'The reason schools seem so stressful is that the learning model they adopt emphasises facts. The idea here is that being educated means knowing stuff. Implicit in all this is that we have, as a society, agreed on what stuff everyone should know, and decided that information delivery is the role of education.'
What to Know, How to Learn It is a thought-provoking essay by Roger C. Schank, a computer scientist and cognitive psychologist.
Facts are not the currency of learning, nor does mastery of them indicate anything about an educated person. Facts play a big role in the education system because they are so easy to test. And it is tests (usually highly irrelevant tests) that have helped shape your learning since you were six.(From the compendium How Things Are: A Science Tool-Kit for the Mind, edited by John Brockman and Katinka Matson. Formatted for on-screen viewing. All emphases mine.)
Curiously, most important things that people know they cannot explicitly recall or state as facts. What is the right way to get the person of your dreams interested in you? How does one pursue a successful career? Was the United States wrong to believe in Manifest Destiny? Is the situation in Bosnia really all that similar to Nazi Germany, or is it more like Vietnam? An educated person may have answers for these questions. But they are not simple questions and there are no simple answers for them.
Being educated means being able to understand the questions and knowing enough relevant history to make reasoned arguments. Making reasoned arguments, not citing history, is the key issue here. Learning to think and express what one has thought in a persuasive way is the real stuff of education.
What is the currency of learning? It is a preparedness to be wrong, a willingness to fail, and the ability to focus on one's confusion in hope of being able to create or being able to understand an explanation that will make things better.
It isn't what you know but how you come to know it that matters. While it is not easy to resist a school's attempts to force you to memorise facts, it is important to recognise that merely memorising things doesn't mean you'll know much. Being able to articulate facts is useful for passing tests, impressing your friends, and doing well on quiz shows, but for little else.
The brighter, more serious students were the least desirous of grades, possibly because they were more interested in the subject matter of the course, whereas the dull or lazy students were the most desirous of grades, possibly because grades told them if they were getting by.(Phædrus tried a semester without grade-based testing, and evaluated the scheme towards the end as above.)
--Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
It appears that there are three phases to partner relationships. In the first phase, you are trying to get to know the person. You are attracted to him or her. You cajole, you court, you propose love. In this phase, everything is sweet, because you give yourself to the task of making someone yours. It is a joy to give.
Once the proposal is accepted, the second phase begins. It is usually tumultous, because of a balancing act: how much of your life do you want your own way, and how much are you willing to sacrifice, now that you know that he or she is yours? If you went totally out of your way during the courtship, or if there is too much of a give on one side and too much take on the other, balance simply cannot be achieved. Most relationships fail in this phase.
If you are able to go past it, however, the third, stable phase starts. You both now know and respect each other's limits, individuality. You see what it takes to keep the relationship going and strive to achieve it. You give yourself to it, and in doing so, regain happiness.
The Hindu mentions1 something interesting in one of its supplements today: the Broken Window Experiment.
In 1969, a Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo2 placed two cars, with bonnets raised and without licence plates, in two separate communities: one in the poor New York slum of Bronx, the other in the affluent community of Palo Alto.
Within minutes of being left unattended, the car in Bronx was vandalised. In the next few days, it was totally stripped. In contrast, the car in Palo Alto stood untouched for more than a week, until Zimbardo damaged it himself by smashing it with a hammer. Observing the car over the next several days, he watched as it too was vandalised, overturned and trashed.Says the paper, 'the moral of the thesis is that human behaviour is influenced by symbols of harmony and disorder. If a city or one of its areas appears orderly, people feel safer, and even those that feel left out by "progress" are less likely to take it out on public property. But if nobody cares, everybody gives up.'
Of all the prayers I have read and heard, nothing moves me as much as the one attributed to St. Francis of Assisi.
Where there is hatred let me sow love;How wonderful!
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love,
For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned
And it is in dying that we are reborn
To eternal life.
olle kelasava maadisu, jnaana jyothiya belagisu!Thaayi shaaradhe loka poojithe -- it's a school prayer, set in a hilltop, with the master singing the song devotedly and the little kids repeating it. Beautiful. It's etched in my mind.
olle dhaariyalemma nadesu, vidyeya kalisu!
A fortnight ago on a visit to the bookstores in Church Street, I picked up a pocket book. A story, for the reader's pondering:
A saint saw that hunters were laying nets to catch birds and baiting them with bread. So he taught a parrot to fly around the jungle, squawking "Don't eat the bread or you will get caught! Don't eat the bread!" The other birds heard this message and avoided the bread, but the parrot was only repeating what the saint had taught him and didn't understand what he was saying. When all the birds had flown away he flew down to eat the bread and was caught by the hunter's net.
The Washington Post has a couple of articles1,2 today on the complicated gizmos that computers are to non-technical users. When Kathleen's daughter complained that she could not use the instant messenger, it started a 'much larger headache, one that launched an odyssey that has taken $800 and roughly 48 man-hours over nearly three weeks to end.'
During that time, my personae alternated, usually several times a day. One moment I was the computer addict, the person stuck to the keyboard for hours and hours on end, driven by belief in a holy grail, that one more attempt would fix things.Kathleen had done no mistake. Except that she had switched to broadband Internet, and had installed no firewall, antivirus updates, or Windows critical updates. She is a writer, after all.
Rule I of writing software for non-technical users is this: if they have to read documentation to use it, you designed it wrong.
--Eric Raymond, The Luxury of Ignorance
How would one experience God? By stimulating one's temporal lobe in the brain. This is not fiction, but actual experimental results, conducted with the aid of transcranial magnetic stimulator (New Scientist, In Search of God, Apr. 21, 2001). I have been reading Phantoms in the Brain by V S Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee. The book goes on to say that people who have epileptic seizures in the temporal lobes 'experience' God and being 'One' with the Universe.
But if [the focal seizures] happen to be in the limbic system, then the most striking symptoms are emotional. Patients say that their "feelings are on fire," ranging from intense ecstasy to profound despair, a sense of impending doom or even fits of extreme rage and terror. Women sometimes experience orgasms during seizures, although for some obscure reason men never do. But most remarkable of all are those patients who have deeply moving spiritual experiences, including a feeling of divine presence and the sense that they are in direct communion with God. Everything around them is imbued with cosmic significance. They may say, "I finally understand what it's all about. This is the moment I've been waiting for all my life. Suddenly it all makes sense." Or, "Finally I have insight into the true nature of the cosmos." I find it ironic that this sense of enlightenment, this absolute conviction that Truth is revealed at last, should derive from limbic structures concerned with emotions rather than from the thinking, rational parts of the brain that take so much pride in their ability to discern truth and falsehood.Much of R.P.'s (et al.) aberrant behaviour now stands explained, even if not acceptable to the fan followings. Every so often to him, every object and event would become imbued with deep significance; he would float on an ocean of ecstasy. He would dance, cry, and faint on the ground.
I decided to ask just one more question. "Mrs. Dodds, can you clap?"
With resigned patience she said, "Of course I can clap."
"Will you clap for me?"
Mrs. Dodds glanced up at me and proceeded to make clapping movements with her right hand, as if clapping with an imaginary hand near the midline.
"Are you clapping?"
"Yes, I'm clapping," she replied.
I didn't have the heart to ask her whether she actually heard herself clapping, but, had I done so, we might have found the answer to the Zen master's eternal koan or riddle -- what is the sound of one hand clapping?
Consider the old question, "If a tree falls in the forest, was a sound made if no one is present to hear it?" The answer is "no," because a sound is a sensation that must be perceived by an observer, and no observer was present to hear it.) The startling truth is that we live in a neurologically generated, virtual cosmos that we are programmed to accept as the real thing. The challenge of science is to overcome the constraints of our kludgy, neurological wetware, and understand a physical world that we know only second-hand. In fact, we must make an intuitive leap to accept the fact that there is a problem at all. Common sense and the brain that produces it evolved in the service of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, not scientists.
--Robert R. Provine, What is Real?
What would you do if you were stuck in a boat in the Pacific? What would you eat, if you have remained vegetarian all your life? What would 'time' mean to you? What about boredom, sea-sickness, loneliness? Would you have any hope of staying alive, or rot and die in despair?
The greatest lesson from Life of Pi (Yann Martel) is actually quite simple. You can get used to anything.
The pleasant life, which consists of experiencing as many of life's pleasures as possible, is what we mean most often when we talk about happiness.
Deeper contentment lies in the other two: the good life -- getting absorbed in the things you do best and losing yourself in the process -- and the meaningful life, where engaging with a cause or an institution supplies a sense of belonging to something much bigger than you are.
'What is the power that makes the eyes see?'This is exactly the kind of paradoxes one encounters in the higher realms. As Siddhartha puts it so beautifully, 'in every truth the opposite is equally true'. This is why it cannot be expressed, because it reduces it to a state of finiteness, and thereby makes it lose its meaning.
'The eye of the eye!'
'What is the power that makes the ears hear?'
'The ear of the ear!'
The master than asked the disciple: 'Did you understand what I said?'
'No, I did not!' said the disciple in confusion.
'If you did not understand my explanation, it means you have understood. If you understood, it means you have not understood!'
(--from Kenopanishad)
This extract puts the nirvana so very beautifully that I can read it a hundred times without being bored. I can relate to its matter!
Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom. It is the result of long and patient effort in self-control. Its presence is an indication of ripened experience, and of a more than ordinary knowledge of the laws and operations of thought.
A man becomes calm in the measure that he understands himself as a thought-evolved being, for such knowledge necessitates the understanding of others as the result of thought. As he develops a right understanding, and sees more and more clearly the internal relations of things by the action of cause and effect, he ceases to fuss and fume and worry and grieve, and remains poised, steadfast, serene.
The calm man, having learned how to govern himself, knows how to adapt himself to others; and they, in turn, reverence his spiritual strength, and feel that they can learn of him and rely upon him. The more tranquil a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good. Even the ordinary trader will find his business prosperity increase as he develops a greater self-control and equanimity, for people will always prefer to deal with a man whose demeanor is strongly equable.
The strong calm man is always loved and revered. He is like a shade-giving tree in a thirsty land, or a sheltering rock in a storm. Who does not love a tranquil heart, a sweet-tempered, balanced life? It does not matter whether it rains or shines, or what changes come to those possessing these blessings, for they are always sweet, serene, and calm. That exquisite poise of character which we call serenity is the last lesson culture; it is the flowering of life, the fruitage of the soul. It is precious as wisdom, more to be desired than gold - yea, than even fine gold. How insignificant mere money-seeking looks in comparison with a serene life - a life that dwells in the ocean of Truth, beneath the waves, beyond the reach of tempests, in the Eternal Calm!
--James Allen, As A Man Thinketh
Does increased affluence and increased choice mean we have more happy people? Not at all. ... Why are people increasingly unhappy even as they experience greater material abundance and freedom of choice? Recent psychological research suggests that increased choice may itself be part of the problem.
... We have identified several processes that help explain why increased choice decreases satisfaction. Greater choice:To illustrate these last two points, I recall buying a bottle of wine to accompany dinner when I was vacationing with my family in a seaside cottage in a small town in Oregon. The tiny general store had about five options from which to choose. The wine I chose wasn't very good, but I didn't expect it to be, and I knew that I couldn't really have done much better. Contrast that with how it would feel to bring home a disappointing bottle of wine from a store that offered thousands of bottles from which to choose.
- Increases the burden of gathering information to make a wise decision.
- Increases the likelihood that people will regret the decisions they make.
- Increases the likelihood that people will anticipate regretting the decision they make, with the result that they can't make a decision at all.
- Increases the feeling of missed opportunities, as people encounter the attractive features of one option after another that they are rejecting.
- Increases expectations about how good the chosen option should be. Since assessments of the quality of a choice are almost always made relative to one's expectations, as expectations rise, actual choices have a rising standard to meet if they are to produce satisfaction.
- Increases the chances that people will blame themselves when their choices fail to live up to expectations. After all, with so many options out there, there is really no excuse for a disappointing choice.
* * *
If enhanced freedom of choice and increased affluence don't enhance well-being, what does? The most important factor seems to be close social relations. People who are married, who have good friends, and who are close to their families are happier than those who are not. People who participate in religious communities are happier than those who do not. Being connected to others seems to be more important to well-being than being rich or "keeping your options open."
In the context of this discussion of choice, it is important to note that, in many ways, social ties actually decrease freedom of choice. Marriage, for example, is a commitment to a particular other person that curtails freedom of choice of sexual or emotional partners. Serious friendship also entails weighty responsibilities and obligations that at times may limit one's own freedom. The same is true, obviously, of family. And most religious institutions call on their members to live their lives in a certain way, and to take responsibility for the well-being of their fellow congregants. So, counterintuitive as it may appear, what seems to contribute most to happiness binds us rather than liberates us.
Yet more than a quarter of Americans report being lonely, and loneliness seems to come not from being alone, but from lack of intimacy. We spend less time visiting with neighbors. We spend less time visiting with our parents, and much less time visiting with other relatives. Partly this is because we have less time, since we are busy trying to determine what choices to make in other areas of life. But partly this is because close social relations have themselves become matters of choice. As Robert Lane writes: "What was once given by neighborhood and work now must be achieved; people have had to make their own friends ... and actively cultivate their own family connections." In other words, our social fabric is no longer a birthright but has become a series of deliberate and demanding choices.
--Barry Schwartz, Author, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, as cited in The Tyranny of Choice.
Whenever I have felt sad, angry, or frustrated, I have found solace in this little passage from Lila. It is at the very end of the book, when Phædrus reaches the nirvana.
If you take all this karmic garbage and make yourself feel better by passing it on to others that's normal. That's the way the world works. But if you manage to absorb it and not pass it on, that's the highest moral conduct of all. That really advances everything, not just you. The whole world. If you look at the lives of some of the great moral figures of history -- Christ, Lincoln, Gandhi and others -- you'll see that that's what they were involved in, the cleansing of the world through the absorption of karmic garbage. They didn't pass it on.
--Robert M. Pirsig, Lila
Several decisions form a day. Every time we make a choice, we give up on other choices. Why then do we need to worry about the alternatives? If we live confident of ourselves and our decisions, that's enough.
A man, after all, is only a man. He stands somewhere between absolute freedom on the one hand, and total helplessness on the other. All of his important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data. It is enough if a man accepts his freedom, takes his best shot, does what he can, faces the consequences of his acts, and makes no excuses.
Life is a dilemma: of total responsibility, within an existence of only partial knowledge and partial freedom.
--Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him!
The secret is that there is no secret.
Everything is just what it seems to be. This is it! There are no hidden meanings. Before he is enlightened, a man gets up each morning to spend the day tending his fields, returns home to eat his supper, goes to bed, makes love to his woman, and falls asleep. But once he has attained enlightenment, a man gets up each morning to spend the day tending his fields, returns home to eat his supper, goes to bed, makes love to his woman, and falls asleep.
The Zen way to see the truth is through your everyday eyes. It is only the heartless questioning of life-as-it-is that ties a man in knots. A man does not need an answer in order to find peace. He needs only to surrender to his existence, to cease the needless, empty questioning. The secret of enlightenment is when you are hungry, eat; and when you are tired, sleep.
The Zen Master warns: 'If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!' This admonition points up that no meaning that comes from outside of ourselves is real. The Buddhahood of each of us has already been obtained. We only need recognise it. Philosophy, religion, patriotism are all empty idols. The only meaning in our lives is what we each bring to them. Killing the Buddha on the road means destroying the hope that anything outside of ourselves can be our master. No one is any bigger than anyone else.
--(ibid.)
Life is a compromise between
The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find... that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given.
Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never traveled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.
--Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, Chapter XV.
[04/05/04-11:57] v_t: temme some nice definition
[04/05/04-11:57] v_t: I feel love to be .. : trust, understanding, sharing
[04/05/04-11:57] d: a subconscious tendency to see another person happy
"If you get too famous you will go straight to hell," a Japanese Zen Master had warned... Zen hell is this world right here and now, in which you see life around you but can't participate in it. You're forever a stranger from your own life because there's something in your life that holds you back. You see others bathing in the life all around them while you have to drink it through a straw, never getting enough.Footnote 01/Aug/2004:
You would think that fame and fortune would bring a sense of closeness to other people, but quite the opposite happens. You split into two people, who they think you are and who you really are, and that produces the Zen hell. ...
Each person you come to is a different mirror. And since you're just another person like them maybe you're just another mirror too, and there's no way of ever knowing whether your own view of yourself is just another distortion. Maybe all you ever see is reflections. Maybe mirrors are all you get. First the mirrors of your parents, then friends and teachers, then bosses and officials, priests and ministers, and maybe writers and painters too. That's their job too, holding up mirrors.
But what controls all these mirrors is the culture: the Giant, the gods; and if you run afoul of the culture it will start throwing up reflections that try to destroy you, or it will withdraw the mirrors and try to destroy you that way... The mirrors take over your life and soon you don't know who you are. Then the culture controls you and when it takes away your mirrors and the public forgets you the withdrawal symptoms start to appear. And there you are, in the Zen hell of celebrity.
--Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals.
At a sufficiently advanced level of thought, everything is fuzzy. Everything goes in circles. There are no answers to any questions. Rather, the questions dissolve. I cannot even describe the feeling, and it's not even funny.
Hell, I feel so much like Phædrus.
Addendum 18:35.
Trying to create a perfect metaphysics is like trying to create a perfect chess strategy, one that will win every time. You can't do it. It's out of the range of human capability. No matter what position you take on a metaphysical question someone will always start asking questions that will lead to more positions that lead to more questions in this endless intellectual chess game. The game is supposed to stop when it is agreed that a particular line of reasoning is illogical. This is supposed to be similar to a checkmate. But conflicting positions go on for centuries without any such checkmate being agreed upon.
--Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals.
The most important things that each man must learn no one else can teach him. Once he accepts this disappointment, he will be able to stop depending on the therapist, the guru who turns out to be another struggling human being.
--Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!
"Reality" is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.
--Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics, Enlightenment/The End of Science.
The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics tries to explain Young's Double Slit Experiment in a mysterious way, quite unappealing to a classical mind. A photon exists as a wave function associated with it, which represents all the possibilities that can happen between it and an observing system. It collapses into a 'real photon' only when actualised at one of the slits, say by a light detector.
Without perception, the universe continues, via the Schrödinger wave equation, to generate an endless profusion of possibilities. When perceived, however, the wave function immediately and dramatically collapses into one part, which actualises into reality. Nobody knows which possibility actualises - it is pure chance.
The physical world, according to quantum mechanics, is 'not a structure built out of independently existing unanalysable entities, but rather a web of relationships between elements whose meanings arise wholly from their relationships to the whole.' (Henry Stapp, S-Matrix Interpretation of Quantum Theory, 1970.)
cf.
om purnamadah purnamidam purnat purnamudachyate|
purnasya purnamadaya purnamevavashishyate||
That is whole; whole is this; from the Invisible Whole comes forth the visible whole. Though the visible whole has come out from that Invisible Whole, yet the Whole remains unaltered. (Invocation, Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, c. 2500-1700 BC.)