From the very start this book got me hooked with its descriptions of life in various settings - the din, the reckless pace, and the isolation of the city life compared against the back drop of a slow paced rural dwelling where people can still converse without trying to achieve anything.
"The whole pace of life and the personality of the people who live along them are different. They are not going anywhere. They are not too busy to be courteous. The hereness and nowness of things is something they know all about. It's the others, the ones who moved to the cities years ago and their lost offspring, who have all but forgotten it.... I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it and yet we didn't see it. Conned perhaps into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling."I loved the perspective that the author brings to the subject of excellence, of care, of quality, of unity, of oneness. He has managed to capture the essence of all religions in a very technical fashion for our top heavy society of today. The idea that we rush through things because we no longer care for what is in front of us, as we lust for what can be, is so obvious, so in your face, and yet so illusive to our generation that is always looking for more, for better, and is convinced that this more is to be found anywhere but in the here and now.
The writing style is also very engaging. The author has managed to bring to table this very complicated subject piece by piece with the dexterity of a master jigsaw puzzle solver. At each step the reader is invited to invent the full picture based on the pieces presented thus far only to discover the picture and its potential have changed again with the addition of new pieces. Even without the appeal of the subject the writing style by itself is gripping.
There are some ideas in this book that can be life transforming if truly understood and made part of one's life and living. One such idea is that of the difference between what one sees and what it means. It sounds simple, perhaps even simplistic and may be even a little confusing at first. I grappled with it for sometime before I fully understood not just the meaning but the greater underlying import. It was a great aha! moment. "He isn't as interested in what things mean as in what they are." When I reflected on this in greater detail I found this to apply to almost every aspect of our life. The famous dictum - things are rarely what they seem to be - comes to mind. It plays an important role in our relationships. For instance, what I see is that my girlfriend is upset about my leaving on a trip. It is easy to let this bog me down if I do not pay attention to what it means - that she misses my not being there, that she values my presence in her life. So it applies to most instances of our life whether in a marketplace or sitting at home alone - it is very meaningful to investigate beyond the obvious (the seen) into the unseen (the root cause).
The other aspect of this puzzle is that we increase our ability to be effective when we address or speak to the underlying (what it means) versus to what is seen (the superficial). To extend the previous example, addressing my girlfriend's sense of loneliness by expressing my love as I part is far more meaningful gesture than asking her to not make a scene about my leaving. Simple, profound, powerful, and considerate - an act rooted in love and understanding rather than in reacting.
The other beautiful aspect brought out in the work is the distinction between the "classical" and the "romantic" way of approaching things, which in some ways is another form of the above concept. The Romantic style concerns itself only with the superficial (the feeling derived from immediate encounter) while the classical dives deeper to extract and reveal the underlying complexity that may be belied by a simple or an ugly facade. To dive deep is to be in a long term relationship versus a touch and go kind of superficial phenomenon.
"The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. "Art" when it is opposed to "Science" is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition, and esthetic conscience.... The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reasons and by laws - which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior... although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.
...and so in recent times we have seen a huge split develop between a classic culture and a romantic counterculture - two worlds growingly alienated and hateful toward each other with everyone wondering if it will always be this way, a house divided against itself."This, as the author deftly portrays, has led to a great divide in todays society as people tend to approach things through one view point or the other when both are needed to fully comprehend the truth of things as they are.
Next the author touches on the distinction between consciousness and awareness and the application of discrimination to understand reality, the very effort of which tends to move us farther away from the understanding that we seek - ironic and paradoxical but true.
"All the time we are aware of millions of things around us... aware of these things but not really conscious of them.... From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife.... The handful of sand looks uniform at first, but the longer we look at it the more diverse we find it to be. Each grain of sand is different. No two are alike....the process of subdivision and classification...just goes on and on. Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other.
What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand for its on sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to direct attention to the endless landscape from which the sand is taken."The one other profound observation worth highlighting is about the religious wars and how the doctrinal differences between Christianity and Islam are so much more pronounced than they are for Taoism, buddhism, or hinduism. Primarily because "holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements of reality are never presumed to be reality itself."
Another gem of an observation is about confidence in something versus fanatical pursuit of it - "You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt." This has applications beyond mass activities, it is great insight into individual behaviors as well. We would rather be right than be awakened. The hunger to be right supersedes the desire for truth. If we were driven half as much by the desire for truth as we are driven by the hunger to be right we would have created a whole new world for ourselves. Being right at the expense of truth is a lazy and easy way out of the hard work involved in making a good life. The former can help us make a living but it is the latter that truly makes us come alive.
How we learn and what really helps us learn are also critical aspects of living and touched upon. Learning is not by rote, although that has its place in learning. It really comes about when we struggle with the problem, with the solution, with our existing ideas about it and the conflict we have to overcome when faced with contradictions in form of new knowledge. "...the only real learning results from hangups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know." To this end, the author also observed how the bright students were intrinsically driven by the joy of learning regardless of the external measures (grades etc) while the not to bright ones were more focused one external symbols of knowledge (degree and grades). "Grades really cover up failure to teach."
I can relate to this quite well. Although none of my teachers or classmates would ever qualify me as a dull student, I personally recognize that I have struggled through school out of a sense of obligation. Few subjects that are of any real interest to me (what does it mean to be virtuous, how to live a good life, why do we hurt each other, etc) are ever taught in schools. Consequently, I was there to get grades and even though I did well in school, I cannot say that I found myself more learned in the process. It only made me realize how much I left at the table because I wasn't really interested in the subject being taught.
Another inspirational quote from the book on achievement and glory:
"Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster...When you climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do, it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way."Another great point that makes us wary of regarding a fool as a wise man based on what he says:
"It's an old rule of logic that the competence of the speaker has no relevance to the truth of what he says".The other powerful facet that the book touches upon is the power of "doing what one likes". This is a very profound notion. What makes it so powerful is that "doing what one likes" is revolutionary to social setup, while suppressing it lies at the root of social "stability". We have a conditioned society which loves us for not doing what we like; conformance is the rule of the game. This is why we witness so many long drawn faces, bereft of life, in our day to day living, each conforming to the demands at the expense of full living. There does exist a happy medium and there is room for revolutionary "do what you like". However, a conforming society with dull faces, reflection of a subdued life, is not a world we should aspire to create or to foster.
I was also impressed and inspired by the author's instructions on writing, which are strewn across the book. I could relate to the fact that when writing is taught, it is taught based on certain rules, distilled from writings from famous authors. However, these authors were not following these rules. These rules were identified post-fact. And this rule-following puts limitations on creativity of the followers, who find it difficult, if not impossible, to give voice to their own expression because it does not exactly fit with the laid down norms of writing. I have struggled with this myself as I tried to follow the rules of details, drama, and dialogue. It made my writing artificial and suppressed the flow of thought. Perhaps they become second nature with practice and then one can become apt at writing "popular" prose but does it steal one's ability to convey one's truth? I have read authors who write books on writing and talk about their own experience of becoming an author. Almost all of them (with the exception of Stephen King) come across as fake in their writing. This may go unnoticed to the novice reader but for any who has studied these so called rules of writing, it is easy to spot that the author is making special effort to add details, analogies, etc to make the writing more appealing. The packaging has eaten up he message. "In the process of examining the train and subdividing it into parts we've inadvertently stopped it, so that it really isn't a train we are examining. That's why we get stuck... classical, structured dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn't enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good. That is what caries you forward. This sense ins't just something you are born with. Although you are born with it. It's also something you can develop. It's not just "intuition," not just unexplainable "skill" or "talent". It's the direct result of contact with basic reality, Quality, which dualistic reason in the past has tended to conceal."
"If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it is loaded with ideas...Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It is the psychic predecessor to all real understanding."
Also, the author's experimentation with writing about very small things - a brink in the church wall, one side of a coin, etc - is remarkably brilliant and worth experimenting with for any person who wants to write but feels at a loss for a subject of adulation.
Throughout the book the author touches upon the various aspects of technology and people's love and/or hate relationship to it. This was very meaningful to me because I work in this field and I carry a love-hate relationship myself, to technology. The extent to which technology has extended the length and the quality of our lives is truly amazing. It is a harder pill to swallow, however, when one sees the destruction of society and the environment that it has precipitated. "Technology is simply the making of things and the making of things can't by its own nature be ugly or there would be no possibility for beauty in the arts, which also include the making of things...The real ugliness is not the result of any objects [or subjects] of technology, the people who produce it or the people who use it. Quality, or its absence, doesn't reside either in the subject or in the object. The real ugliness lies in the relationship between the people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use technology and the things they use." This reminds me of Steve Jobs and his contributions to technology, which stem from his intimate relationship with it.
"When one isn't dominated by feelings of separateness from what one is working on, then one can be said to "care" about what he's doing... So the thing to do when working [on any task] is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one's self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all."The next very critical area that the author ventures into are what he calls the "Gumption traps". These are essentially circumstances - both external ("setbacks") and intrinsic ("hangups") - that surface in the Quality relationship between the machine and the mechanic and drain-off gumption, destroy enthusiasm, and leave you so discouraged you want to forget the whole business. The author goes on to describe techniques to overcome these Gumption traps. The treatment for Setbacks (external raps) is not all that impressive or detailed and speaks of things like planing, debugging, research, and building. The hangups or the intrinsic traps are paid more attention and with good outcome categorized under three types of gumption traps: Value traps, Truth traps, and Muscle traps:
1. Value Rigidity Trap is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values...to overcome this trap you need to slow down deliberately and ... see if the things you thought were important were really important. A great example used here is that of a monkey trap in India. A monkey reaches for a morsel of rice in a short mouth container and his filled fist gets caught. Monkey is unable to let go of the rice in his hand - because of his Value Rigidity that does not allow him to see the trade off between having rice and having freedom and make the right choice. We all have such tendencies from time to time where we hold on to something rigidly while losing sight of the bigger picture. This is most common in relationships where often winning an immediate argument can take precedence over the long term joy that the relationship promises.
2. Ego trap: If you have a high valuation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. I think this ties to the previous Value Rigidity trap in certain ways since ego is the root of rigidity. One holds on inflexibly to certain values since one derives a sense of 'who I am' from the identification with these values, which serve to build the individual sense of personality, which is a manifestation of the ego.
3. Anxiety is the next Gumption trap. It is sort of opposite of ego. you are so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than "laziness" is the real reason you find it hard to get started. This gumption trap of anxiety, which results form over-motivation, can lead to all kinds of errors of excessive fussiness...The best way to break through this cycle, I think, is to work out your anxieties on paper... You should remember that it is peace of mind you are after.... It is indeed quite remarkable how anxiety makes us restless and keeps us constantly busy and engaged without accomplishing much, leading to further anxiety. I have witnessed it at work and in general. Anxiety makes us busy but not necessarily productive. Anxiety zaps life of meaning.
4. Boredom is the next Gumption trap. This is the opposite of anxiety and commonly goes with ego problems. Boredom means.. you are not seeing things freshly, you've lost your "beginner's mind"...when you are bored, STOP! Go to a show, turn on the TV, call it a day. If you don't stop, the next thing that happens is the Big Mistake [which can really knock the gumption out]. My favorite cure for boredom is sleep... one solution to boredom on certain kinds of jobs... is t turn them in to a kind of ritual... Zen has something to say about boredom. It's main activity of "just sitting" has got to be the world's most boring activity...yet in the center of all this boredom is the very thing Zen Buddhism seeks to teach. What is it? What is it at the very center of boredom that you are not seeing?
5. Impatience is close to boredom but always results form one cause: an underestimation of the amount of time the job will take...Impatience is the first reaction against a setback and can soon turn to anger if you're not careful... Impatience is best handled by allowing an indefinite time for the job, particularly new [unfamiliar] jobs; doubling the time allocated; or by scaling down the scope of what you want to do.
The author then talks of some other traps such as the tendency to see things as Yes/No, black/white, versus being able to see the indeterminate reality (Japanese term mu). The other things that can impact gumption are inadequate tools and bad surroundings/environment. Anyone working in a office setting can speak to the frustration caused by bad tooling and bad culture.
But the most important thing that the author highlights is not until after he has covered in detail these various gumption traps. The essence of which is that having addressed these gumption traps effectively is not enough, one must also live right. Perfection within is perfection without and the quality of our work is not disjoint from the quality of the person that we are, in fact it is a reflection of it.
6. Finally the author closes the gumption traps by citing the most important one of them all - the Funeral Procession! We are all familiar with it. I see it daily at work and often wonder at the zombie like presence of several individuals as they walk through the corridor with blank looks or stare through meetings with no engagement in them. One can witness this when driving down a highway as well: the cars seems to be moving at a steady maximum speed...as though they want to get somewhere, as though what's here right now is just something to get through.
Finally, I will like to end this entry with another very beautiful quote from the book:
"Phaedrus remembered a line from Thoreau: "You never gain something but that you lose something. And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth - but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be part of the world, and not an enemy of it."
