could look into her own soul or into the lives of others or into the universe itself and find what truths might be helpful to the creation of a happy life . . . and make those observations conscious. Similarly, she seems to have been able to look into her soul or the lives of others or into the universe and when she found that which would bring pain or sorrow, leave what she found in such a way that no one would ever know she had ever found it.

"This," Anne Elliot says to Mr. Elliot, "is nearly the sense, or rather the meaning of the words, for certainly the sense of an Italian love-song must not be talked of.”

As if to say, I can only tell you what is appropriate to say and ask you to understand that there was more.

"But I am getting too near complaint,” she wrote as she was dying, “It has been the appointment of God, however secondary causes may have operated."

She was 42. To the last, affectation, desire, the longing for something, in this case, immortality, was influencing and dare I say persuading observation which, for all intents and purposes, would have left her crying out, “My god, My god, Why have you forsaken me?”

Question for comment: Would it bother you to discover that your emotions and desires affected your observations more than you think they do?

Tonight's documentary was Why Shakespeare? A presentation of the rationale behind the reading, production, and acting of Shakespearean Drama. Its full of interviews by various actors and directors who talk about the important place that Shakespeare has played in their lives. If you manage to get your hands on this film, the BEST part of it is in the extra interviews where you really get this unedited look into the value of drama in the creation of interesting people.

I watch something like this and I am reminded of how I myself become a different person when I teach. I am reminded of how much richer of a personality I would be if I could have, as a kid, learned how to EXPRESS emotion rather than just stewing in it and writing bleached versions of it on paper and binary code. In truth, to use a Shakespearean turn of phrase, I think that I often fail in life because I cannot act the scripts I can write. I pick the feelings out of my arguments like porcupine quills out of a dog's nose and ... and ... and I think it makes it impossible for people to connect with me. They can only be convinced or not convinced. They simply cannot be moved.

I loved the interviews. I loved watching people who have learned to express excitement over things they find exciting, Not a one of them sounds like the History teacher in Ferris Beuller's Day Off ... which is what I think I probably sound like altogether too often. These are people who have the capacity to get you to see something that is not there yet and this ability is exactly what I think I so often lack in life. When I have spent so much time thinking about something, it is a shame to find myself unable to speak of it imaginatively.

All to often I fail to create tension when I make an argument. I fail to convey to someone why their agreement with me may have emotional consequences. I prefer to place them in a safe spot to make their decisions purely on the meritsw of the reason. But without that tension, I am not sure that anyone ever will carry the day. W.H. Auden once wrote:  

“Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.”

Question for Comment: Frank Capra once said that drama is not when the actor makes himself cry. It is when he makes the audience cry. Do you find that you have this capacity to connect with other people emotionally? Do you think it is something that can be learned? 

Usually I like to finish a book before I write about it in the blog but this one is particularly fascinating and who knows, once school starts in a week, what time I will have for reading and writing.

The other day, I was “cracked open” by a song. I can only assume that you can relate. It was sort of like someone slipping a key into my brain and unlocking a thought or an emotion or both that had been trapped in there. One second I was fine. Two lines into the song, I was crying. I don’t know about you but when things like that happen to me, I get curious. So yesterday, I started reading Daniel Levitin’s book This is Your Brain on Music. I will just say that it is fascinating. I want to just come over and read the whole thing to you. Grin.

But here are some excerpts.

“This direct mapping of pitches so important, it bears are repeating.  If I put electrodes in your visual cortex (the part of the brain at the back of the head, concerned with seeing), and I then showed you a red tomato, there is no group of neurons that will cause my electrodes to turn red.  But if I put electrodes in your auditory cortex and play a pure tone in your ears at 440 Hz, there are neurons in your auditory cortex that will fire at precicely that frequency, causing the electrode emit electrical activity at 440 Hz- for pitch, what goes into the ear and comes out of the brain!” p. 29

“When the sound is generated on a piano, flute, or any other instrument -- including percussion instruments like drums and cowbells -- it produces many modes of vibration occurring simultaneously.  When you listen to a single note played on an instrument, you're actually hearing many, many pitches at once, not a single pitch.  Most of us are not aware of this consciously, although some people can train themselves to hear that.  The one with the slowest vibration rate -- the one lowest in pitch -- is referred to as the fundamental frequency, and the others are collectively called overtones. 

To recap, it is a property of objects in the world that they generally vibrate at several different frequencies at once.  Surprisingly these other frequencies are often mathematically related to each other in a very simple way: as integer multiples of one another.  So if you pluck a string and its slowest vibration frequency is 100 times per second, the other vibration frequencies will be two times 100 (or 200 Hz), 3X times 100 Hz (300 hertz), etc..  If you blow into a flute or recorder and cause vibrations at 310 Hz, additional vibration will be occurring at twice, three times, four times, etc. this rate …

The brain is so attuned to the overtone series that if we encounter a sound that has all of the components except the fundamental, the brain fills it in for us in a phenomenon called restoration of the missing fundamental. A sound composed of energy at 100 Hz, 200 Hz, 300 Hz, 400 Hz, and 500 Hz is perceived as having a pitch of 100 Hz, its fundamental frequency.  But if we artificially create a sound with an energy at 200 Hz, 300 Hz, 400 Hz, and 500 Hz leaving off the fundamental, we still perceive it as having a pitch of 100 Hz.  We don't perceive it as having a pitch of 200 Hz, because our brain “knows” that a normal, harmonic sound with a pitch of 200 Hz would have an overtones series of 200 Hz, 400 Hz, 600 Hz, 800 Hz, etc. we can also fool the brain by playing sequences that deviate from the overtones series . . . in cases like this, the perceived pitch shift is away from 100 Hz in a compromise between what is presented and what a normal harmonic series would imply.” P. 42-43

“The introduction of energy to an instrument – the attack phase- usually creates energy at many different frequencies that are not related to one another by simple integer multiples.  In other words, for the brief period after we strike, blow into, pluck, or otherwise cause an instrument to start making sound, the impact itself has a rather noisy quality that is not especially musical -- more like the sound of a hammer hitting a piece of wood, say, than like a hammer hitting a bell or piano string, or like the sound of wind rushing through a tube.  Following the attack is a more stable phase in which the musical tone takes on the orderly pattern of overtone frequencies as the metal or wood or other material at the instrument is made up arts to resonate.  This little part of musical tone is referred to as the steady state -- in both instances the overtone is notably stable while the sound emanates from the instrument during this time.

“… After Shafer edited out the attack of orchestral instrument recordings, he played back the tape and found that it was nearly impossible for most people to identify the instrument that was playing.  Without the attack, pianos and bells sounded remarkably unlike pianos and bells, and remarkably similar to one another.  If you splice the attack of one instrument into the steady state, or body, from another, you get varied results: in some cases, you hear an ambiguous hybrid instrument that sounds more like the instruments that the attack came from than the one the steady state came from.  Michael Castellengo and others have discovered that you can create entirely new instruments in this way; for example, splicing a violin bow sound onto a flute tone creates a sound that strongly resembles a hurdy-gurdy street organ.  The experiment showed the importance of the attack” p. 54-53.   

What is so interesting to me is how it reminds me that none of us “hear” the same thing when we hear. Even if our eardrums vibrate in the same way, our brains are rascals to us. It is entirely possible for us to “hear” things that were NEVER played! (Men have known this for centuries. Grin). The facts are clear. Something can be taken OUT of a message and if the piece removed is expected, it will still be “heard”. Designed to help, our brains can deceive. Whatever the FIRST thing heard is, may control how everything AFTER is heard. As he says, if you splice the attack sound of a bell onto the steady state of a Tuba, you may just find that the whole sound, is heard as a bell. Sometimes, your brain doesn't wait to hear what the attack leads it to expect. How IMPORTANT is THAT analogy for resolving conflicts, I ask you?

One of the experiments the author talks about involves actual sound recordings of owl brains (some people get paid to do the weirdest things!) Because sound frequencies get translated into electrical frequencies in the brain, a person with the right equipment can record the electrical frequencies and play back the sound as transmitted through brain signals. That way, you can literally take frequencies OUT of the input and listen to them after the brain has re-inserted them.

No one who has ever had a marital argument should be without this piece of scientific evidence. Heaven only knows how many times I may find myself using it from here on out. ;-)  

What I am looking forward to exploring in the book, to get back to my original question, is just whether or not music literally performs a "chiropractic adjustment" in our neural wiring. Is it possible that music is as important to our brains as say, sleep, or food? Did the "combination" of words, timbre, melody, pitch, rhythm, tempo, volume, key, or reverberation just put the tumblers in place? Or is there a higher power at work here?

I find it interesting that I am not one who is typically "moved" by music though I listen to it all day long. Something Levitin said about a friend of his struck a cord (no pun intended):

“Our culture, and indeed our very language, makes a distinction between a class of expert performers -- the Arthur Rubinstein's, Ella Fitzgeralds, Paul McCartneys -- and the rest of us.  The rest of us pay money to hear the experts entertain us.  Jim knew that he wasn't much of a singer or a dancer and to him, a public display of singing and dancing implied he thought himself an expert.  The villagers just stared at Jim and said, ‘what do you mean you don't sing?!  You talk!’  Jim told me later, ‘it was as odd to them as if I told them that I couldn't walk or dance, even though I have both my legs.’  Singing and dancing were a natural activity in everybody's lives, seamlessly integrated and involving everyone.  The Sesotho verb for singing (ho bina), as in many of the world's languages, also means to dance; there is no distinction, since it is assumed that singing involves bodily movement.” P. 7

It makes me wonder, what did we lose when we started turning on TV's (I don't have one) and stopped playing music together and dancing?

One last quote that I absolutely hope to never forget:

“The Catholic Church banned music that contained polyphony (more than one musical part playing at a time), fearing that it would cause people to doubt the unity of God.” P. 13

Banning polyphony. That is just going to have to go on my list of the 10 dumbest things the church ever did. I mean ... How many beings are there in a TRINITY people? Sigh. What if God cannot be heard WITHOUT the polyphony?

It is not hard to see how this connects to things I have written about Toni Morrison's writings or various artists like Cezanne.

Question for Comment: When was the last time you got "torn open" by a song? Do you prefer to look at what is happening in your brain when that happens? Or does that take the essential mystery of it all out of the experience for you? Can a person believe in both the brain physics of the experience without discounting that there might be some ONE behind it as well?

"Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other.  Perhaps they should live next door, and just visit now and then." Katherine Hepburn

Just finished reading Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior by James McBride Dabbs. I figured since I have two teenage boys now, it couldn't hurt to start learning what I should have known three decades ago myself. Grin.

Dabbs writes:

“A testosterone measurement is like a weather prediction.  He gives a general idea of what will happen, but it leaves much unspecified. . . . the weather can be affected by the vagaries of the jet stream, local wins, fast-moving fronts, and moisture from the Gulf of Mexico.  Knowing it is August tells us to expect summer weather, but there is no way to be sure what the weather will be on any given August day.  Testosterone is like this.  We can count on it to affect behavior in the long run.  In the short run, on any given occasion, its effects are likely to be relatively mild, one of many influences on our behavior.”

It occurs to me that asking people to describe themselves as a weather pattern might be an interesting way to get to know them. If they had to pick a place on the earth for the similarity between its weather patters and their emotional lives, where would they locate themselves? the cape of Good Hope? The North Atlantic? San Diego? New Orleans? Saudi Arabia?

Then it occurred to me that people might have three weather patterns, that which they feel and that which they emote privately and that which they emote publicly. 

I loved this little tidbit about how testosterone can affect concentration:

"In the novel Lonesome Dove, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call were driving cattle from South Texas to Montana.  The drive was long and hard, and on the Platte River in Nebraska they stopped to visit Augustus's old friend Clara.  She tried to persuade visitors to stay.  She said, ‘there's cheap land not three days ride from here.  You could have the whole north part of the state if you want it.  Why go to Montana?’ ‘Well, that's where we started for,’ he said, ‘me and Call have always like to get where we started for, even if it don't make a damn bit of sense.’” P. 45

Question for comment: Do you have an emotional weather pattern? Where would you locate it? To what extent do you think of your emotional self as a product of bodily chemistry?

Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony De Mello

OK, my friend, Tom, sent me a book a month or two ago and it is high time I responded to it. Awareness by Anthony DeMello is a spiritual self-help book that asks readers to question some of the basic assumptions upon which they are attempting to navigate their way toward happiness and meaning. Regardless of my specific reactions to father De Marsh Mello’s conclusions, I think he asks good questions.

So, here is his advice in a nutshell:

1.       Do not assume that the world you live in is giving you accurate strategies for achieving happiness or your purpose in life.  To the contrary, he says, you should assume that the world is crazy and treat its ideas as the ranting of a crazy man.

“You know one sign that you have woken up?  It is when you are asking yourself, ‘am I crazy, or all of them crazy?’ it really is.  Because we are crazy.  The whole world is crazy.  Certifiable lunatics!  The only reason we are not locked up in an institution is that there are so many of us.” P. 14

“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, everyone of them.  They are loony, they're crazy.” P. 75

2.       Do not assume that you are free from external control as you think you are. Without a rigorous struggle to define reality, pseudo-realities of others will be the default programming that controls you.

“You think you are free, but there probably isn't a gesture, thoughts, an emotion, an attitude, a belief in you that isn't coming from someone else.  Isn't that horrible?  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 is 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.” P. 45

3.       Do not make mistake of thinking that emotions are the consequence of external stimuli. They are always the product of your own thought about the external world.

“no person on earth has the power to make you unhappy.  There is no event on earth has the power to disturb you or hurt you.  No event, condition, situation, or person.” P. 79

… 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.” P. 82

4.       The belief that human beings need to be loved is an illusion, and a dangerous one at that. Humans desire only to love. The desire to BE loved is imposed into our psyche’s from some outside source.

“Many say we have a natural urge to be loved and appreciated, to belong.  That's false.  Drop the solution and you will find happiness.  We have a natural urge to be free, natural urge to love, but not to be loved.” P. 112

“When I die to the need for people and I'm right in the desert.  In the beginning it feels awful, it feels lonely, but if you can take it for a while, you'll suddenly discover that it isn't lonely after all.” 141

“Think of a life in which you depend on no one emotionally, so that no one has the power to make you happy or miserable anymore.” P. 173

5.       The knowledge of abstract concepts can never replace the necessity for personal concrete experience because no reality is synonymous with  its abstract representation.

“As soon as you look at the world through an ideology, you are finished.  No reality fits an ideology.  Life is beyond that.” P 148

“Frequently, in the life of a priest, 50 years of experience is one years experience repeated 50 times.” P.160

“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 spare despite the similarities.  It's a great help to have similarities, so we can abstract, so 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 . . . the ass that you mount and that you use to travel to a house is not the means by which you enter the house.  You  use the concept to get there; and you dismount, you go beyond it..” P. 121, 123

Tom may of course be interested in what I think about these pieces  of advice and so I will elaborate. First of all, I think the world has been more successful at finding happiness for itself than I have so I won’t critique it on that point. That said, I think I may have been more successful at living out a meaningful life purpose but who am I to say? What if the world IS crazy but craziness works in a world where everyone else is crazy?

Secondly, I tend to agree with him that we each determine who we “are” or will be by a series of choices between options given to us. Periodically, some of us leap into an original idea and if we are lucky, we have friends try it out to see if it works (Like Lord Henry in Picture of Dorian Gray). I will only say that building an “I” from scratch takes a lot of work. Not a lot of people are up to it. Particularly as it can leave them alone and outside all of the herds they have ever met. They are who they are but they belong nowhere and have no one. Its not a pretty picture even if absolute integrity is the reward.

Thirdly, De Mello’s notion that ALL emotional experience can be controlled by the discipline of one’s own thoughts is an ancient Stoic notion that I think people like me have suffered for implementing. It is an ideal that causes one to think that they are a “Rock. An Island” as the Simon and Garfunkle song puts it. But I am not sure that we are. At some point in time, a person needs to learn how to construct and maintain a network of friends and family. I have tried De Mello’s strategy and wound up in the looney bin. And I have a pretty good mind for that sort of discipline. Maybe just not good enough?

Fourthly, and I apologize for being brief, human beings do need love.

Lastly, I love the analogy of using generalized knowledge like an ass to take you to the door of experiential knowledge. IT is exactly what I need to remember to do in my teaching.

Thanks Tom. Good read.

Question for Comment: If you could clone yourself and raise your clone to live a life more like the one you wish you had, how would you go about it? (assume that your clone was "you" for purposes of the question even that might not be the case.

Boys and I had at least two really good conversations today. We were talking about the difference between Brutus' and Antony's perceptions of the crowds in Julius Caesar. Brutus is a man of reason and principle. Our reasons are so full of good regard" he says "That were you, Antony, the son of Caesar, You should be satisfied. . . ."

By your pardon;
I will myself into the pulpit first,
And show the reason of our Caesar's death:”

He believes that since HE cares more about principle and logical consistency, others can be expected to think and act in the same way. Indeed, Brutus would kill himself if his principles dictated that he do so.

"With this
I depart,--that, as I slew my best lover for the
good of Rome, I have the same dagger for myself,
when it shall please my country to need my death."

 Instinct means nothing to him. Emotional bonding, also nothing. Ties of friendship? A third time nothing. He expects the crowd to be the same way ... and to some extent, they are. They do respond to his reasoning power. But this reasoning is buried like Pompey under Vesuvius lava within a few minutes of Antony's opportunity to speak. Why? Does Antony counter Brutus' reason with reason? No. He doesn't bother. He counters Brutus' reason with tone of voice, with immediate experience, with emmotion, instinct, and appeals to the self-interest concerns of the crowds.  The crowds go from "Live, Brutus, Live" to "Burn their houses" in a matter of minutes. Crowds, Shakespeare seems to be saying, are not controlled by logic but by a far more inherent instinctual collective id. How am I affected NOW? What can I see, hear, smell, taste NOW? What do I feel NOW?

Is he right? Is a person who learns to think, to summarize information, break information down into smaller parts, put information and perspectives together, evaluate arguments, identify basic assumptions, compare and contrast arguments, short-circuit group thinking tendencies, ask questions, identify important but ignored questions, construct visions, follow ideas to logical conclusions, trace cause and effect patterns, predict unseen side effects to policy decisions, admit mistakes, explain failures, assimilate contradictions, solicit alternative perspectives, undermine oppositional ideas, build communities, integrate cultural core beliefs, identify problems, and communicate creative solutions among a thousand other things that brains are capable of simply learning how to use a sword in a world of machine guns (people who can manipulate others with emotions?

Question for Comment: Are we doomed to be ruled by those who master the art of  appealing to the instinctual programing of human motivation? Should I quite trying to be a critical thinking teacher and learn to be less like Brutus and more like Antony? Is a person who can think always going to be like that poor sword wielding Ninja guy in Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark?

"Males [younger than teachers] possess neither fears nor noble hopes, let alone fine feelings - or inner lives at all. They were more like bumper cars than people." Annie Dillard, from the novel, The Maywoods

I wonder if it is possible to raise adolescent boys who have inner lives, who go through life as adolescent boys as something more than bumper cars?