HinesSight

Happiness is a new mountain bike. Maybe.

My birthday has begun. Actually, it started five days ago. It’ll culminate on October 7, which used to be known as my “birthday.” I’ve decided to celebrate it like Ramadan—a full month of honoring what I reverence most: me.

This makes perfect sense, because the older I get (have started to become 58), the fewer birthdays I have left to celebrate. Therefore the celebration should get longer as I age, to make up for fewer future celebratory opportunities. If I live to 100, I suppose I’ll be celebrating continuously.

Anyway, here’s my first major gift to myself. A black 2007 Specialized Rockhopper mountain bike. My old Raleigh was cream colored. I like my new Ninja look. I also like how my riding happiness has increased since Sunday, when I picked up the bike at Eurosports in Sisters.

Just as I expected. Otherwise, why would I want a new bike? On the same day I bought myself this present, I received a few other gifts from myself after a visit to my other favorite Sisters store, Paulina Springs Books.

I saw “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert on the new non-fiction table. At first I figured that the book would tell me how to do just that. But as I thumbed through it I realized that Gilbert had a more tasty fish to fry. He’s out to explain why what we think will make us happy usually doesn’t. At least not in the way we thought it would.

A small still voice in the back of my mind said, “Brian, you just bought yourself a $500 mountain bike that you expect will bring you great joy. Isn’t it dangerous to now plunk down $24.95 on a book that promises to burst your happiness expectation bubble?”

I paused to ponder my small still voice. Then I told it to shut up. After all, I’d just read a blurb on the front cover from Steven Levitt that said, “This absolutely fantastic book will shatter your most deeply held convictions about how the mind works.” So why should I trust what my mind was telling me?

Screw it. I’ll buy the book. And the bike. And whatever else I want and can afford for the next 28 days. It’s my goddamn birthday month! I deserve it all!

Good decision. I’ve been enjoying “Stumbling on Happiness” just as much as my bike, even though it’s got a mostly white cover and doesn’t meld very well with my new Ninja nature. Gilbert is one of those authors who makes me think, “Dear devil, I’ll gladly sell my soul in exchange for being able to write as well as this guy.”

He had me hooked by the time I finished the first paragraph of his Acknowledgements.

This is the part of the book in which the author typically claims that nobody writes a book by himself and then names all the people who presumably wrote the book for him. It must be nice to have friends like that. Alas, all the people who wrote this book are me, so let me instead thank those who by their gifts enabled me to write a book without them.

Terrific. Then the hook was set, hard, by the first few pages of Gilbert’s Foreword. After that, I couldn’t put the book down.

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of our hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our paychecks each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, jogging and flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, enduring dirty diapers and mind-numbing repetitions of The Cat in the Hat so that someday they will have fat-cheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps.

Great stuff. I was happy that I’d indulged me right now, instead of the future him that I so often sacrifice myself for. But then I read on. And began to see the Dark Side.

In fact, just about any time we want something—a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger—we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, minute, day, or decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forebearance.

Yeah, yeah. Don’t hold your breath. Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless….How can this happen? Shouldn’t we know the tastes, preferences, needs, and desires of the people we will be next year—or at least later this afternoon?

Seems like it. But Laurel already has listened to Gilbert’s book on CD, and she tells me that research shows we’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy. (Well, I’ll believe it when I read it. The day my body listens to a book will be the day they pry my yellow fluorescent highlighter from my cold dead hands.)

So maybe, maybe, my new mountain bike isn’t going to bring me as much joy as I’m expecting it will. Yet I’m different. I’m special. I’m like no one else in the world. Other poor fools may not know what makes them happy, but I do.

Such is my fervent hope. And, likely, my fervent delusion, based on peeking ahead to the last line of the final chapter.

Alas, we think of ourselves as unique entities—minds unlike any others—and thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional experience of others has to teach us.

Well, stay tuned. It could be that every single person who gets a new mountain bike from Eurosports, including me, is happy for the rest of their days. I’ll let you know if that’s true. (If it is, you'll be eager for this information.)

Osama Bin Laden’s mistress, a topless womanist

Kola Boof claims that she was Osama Bin Laden’s mistress in the mid-1990s. In her book Boof reveals juicy details about Bin Laden’s sexual and cultural predilections.

From a Harper's excerpt I learned that Boof’s Al Qaeda boy toy made her dance naked to Van Halen; he didn’t know the difference between being vicious and being tender (shock!); he enjoyed hitting the hookah before sex; his favorite TV shows were The Wonder Years, Miami Vice, and MacGyver; and he adored Whitney Houston so much, he wanted to give her a mansion in Khartoum.

I believe it all. Sure, there are skeptics who doubt her story just because of minor details like the fact that she claims she performed sex acts on a group that included Bin Laden and several of his lieutenants, some of whom were dead or in prison at the time.

Like I said, details, details.

Guess I’m a sucker for an African womanist who proudly poses topless on her web site. She says that publicity and vanity have nothing to do with it.

Rather, Boof explains, “"I am topless to honor my mothers and grandmothers, my own African womenfolk who were always bare breasted in the sun and who gave birth to this whole world.”

I definitely can get behind her religion (in front of it too). She writes:

They [her relatives] were naked because it pleases God…and I do believe that it's an abomination against God for any woman's breasts to be covered. So I have it written in my book contracts that I must appear topless on the back covers of my books. I also do it because it's not Christian and it's not Islamic. I truly want to plant a seed in favor of women creating their own institution of religion, because that's all religions are-institutions.

Ms. Boof, if you start up a religion where all the women are topless in church, sign me up as the first male convert. I’ll be happy to hold the collection plate as the worshippers pass by. With my eyes humbly cast downward, of course.

My satori is near at hand

Clearly my final enlightenment—satori!—is near at hand, for I have bought a book that will lead me there: D.T. Suzuki’s “The Zen Koan as a means of Attaining Enlightenment.”

The clerk at Salem’s Book Bin was suitably impressed with my purchase, telling me “We hope you’ll come back after your enlightenment and share your realization.” I said, “Absolutely. I plan to charge $8 for this dispensation of wisdom, which will enable me to realize a 50 cent profit from buying this $7.50 book.”

Obviously my spiritual motives are pure. So pure that a humble part of me continually whispers, “Brian, you are already enlightened.” I like that voice. I want to trust it. But I don’t want to take any chances with my satori. Though I may already have become one with Buddha nature, I figure it won’t hurt to add to my oneness.

Hence, my purchase of the book. Now, I don’t have a Zen Master, nor do I want one. My Zen transcends spiritual discipline and organized practice, which makes it so easy for me to follow. And also easy for me to confirm my satori, since I don’t have to go through the unappealing process of getting my enlightenment confirmed by someone else.

I’ll decide when my Buddha nature is fully Buddhaized, thank you. And I don’t need a Zen Master to give me a koan either. I’ve got plenty of koans lying right around the house that should work fine to top off my satori tank. Here are some examples of homey koans that defy rational explication.

If our dog has Buddha nature, then why does she always ask to go out just when I have settled down comfortably on the couch?

When my wife’s closet is filled to capacity, how is it possible that she can keep shopping and coming home with more clothes?

After a man has washed the cutting board and returned it to its place still wet, so the board can drip-dry onto the counter, if he does not hear the sound of a woman chastising him, is he still wrong?

And lastly, my favorite koan of all:

If a sentient being already has acquired countless books describing a myriad of spiritual practices, only a few of which are shown here, and each claims in its own unique fashion to convey the truth about ultimate reality, what are the chances of another book making any difference?

Anxiously analyzing Amazon’s text stats

Just what I didn’t need the first “work” (using that term in a writer’s sense, extremely loosely) day after a relaxing vacation in Maui. In the course of checking on my book’s miniscule sales status, I discovered that the geniuses at Amazon.com have added some new features to their already filled-to-the-gills web site that can make an author anxious:

Readability statistics for books included in their Search Inside the Book program (where authors/publishers send Amazon a book to be scanned, after which every darn word can be searched for and sample pages perused). Plus a concordance of the 100 most frequently used words in a book. And a statistically improbable phrases feature helpfully described by Amazon in a pop-up window:

“Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or ‘SIPs’, show you the interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books in Search Inside the Book. Our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to how many times it occurs across all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.”

I was thrilled to see that “Return to the One” garnered five SIPS: mystic philosophy, mystic philosopher, intuitive intelligence, first emanation, inward contemplation. I would have been disappointed if there weren’t any interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases in my book.

I also enjoyed looking at the graphically enhanced concordance (elsewhere on the page linked above). Of the 100 most common words in a book, Amazon apparently puts the most common of the common in a larger, bolder font. So I could quickly see that my book talked a lot about soul, Plotinus, spirit, and spiritual—which is absolutely true.

It wasn’t quite as much fun to anxiously analyze the readability statistics. At first I fantasized that my score of 14.6 on the Fog Index sounded admirably low. But then I saw that 7-8 is considered ideal, and anything over 12 means the book is difficult to read. OK, I’ll admit to “Return to the One” being more or less guilty as charged.

Yet let’s see the developer of the Fog Index write a really easy to read book about one of the densest and most profound philosophers of all time. (Oops, make that “mystic philosopher”—might as well use my special Statistically Improbable Phrases as much as I can.) So I decided to check out some of the related competition, a few of the Books on Related Topics that Amazon lists on my book’s page.

Yeah, baby. Let’s go head to head with Pierre Hadot’s “Plotinus or the simplicity of vision,” which is one of the most popular (in the sense of both best-selling and easy to read) books about this Greek philosopher.

Fog Index: Hines scores 14.6 and Hadot 17.5. Yay, a point for Hines!

Flesch Index (90-100 appropriate for 5th-6th graders, 0-30 means you need a college degree to understand the book): Hines scores 51.5 and Hadot 44.0. Boo, a point for Hadot.

We’ve got a tie, one point each. It all comes down to the Flesch-Kincaid Index, a refinement of the Flesch Index that relates the score to a U.S. grade level. You would think that Hadot would win out again here, but no…

Flesch-Kincaid Index: Hines scores 11.5 and Hadot 14.2. Yay, another point for Hines! He wins 2-1! If you just made it halfway through your senior year in high school, you can still enjoy “Return to the One”—no need to plow onward into the junior year of college just to be able to understand Hadot’s book.

Plus, take a look at Amazon’s Fun Stats: with my book you get a whopping 10,324 words per dollar; with Hadot’s book you just get a measly 2,755. Where can you get 10,324 of anything for just a buck? And here you get 10,324 words of profound mystic philosophy for your $1 (to work in another SIP; by the way, Hadot only managed to come up with two SIPS, “total presence” and “our true self”; you get five in my book.

Sure, you could get your philosophy from the “Tao of Pooh” and only need a 6th grade education to understand it. But come on: the concordance shows that you’re going to read “Pooh said” over and over and over. For about $4 more you can get almost 100,000 additional words in “Return to the One” and learn about a mystic philosopher who wrote that the nature of God, the One, can’t begin to be expressed in language.

To get at the root of that paradox you’re going to have to buy the book.

The mystery of suffering

Why do we suffer? There’s no better question to ask, because a search for the answer leads into the deepest mysteries of life, death, God, existence, body, soul, meaning, purposelessness—the whole shebang that philosophers ponder, mystics meditate on, scientists study, and preachers pontificate about.

Bill Long’s recently-published book, “A Hard-Fought Hope: Journeying with Job through Mystery,” examines suffering through a biblical lens, the book of Job. Yet Bill, a Salem resident and friend of mine, doesn’t take a traditional religious approach to understanding Job. He starts by laying out a legal complaint against God, Ruler of the Universe on behalf of Job, an individual.

The charges? Breach of contract, negligence, loss of consortium, intentional infliction of emotional distress. The prayed-for remedy? What we all want, relief. Since Bill is both an attorney and a religious scholar, his discussion of the book of Job is systematic and logical while also compassionate and devotional. Committed Jews and Christians who read “A Hard-Fought Hope” will find that Bill speaks their language.

I’m neither a Jew nor a Christian, yet I enjoyed learning about a perspective on suffering that was unfamiliar to me. I might have read the book of Job sometime in my life, but it hadn’t registered with me. So I appreciated how Bill breaks down Job’s response to God’s testing of his faith into well-defined “stages of grief,” so to speak, that comprise his book’s central chapters: “A Torrent of Emotions,” “The Grace of Job’s Anger,” “The Music of Job’s Grief,” “The Power of a Question,” “The Turning Point,” “Wisdom Seeking,” “Listening Differently,” “Living Differently.”

The problem I had with “A Hard-Fought Hope” didn’t have to do with Bill’s writing, which is highly readable, nor with the book’s subject of suffering, which is of intense interest to me—particularly when life doesn’t go the way I think it should (in other words, I’m interested almost all of the time). No, what gave me pause throughout my reading of the 160 pages was this: I couldn’t stop thinking, “Is all this dialogue in the book of Job between a suffering man and the God who makes him suffer anything more than literary fantasy?”

Lots of novelists have written about suffering. Why isn’t their message taken as seriously as the words in the Old Testament that Bill interprets for us? It must be because so many people consider that the book of Job really is a true description of how God sent suffering to a man, and how that man responded to the divine test. Otherwise, Job is just a fictional description of a guy with delusions that a unseen malevolent metaphysical force is out to get him: “He has torn me in his wrath, and hated me; he has gnashed his teeth at me; my adversary sharpens his eyes against me.” (16:9) “I was at ease, and he broke me in two; he seized me by the neck and dashed me to pieces.” (16:12)

Personally, I think the book of Job is fiction. There really isn’t a God who gnashes his teeth, seizes people by the neck, and breaks them in two. But many believers think there is, which to me is the most interesting question about Job in particular and the Bible in general: Why does the notion of an external, supernatural source of suffering hold so much appeal? A short possible answer: Because a God who gives suffering can take away suffering, which lifts the responsibility for eliminating suffering off of my shoulders and puts it in God’s hands.

Near the end of his book, Bill writes: “If only Job could have believed in a God who did not intervene in human life, that would have solved all his difficulties.” Yes, in a sense it would have. Job still would be afflicted by all that he was suffering from, but he wouldn’t have the significant added burden of suffering from a belief that the God he loved so much had singled him out for special nasty treatment.

I know lots of people who believe that many, if not most, of the things that happen to them are for a reason. This isn’t a peculiarly Christian/Jewish doctrine. Some think that angelic beings or spiritual guides are directing the course of their life. Others, an ascended (or descended) guru, master, avatar, yogi, or other entity with a power to alter events. I can’t say for sure that they are wrong. Still, almost all the evidence of both science and common sense points toward natural, universal, and impersonal causes of life’s happenings.

My bet is that the only cure for suffering is what we prescribe ourselves. This is the basic Buddhist perspective, echoed in a little book by Paramhansa Yogananda that I re-read recently: “The Science of Religion.” I don’t agree with everything Yogananda says, but I find persuasive his essential psychological premises: “Desire, or the increase of conditions of excitations of the mind, is the source of pain or misery….Every human being is seeking to attain Bliss by fulfilling desire, but he mistakenly stops at pleasure; so his desires never end, and he is swept away into the whirlpool of pain.”

This may sound rather New Agey. Still, when I consider Yogananda’s well-reasoned arguments, which are more sophisticated than my two sentence summary here, they resonate with me more persuasively than does the book of Job. For Yogananda, Buddhism, and Eastern philosophy in general (plus the mystic neo-Platonism of Plotinus) locate the source of suffering in the human psyche, not God’s will. This means that we should look inward to our own self for answers to why life is so painful, not outward to a being in the heavens.

Still, what do I really know about all this? Not much. What I’ve just said is only one of many options on this interesting and amusing “Why Do We Suffer?” quiz.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any answers at the end of the quiz. Just more questions. Maybe that is the best answer.

Ranting reaps a review

Proving either that ranting results in a rapid response from the cosmos, or, more likely, that magical thinking is alive and well in my twisted mind, after yesterday’s posting I was pleased to find an email from the Radical Academy waiting for me when I turned on my computer this morning. My book had been reviewed!

My fingers were trembling slightly as I clicked on the link to Dr. Jonathan Dolhenty’s review. For while I have been eager to have “Return to the One” reviewed, naturally I was envisioning positivity at the end of the Review Rainbow, not negativity. Thankfully, a quick read through Dr. Dolhenty’s thoughtful analysis of my book about Plotinus allayed my anxieties.

He ends with these words: I highly recommend "Return to the One" to all those interested in the philosophy of Plotinus, the general history of Western philosophy, religious philosophy, or mystical philosophy. The subject is interesting and important and Brian Hines' prose is crisp, concise, and easily understood.

Well, I may have to revise my potential (and so far utterly unrealized) sales projections. As noted in the posting below, I’ve been considering that this book would appeal to enthusiasts of mysticism and Greek Philosophy. But, hey, if we open the door to “the general history of Western philosophy” and “religious philosophy,” a lot more readers could enter in.

The Radical Academy is an interesting website. On the home page it says, We discuss traditional philosophical, moral, and religious questions; contemporary political, social, and cultural problems and policies; current scientific and technological issues and speculations; challenges to the "conventional" wisdom, "popular" ideologies, and "accepted" paradigms of our culture; and the application of commonsense realistic principles to all human affairs.

Dr. Dolhenty lives in Port Orford, so the Radical Academy has Oregon roots. He is President and Webmaster of the Academy and its parent organization, the Center for Applied Philosophy.

A lot of people would consider a Center for Applied Philosophy about as useless an enterprise as you could think of, especially since it has a significant emphasis on classic Western philosophers. And a lot of people would be mistaken.

I’ve been re-reading what Thoreau has to say on this subject in his “Reading” chapter in Walden. Maybe one day the New Age Retailer reviewer who declined to write a review of my book because it was “not relevant to today’s issues” will read Walden’s words and change his or her mind:

The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, because it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.

…I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him, --my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are under-bred and low-lived and illiterate.

…How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhat uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.

Since “Return to the One” was published I’ve been told by several people, “I’ve started your book, but I haven’t been able to get past the opening chapters. It’s heavy.” Well, yes, it is. And also exceedingly light if you allow yourself to soar with Plotinus’s spiritual vision. At the risk of sounding like George W. Bush, I’ll say that “Reading a classic philosopher is hard work. You have to be steadfast.”

Thoreau: To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

Bumper sticker wisdom

Here’s some bumper sticker/wooden sign wisdom that I picked up in several artsy-crafty Sisters stores yesterday:

“My greatest fear is that there is no PMS, and this is my personality.”

“If life were logical, men would ride side-saddle.”

“Isn’t a smoking area in a restaurant like a peeing area in a swimming pool?”

“My wife keeps saying I never listen to her…or something like that.”

“If I want to hear the pitter-patter of little feet, I’ll put shoes on my dog.”

I started paying more attention to this pithy literary genre because I was looking for a way to entertain myself while Laurel pawed through seemingly endless bins of prints, searching for some artwork that we needed in our house for some reason that never quite registered on me (guess I should have bought #4 above.)

So I’d get out my always-handy notepad and pen and jot down sayings that struck me, figuring that this was more courteous and less likely to result in annoyed looks from the store owner than taking a flash photo of the bumper sticker or wooden sign whose message I wanted to remember but didn’t want to buy.

Now I have a shopping purpose in life, somewhat comparable but much less intense than Laurel’s quest for the ultimate pair of dichroic glass earrings. I shall continue accumulating the best short sayings I see until I have several hundred. Then I will publish them in a Best Bumper Stickers book, sit back, and wait for several hundred copyright infringement complaints to flow in, the cost of which to settle will suck up all of my royalties.

Better think of another book idea. Like the wonderful “Walter the Farting Dog” that Laurel bought yesterday. This is a great book and appears to be a best-seller, which isn’t surprising given the title. “Farting” is a guaranteed attention-getter, whether the word is spoken or written, and even more so when the action is enthusiastically indulged in.

A bit more about George W. Bush and bumper sticker wisdom: in the September 13 issue of “The New Yorker” there is an article on “Bush Speak—the President’s vernacular style.” The author, Philip Gourevitch, concludes what I have always thought myself. Namely, “He is grossly underestimated as an orator by those who presume that good grammar, rigorous logic, and a solid command of the facts are the essential ingredients of political persuasion, and that the absence of these skills indicates a lack of intelligence.”

Actually, says Gourevitch, Bush’s intelligence “is—if not especially literate—acutely verbal.” Bush clearly is a better speaker than Kerry, and I’m afraid he is going to clean the floor with Kerry in the presidential debates. One reason is that Bush knows how to put his points across as if he was reading from a series of bumper stickers. His words are simple, understandable, and strong. In contrast, Gourevitch observes, “John Kerry can speak rousingly for whole paragraphs without saying anything precise or concrete.”

Kerry would do well to spend some time as I did yesterday: reading bumper stickers and being exposed to writing that says a lot in a few words. I’m no one to talk, of course, as I love to spend a page saying what could be said in a couple of lines. But I’m not running for president. Kerry is, and we desperately need him to learn how to speak effectively. Now!

Sacrifice religion for God

It isn’t often that I recommend a 300 page book after reading just 30 pages. But I can already tell that “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason” is a book well worth recommending. I’d been feeling listless all day until I took a first look at Sam Harris’ warnings against religion. Right away I felt energized. Brutally honest words can do that to you, especially when well-written, as Harris’ book is.

I sense that Harris is a kindred spirit. He’s working on a doctorate in neuroscience, so his mind is attuned to the scientific method. And he has a fondness for mysticism, judging by a concluding chapter, “Experiments in Consciousness.” Harris says, “Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not. The mystic has recognized something about the nature of consciousness prior to thought, and this recognition is subject to rational discussion.”

A San Francisco Chronicle book reviewer takes issue with this elevation of mysticism over religion, but I agree with Harris. Consciousness is something directly accessible by every human. And the contents of consciousness also can be directly manipulated by any person who wants to experiment within his or her own psyche.

Sure, meditation is damnably difficult. Few people can successfully conduct the experiments in consciousness described by the great mystics. But at least we are dealing here with something concrete and undeniably real, as contrasted with religious talk of God—which is almost always hearsay, distant reports of what someone else supposedly experienced hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Harris says, “The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.” In the first chapter he suggests an interesting thought experiment: imagine that all six billion people in the world wake up one day with no knowledge of the world. Wisdom would have to be recreated from scratch. Where would we start? How would we relearn what we know now? Which currently widely-held religious tenets would be reincarnated, and which would have died, never to be reborn?

He writes, “When in this process of reclaiming our humanity will it be important to know that Jesus was born of a virgin? Or that he was resurrected? And how would we relearn these truths, if they are indeed true?”

Along these lines, I have my own thought experiment that I often like to ponder. It leads to the same conclusions Harris comes to, but from another direction—from deep outer space. Imagine that beings from a highly advanced extra-galactic civilization make a visit to Earth. The challenge is to communicate with them. Where do you start with a being whose culture, history, experience, knowledge is so utterly different from your own? What common ground do you share? What is the Rosetta Stone that enables you to translate your concepts into their concepts?

Well, it seems obvious that this would be: reality. Earthly scientists likely would have little difficulty beginning to communicate with their extra-terrestrial counterparts. For even if their representation of a hydrogen atom, say, was unlike that familiar to human physicists, it wouldn’t take long to form a common understanding of a entity that exists both on our planet and in a distant galaxy: hydrogen.

But what of God? How would our religious leaders be able to establish any sort of common ground with these beings? Almost certainly they would have no experience of anything akin to our Bible, Koran, Adi Granth, Talmud, Upanishads, or any other scripture. Even more: I like to imagine that they would have no conception at all of religion as we know it. They would only be familiar with a single entity, reality, what exists. What doesn’t exist, but what earthly religions believe exists, would be utterly foreign to them.

So could there be any communication about religious or spiritual matters with these beings? Yes, since both they and we are conscious. In the realm of what we call metaphysics, pure consciousness would be our common ground, not the cultural/historical contents of consciousness that forms the foundation of the religions on our planet.

I like to think that the advanced mystics of Earth and these extra-galactic visitors eventually would have a grand old time sharing their experiences of God, ultimate reality. But there wouldn’t be a trace of religion in these communications of consciousness.

Religion has to be sacrificed on the Altar of Truth to know God. Such is how it always has been; such is how it always will be. Sadly, though, most people would rather worship Belief, which is why Harris’ call for an end to religion won’t be widely heeded.

Still trying to set my hair on fire

I was sitting outside on our deck this afternoon, working hard at avoiding doing anything productive, when that damned voice in my head spoke words that I’ve been hearing way too frequently lately: “This moment will never come again.” The message was so clear it almost made me go back to my computer and get back to compiling the footnotes for the rewrite of my first book. Almost.

Because, with a little more pondering of the Unfathomable Mystery that is our cosmos, I was able to tell myself: “So what matters is the moment, not what transpires in it.” Hence, lounging lazily in the warm sun is as momentous (using my special definition of the term) as is typing intensely at my desk, working on finishing the footnotes.

After all the news of the 9/11 hearings, where the phrase “hair on fire” was uttered many more times than it had any right to be, I paused before I used these words in the title of this posting. It seemed too much like meme-littering. But then I recalled the phrase’s noble Zen heritage. George Leonard says that these were words of instructions to a medieval samurai: “You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair.”

Well, I’m still in the simmer stage. It’s amazing how often I walk away from my parked Volvo and then walk right back to it, not being sure whether I pressed the “lock” button on the key fob. Where’s my fire-in-the-hair concentration? Frequently, in a memory of a past moment or an anticipation of a moment to come. I’m missing the moment that is really here right now, the only moment that truly exists.

I’m an advanced student of the theory of momentology. However, I’m still a neophyte in the practice of this all-important discipline. Theory and practice go hand in hand, though, so I’m hoping that what I’ve read on this subject will someday translate into direct fiery experience. My favorite essay is Luther Askeland’s “The God in the Moment,” a chapter in his highly recommended book, “Ways in Mystery.” (Obtaining this link, I just saw my laudatory Amazon comment—one of the few I’ve written, which shows how much I like this book).

These excerpts I found on a web site don’t do justice to the complete essay, which nears an end with these words:

“The truth is that we are all too often back at the beginning, back where this essay and the Pascalian analysis begins, back, that is, with the moment itself and our unease about it, back with ourselves and our more or less confounded minds and divided hearts, back with the relentless impulse to just cover this discomfort, or pain, with sights and sounds, memories, experiences, actions, projects, dreams, other pain.

So it is that in our spiritual lives—the goal of which is an infinite journey toward God—it is the very first steps that we must repeat again and again. And so it is that we are continually brought back to the same dilemmas, conflicts, and choices. Shall I fill up the moment and simply blot it out with memories, or with the future, or just by doing anything at all, or shall I try to look directly at where I am right now and what my condition is right now?

...This is the choice we face, or evade, each moment. It is the choice between filling up the moment or attending to it. It is the choice whether we will have a life or something else, whether we will dwell stretched out across time, or somewhere else. It is the choice whether to live in what can be said and thought, or to seek the real.”

Moments.
Seemingly—
So many. So fleeting.
‘Always more where that came from.’
Yet really—
Only one.
So precious.

I’ve become the person I warned myself about

Partway through my martial arts class last night the head instructor, Master Allen, showed us some alternative moves in a kata that we had been practicing—it’s called Kanku Dai in Japanese, Kong San Goon in Korean. He said, “There is no one Way. There always is more than one Way. Anyone who believes there is one Way is limiting himself.”

Music to my ears, now. But it would have been heresy to my ears, then, during the nine years I was studying traditional Shotokan karate. In Shotokan karate there is one way to perform a kata: the sensei’s way, the instructor’s way. And even a high-ranking instructor, such as a fourth-degree black belt, is not going to perform a kata in a way different than Sensei Nishiyama, the ninth-degree leader of Shotokan karate, says it should be performed.

I used to believe that this was the right way to practice the martial arts: try to follow the One Way, the Master’s Way. Along with most of my Shotokan comrades, I used to belittle those poor deluded practitioners of “mix and match” martial arts systems that melded techniques and approaches from many different styles into a unique blend.

And now I find that I’ve become one of the people I used to belittle. Not surprisingly, my perspective is much different now. Yes, I understand why someone would want to study under a rigid “it’s my way or the highway” philosophy—which pretty accurately describes traditional karate—but I don’t think this is the best way to learn the martial arts. Or anything, for that matter.

My spiritual practice has evolved along similar lines. Thirty-four years ago I was initiated into a meditation path that goes by various names: Science of the Soul, Sant Mat, Path of the Masters, Surat Shabd Yoga. I’ve written several books that have been distributed by the organization behind this path—Radha Soami Satsang Beas. Over the past three + decades I’ve had many wonderful experiences, met lots of wonderful people, learned much wonderful stuff.

Yet…just as with the martial arts, the longer I follow a spiritual path the more I realize there isn’t just one Way. There may indeed be the One at the end of the Way (self-promotion interlude: in July 2004 my new book “Return to the One” will be released). But there are many Ways to the One, I’m increasingly sure of that.

So I find myself adapting my meditative practice in ways that I would have considered heretical just a few years ago. Here too, I’ve become the heretic that I used to warn myself about, one of those who thinks for himself and doesn’t follow the party (or Master’s) line simply because the word has come down from on high, “This is how it should be done.” Yes, I start with this. However, if that turns out to be more efficacious than this, I make the change. Such is the way of science. And also of nature. Flexibility. Adaptability. Openness. Evolution.

Systems are necessary. Without them, chaos rules. But without some chaos, rigidity rules. Dee Hock, the founder and CEO Emeritus of VISA International, wrote a great book called “Birth of the Chaordic Age.” It describes both the chaordic way he got VISA going, and how chaordic principles can be applied both in organizational management and personal growth. “Chaordic,” says Hock, is defined as:

“1. the behavior of any self-governing organism, organization or system which harmoniously blends characteristics of order and chaos. 2. patterned in a way dominated by neither chaos or order. 3. characteristic of the fundamental organizing principles of evolution and nature.”

Go Chaordic. It’s much better than going all Orderly, or all Chaotic. Each of us needs both in our lives. Order and Chaos. If you’ve got too much of one, embrace the other. It seems to be working for me (though my wife wouldn’t entirely agree, especially when it comes to the state of my t-shirt drawer.)

“You say you want a revolution…”

I’ve always loved these Lennon/McCartney lyrics: “You say you want a revolution…You say you got a real solution…Well you know you better free your mind instead.” It’s deep, man. And wonderfully applicable to so much in everyday life. Which in my life includes where the 275 acre Sustainable Fairview development is heading, and where I myself am heading.

Under the “Sustainability” category to the left I periodically rant and rave about the opportunities that so far have been missed to make Sustainable Fairview a truly world-class model of sustainability. Laurel and I are investors in Sustainable Fairview Associates, the limited liability company that has been stumbling along, crippled by poor management and a lack of vision, casting about for a way to be as Green as possible without losing the green stuff that we and others put into this cause several years back.

There are some glimmers of hope on the horizon. I’m looking forward to Chris Jones and his Eco-West Development company becoming more active in Sustainable Fairview—which needs a new name as desperately as it needs competent professional management (I still like “Terramore,” a name I suggested way back that got the most votes in an online poll I conducted of Sustainable Fairview Associates’ name candidates, none of which have been adopted yet).

Regardless, I think John and Paul hit it on the head. Sustainability won’t change the world if people just mess around with outward solutions. Recycling. Solar energy. Smart growth. Fuel cells. All these Green buzz words just point toward programs that fail to get at the real problem facing our Earth: us. What you, me, and everyone else wants out of life obviously is directly related to what we have to take from nature to get what we want.

I read in the Oregonian recently that Green buildings are a hot commodity in Portland now. People are willing to pay a lot to live and work in them. Real estate developers see sustainability as a new way to make more money, to feed the American Profit Machine that is one of the root causes of why our planet is in so much trouble. I find this deeply disturbing, the same reason I have found the direction of Sustainable Fairview Associates so disturbing. A commitment to sustainability should lead to business-as-unusual, not business-as-usual. Also thinking-as-unusual, not thinking-as-usual.

Tom Bender, who lives on the Oregon coast, and who I got to spend a pleasant few hours once discussing the Fairview vision, talks about the need for qualitative change in his book “Learning to Count What Really Counts.” Tom says, “Our present society and the sustainable one which we need to become operate on totally different principles and values.” Amen. This is what Russ Beaton, one of the founders of Sustainable Fairview Associates and a friend of ours, has been preaching to largely deaf ears in the company for several years. I’ve been echoing what I’ve learned from Russ, but it is hard to get through to people who see “sustainability” as something you can buy at the Green Technology Store rather than something you have to create within your own mind and heart.

Russ, me, and the other visionaries who tried to make Eco-Enterprises, Inc. a go wanted Sustainable Fairview to be founded on a whole different land ethic. We wanted these 275 acres to be owned by a Community Land Trust, with a generous share of the profits accruing from the land to be plowed back into the land—rather than being harvested by outside corporate interests, as will probably happen now at Fairview. We had a truly sustainable vision; we weren’t content with playing around with a few sustainable programs.

I’ve started reading one of Daniel Quinn’s books, “The Story of B.” There’s a lot to like and also quite a bit not to like in Quinn’s animistic philosophical perspective. I do resonate to his distinction between new visions and new programs, though. This is precisely what I’ve been railing on about since Laurel and I joined Sustainable Fairview Associates. Absent a new sustainable vision, supposedly sustainable programs are like spitting in the wind. Vision is the wind itself. It carries you where you need to go with hardly any effort. But it takes guts and a willingness to change to follow a vision, which is why most people are content with programs. Here’s a few excerpts from “The Story of B”:

“If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision. It will not be saved by people with old minds and new programs. It will not be saved by people with the old vision but a new program…Recycling is a program…Programs invariably run counter to vision, and so have to be thrust on people—have to be ‘sold’ to people…In our culture at the present moment, the flow of the river is toward catastrophe, and programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede its flow. My objective is to change the direction of the flow, away from catastrophe.”

If people get in their Toyota Prius’s (we’re proud owners of a 2004) to drive a thousand miles to Disneyland every year in search of plasticized fun, or ten miles every week to WalMart and Costco to bring home the next new gadget (made overseas) that relieves the boredom of their lives, we’re not really moving toward sustainability. We’re using less gasoline to do the same things, but that is something totally different.

I don’t know what a truly sustainable society would look like; I do know it isn’t what I see around me now, and what Laurel and I are living now (yes, we regularly go to WalMart and Costco). Well, at least we’re seeking the vision, which is more than most people are doing. And those who seek will find, or so we’re told.

“He is risen!” No, almost certainly not

Once again I brought too many books to Maui. Back in Oregon I forgot how enjoyable simply sitting on the beach is. I picture myself reading much more than I end up wanting to do. However, I’ve slowly been making my way through a wonderful book, “Think,” that I started reading several years ago, re-discovered on a shelf, and decided to throw into my suitcase.

With Easter tomorrow, I figured it would be appropriate to share some thoughts from the chapter on “God.” Simon Blackburn, the author of "Think" is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina. His book, says an inside cover, is “about the big questions in life: knowledge, consciousness, fate, God, truth, goodness, justice.”

It isn’t a typical “beach book,” but Blackburn writes in crystal-clear, simple prose, and even throws in some understated humor. I admire any philosopher who can intersperse some digs about the reliability of Windows in a section on “The Problem of Evil”. Challenging the notion that an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God can be deduced as lying behind the world’s obvious deficiencies, Blackburn says: “Nobody ever inferred from the multiple infirmities of Windows that Bill Gates was infinitely benevolent, omniscient, and able to fix everything.”

Tomorrow countless Christians will consider that they have been saved through their belief that Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected several days later. Almost certainly they are wrong. Probably, both about being saved and about the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection. I find Blackburn’s analysis of people’s beliefs about God highly persuasive.

He says that it makes sense for any thinking person to be skeptical of all the conflicting claims about miracles, one of which, of course, is the Christian claim that Jesus died and then bodily lived again—as also will, supposedly, the Christian faithful. “Which is more likely?” Blackburn asks: that something miraculous happens which is totally surprising, that in normal life just never happens (like the dead coming back to life), or that the purported miracle is the result of causes we encounter all the time: delusions, memory lapses, misunderstandings, metaphors mistaken for literal truth, deliberate fabrications for selfish ends, and so on.

He also observes, quite rightly, that every religion considers that its miracles are genuine, while the miracles revered by every other competing religion fall into one or more of the categories above: delusions, fabrications, etc. So religious believers have to admit that people are prone to error when it comes to believing things that really aren’t true. But somehow they consider that my religion, and only my religion, is immune from the errors that every other religion falls prey to.

I don’t accept this. If one religion is wrong, then all religions are wrong. And this, I strongly suspect, is indeed the case. Any religion that purports to explain the mysteries of God in human concepts has to be wrong, unless one assumes that the everyday human mind somehow is virtually identical to the essence of the Creator, which seems to be a very far reach given the inadequacies of Homo sapiens.

Absent miracles there still is plenty of mystery to keep anyone with a religious consciousness occupied. All anyone needs to do is look outward and behold the inconceivable vastness of the cosmos, or look inward and behold the inconceivable vastness of consciousness. Who needs miracles when the miraculous is all around us, and indeed is us?

“I” for an “eye”

Last night we watched an hour and a half Oregon Public Broadcasting fundraising program about the photographer Jim Brandenburg, blissfully shortened through the magic of our PVR (personal video recorder), which took out all the fundraising moments. Brandenburg is a highly successful nature photographer who felt burnt-out after twenty years of traveling the world and working for National Geographic and other magazines.

Searching for a way to rekindle his passion for photography (and, we must presume, life), he decided to do something amazing—for a professional photographer, at least. Rather than taking hundreds or thousands of photos a day and culling through them for the best shots, he decided to take one frame a day for ninety days and publish the results. Time: from the beginning of fall to the beginning of winter. Place: the wilds of northern Minnesota, where he lives.

Laurel saw a mention of this program in the OPB guide (we’re members, which allowed us to fast forward through all the dreadful fundraising pitches with no qualms). I reluctantly passed up my traditional Sunday evening taping of “60 Minutes” for what I thought would be a typical nature show. But “Chased by the Light” was anything but. Brandenburg brings a Zen sensibility to his photographic artistry, and limiting himself to a single photograph a day meant that whatever moment he chose to capture had to be just the right moment.

You can see his 90 photographs on his website. Last night we heard him describe how many of the shots transpired, which gave them much more meaning. His philosophical observations were equally intriguing. Consider the photo of Day 5, “Raven Feather.” Brandenburg said that on this day he had two choices (I seem to recall him saying that the sun was setting, so a decision had to be made quickly about that day’s shot). There was a beautiful rainbow over a lake, what he called “a calendar shot.” Safe, grand, familiar. And then there was the raven feather that had fallen on a rock. Brandenburg chose the risky, quirky, unique shot. He didn’t regret it. The road less traveled...

Brandenburg is an artist with a tremendous eye. Yet it is his “I” that makes possible his remarkable vision of nature and animals. He doesn’t imitate. Brandenburg is an original. As I watched the 90 days unfold I kept thinking, “What if I could see one ‘frame’ of life every day with the same freshness and passion that this photographer brought to his quest? What is my eye, outer or inner, not seeing because my ‘I’ is occupied with second-hand visions?”

This morning I got out “The Spiritual Emerson” and re-read Emerson’s essay on “Self-Reliance” along with a related essay, “The Divinity School Address.” Here are two excerpts from the essay on Self-Reliance that reminded me of Brandenburg’s central message: be your own “I,” and see with your own “eye.”

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty…Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today.”

This is the gift of Jim Brandenburg who, like Emerson and Thoreau, finds the hand of God in the tapestry of nature. Most of us can’t see what Brandenburg sees, though we all have eyes like him. What is different about Jim is that he doesn’t have a borrowed “I” as most of us do.

May we all become originals rather than copies. Life is so much clearer and sharper when we aren’t trying to see through someone else’s lenses.

Refrigerator friends, art, and Emerson

An eclectic collection of topics, but it’s been a week since my last post, making it difficult to focus on a single subject.

Refrigerator friends…Laurel found a mention of such in an article she was reading a while back. This well describes Ron and Rita, from Seattle, whom we had the pleasure of hosting as weekend guests. A refrigerator friend is someone who unhesitatingly can walk into your house and open the refrigerator without asking, even saying, “What do you have to eat? I’m starving.” The author of the article said that everyone needs some refrigerator friends, because these are the sorts of people you can feel utterly comfortable with, since nothing (or, at least, little) is hidden behind the usual masks of faux politeness and chit chat that allow for superficial niceness, but prevent simple honesty.

Art…We took Ron and Rita to the Salem Art Fair on Saturday, an emerging annual tradition. The Art Fair is our favorite local event, which deserves the highest compliment one can offer, “This is as good as anything you could go to in Portland (or Eugene).” We Salemites have good reason to feel culturally inferior to our neighbors to the north and south, but the Salem Art Fair lets us stand tall for a few days.

Per usual, Laurel supported the arts by buying a print that cost more to frame than it did to buy, and wouldn’t be classed in the category of fine art—a humorous rendering (“Lazy Bones”) by J. Summer of a dog lounging on a couch. An empty bottle of bone brew is on the floor, tossed on a flattened hide of a cat with its tongue sticking out. A U.S. Mail cap with a bite out of it lies in one corner; dog-erotica (a Dalmatian butt and French poodle legs) paintings are on the walls. One of those works of art you can look at every time you walk by, and smile.

Laurel also bought a good share of the Fair’s stock of diachroic glass, or whatever you call those shiny earrings. She also went to the fair on Friday, to be sure that the earrings weren’t all sold out by Saturday (no worry there, mate, as our Visa statement will testify to). This made for a pleasantly personal walk around the fair, as earring artisan after earring artisan would call out, “How nice to see you again, Laurel. Come on over and take a look at our new stock.” I have a feeling that if news ever got out that Laurel couldn’t make it to the Art Fair some year, every diachroic earring maker would cancel their agreement with the Salem Art Association, figuring that now there wouldn’t be any way for them to realize their usual healthy sales.

Emerson…It’s close to the two-hundredth anniversary of Emerson’s birthday, which was marked by the publishing of “The Spiritual Emerson—Selected Writings.” I really like Emerson’s writing, and his philosophy. For a long time I’ve had a collection of his essays on my bookshelf. This title covers some of the same ground, as it includes the classic “Self-Reliance” and “Compensation,” but also has many Emerson writings that I had never encountered before. This morning I finished “Experience,” which is pure Emerson, great reading. He wrote this several years after the death of his five-year-old son. The book’s editor notes that this essay “is the record of Emerson’s coming to terms with irreparable personal loss and, in a larger sense, his philosophical reflection on a universe in which such loss is inevitable.” It draws you in with its unvarnished directness. Emerson lets you look right into his soul, a fascinating vision. Here’s a few excerpts that show Emerson’s ability both to think deeply about the big questions of life, and also turn a phrase with seemingly effortless ease:

“The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is…An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with…I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature…Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion… Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions and shuts us in a prison of glass which we cannot see...The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand…We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them…To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom…All good conversation, manners and action come from a spontaneity which forgets usages and makes the moment great. Nature hates calculators; her methods are saltatory [proceeding by leaps] and impulsive.”

So, if you pass by a good friend’s refrigerator door, and you’re hungry, for God’s sake, open it! And he or she will do you the same favor, giving the Emersonian gift of natural spontaneity, living well in the moment. When the siren song of diachoric glass earrings lures you to an artisan’s booth, for God’s sake, buy what they have made, now!, as you will never again meet up with this earring and this artist, at this place, again. Here’s one last Emerson quote from “Self-Reliance”:

“Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away—means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour…Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage [yes, just as I am doing now!] He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today.”

The substance of emptiness

I’ve got a Buddhist book called the “The Emptiness of Emptiness.” I bought it mainly because I liked the title. Unfortunately, the title continued to be the best thing I liked about the book, even after I read it. The idea that an idea of emptiness fills up, and thus negates, the emptiness is cool. Buddhism 101. But a whole book on the subject? The title suffices.

So I’m running the danger of doing the same thing by even going on as long as I have. But without saying something about emptiness, we’d be stuck in our own isolated islands of individual understanding. Words can be bridges, as well as barriers. The notion that emptiness is the primordial substance is, of course, ageless. It’s at the core of every deep mystical spirituality.

Recently I came across this piece about Faqir Chand, an Indian mystic, written by David Lane. It’s an interesting discussion of the idea that every sort of form, whether physical or spiritual, ultimately stands between us and the highest reality, which I like to think of as pure and simple existence. “Sat,” in an Indian language. Truth. Existence. Real reality. What remains when everything that isn’t truly Sat is removed.

Sat often is combined with chit and ananda, Sat-Chit-Ananda. Existence, consciousness, bliss. Probably the best three-word description of God, or ultimate reality, that anyone could ever come up with, the real Trinity. We need it all. Truth. But also consciousness of truth. And who would want a nasty, painful, horrible consciousness of truth. So bliss too. Satchitananda. Blissful awareness of fundamental existence. Sounds good to me.

Yin and Yang news stories

Maybe “yin and yang” isn’t quite the right term to describe the relation between these stories. Maybe there isn’t any relation between them at all. Maybe they are just two stories, each being what each is. Still, somehow they seem to say something about the polar ends of the human condition, not that I know what the two ends consist of, nor what value should be attached to each end.

The June 23 issue of Time magazine featured a cover story, “Why Harry Potter rules,” all about J.K. Rowling and her fabulously successful series of five Harry Potter books. I’ve only made it partway through the first book—must be getting too old for this sort of reading, though “Lord of the Rings” captivated me as a near-adult—but admire Rowling’s ability to create a whole fresh world of magic, and keep it up through so many volumes. After reading the cover story, I found another reason to admire her.

Catie Hoch is a girl with a rapidly spreading cancer that began in her kidneys. During her chemotherapies and operations she began reading the Harry Potter books. Then, Nancy Gibbs, who wrote the cover story, says, “In January 2000, when it seemed as if her treatment options had run out, Catie was back home, her chances of living to read Book 4 looking very slim. That is when an e-mail arrived form someone in Britain who had heard about the 8-year-old girl in New York who loved Harry so much.” The author, J.K. Rowling, kept writing to Catie.

“Gina [her mother] watched the friendship unfold, watched a stuffed owl and a toy ginger cat arrive in the mail as gifts. ‘I couldn’t believe it when the first e-mail arrived, but what I really couldn’t believe was that they kept it up,’ she says.” Then, the cover story ends with this, which I found most moving:

“A month after Catie Hoch’s ninth birthday, doctors found that the cancer had spread to her brain and that she had only a few weeks left. That was when the phone rang. Over the next few days, Rowling read aloud to Catie from Book 4, which was finally finished but would not be released until summer…The family resisted putting the call on the speaker phone. ‘That was Catie’s time with Jo,” Gina says. ‘We didn’t want to intrude on their privacy.’ The last few times Rowling called, Catie was too sick to come to the phone. She drifted into a coma and died on May 18, 2000.”

“Rowling wrote to her parents three days later. ‘I consider myself privileged to have had contact with Catie,’ she wrote. ‘I can only aspire to being the sort of parent both of you have been to Catie during her illness. I am crying so hard as I type. She left footprints on my heart all right.’ Catie’s parents established the Catie Hoch Foundation to help young cancer patients. In November a check for $100,000 appeared, from Catie’s favorite English friend.”

And then, for a marked change of gears, we have men hunting naked women in Las Vegas. Fellow humans, we are an interesting species, that’s for sure.

Lies and Liars

Proving that television isn’t a total wasteland, last night we stumbled upon C-Span2 coverage of the Book Expo America convention in Los Angeles. That doesn’t sound like stimulating viewing, but we picked the right time to be watching, as we got to see a hugely entertaining panel of politically-inclined authors: Molly Ivins, Bill O’Reilly, and Al Franken. This was stuff you don’t get to see on regular talk shows—the uncensored insults and anger. Ivins was rather mild, though we didn’t hear all of her remarks.

Then O’Reilly, host of the inaccurately titled “No-Spin Zone” on Fox (I believe) and author of a similarly named book, blabbed on for his fifteen minutes about what an accurate reporter he is, how they never have to make retractions on his TV show because their research is so extensive, how proud he is that he has gone beyond distinctions of liberal and conservative in his No-Spin search for the truth, and similar self-serving, egotistical blather.

It thus was a joy to have Al Franken take to the podium, hold up a draft cover of his upcoming book, "Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them -- a Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," and ask O’Reilly if he could supply him with a better photo of himself for the cover. “Anything with your mouth open” would be great, Franken said. Franken then launched into an amusing dissertation about the lies put out by O’Reilly and other right-wing TV and radio talk show hosts—much of the time looking directly at O’Reilly as he trashed him and his peers. Franken’s point was that we don’t have to take this right-wing crap anymore. It is time to call them on their lies.

Franken then went into a hugely amusing riff about O’Reilly’s claim to have won two Peabody awards for his work on “Inside Edition,” and Franken’s efforts to get O’Reilly to admit that no Peabody awards had ever been given to that show. O’Reilly clearly was fuming as Franken spoke way over his allotted fifteen minutes, having built up too strong a head of liberal steam. The poor moderator, Pat Schroeder, had a difficult time handling O’Reilly and Franken when Al finally sat down. O’Reilly was seriously pissed off after being called a liar on national TV by Franken, and Franken was just as piqued at O’Reilly for having been so No-Spin sanctimonious, when he has no problem putting his own spin on awards that he never has won. O’Reilly claimed that he had forgotten that it wasn’t a Peabody that “Inside Edition” had won, but Laurel and I thought this was a pretty lame excuse. Could anyone really believe that they had won a Nobel prize, if they hadn’t?

Anyway, it was refreshing to watch Franken take on the right-wing jerks who mangle the facts, and then claim that they are the ones standing up for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. It also was refreshing to listen to someone who has both a great sense of humor and the guts to call it as he sees it. Franken mentioned that Ann Coulter had called him a friend in her book (Coulter is another conservative commentator who is even more obnoxious than O’Reilly, except she is attractive, slim, blonde, and wears short skirts on her TV appearances, which are four substantive points in her favor).

But that this was based on a single lunch Franken had with Coulter during which, Al said, he was too courteous, because he didn’t tell Coulter the truth: “I can’t stand you, and you are wrong about everything.” Franken can pull this stuff off with his engaging smile and wry attitude. Most anyone else would sound like a jerk if they uttered such sentiments. With Franken, you just wish that he would run for office, so you could finally vote for someone who truly says what he believes, and believes what he says.

For some more perspectives about O’Reilly’s twisting of the truth, here’s a site that comments on the Peabody claim (at the bottom of the page), and another anti-O’Reilly site that also disputes that claim.

Sustained by Drunkenness

I read the Tao Te Ching again over the weekend, looking, as always, for some inspiration and answers to life’s big questions. Of course, right off the bat the first line of chapter one demolishes this ridiculous expectation: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” Damn! I should be able to learn the secrets of the universe from a book! Except…wasn’t the universe around for, oh, some twelve billion years before there were books? Hmmmm. Maybe what made it possible for books to eventually be written is something far different from what is in books—words, concepts, ideas.

Laurel and I have been struck recently (not that this is a new revelation) about how shaky is the ground on which we all try to sustain ourselves. Of course, we have our idiosyncratic personal supports, which are different from other people’s supports. But almost everyone tries to sustain him- or herself by leaning on props that are something other than him- or herself. And those props are prone to falling over. People. Organizations. Political parties. Nations. Ideologies. Philosophies. Nature. Everything around us is changing and changeable. Disappointments are inevitable when we expect to find a firm grounding on ever-shifting sand.

Expectations have a lot to do with dissatisfaction. This is an obvious observation, but it bears observing nonetheless. What is happening is what is happening. And what isn’t happening is what isn’t happening. (If I keep on in this vein, I’ll have written a New Age book). So, how do we accept reality, whatever it may turn out to be? Chuang Tzu, an ancient Taoist sage, has some nice advice in a treatise called “The Full Understanding of Life.” Yes, these are just words. But they point toward a way of being that is anything but conceptual.

Chuang Tzu says, “The perfect man attains to be without form, as it were, and beyond the capability of being transformed….He will study with delight the process that gives beginning and ending to all things…In this condition, with his heavenly constitution kept entire and no crevice in his spirit, how can things disturb his serenity?” Wow. That sounds great. Having achieved that, I could probably even watch Fox News and not feel my blood beginning to boil. The key, it seems, is remaining continually drunk. Not on alcohol. But on something else that inebriates, and is all around us—maybe it even is us. This next Chuang Tzu paragraph is cool:

“Take the case of a drunken man falling from his carriage. Though he may suffer injury, he will not die. His bones and joints are the same as those of other men, but the injury which he receives is different: his spirit is entire. He knew nothing about getting into the carriage and nothing about falling from it. The thought of death or life, or of any alarm or affright, does not enter his breast. Therefore he encounters danger without shrinking from it. Completely under the influence of the liquor he has drunk, it is thus with him. How much more would it be so if he were under the influence of his Heavenly constitution.! The sagely man is kept hid in his Heavenly constitution and therefore nothing can injure him.”

Now, if I could just find that Tavern where the Liquor of Life never stops being served, and hangovers are unknown. I’ve heard sages say that it is so close at hand that we can’t see it because of its nearness, not its distance. Got to keep looking, I guess, though more and more I wonder if it is the looking that prevents me from finding it.

Stephen Hawking and me

Watching the "60 Minutes" piece about Stephen Hawking last Sunday, I came to realize that Stephen and I have a lot in common. To wit, I've read every page of "A Brief History of Time" and so, I must presume, has Stephen. The reporting was that millions and millions of copies of this book have been sold, but only a few dozen have actually been read (a slight exaggeration, perhaps, but not by much). "This is a book," said a minister with a sense of humor, "that you buy and put on the shelf, never to be looked at again, like the Bible."

I've also read Hawking's new book, "The Universe in a Nutshell," from cover to cover, so this must put me in even more exalted company. However, since evidently I like to read books that few other people read, the disturb