An Ever-Changing ‘Self’

The Wednesday night class has finished its discussion of Rodney Smith‘s “Stepping Out of Self-Deception” and has begun reading Thich Nhat Hanh‘s “The Heart of Understanding,” a commentary on the Heart Sutra. Hour after hour, page after page, of non-self, impermanence, and emptiness.

‘Emptiness’ is a tricky word. It’s easy for me to understand providing it doesn’t become a thing, that is, a noun. Once I read, “Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form” I get into trouble. So sit, sit, let know-nothing mind have a chance.

Smith and Hanh write a good deal about impermanence of the physical body. This slides down easy. I am a chemist so my awareness that the atoms and molecules of my body change with every breath is simple stuff. Impermanence in the physical world, you might say, is a chemist’s bread-and-butter.

But what about those other skandhas? Feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness? There are a lot of strong ‘self’ thoughts that I cling to. When I say, “this happened to me at my Bar Mitzvah”, the “me” in that story somehow feels so close to the “me” that is typing on this keyboard. I can remember his joys and pains. Our histories feel so strongly connected. Isn’t there a mental “me” that is ongoing, happening inside my head, and separate from you?

Surely “I” have changed over the last 40-odd years, but it all seems so gradual and memories seem to take me right back to where I was then. Can that old me be gone for good? I think so. Let’s try a thought experiment: Suppose you tell me a joke that I have never heard. The punchline is so terrific and so unexpected. It hits me like a pie in the face. I laugh. A moment later, you try to tell me the same joke (it was that good). “Wait a moment,” I say. “I’ve heard that one already.” The pie never lands. I have already ducked.

So the old “me”, the old “feelings, perceptions, mental formations, consciousness” have all changed. And they keep changing with every passing moment. Change cannot be stopped, it can only be forgotten or overlooked.

Last night, in the few minutes that passed between the end of kinhin and the start of dokusan, I composed this poem for my teacher:

Before the boat slips away from the dock,
Birds fly overhead,
A fish craps in the water -
Everything is in motion.

Life is the only joke whose punchline always changes.

Peek-A-Boo, Skype Sees You

My youngest daughter started college two years ago. We began skyping back and forth to stay in touch. My office was a favorite place for me because we have high-speed internet at work.

It felt so good to hear her voice and see her face (even if it was inclined downward – someone needs to design a camera that sits in the center of the screen). I even tried playing peek-a-book by substituting this little smiley guy (drawn hastily on a small white board) for me. He looks happy, doesn’t he? I know I was (am).

Inspector Martin Beck, 8 (not 9)

A disclaimer: I read and reported on Cop Killer (#9) before I read The Locked Room (#8). When Beck appears in the latter book, he is still in the very early stages of psychological recovery from his near-fatal rooftop encounter with the killer of The Abominable Man (#7). These events, injury and recovery, are already safely tucked away by the time Beck appears in Cop Killer. So read the books in order if you want to make sense of Beck’s return.

Now to the The Locked Room … unlike many of the other plots in this series, I had to spend nearly the entire book with a dead body and no clear idea of how, or even if, a crime could have been committed. Of course, once I learned how it was done, I slapped my forehead. So “obvious”.

Sometimes it seems that the raison d’etre for this series is to lampoon the incompetence of Swedish police (who, despite their inability to keep the streets safe, are incredibly savvy when it comes to finessing the political system). Even prosecuting attorneys come in for their share of ridicule here.

But what we care about, of course, is the recovery of Martin Beck from his gunshot wound. Is he healthy again? Is he sane? Can he ever be happy? Physical health turns out to be the least of his problems. Although he is incapable of reaching this conclusion for himself (at least, not before his nose is rubbed in it), the love and companionship of a good woman are what he needs.

Lecture is Dead (Again)

Fred S. Keller, a well-respected psychologist and educator, was asked to give the President’s Invited Address to the American Psychological Association in Washington, DC in September, 1967. His title, “Good-Bye, Teacher …”. The lecture discussed a new system of education in which students (aided by materials and coaching that a teacher provided) would move at their own pace, a pace that was determined mainly by their ability to demonstrate mastery of course content.

The Personalized System of Instruction, or PSI, became very popular in the late 60′s, and then went through a decline in the mid 80′s, but it lingers on in many forms today (check out CAPSI). Since that time many other forms of instruction, such as POGIL, have climbed on the “lecture is dead” bandwagon even if they don’t subscribe to many of Keller’s other ideas.

So it’s interesting to see academics re-discover personalized instruction (this time with online videos): D. Kroll, “Death Knell for the Lecture: Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education,” NY Times, Dec. 5, 2011. What is it about “lecture is dead” that threatens teachers so much?

Milo and Tock Turn 50

I just learned that the most powerful book of my childhood, The Phantom Tollbooth, has turned 50. As Adam Gopnik explains in his wonderful appreciation of the book (New Yorker, Oct. 17, 2011), turning 50 is an important achievement in the life of a children’s book because “it means that the book hasn’t been passed just from parent to child but from parent to child and on to child again.”

We’ll see. I fell in love with the book in elementary school (the book was only three or four years old then) when Mrs. Anschel introduced it into our fourth grade classroom. When Chanukah rolled around a few months later, or maybe it was my birthday?, it became the first book that I ever asked my parents to buy for me. Years later I couldn’t wait for my children to discover it so I bought each of them a copy as soon as I thought they would be old enough to appreciate it. Once I even urged my younger daughter through a dark doorway in downtown Portland so that some strange man (Norton Juster, sitting behind a table) could sign her copy of the book. And just before I graduated from high school, I threw aside all teen-aged self respect and waded into a movie theater strewn with noisy 8 and 9-year olds so that I could watch the animated version. (It was awful.)

The Sea, The Sea

The first third of Iris Murdoch‘s award-winning novel is obsessively detailed and beautifully written. I asked my wife, “How can a person pour so much imagination into a character? How can they ever find the strength to imagine another character or another story after the effort needed to produce one like this?” Charles Arrowby is alive.

But the book turns a corner and I began to wish that he were dead. His obsession with his past, and our (his, mine) failure to discover what went wrong back there, began to wear me down. Even as I started to spend more and more hours with the book, an anger welled up. “Why can’t you just let go? Don’t you see what you are doing to everyone around you? And to yourself?”

The Man of Numbers

Every schoolchild in America is taught to read Roman numerals, but I’ve never understood why. Computation with Romans isn’t taught (wow, would that ever make math unpopular!). So what does “numeral recognition” achieve? As far as I was concerned, the only benefit I ever derived from Romans was the ability to read the year a movie or TV show was first produced when the credits rolled.

Given my flip view of Roman numerals, I was utterly blown away to learn from Keith Devlin‘s slim new book of mathematical history (subtitled Fibonacci’s Arithmetic Revolution) that the transition from Roman to Hindu-Arabic numerals began only recently (the latter appeared in Europe after 1200 C.E. and it took a couple of centuries before they had clearly carried the day), that it was instigated by the writings of a single man, a certain Leonardo of Pisa (who many of us recognize more readily as “Fibonacci”), and was driven by commercial interests.

It turns out that Leonardo did far more than describe a new way to represent numbers, he also described how to perform all manner of calculations with them, which he illustrated through hundreds of practical problems (some of which schoolchildren will still recognize!). We know very little about Leonardo, but we can guess that he learned the new system as an adolescent assisting his merchant father in northern Africa and his writings appeared at just the right time, neatly dovetailing with the expanding activities of Italian traders. The new Hindu-Arabic numerals made computation far more convenient, and once one could compute conveniently, one could begin to solve all sorts of problems like currency exchanges, interest on loans, and dividing profits among unequal investors, that had been difficult or nearly impossible under the Roman numeral system.

But there’s so much more I would like to know. The Italian traders were the ‘globalizers’ of their day, dominating trade across the Mediterranean. These innovations in trade and math appeared just before the Black Death would wipe out a vast portion of Europe’s population. How did trade and arithmetic survive? Would our global information network survive a modern health/environmental catastrophe?

On a personal level, what compelled Leonardo to write his methods down? He wasn’t the inventor of Hindu-Arabic numerals or the inventor of the arithmetic procedures that they permitted, and much of what he wrote had already been written down in Arabic and spread throughout that culture. What made him (besides his young age) receptive to these ideas, and what made him decide to organize them so comprehensively?

And, more generally, what determines when an idea will take root and flourish?

Inspector Martin Beck, 9 (not 8)

The ominously titled Cop Killer takes us far from Stockholm’s dirt and depravity to Sweden’s rural southern tip: Anderslov police station in the Trelleborg police district. A local woman has gone missing, but when the police discover that her next-door neighbor turns out to be a convicted sex criminal and her ex-husband a bitter unemployed violent drunk, murder seems like a distinct possibility. Time to call in Martin Beck, the chief of National Homicide.

Unfortunately for Beck, evidence of either man’s involvement proves hard to come by, and when two policemen are shot dead during a late night traffic stop, pressure mounts on Beck and his team to pin the woman’s murder on whoever is most convenient so that they can assist the mini-army that is being assembled to hunt down the suspected cop killer. Fortunately, as was the case in book #7, Gunvald Larsson’s enthusiasm for insubordination saves the day.

A prominent theme in books #7 and #8 is the way that politically well-connected incompetents (represented by Beck’s boss, Superintendent Malm of the National Police) turn to highly orchestrated displays of overwhelming police force as a substitute for competent police work. Gunvald Larsson, a thinking man of action, however turns out to be worth a hundred bimbos in blue.

Inspector Martin Beck, 7

At one end of The Abominable Man sits a gruesome murder. A sick man, perhaps on his deathbed, returns to his hospital room late at night only to get savagely ripped in two by an assailant armed with a gun and bayonet. At the other end is series of police campaigns, each more desperate than the last, to capture the murderer who has holed up on the hospital roof. A specially trained commando is shot dead. Martin Beck, perhaps riven with guilt, goes to the roof himself and is gunned down. Finally, the massively incompetent police must turn to the unlikeliest set of partners imaginable, Lennart Kollberg and Gunvald Larsson, to put an end to the carnage.

What lies between these bookends is an investigation that reveals decades of sanctioned police brutality. That, and the uncomfortable feeling that justice was on the murderer’s side all along.

Dogen: Work with All Materials

A part of Dogen Zenji’s “Instructions for the Tenzo” caught in my heart this morning:

“Thus, do not be careless even when you work with poor materials, and sustain your efforts even when you have excellent materials. Never change your attitude according to the materials. If you do, it is like varying your truth when speaking with different people; then you are not a practitioner of the way.”

Read more at the Tricycle Wisdom Collection (Summer 1993)