Category Archives: Psychology

Notes on Worldly Success

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Yesterday afternoon I sat for a while on the back porch, watching the rain and admiring my neighbor’s and my handiwork.  Over the weekend, we shored up the fence and gate in preparation for winter.  My neighbor knows a lot about carpentry.  I don’t, and because of that, I felt a huge sense of satisfaction, as much or more than I did a few weeks ago, when I finished a pretty good short story for the Writer’s Digest contest.  I guess with that attitude, I’m not likely to get my face on the cover of Time, either for carpentry or for writing, even though both can bring me a great deal of satisfaction.  Sitting on the porch, I started thinking of various examples of success and failure.

***

I’ve been reading a lot about Steve Jobs in recently published tributes.  Viewing the whole sweep of his life, he seems to have had great self-confidence and an unerring instinct for doing the right thing. Much of that impression comes from his 2005 graduation speech, the reflections of a mature man, sobered by a serious brush with mortality.  I found myself wondering how he dealt with setbacks when he was young and first starting to make his way?  Lives written in history books and obituaries often leave out the messiness, the dark nights of the soul, the nights we wake up a 3:00am wondering what to do.

Somehow the story of Jobs’s trek to India leads me to think he connected with his heart and intuition – as he talked about in his speech – at a pretty young age.  You don’t venture to a strange continent, in search of something you aren’t sure of, unless you are confident enough to live with uncertainty and believe you can find the answers.  Unlike many creative people, Jobs’s passion aligned with his livelihood, but that did not prevent the devastation of getting fired at 30 from the company he had founded.   He had enough wealth to retire from active life and never know want again, but failure prodded Jobs to come back and reinvent himself – and animated films while he was at it.

Rule for success:  Find a way to believe in yourself.
Another rule of success:  Never give up.
A useful tip:  Love what you do, if possible.

There are clear parallels in the life of Thomas Edison, 1847-1931, to whom Jobs is often compared.  Edison ran numerous unsuccessful experiments (estimates range from 700 to 10,000) before discovering tungsten as a workable filament for electric lights.  Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”  Did Edison ever come close to giving up?  Did he ever know dark nights of the soul?

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration" - Thomas Edison, 1903

Several of the pithy statements he made in maturity sound like things Jobs might have said:  “I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun.”   Like Jobs, Edison never dreamed of resting on his laurels:  “Show me a thoroughly satisfied man, and I will show you a failure.”  Perhaps my favorite Edison quote is this one:  “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”  Might that include a pile 2×4’s and fence boards?

Tip for success:  A sense of humor and a sense of play are marvelous attributes.

***

The list of Abraham Lincoln’s failures is often used to motivate people, because he had so many of them.  Here’s a more balanced chronology of his victories as well as losses.  He won some and lost some, just like everyone else, and like Jobs and Edison, he kept on trying.  http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/education/failures.htm

Lincoln believed that he was an agent of destiny and spoke of “the chorus of Union” that would sound when touched by “the better angels of our nature.”  This sense of calling may have made his task possible but didn’t make it easy:  I’ve heard that he wept at the casualty counts from the last battles of the Civil War.  Like Jobs, he was aware of his own mortality:  a week before he was shot, Lincoln dreamed of lying in state in Capitol rotunda, but just like the men he ordered into battle, fear of death could not deter him.

Close to Lincoln during the last years of his life was another future president, Ulysses S. Grant, who may have been the only northern general able to win the war, but whose life outside the military reads like a litany of failure.  Born, Hiram Ulysses Grant, he discovered when he entered West Point that he had been registered as, Ulysses Simpson Grant.  He never bothered to change the name, and in a similar vein, gained a reputation as a sloppy cadet.  Though he served with distinction during the Mexican War, afterwards he failed as a businessman and a farmer.

As president, Grant was noted for enforcing civil rights and fighting the Ku Klux Klan, but his administration was was rocked by scandal and inept handling of the Panic of 1873, a world-wide financial crisis.  He left office on a note of failure, went into business with a man who cheated him, and died in debt and in great pain from throat cancer.  By force of will, he finished his memoirs before he died, which saved his wife from bankruptcy.

Like so many before and after, Grant was a poster-boy for another truth:  Worldly success is no guarantee of happiness.  This realization raises the critical question of what we really mean by success.  The purpose of life is finding happiness and sharing it with as many others as we can, according to the Dalai Lama, in The Art of Happiness, a book I will have more to say about later.

In the meantime, I come around again to the thought of fixing fences with my neighbor.  When measured by the creation of and sharing of happiness, it may have been even more important than I imagined.

A Soul Day

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One of my psychology professors once described a presentation he made at business conference. His subject was depression among top executives, a problem serious enough to warrant its own session.  After running through professional interventions like medication and psychotherapy, he told his audience, “There’s a simpler and far less expensive approach, though I don’t expect many of you to adopt it.”

He told them to choose one weekday a month to call in sick or take a vacation.  He insisted on a weekday, since weekends are usually given to errands and chores.  The professor called it a “soul day” and the rule was, do nothing of a goal oriented nature.  No work, no phone meetings, no fiddling with Blackberrys.  This was a day for those little desires at the edge of the mind:  a walk in the park, a family picnic when others are working, trying one’s hand at watercolor.

There were lots of protests.  When a CEO said he was too busy; the professor said that might be one of the reasons he was depressed.  Someone else feared that if he let himself “slack off,” he might not want to get out of bed.  “Then stay in bed,” the professor said.  “Sooner or later you’ll get bored and think of something interesting to do.”

I heard this story 20 years ago and still sometimes put it into practice.  It isn’t just for when you’re feeling blue; it meshes with the biblical concept of a day of rest, but it takes a special resolution, since most of the time, our days of rest are not very restful.

I’ve come back to it now because stepping outside of habitual routines can be a way of stepping outside of habitual ways of thinking, which feel a little stale as the season begins to change.  This practice isn’t as easy as it sounds.  It takes discrimination to separate what I want to do from what I think I should do, or other subtle forms of self-improvement.  But I don’t have to get it right, since being perfect takes an inordinate amount of effort.

I began yesterday with a period of an easy sort of meditation, as opposed to some of the more energetic ones.  Then I took a walk around the track at a nearby school – no problem there, for walking each day is a pleasure and something my body craves.

Later that day it took some effort not to attack a story that isn’t working, but the anxiety that came with the thought was a clue to let it go.  I did allow myself 10 minutes with a tape measure, pencil, and paper to survey which parts of the back yard fence are in need of repair.  Goal oriented, yes, but easy and the dogs needed to run around.

That’s how the day went.  No reading except the Sunday paper and a light mystery novel.  No writing except the opening paragraph of this post which I stopped after 10 minutes because I could feel myself starting to work too hard.  No cooking in the evening – we went out to dinner and brought home a key lime pie, my absolute favorite.

Sometimes I think of old pictures of ancestors – those serious, even dour looking men and women, sitting very still as they peer into the camera.  Often I imagine them frowning at “a slacker like me,” but maybe not.

I have a 4″ thick family bible that belonged to my great-great grandfather.  He inscribed the family name on the cover page in 1856.  I imagine him reading the good book aloud to his wife and eight children every evening after dinner.  For all I know, he observed the sabbath better than I ever have.  His family lived on a farm, and maybe they all took one day a week to rest and give thanks.  And eat pie – if not key lime, then almost certainly, apple or peach.

Maybe they knew something I have forgotten – but it is never too late to learn.

Your Brain on Google

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According to Alva Noe, Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley, Google is not making us stupid.  Good news, even though I wasn’t worried until I saw his article. http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/09/20/140625802/google-is-not-making-you-stupid.

Noe is the author of, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness.

He refers to results of a Columbia University study that found we are more likely to remember things we cannot find online than things we can.  The study caused some concern, but Noe says this is unwarranted and links to a blog with this quote from Einstein:  “Never memorize something that you can look up.”

Researchers are not picking on Google in particular but cite it because the phrase, “Google effect” has come to stand for the way many new technologies influence us.  Noe suggests that they are not qualitatively different from other tools we use to navigate the world and make sense of it:  “We use landmarks and street signs to find our way around; arithmetical notation makes it possible for us to calculate with big numbers; we wear wrist watches so that we can know the time without needing to know the time; and we build libraries so that we have access to what we need to know, when we need to know it.”

My predisposition to agree with Noe is based on Sherlock Holmes.  Conan Doyle’s famous detective told Watson he could not afford to fill his mind with information not relevant to his profession.  As a result, he could identify 37 varieties of cigarette ash but knew almost nothing about the solar system.

Beyond my lifelong fascination with Holmes, several things leap to mind.  I really don’t use the internet to remember things – I use it to find things.  Also, memory and intelligence are not the same.  If they were, I’m sure post-it-notes would have shaved several points off my IQ.

Though I don’t worry about Google and memory, Noe adds a link for further reading that raises more serious concerns.  In August, 2008, Nicholas Carr published an article in The Atlantic, called, “Is Google Making Us Stupid:  What the Internet is Doing to our Brains.”  http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/).

Carr is the author of, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google.

If nothing else, the internet is changing our brains, says Carr:  “I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.”

Carr cites the work of Marshall McLuhan, who in the ’60’s observed that media not only supply the content of thought, but shape the process of thought.  Carr says, “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”

Before anyone panics, we should note that Carr is primarily talking about the fight “to stay focused on long pieces of writing.”  An acquaintance of his says he can’t read War and Peace anymore.  I couldn’t get through it even once.  Carr emphasizes intelligence as a series of very cerebral pursuits.  I suspect he and I have different ideas of “meditation and contemplation:”  I don’t think he’s talking of sitting meditation, something I’ve always used to counterbalance intellectual activity, and one I do not find impacted by time spent online.  Watching a violent movie may impact my ability to meditate, but so far, Google does not.  Maybe I’m in denial, but these concerns are fairly low on my hierarchy of worries.

Carr cites another concern that comes from the mouths of the founders of Google:  Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains.  More than once, I’ve chatted with friends about how “they” will jack into our brains when the day comes:  USB?  Firewire?  The Matrix ruined my ability to take such a fantasies literally.

***

Serious research is underway, studying what is good and bad about our reliance on the internet.  Parallel hopes and concerns met Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.  From the distance of centuries, we can see how it affected our brains.  No one in a literate culture has the memory of the tribal Griot in Alex Haley’s, Roots, or the ancient Homeric poets, but we have to ask, along with Einstein, how much should we care?  Is that kind of memory central to intelligence?  Does it’s loss have a negative human destiny?

The internet seems every bit as profound a change as the invention of printing, and it’s likely to take a long time for the dust to settle so that objective evaluations can occur.  Hopefully, as with printing, the good will outweigh the bad.

***

Everyone who has made it through this post should feel good about their ability to concentrate.  Having come to the end, I’m going to go for a walk – one of those those vitamin C for the brain type strategies that can hopefully inoculate me even against the dangers of Google!.

200 Posts!!!

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It’s like one of those birthdays that end in zero.  It’s sort of like any other day – but it’s not.  This is just another post, though it’s something more at the same time.  At a minimum, this is an occasion to step back and reflect.  Here are a few random thoughts about this blog as a work in progress:

I need to update my About page:

This First Gates is no longer about what it was in the beginning.  I started writing about fiction and the process of writing.  Later I included spiritual topics, but from my current perspective, the thread animating all these posts is imagination.  Not only artistic “creative imagination.”  I use the word in the wider sense employed by psychologist, James Hillman, an influential post-Jungian thinker:

“By soul I mean the imaginative possibilities in our natures…that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical” – James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, 1977.

I ventured into the realms of politics and economics this summer not for the subject matter alone, but because of the passions involved.  People do not get that excited over literal truths.  Along with Hillman, I’m fascinated by the reality in our fantasies and the fantasy in our “realities.”  This understanding is likely to guide my choice of subject matter in the future.

Am I slowing down?

A bit, at least over the last six weeks or so.  Through spring and early summer I was posting three or four times a week.  Lately it has been about twice a week.  Partly it’s the season and a desire to be out and about more, enjoying the warmth and the daylight while they last.  Related to that are a summer’s worth of neglected yard chores I have no excuse to avoid now that the days are growing cooler.  We also tend to travel in the fall (thought that doesn’t necessarily preclude blogging).

Nerdvana - Wifi in the Woods

There’s an ebb and flow to things like this, and I suspect I will pick up steam again as the days grow shorter and colder.

Enjoying the blogosphere:

When I started, I didn’t know other bloggers, and it took me a while to connect.  Lately the number of blogs I follow has exploded.  Sometimes I am reminded of hanging out with kindred spirits in college.  However naive the discussions, the excitement and fervor often came to mind during the years of corporate meetings, where such qualities were notable by their absence.  It’s trendy to criticize connecting online rather than face to face – as if distance and time zones and schedules are easy to overcome.  As a next-best-thing, this is a pretty decent medium for sharing stories and ideas.

Thanks to everyone:

Let me again thank everyone who stops by here to read or leave a comment.  It’s you who keep me going.  Now it’s time to go read a few blogs and mull over possible topics for post #201.

Seven Year Cycles, Part Deux

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While reviewing my previous post on seven-year cycles, two other writings came to mind.  In their own ways, both hint that our concepts of time, and and things like cycles, are just that – concepts.

The first of these writings comes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem, The Four Quartets.

T.S. Eliot

You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travelers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,

***

Rodney Smith says something similar in Stepping Our of Self-Deception:  The Buddha’s Liberating Teaching of No-Self (2010).   Smith founded the Seattle Insight Meditation Society and is the author of, Lessons from the Dying which grew out of his years of hospice work.

Rodney Smith

He says, “future and past have no reality outside thought…no true authenticity other than the validity we give an idea or image.”   Smith does not deny our experience of past and future, but suggests that it’s not what we usually imagine.  Past and future, he says, are ideas we entertain in the present moment:  how could they be anything else?

His comments remind me of crossing one state into another.  The sign says, “Welcome to Oregon,” but you find no lines on the earth as there are on the map: one instance of the difference between a concept and the experience made visible.

Seven Year Cycles

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If you google on almost any topic related to “cycles,” you wind up with a flood of information.  Scientists define life cycles for everything from insects to stars.

Cycles abound in spiritual and esoteric traditions, ranging from newspaper horoscopes to “Days and Nights of Creation” lasting millions of years.

I was searching for something simpler than that.  Biologists say our bodily cells renew themselves every seven years.  Parallel to that, I’ve noticed my world of ideas, interests, and ambitions changing, sometimes radically, over a similar time frame.  I’m not the only one.  Google on, “seven year life cycle,” and you get 5,400,000 hits.  Although Rudolph Steiner wrote on the subject, most of the entries I found were generic, analogous to newspaper horoscopes.  Here is Aquarius.  Here are your life tasks between the ages of 21 and 28.

No doubt Gemini’s, and seven-year-olds, and seventy-year-olds each have things in common, but I was looking for individual accounts of people who find their ideas, concepts, and aspirations changing every seven years or so

What brought this to mind was thinking of 2005, a year in which I experienced many beginnings.  One night I woke up at 12:30am, grabbed a pen and a notebook, and wrote the opening pages of my first novel.  The momentum grew, and I finished the first draft five months later (in retrospect, it was pretty bad, though I doubt that I’ll ever have so much fun writing again).

Aided by a sabbatical from work, and energized by visits with family and friends I hadn’t seen in years, I was bursting with fresh energy, new ideas, and new ambitions.  Many threads in my life seemed to become clear.  I jotted some down in a notebook.  I underlined things I was very sure of.  A bit of skepticism remained, so I made  note in the margin:  “check back in five years.”

Six years later, in most respects, I am not the same person.  I don’t really read or aspire to write the books I cared about then.  My spiritual ideas have shifted.  What I value and want to accomplish are not the same.  My overall outlook is different.  I’ve noted these seven year changes before; this was just more pronounced.

Once again I have to conclude that most of the contents of consciousness are in flux and do not capture the “core” of who I am or who anyone else is.  The metaphor I use is the mirror.  A mirror is not defined by what it reflects from moment to moment.  “I” am not what passes through awareness, “I” am the indefinable awareness itself.

This is wisdom that’s thousands of years old but I believe it more and more as time goes on.  This is the koan:  what is a mirror beyond what it reflects?  What is the heart/mind beyond what it conceives?

The Freedom Index

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Actually, there is no Freedom Index, except in my possibly fevered imagination.  The idea came from reading the WordPress Daily Post, “What Does Freedom Mean?”  That’s a good question to think about.  It is very hard to answer, which makes it interesting.

All of the obvious answers lead you in circles.  Millions of people in these troubled times long for the freedom that work brings, but that reminds me of all the five dollar bills I tossed into lottery pools at work.  I’m guessing that nearly all working stiffs sometimes dream of winning the lottery and achieving that sort of freedom – even though lots of studies show that a year later, most winners are no higher on the Happiness Index (which really exists).

News reports are always full of threats to our freedom, often couched in words of blame for someone else.  Still, on a hypothetical Public Freedom Index, things could be a lot worse.    We can watch fireworks if we choose – or not, since we don’t have mandated public celebrations.  The explosions tonight will be for fun; we live free of the threat of real bombs.  We can can blog and tweet to our heart’s content, and Google on a staggering array of topics.

Personal Freedom is always a little more dicey.  We are still guaranteed “the pursuit of happiness,” but you have to wonder how most people would answer the Dr. Phil question:  “How’s that working for you?”

The Dalai Lama says all of us desire happiness and an end to suffering, but we really don’t know how to go about it.  Many of our choices lead to the opposite result.  Perhaps the freedom to ask – really ask – where our real happiness lies, is one of the greatest freedoms of all.  That and Freedom of Information which allows us to follow the trail where ever it leads.

Here is Buddhist blessing/prayer, known as The Four Immeasurables:

May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all beings know the supreme happiness that is beyond suffering.
May all beings rest in equanimity, free from attachment and free from aversion.

Happy Fourth of July!

Marginal People, People of the Margins

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Given the doings and structure of the psyche, there is no such thing as being alone.  If you are the only one in the room, it is still a crowded room. – Michael Ventura

While reading and enjoying the interviews in Bill Moyers Journal (which I discussed here, https://thefirstgates.com/2011/05/24/bill-moyers-journal-the-conversation-continues/), I came upon a phrase that evoked a cluster of other ideas.

Moyers interviewed author, Louise Erdrich, concerning her novel, Shadow Tag, which he considers exceptional.  During the interview, Erdrich, who is the daughter an Ojibwe mother and a German American father, said “I live on the margin of just about everything, Bill.  I’m a marginal person, and I think that is where I’ve become comfortable.”   I recommend the interview as a whole, as I do the others in Moyers’ book, but right now I want to focus on the phrase Erdrich used – “marginal person.”

Louise Erdrich

In context, she was talking about the split between people’s waking selves and their dream selves, which is one of the subjects of Shadow Tag.  She was also talking about the tensions between her Catholic upbringing and the Ojibwe culture, as well as the tensions between her various roles, such as mother and writer, which don’t always fit well together.

In short, I take the phrase, “living on the margin,” and being a “marginal person,” to mean”outsider,” one who stands at the edges watching, related but not quite part of.  I am going to take this notion a step further, because it accords with recent thought in depth psychology as well as conditions in our culture.

James Hillman, a prominent post-Jungian thinker, has written eloquently of our “polytheistic” psyches, formed of a number of archetypal forces that often compete with each other.  This is in distinction to Jung’s “monotheistic” psychology, which posits a central “Self” which is alpha and omega of the psyche.

James Hillman

Here is what Michael Ventura, a journalist, screenwriter, and friend of Hillman’s has to say:  There may be no more important project in our time than displacing the…notion that each person has a central and unified “I” which determines his or her acts.  “I” have been writing this to say that I don’t think people experience life that way.  I do think they experience language that way, and hence are doomed to speak about life in structures contrary to their experience.  Ventura adds, The central “I” is not a fact, it’s a longing – the longing of all the selves within the psyche that are starving because they are not recognized” (Michael Ventura.  From “A Dance For Your Life in the Marriage Zone,” in Shadow Dancing in the USA, 1985, out of print).

Ventura’s essay on marriage names a few of these “selves:”  My tough street kid is romancing your honky-tonk angel.  I am your homeless waif and you are my loving mother.  I am your lost father and you are my doting daughter.  I am your worshipper and you are my goddess.  I am your god and you are my priestess.  I am you client and you are my analyst.  I am your intensity and you are my ground.  These are some of the more garish of the patterns. 

You get the idea, and though you may find it mildly interesting, perhaps you wonder, what is the point, and what does it have to do with margins?

Plenty, I think, and it’s all wrapped up in a word in a word related to margins.  The word is liminality, from the Latin word, limen, which means, “threshold.”  People and cultures in liminal states are “betwixt and between.”  The definition given in Wikepedia is:  a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the “threshold” of or between two different existential planes.  Though the word was initially used by anthropologists to anaylze the middle stage of ritual practice, it has passed into broader usage, with this important meaning: [liminality is] now considered by some to be a master concept in the social and political sciences writ large…very useful when studying events or situations that involve the dissolution of order, but which are also formative of institutions and structures.

Hermes, the Greek messenger god, is the archetypal figure of liminal states, for he can easily pass between the worlds and speak to gods and mortals.  His Roman name, Mercury, is synonymous with quicksilver, that flashing liquid metal that is not quite one thing or another and cannot be contained.  My suggestion is that marginal people, people who are at home in the margins, people whose psyches welcome Hermes, are fortunate in this liminal state of our culture and world, as it becomes increasingly hard to bury our heads in the sand and fail to note “the dissolution of order…which [is] also formative of institutions and structures.”

Hermes, Messenger of the Gods

My previous post on nonfiction writing spoke of the “dissolution of order” in publishing and the nimbleness that is likely to characterize and benefit those writers who can adapt and even help create the new structures that are going to emerge.

The landscape of work is another example that touches everyone.  My father worked forty years for the same company, doing the same sort of job, before retiring with a pension.  Showing up as the same person every day served him well.  I had three distinct careers in six different organizations; that is the current statistical norm, and I bet it will seem tame to the generation now coming of age.  Access to a variety of “selves” was an asset in sailing those waters.

Rigid and hierarchical structures are not faring well this year, be they Arab governments, the government of California, the management of Borders, or people in almost any endeavor who cling to business as usual.

If you recognize yourself as a marginal person, a child of Hermes, one who has never been quite “this” or “that,” but both and neither, relax.  These may be the very times when you shine, when your gifts are needed, and when the ways will open as you come into your own.