Elegance

It
Is not easy
To stop thinking ill
Of others.
Usually one must enter into a friendship
With a person
Who has accomplished that great feat himself.
Then
Something
Might start to rub off on you
Of that

True
Elegance.

Hafiz, version by Daniel Ladinsky

Walking

Just read a lovely account of two London chaps who walked the 78 mile London Ring walk for charity, which certainly appeals to me, as I love discovering the hidden places in this city. On the last day, one chap's dad joined them, and at their local over a final restorative shandy he announced:
"Solvitur ambulando"
"Things are worked out by walking"

Just remembered this related quote and googled it to find out who it was from, turns out to be the author of the great cartoon 'Peanuts':

"No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away from it."
Charles M. SchulzUS cartoonist (1922 - 2000)

Tragedy

Relating to the previous post, Mark told me about a TV programme he saw recently where a classics scholar brilliantly and succinctly explained the Greek concept of tragedy (in art, myth, theatre and culture). I hope I remember Mark's quote near enough:

'Tragedy is the inevitable consequence of attachment to any ideal.'

At the moment, as if something is in the air, I keep coming across examples from 'western' idioms of what I had previously seen historically only in 'eastern' cultures and in T'ai Chi practice. It's heartening.

Rigidty

"I contend that rigidity, whether physical or mental, i.e. the adherance to a principle to the utter exclusion of its opposite, is contrary to the laws of life. For rigidity in man cannot be obtained without suppressing some activity for which he has the capacity. Thus continued and unreserved adherence to any principle, good or bad, means suppressing some function continuously. This suppression cannot be practiced without impunity for any length of time."
Moshe Feldenkrais, quoted in the preface to his book 'Body and Mature Behavior', which I am reading at the moment.

It was my first outdoor T'ai Chi of the year today in the back garden on an unseasonably warm and sunny day with two robins and the friendly cat for company, as well as fine views of the shed. As many of you know, one of the few things I can really covet in life is a nice shed. I had been concerned that once I got one for myself, I would retreat to it permanently with a copy of New Scientist and a bottle of single malt to finally express my inner middle aged man. But all is well, and after putting a few things away I managed to get on with the Form without being at all distracted...

Meaning and the body

This is another great excerpt from a NS article by Mark Johnson 12th January.
FROM birth to death, discovering, creating and communicating meaning is our full-time job as humans. Meaning helps us make sense of both our private world and our public intellectual world. But what do we mean by "meaning"? Can we hope to understand it?
For nearly three decades, George Lakoff, a linguist from the University of California, Berkeley, and I have surveyed mountains of evidence showing that most of our cognition and meaning-making goes on well below the level of conscious awareness. This is why we argue that to discover the nature and sources of human meaning we must explore our non-conscious bodily encounters with our world.
This is no easy task. Four centuries after Descartes, we are still having trouble with the concept of mind-body dualism. Growing up in western culture, we inherit dualisms such as the separation of mind from body, reason from emotion, and thought from feeling. These are predicated on some version of the Cartesian view of mind and body as radically different entities with distinctive functions. Body (material) and mind (immaterial, or at least transcendent) act on each other, and are somehow yoked together to form a human.
This division has influenced theories in virtually every discipline. For example, mind-body dualism has been used to explain how universal concepts and universal reason were possible - on the assumption that mind transcends any kind of human embodiment. As late as the 20th century, first-generation cognitive science was still splitting mind and body. This science, which combines artificial intelligence, information-processing psychology, analytic philosophy of mind and language, and Noam Chomsky's idea of an innate grammar, assumed that nothing about the body as a body shaped our concepts or reason.
However, over the past 25 years, a second-generation cognitive science has recognised mind and cognitive processes as inherently "embodied". This approach has been enticing even hard-core philosophers of mind and language to pay attention to the non-conscious thought and feeling lying at the heart of our ability to make sense of things.

In the end, we are all part of one another

I very much liked this article from issue 2594 of New Scientist magazine, 10 March 2007. Douglas Hofstadter is professor of cognitive science and computer science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His latest book is I am a Strange Loop. He comes across as an incredibly humane character.

Getting up each day, you probably take the idea that there is such a thing as a "self" for granted. Even if you do think about it, the existence of self seems obvious - what else would be asking whether it existed? But push harder, and it all gets very strange. Nearly thirty years after his best-selling book Gödel, Escher, Bach, cognitive scientist and polymath Douglas Hofstadter has returned to his extraordinary theory of self in his latest book. Mike Holderness caught up with him recently
Why do we need to challenge the common-sense idea of a "self"?
Because the harder you think about the common-sense notion, the less sense it makes. Let's start with a rather extreme philosophical thought experiment. Suppose I get into a teleporter cabin, where my body, and therefore my brain, is destroyed in the process of scanning it. The machine sends a blueprint of me to Mars and Venus simultaneously, and atoms on Mars and on Venus are reassembled into exact replicas of me. If it went only to Mars, people might be happy to say: "Oh look, you were reconstructed on Mars. You simply travelled." But if I am transported to two planets, people would worry, and say: "You can't be in two places at once." Although it's counter-intuitive to the highest degree for us humans, we have to accept the fact that there would be two instances of me, and that the question "Where am I?" would not be answerable in that case.
But what about here in the world as we know it?
There are twins among us, and they serve a similar purpose for our thought experiment. I devised a philosophical fantasy world I call "Twinwirld" to help me think about identity and self and the language we use to describe them. In Twinwirld, 99 per cent of births are identical twins, who spend all their time together and hire themselves out for work as a single unit - I call them "a pairson". There's no need to refer to half a pairson, except when you ask which half stubbed its toe. The halves aren't as deeply fused as our two cerebral hemispheres, but they're closer than identical twins, even than husband and wife in our world. And in our world, it's plausible to refer to twins who grow up virtually inseparable as a two-bodied entity, as one "pairson".
What I'm trying to do with this is to open people's minds, to get them to feel there can be something more abstract about a self that isn't absolutely rigidly locked into one physical object - even though the brain is not a physical object in the normal sense because it is something that changes all the time.
So what is self if not tied to a physical object?
It's a pattern. Think of a smile. There are no atoms that compose it, it doesn't have mass or dimensions. A particular smile can not only be seen at a distance and recognised, it can also be heard if, say, I'm smiling broadly while I'm on the telephone. You can see "my smile" on my children's faces. So what is this thing called a smile? Of course there are no physics of smiles that say they move at certain speeds. A smile persists for a while, and then vanishes. Where is your smile when it's not on your face? It's a potential. Once more, it's a pattern - like a whirlpool or a tornado.
In what sense does a smile exist then?
Someone's smile changes over time, from babyhood, through childhood to old age. Yet people may say: "I still see the same smile I could see 50 years ago." It can exist in different media, on different substrates if you prefer. I see it in the mirror, in photographs. And, again, a bit of it is on my children's faces if they happen to be smiling. So if someone asks: "Your smile yesterday and your smile today: which one is the 'real' smile?" I'd reply: neither, both are genuine, my smile comes in multiple instances. With this analogy I'm trying to get across that "I" can exist in multiple spots in the world, that it can flicker in and out of existence the way a smile can.
If people ask which is the real "you", don't they want one that is persistent, continuous, singular?
I guess it's very comforting and simple to feel there's some fixed entity that persists and that it is uniquely linked to a fixed physical entity. Consider the identity of a novel. When we publish translations of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, nobody screams: "This is a lie!" - even if not one word of the Russian remains. One temptation is to say: "Of course a novel is a pattern, it's a sequence of words." You must resist that temptation, because the pattern exists at many levels other than word order: characters, events, places, cultures, style. And one essential in preserving its identity across media or languages, in deciding whether a translation really is Eugene Onegin, for example, is the "grain size", the resolution. A summary isn't a novel, it's too coarse.
How does your self differ from a novel or a character in a novel?
This pattern, this self, includes an image of itself. This self-image is at the heart of what I mean by the phrase "strange loop" - and strange loops are integral to selves.
Where does your "strange loop" idea come from?
I first mentioned it in my book Gödel, Escher, Bach in 1979, and it seems to have migrated out widely into the culture - though I spelled out the connection to selves at the end of the book and not everyone got that far.
This time I go into it all much more explicitly. Strange loops arise when, moving up or down through a hierarchical system, one finds oneself back where one started. They can involve self-reference, paradox, irony, humour. Classic examples in GEB are the liar paradox and Kurt Gödel's mathematical proof of his first incompleteness theorem, which uses logical structures that talk about themselves.
And how do they relate to the self?
To some extent, as I say in my book, there are lots of times when we are cognitively or emotionally split: part of us wants to do A and another part wants to do B, and in that sense we are sort of two sub-selves. Most of the time we have this sense of being "integrated", of being one self that wants a thing. The best way of saying it is that there is one loop, the self-representation. And our loops include things we know about other people as well - I see it as importing parts of their strange loops into ours. When I was quite young, I played with another sort of loop that is relevant here. I wondered about pointing a television camera at the TV displaying its output. The assistant in the TV store told me the feedback would destroy the TV, but it doesn't. You get a vortex of images of the frame and surround, spiralling in to what might as well be infinity. These are very rich patterns in the loop - and that's where they are, not in the hardware. I have the sense that each person has a kind of hidden "infinity" inside them. It's a self-representation spiralling way back to their childhood.
But isn't a self more than self-representation?
We create an image of who we are inside our self. The image then becomes very deeply entrenched, and it becomes the thing that we attribute responsibility to - we say "I", "I" did this because "I" wanted to, because "I" am a good person or because "I" am a bad person. The loop is the fact that we represent our selves, our desires, hopes, dreads and dreams: it is the way in which we conceive of ourselves, rather than the way we conceive of Mount Everest or of a tree. And I say it exists entirely in the loop: the self is an hallucination hallucinated by an hallucination.
“Self is an hallucination hallucinated by an hallucination”
What about other people, other selves?
We have partial copies of other people in our brains, so we have copies of other strange loops in our brains. There are lots of low-resolution copies of us floating around in other people's minds, but there's only one that has high resolution, one you would agree is "the real you". But if we could make higher-resolution copies with finer grain size, then there'd be some rivalry over which is the genuine one. And if we ever got a copy that was just as high-resolution, then there would be no answer any more to "where is the self?".
Does your view of self affect how you live?
My wife died 14 years ago, when we were in Italy. Small copies of the pattern that was her, persisting in my mind, made me make all sorts of decisions. Our children and I continued the year we'd begun in Italy to its conclusion: Carol and I had made a decision together to spend a year in Italy, and we'd do that. We wanted our children to be bilingual, in English and Italian, and when I returned to America I continued to speak Italian. So I kept alive a joint dream and brought our children up in a fashion that was completely different from most children in the US.
If she were to walk in the house today, she'd say: "It's very similar to how it always used to be - the same old pots and pans, the same old silverware, the same paintings on the walls, the same cars." The reason I keep things like this is that I feel that Carol persists in my brain, and this physical environment I live in and the image of Carol in my brain resonate with each other, they reinforce each other. Other people do the opposite: when a loved one dies, they get rid of all of their belongings, move, and do all they can to get rid of the pain, to get rid of the constant confrontation.
How long can these partial copies persist in other minds?
If you were brought up as a traditional Christian perhaps you would believe that you would live for ever. My fundamental orientation is scientific, and says that a pattern cannot persist forever. It persists in my brain for a while, then my brain disintegrates and little copies exist in a few places, then they disintegrate too and it's pretty much all over.
In the book, you often talk of selves as "souls", and of their size. What makes a soul larger?
It's not just about how much someone reflects other people in their brain, it's about how. It's a question of reflecting them with empathy, with the ability to put yourself in their place, to suffer along with them. I am a very deep believer in trying to see things from the viewpoint of other people, especially people who are suffering, and projecting myself into other people's mindsets as much as I can.
“I project myself into other people's mindsets as much as I can”
And do we treat people differently on the basis of the "size of their soul"?
We do. We don't acknowledge it, but if you like somebody because you think they're nice, you treat them better. And you probably like them because they are empathetic. So empathy is favoured in the world. The political scientist Bob Axelrod explored the evolution of cooperation using game theory. He set up tournaments between computer programs playing the Prisoner's Dilemma game where a player that betrays another gets a certain pay-off, and so on. The simplest strategy, which he called "Tit for Tat" but you might call "Do unto others as they have just done unto you: a smile for a smile, a slap for a slap", won. I don't think that's an accident. Fundamentally, in the end, cooperation wins out over selfishness.
Does that suggest society is built on a strange loop involving all of us?
Absolutely. Go back to Axelrod's book The Evolution of Cooperation. It may be that there's some slightly better strategy if you make more elaborate tournaments or simulations, but I think basically there's a sort of law of the universe that says cooperation is a very good strategy. It's sort of a law about the way the world works

Curfews

Noise

Is a cruel ruler

Who is always imposing

Curfews.

While

Stillness and quiet

Break open the vintage

Bottles,

Awake the real

Band.

Hafiz. For D G

Two Bears

Once

After a hard day's forage

Two bears sat together in silence

On a beautiful vista

Watching the sun go down

And feeling deeply grateful

For life.

Though, after a while

A thought-provoking conversation began

Which turned to the topic of

Fame.

The one bear said,

"Did you hear about Rustam?

He has become famous

And travels from city to city

In a golden cage;

He performs to hundreds of people

Who laugh and applaud

His carnival

Stunts."

The other bear thought for

A few seconds

Then started

Weeping.

Hafiz. For M K

Also from 'The Gift' Poems by Hafiz, Trans. Daniel Ladinsky.

DIVIDING GOD
The moon starts singing when everyone is asleep and the planets throw a bright robe around their shoulders and whirl up close to her side.
Once I asked the moon, why do you and your sweet friends not perform so romantically like that to a larger crowd? And the whole sky chorus resounded:
The admission price to hear the lofty minstrels speak of love is affordable only to those who have not exhausted themselves dividing God all day and thus need rest.
The thrilled Tavern fiddlers who are perched on the roof do not want their notes to intrude upon the ears where an accountant lives with a sharp pencil, keeping a score of words that another in their great sorrow or sad anger may have once said to you.
Hafiz knows: The sun will stand as your best man and whistle when you have found the courage to marry forgiveness, when you have found the courage to marry Love.

For S M

Ben, who works as the caretaker at Hackney Round Chapel, has been a true friend and help over the last year that I have been running a class there, since Steve asked me to step in when he moved to Israel. Last week I found Ben full of the joys of Sufi poetry, saying he was in the middle of the best book he'd read in a year. This week he has generously lent it to me, and I plan to blog a few verses. I have read a few excellent poems of Hafiz before, mainly in prefaces of collections of my hero Rumi's poetry, who lived 100 years before, in Persia. The translations in this book are modern versions by Daniel Ladinsky of 20th century translations; Ladinsky is doing for Hafiz what Coleman Barks has done for Rumi. I don't mind if Sufi poetry is in vogue because Madonna likes it or is unpopular as hard-line religious folks find the allusions to wine, love and the tavern too 'worldly'... I post this with love and gratitude to my teachers.

The Sun Never Says

Even

After

All this time

The sun never says to the earth

"You owe

Me"

Look

What happens

With a love like that,

It lights the

Whole

Sky.

Thanks to Scott for these photos he took near Inverurie recently.

frost / mountains

This picture is by Scott.

Paying for insults

Thanks to David for tracking down a great teaching story we use, though I'd forgotten where I first heard it. It seems to be an excellent slant on 'invest in loss', with the investment being literal. I had first read it in Jack Kornfields good book 'A Path With Heart', but this is a fuller version. It's also nice to see this recurring and important theme mirrored in a non-oriental source.

It is related in Thomas Merton's The Wisdom of the Desert: Songs from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century:
"Once there was a disciple of a Greek philosopher who was commanded by his Master to give money to everyone who insulted him. When this period of trial was over, the Master said to him: Now you can go to Athens and learn wisdom. When the disciple was entering Athens he met a certain wise man who sat at the gate insulting everybody who came and went. He also insulted the disciple who immediately burst out laughing. Why do you laugh when I insult you? said the wise man. Because, said the disciple, for three years I have been paying for this kind of thing and now you give it to me for nothing. Enter the city, said the wise man, it is all yours.

Abbot John used to tell the above story, saying: This is the door of God by which our fathers rejoicing in many tribulations enter into the City of Heaven."

NB. BBC TV's 'Extreme Pilgrim' will be with the Desert Fathers of Egypt next week. http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/misc/extremepilgrim.shtml

The happiest man in the world

Thanks for Davina for this lovely radio interview.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/check/worldservice/meta/tx/heartandsoul?nbram=1&nbwm=1&size=au&lang=en-ws&bgc=003399&ls=p22&ls=t1720

more info here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/heart_and_soul.shtml

This lovely quote from Randolph Hodgson who owns the Neal's Yard Dairy in Covent Garden, in an interview with him and his wife Anita Leroy (who runs my favourite London cafe and hideaway The Monmouth Coffee Company) in the Guardian magazine yesterday. These two people really care about what they do, and do it really well.

"I was once approached by a man from a very big company who wanted to invest a lot of money to expand the business, and I said, 'Why would I want to do that?' He said, 'To give you an exit strategy, so you can do the things you like doing.' I told him I was already doing the things I like doing, and that my exit strategy is death."

Bokken Bags

I am finally up and running with my trusty sewing machine, and have enough fabric to make a batch. All I need to do tomorrow is buy some of those little spring cord closers to keep them done up, so a trip to the Alladin's cave which is WimSew is in order. The cotton I have is thick, soft and strong. I have dyed it a deep red/purple colour. Please let me know if you'd like one made, and which if your bokken is a medium or large, if the bag needs to hold 2, or if it's for a sabre, etc... all I need is £3 for materials. NB, all the next ones will have the texture stripes running vertically rather than horizontally unless asked for otherwise.

I have the 3rd part of the sabre form on a video format which opens with Quickplay. Email me if you need it for your study.

Aberdeenshire February Weekend Workshops

Here's the schedule for the next workshops with Mark Raudva. All workshops are at Heather's except sabre, cost £15/£10, and all are welcome.

Thursday 31st Jan: 7.30-9.30 regular Thursday night class with Caro (£5/£3.50)
121s also available with me at Heather's Friday 11am-5pm, Saturday and Sunday 11am-1pm, get in touch if you'd like one.

Friday 1st Feb: 7-10pm - Ta Lu
Saturday 2nd Feb: 2-5pm - Long Form & applications
Saturday 2nd Feb: 7-10pm - Sabre at local hall.
Sunday 3rd Feb: 2-5pm - Short Form & applications
Sunday 3rd Feb: 7-10pm - Partner Work

Hackney Round Chapel Dates 2008

We are having a class every Wednesday this year except these dates: 26/03, 02/04, 06/08, 13/08, 20/08, 27/08, 24/12, 31/12. The three term dates I cannot teach will be run by David Knight.

Easter Workshop

I am finalising arrangements for Mark's Spring week long workshop March 28th - April 4th in Aberdeenshire at Easter. Please let me know by email if you intend to attend the workshop, and for how many days. Also let me know if you need accommodation. All students are welcome as long as they have at least one full term's experience in T'ai Chi. You can arrive on the Saturday and attend as many consecutive days as you can get off work... As usual there will be a Ta Lu session on the Friday night before hand, for all who wish to attend.

Over the week everyone will get plenty to be working on as well as lots of individual tuition. More importantly, we can all collaborate on the good work and putting our energy into such a rare and excellent thing: 7 uninterrupted days of T'ai Chi in great company. Monday to Friday will be held at Fetternear Hall, near Heather's near Inverurie, Aberdeenshire. The venue for the Saturday and Sunday will be Kemnay Hall as I could not get Fetternear due to a bowling championship and a ceilidh. The workshop will cost £30 / £20 per day. (I wrote this wrongly in the emails I sent out as £25 / £15, apologies. Anyone who needs a greater reduction to be able to attend, do fee free to get in touch.) There are kitchens at the halls so we will bring food to share. Visiting students can stay at local students' homes for £5 per night.

Anyone needing travel or other information, please do get in touch.

I just heard a moment ago that one of my dear students, Tis from the Hackney class, passed away very suddenly two days ago. Phil and Tis had started T'ai Chi a year or so ago but couldn't continue again until September when they joined my class. They were both always full of such enthusiasm and Tis smiled in such a broad and deep way when something resonated with her or some seeming paradox amused her. I just spoke with her partner Phil, a friendly, warm man and a perceptive student, who had called me to apologise that he wouldn't be at class for a while but hadn't abandoned his T'ai Chi. I send love and deepest sympathy on behalf of the whole class.

This came in a lovely card yesterday from Chiara, the wonderful WWOOFer who came to Drumblair a few years ago and did T'ai Chi with both Mark and myself. She is living in community in France now, and I hope to go visit her at Easter. My clothes and hair always look much more cool in her drawings of me than in real life...

Aberdeenshire class this Sunday

Class this Sunday 6th January will be at Jim & Betty's.
Please email if you need directions: davina [at] greatrivertaichi [dot] co [dot] uk

Aberdeenshire class, Thursday 3rd January

The first Aberdeenshire class of 2008 will be at 7:30-9:30pm this Thursday, 3rd January at Heather's place. All Great River students are welcome.
Snow is forecast, so please drive safely.