Acceptance

A student once asked his Zen master,  "Why did you not ever marry?"

The Zen master replied, "Well, I was looking for the perfect woman".

The student eagerly asked, " Did you not find the perfect woman?"

"Oh, I did", replied the Zen master with a smile.

"Then...what happened.. why did you not marry her?"

The Zen master paused and with a twinkle in his eye said, "Well, she was looking for the perfect man."

(paraphrased from  John Gottman)

Words: Misread and misheard

Over the weekend as I was transferring the clothes from the washer I noticed this scribbled on a piece of paper:

ANGER NOT WORKING, BEING FIXED. TX!

I was struck by the profundity of the message and chuckled at the absurdity of finding something like this in the laundry room. Sometimes life is like that - you never know what you find. Everybody's anger needs fixing. I am glad that the person who wrote that note at least acknowledged it. It drew a much bigger laugh a few minutes later when the reality of the message struck me.

The New Yorker (May 23, 2011) informed me about the 'karma chain' that was set in motion by Lama Pema in New York a month ago. It was an interesting experiment: Lama Pema played a version of 'Chinese Whispers' (called 'Telephone' in the U.S.). The idea was that Lama Pema at the start of the chain of 300+ people would recite three sutras that would be passed from person to person with the author Salman Rushdie at the very end of the chain to receive the final message. The Lama wanted to test the proposition "information can extremely volatile when words pass from person to person". The sutras that he read out (using his iPhone!) to person #1 in line were:

1) Like a shimmering star, or a flickering lamp
2) A fleeting autumn cloud, or a shining drop of morning dew
3) A phantom, a dream, or a bubble, so is all the existence to be seen

Even by the 20th person the messages were largely mangled from the original. Finally at the end, Salman Rushdie read out the final messages

1) Follow the glass stone. Follow the glass stone
2) The droid from hell
3) If anything exists it changes

These were 100% wrong as the Lama said. He said that not a single word that Rushdie read was the same, but in the end 'the words were not my message'. Accidentally and miraculously the listeners had listened to the gist of the message and then had collectively "put words to it". I am not sure I agree 100% with the Lama (considering #2), but it was an interesting exercise.

The scribbled message in my laundry room that sounded profound actually wasn't. It was more mundane and functional than spiritual and insightful than I had imagined. Because of the loopy 'Y' and the hastily scribbled cursive capital 'D', I had misread the first word: it was 'D-R-Y-E-R', not 'A-N-G-E-R'. Clarity had been restored, or not? My original misreading had actually lead to a moment of clarity. Everybody's anger needs fixing. It was a happy misreading.

Miksang- The Good Eye within

Red on Blue

Over the weekend I was at a Miksang photo workshop in one of my favorite cities - Chicago. The workshop called for digital camera. It could be simple, but it had to be digital. So I had to break my moratorium on digital photography and leave my beloved Leica and B/W photo-love behind. Since, Miksang - meaning 'good eye' in Tibetan promised to be purest of the pure in the digital world - no cropping, no digital alteration, and you aren't even supposed to real seek the picture. I felt that this was a worth exception (similar in some high-minded exceptions I make to eat meat).

Opening your eye

From What is Miksang?

Miksang, at its most basic level, is concerned with uncovering the truth of pure perception. We see something vivid and penetrating, and in that moment we can express our perception without making anything up—nothing added, nothing missing. Totally honest about what we see—straight shooting.

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Haiku with a leaf

This being Level 1 the images are simple. The teacher gave a great analogy: "it's like practising your scales". So, for the two days, I put image-making and even image-seeking behind to make picture of pure perception, at least as best as I could.

The assignments were Color, Texture, Shadow and Light, Space and Dots in Space. Having never ever tried such pictures before it was an exhilarating and very meditative experience. I can see why it can be contemplative, as every tiny object, or mundane one gets imbued with beauty.

Curves in White

After a while you can't stop noticing. The world around you is so alive and rich with color, texture, and space. We shot for only about 1.5 hours, but I was exhausted. It was also interesting to see what others had shot in the same space and there were a few, but not too many similar pictures. Everyone had their own unique sense of beauty.


Link to my Miksang-Level 1 pictures

Where literature comes in

Sometimes as a scientist, you wonder if literature has anything really important to say that science won't be able to answer given adequate time, resources and techniques. Can everything be reduced to some laws, even they are quantum or probabilistic ones? Experiments in giant fMRI machines are showing which areas of the brain are responsible for what affective qualities in decision making. While we still try to understand these phenomena literature fills that void. That void is literature's essential subject matter.

More from Menand's piece on Lionel Trilling:

In Trilling’s view, the faith that liberals share, whether they are Soviet apologists, Hayekian free marketers, or subscribers to Partisan Review, is that human betterment is possible, that there is a straight road to health and happiness. A liberal is a person who believes that the right economic system, the right political reforms, the right undergraduate curriculum, and the right psychotherapy will do away with unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy. The argument of “The Liberal Imagination” is that literature teaches that life is not so simple — for unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy happen to be literature’s particular subject matter. In Trilling’s celebrated statement: “To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique relevance . . . because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.” This is why literary criticism has something to say about politics.

What kind of liberal are you?

From Menand's piece on Lionel Trilling:

" ... As a matter of political theory, very different types of liberals. There is, in Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction, the liberal who believes in negative liberty, “freedom from,” and the liberal who believes in positive liberty, “freedom for.” There is the classical liberalism of free markets and individual rights, and the left liberalism of state planning and class solidarity..."

I consider myself a liberal. Now what kind is a difficult question. I am wrestling with the idea of positive or negative liberalism. At the same time, I believe that the labels 'positive' and 'negative' are unfortunate as they seem to connote that negative liberalism is lesser than positive liberalism. It easier to think of them simply as labels and focus on the question.

What if I believed in both kinds of freedom, does that make me a positively negative liberal?