10

“If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.”  Lao Tzu

Over the course of the past couple of weeks, in various things that I've been reading, I've come across the concept of empathy. I decided to research the topic further and found myself WAY out of my depth. I had assumed there was quite a bit of research on it but not as much as I found. Initially this made me feel overwhelmed but then a question popped to mind. Why is this? I think it might be because we have this idea in our culture of empathy as some kind of magic power. Maybe the volumes and reams of writings on it are an attempt to show that it is not magic at all. The common thread in many of the things I read though is that empathy, in the simplest sense, just means identifying someone else's feelings or emotions and relating them back to your own.

As Brené Brown so eloquently stated, there is difference between sympathy and empathy. In her words “empathy drives connection and sympathy drives disconnection.” In other words sympathy is being an outside observer. Empathy is putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Sian Bielock talks about the concept in terms of embodied cognition in that emotions contain outwardly visible cues and part of empathy is reading and identifying with someone else’s “body language.” In her research she talks about how being able to identify with someone’s feelings actually makes our brain behave similarly to having those feelings ourselves. Think of being embarrassed for someone or being sad for someone that you don’t even know. This is not a detached “feeling sorry” (i.e. sympathy). In these cases you are putting yourself in the shoes of the other person and actually feeling sad or embarrassed on a chemical level. This goes for positive emotions too.  

When I think about what all of this has in common with my concept of the “fluid normal” it is about being present. When I talk about being present I'm not talking about it as some sort of mystical meditative present. I'm thinking it was more of it in terms of the Lao Tzu quote above. Living in the past or the future means you are not being observant of the present. Remember from a past post I talked about how Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found that the brain has a finite amount of processing power. Spending brainpower thinking about the past and future takes away from the attention you can spend on the present.  Spending more brainpower on the present can mean seeing something in another person but more importantly in might mean seeing something in yourself that you can reflect on and relate to others. If your emotional reaction to things is muted, then so will be your ability to be empathetic to the feeling in someone else. 

As a digression, I think smartphones are an empathy killer... but there is probably an app for that.

So then empathy is not magic at all. Quite the contrary. I think we see it as some sort of witchcraft because we are so disconnected with the present that our ability to see ourselves in others is compromised. Remember, we are all sides of the same coin or reflections of each other. There is a great Alan Watts quote, “the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.” To me love in this context is not an “I Love You” kind of love but rather a love of the moment. Brené Brown talks about it as experiencing the moment non-judgmentally. Think of love then as a non-judgmental acceptance of the moment. This certainly doesn’t mean that you have to LIKE every moment, but the moment is the moment and you can only influence the future by how you deal with the now.  

In all of this the key in my mind is being in the moment with yourself. This deepens your connection with others.  

bacon

Due to the long weekend and rug rats with no school I was unable to properly proofread and edit my next post.  As a place holder I offer you a shot of my laptop screen previewing my upcoming short film "bacon".

9

Finding Peace in Fluidity

"The web of life is a beautiful and meaningless dance. The web of life is a process with a moving goal. The web of life is a perfectly finished work of art right where I am sitting now." -Robert Anton Wilson

As you've likely figured out if you have been following is this series of essays is that they are really about nothing. Absurdism. A universe without meaning or purpose. Or a universe with infinite meaning and purpose. Yin-Yang. The idea of nothing implies everything and vice versa. Ow. I already need an aspirin and a coffee. 

One of the most disconcerting yet empowering things about acknowledging the fluid normal is just that. It is fluid, ever changing, and we can never know with 100% certainty what will come next. Anyone that has gotten 'that phone call that has changed everything' knows the feeling. Our ideas of what the future holds are based on what we have experienced in the past. It also means that the future holds infinite possibilities. As the adage goes, all that truly exists is the present.  

Hold on a second. Is this turning into some new age, neo-Buddhist, hippie, "you gotta go with the flow man", rant? Nah. Well, not exactly. Let me explain where this comes from for me.

Over the years I have spoken with many people that are either dealing with similar brain surgery or Multiple Sclerosis. In either case the two most common feelings that come up are anger and fear. Every feeling is valid and an important part of wrapping our mind around it but that's the thing. Wrapping your mind around something, even as a turn of phrase, implies mastery. There is no mastery of the fluid normal.    

One of my favorite Alan Watts quotes is "To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float." To me this faith he refers to so not a faith in something external but a faith in yourself. However long you've been here you have been dealing with reality just fine. I think that is the definition of being in the present. Not worrying about the past or the future and having faith or a better word "trust" that you will deal with whatever when it comes, good or bad.    

Man. This is getting all Zen and stuff now. Well, kinda. I'm by no means any kind of authority in anything really. I play the bass gud and write some nice tunes and stuff. That is my favorite thing about some of these concepts. Many philosophies and religions are looking for answers from some external force. Here we are more thinking about the answers, or lack there of, being in you all along.

One of the most noggin blowing texts I've read is a little book called Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel. In the book Eugen, German professor of philosophy, is teaching in Japan and attempts to "study" Zen but goes on quite a different journey than he expected. You see, we have this idea that study of something should give us mastery over it. That is assuming that this illusive something is external and can be mastered.      

Two quotes have really stuck with me over the years from this book. 

 

 "Be like a child holding a finger.  It grips it so firmly that one marvels at the strength of the tiny fist.  And when it lets go there is not the slightest jerk.  Do you know why?  Because the child does not think 'I will let go of the finger and grasp another thing'.  Completely unselfconsciously, without purpose it turns from one to the other..."

"The right art is purposeless and aimless.  The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal the less you will succeed.  What stands in the way is you too much willful will.  You think that what you do not do yourself will not happen"

Willful will. So these feelings of fear and anxiety come from the concept of too much willful will. I find the last two lines of the second quote particularly interesting. The concept of 'willful will' and the concept of essentially trying to micromanage everything. Like I've said before the only thing you can really control is your conscious self. The anxiety and fear comes when events don't play out in your head as you predicted them too. Trust yourself to the water or the fluidity of reality as it were and have faith you'll know what to do with the future when you get there.

Or maybe not.     

winter

In honor of the winter weather we've been having I put together a slideshow of winter photos from my Instagram.  The photo resolutions aren't great because they are from Instagram but hope you enjoy.

8

Finding Humor in Absurdity

"Have no fear of perfection. You'll never reach it."  -Salvador Dali

There are millions and millions of bits of information coming at you every instant. From time to time you are going to do something different than what you intended. You have to. The trick is how you deal with it. I think the first part of this is reconciling the fact that you are taking in and processing a fantastic amount of information and the way you are dealing with the majority of it is just fine. The problem is that since we take those automatic functions for granted the focus then falls on the things we see as anomalies. Remember there is a chaotic (random) quality to the information our brain is trying to reconcile. Compound this with the fact that 'normal' is 'fluid' and we have the ingredients for being self critical all the time. The other part is not necessarily looking at what you perceive as a misstep as an error that cannot be erased but rather something that can be added on to. Yes and and all that.  

In a philosophical sense "absurd" refers to the conflict between our attempt to find inherent value and meaning in life and our inability to find said properties. Absurdity is a human construct. I see it as less of a judgement and more as a recognition. I think it is important to notice and learn to laugh at ourselves. Objective reality (not perceived) (which might not even exist) and the human mind (perceived) do not each separately cause things to appear absurd. It is in the relationship between the two. As a philosophy, absurdism just says that our attempts to find meaning and logic will ultimately fail because of the sheer amount of information and the amazing amount of things we aren't even aware of thus making total certainty impossible. So basically we exist in a universe without meaning or purpose. Depressing. But wait. Is it? If we go back to the idea of an "objective reality" and add the notion that each of us is experiencing reality in a different way, we come to the idea that we are really dealing with a multiverse of subjective perceptions. Crap. That doesn't make it better. Or does it? I think that if we rid ourselves of the ideas of an ultimate truth and that we are imperfect beings we get to a point where we see that everyone's "normal" or experience is fluid. One of the definitions of absurd is  "impossible to take seriously, silly". We laugh at silly stuff. Keep that in the back of your mind and see how it changes your reality.

I think if we learn to laugh at ourselves we start to deal with our judgement of ourselves. Then it all comes down to intention. Since what we experience is random and our perception is subjective and influenced by experience the only way to reach common ground with another person is to strip away the result of the action and look at the intention behind it. Think of getting a gift. You open the box and when you see it you aren't totally happy because it is a wrong color. The disappointment is natural. Acknowledge and embrace it. If you strip away the action and look at the intention however you see that the person was expressing their positive feelings for you. Now think of a car accident. Of course our initial reaction is that of heighten self-awareness. Fight or flight. Do you think the other person, no matter how much you dislike them in the moment, really meant to hit you? Conversely stripping away action lets us see if the intention was malicious and we can be more prepared to deal with it accordingly. This also allows us to be less judgmental of ourselves. Truthfully we are usually our own harshest critical, or at least I am. If we strip away action and look at intention I think it allows us to assess how to more clearly express our intention the next time.

In the immortal words of Miles Davis "Do not fear mistakes, there are none." Of course he is talking about music and probably jazz improvisation more specifically. As I said in an earlier post though life is an improvisation. If we keep "yes, and" as our intention and not fear an illusive and non-existent perfection we lose at least some fear of mistakes. For me that goes a long way to not always feeling like you fell short. A judgment. Oh and reserve apologies for when intention and action were way off. In another wise Miles Davis quote "If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!"

7

I am going to go off on a bit of a tangent from the last post. This week I started reading a book about embodied cognition by a psychologist at the University of Chicago named Sian Beilock called How the Body Knows Its Mind. I am by no means a psychologist but I am a well read guy and have always been a psychology enthusiast. I am very much enjoying the book. I am not even going to try to summarize her research, you should read the book, but just know that the scientific evidence is mounting that there is a strong connection between body and mind and that we learn more effectively by doing. This notion is particularly interesting to me for two reasons. First, as a child I attended a school based on the principles of progressive education and learning by doing. Second, both of the major health incidents, brain surgery and MS, have affected movement for me in one way or another.  Those incidents have made me reflect deeply on the mind/body connection.  

I attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools from 3rd-12th grade. The school was founded in 1896 by John Dewey. Dewey is considered the father of progressive education in America. The whole idea of experiential learning is central to Dewey's philosophy. Later in life I came to read Dewey and found that he also rejected dualism in favor of the idea of a unified whole. This is a slightly different kind of dualism than I talked about in a previous post but philosophically similar. The dualist idea in this case is that the mind controls the body and the the body is merely the machine that transports the mind. This model has been the prominent for a very long time, still is today, and draws its lineage back to Descartes and earlier. Dewey felt the opposite. He felt it was important to treat the mind/body as a unified whole. When I read this I was a blown away. I had always had a deep down feeling that the mind and body operated as a whole but I didn't realize until I actually read it that that was one of the philosophies that guided my education. The other ideas that have really stuck with me are critical thinking and collaboration. I'll go into those more later.

It is very interesting applying this idea of a mind/body connection when there is an electrical break in the connection. Even when we think of the mind and body as connected we are still looking at series of mechanical systems all working together... or are we? As I said earlier, there have been several instances in my life where this connection has been mechanically severed. I'll focus on two here.  

First. In the case of my brain surgery the resection of the acoustic neuroma resulted in several nerves being disturbed or severed. The first was the one that controlled hearing in my right ear.  It was severed and I lost hearing in that ear. I tell kids when they ask how I lost my hearing that "they had to cut the wire". The nerves that control blinking, tear production, and muscle control on the right side of my face were disturbed. Basically the right side of my face was paralyzed and my eye didn't completely close.  The nerves regenerated though not quite to where they were before the surgery. I still have to use eye drops because my eye no longer produces tears, my right eye closes slower than my left, and my smile is crooked.

Second. There have been several incidences where Multiple Sclerosis has caused movement issues. First a quick and dirty overview of MS. In one of the earlier sections I talked about myelin cells that surround the nerve. These cells aid in the transmission of electrical signals in the nerves. MS is an autoimmune disease where your immune system attacks these myelin cells. The problem is that once these cells are damaged the electric signals are slowed down or stopped. All kind of things can happen from mobility issues to memory to mood. Nerve signals are the link from the brain to the body. In my case the two biggies were an incident where I temporarily lost control of the lower part of my left leg and the other was seizure type episodes called tonic spasms where my body would lock up. In both of these cases the signals my brain was sending were not making it to my muscles to tell them to either relax or contract.

I know. The initial reaction upon reading this is "how horrible that must have been.".  I'm not going to lie. There are things I'd rather have done for sure. But I also don't want sympathy. The whole idea of the fluid normal is being in the moment whatever it may be. If you can have your ego take a back seat and observe nonjudgmentally, every moment has something to show you. I tried to look at it from a non-dualist perspective.  The gambit creates the human experience.

So how does this relate to embodied cognition? Since I'm not terribly knowledgable on the topic I'm not going to speak to it directly. I do however know a few things that might relate. I've always been aware that the mind/body connection is strong. When we apply this to my concept of a fluid normal though it becomes apparent that since "normal" is ever changing for everyone the connection is not how effectively the mind and body are connected in a quantitative, qualitative, and electrical sense. It is acknowledgment of the mind/body as a whole. You. You don't just exist couple inches behind your eyes. The examples I gave above from my life are extreme but we all have to deal with days where the connection on a mechanical level isn't as strong. But, you see, "strong" is a qualitative judgment and is dualist. Strong/weak. Lose judgment. Lose dualism. What's left? Being human. The mind/body connection must not just be electrical.

6

Mental Balance

Focus

I left many loose ends in the last post but at this point I want to move on to the idea of mental balance. I'm thinking of "mental" as the mechanical part of conscious operations in the brain. BIG topic I know. Basically I think of it as managing time, organizing thoughts, thinking critically, feeding your mind, and mental focus. There are many more. Mental balance is basically all the things that don't fall neatly into physical or spiritual balance. Here goes.

Physical balance is easy to define. It is a tangible feeling. It is even measurable. Mental or spiritual balance are quite different. They are not measurable though they do sometimes effect physical systems. Moreover they are not clearly defined. Rather than trying to offer a definition I am just going to relate some times that I have dealt with these concepts as they pertain to my life. Like I've said, the mind is fluid. There is a chance my feelings on this will have changed in some way by the time you read this.    

One of the key elements of mental balance for me is focus. I bring this one up first because I see it as a litmus test. I see it as a byproduct of systems working together. For me it is hard to be focused if there is too much imbalance in my mind. The aggravating thing about focus is true focus isn't something you can try harder to improve. It almost requires not trying which creates a paradox because you can't try not to try. My definition of focus is similar to what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the "flow experience". Being completely in the eternal present and focusing such that the rest of the world including time and space disappears.  

Csikszentmihalyi's found in his research that the human brain has a finite amount of processing power. Things like breathing, heartbeat, swallowing, etc are called autonomic functions.  They are on all the time and exist on the subconscious level. Things like hunger, thirst, temperature awareness, location awareness, etc are not automatic and require conscious thought to perceive. Csikszentmihalyi found that in what he defines as the 'flow experience' the task at hand can borrow processing power from these things. We have all had that experience where we have been so engrossed in something that we lose track of time. That's flow.

What he also found was that flow or focus is an autotelic experience. Autotelic means having purpose in and not apart from itself. So autotelic just is doing an activity for the sake of itself. No outside motivator like money, fame, power, etc. To me this is also the definition of being present. If we have the rewards of an activity in mind we are necessarily thinking about the future. I don't think this means not having goals. A couple of years ago I issued myself a challenge to write and record an album of string quartets. I was thinking ahead and planning for the future in laying out a game plan. When it came to the actual implementation of the steps like composing the pieces I found I was most successful when I was doing the composing for the sake of it.

  

We live in a world where there are so many distractions. There are all kind of ways that people can bring some focus to their minds. Some people exercise, some read a book, some meditate, some even go for a drive or take a shower. The common thread here is being in a place where you can be alone with your thoughts. Step back. Notice. Observe. Nonjudgmentally.