Lovely article - Do something.

 http://markmanson.net/do-something

I‘ve been working with self development advice for a large percentage of my life. I’ve come across a lot of concepts and ideas as well as invented quite a few of my own. But the following is one of the most important ideas I’ve stumbled across in my life:

Action isn’t just the effect of motivation, but also the cause of it.

Most people only commit to action if they feel a certain level of motivation. And they only feel motivation when they feel an emotional inspiration.

People only become motivated to study for the exam when they’re afraid of the consequences. People only pick up and learn that instrument when they feel inspired by the people they can play for.

And we’ve all slacked off for lack of motivation before. Especially in times where we shouldn’t.  We feel lethargic and apathetic towards a certain goal that we’ve set for ourselves because we lack the motivation and we lack the motivation because we don’t feel any overarching emotional desire to accomplish something.

Emotional Inspiration → Motivation → Desirable Action

But there’s a problem with operating under this framework: often the changes and actions we most need in our lives are inspired by negative emotions which simultaneously hinder us from taking action.

If someone wants to fix their relationship with their mother, the emotions of the situation (hurt, resentment, avoidance) completely go against the necessary action to fix it (confrontation, honesty, communication). If someone wants to lose weight, but experiences massive amounts of shame about their body, then the act of going to the gym is apt to inspire in them the exact emotions that kept them at home on the couch in the first place. Past traumas, negative expectations, and feelings of guilt, shame and fear often motivate us away from the actions necessary to overcome those very traumas, negative expectations, and negative emotions.

It’s a Catch-22 of sorts. But the thing about the motivation chain is that it’s not only a three-part chain, but an endless loop:

Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Etc.

Your actions create further emotional reactions and inspirations and move on to motivate your future actions. Taking advantage of this knowledge, we can actually re-orient our mindset in the following way:

Action → Inspiration → Motivation

The conclusion is that if you lack the motivation to make an important change in your life, then do something, anything really, and then harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating yourself.

I call this The “Do Something” Principle. And I developed it on accident back in my years as a consultant, helping people who were otherwise immobilized by fears, rationalizations, and apathy to take action.

It began out of simple pragmatism: you paid me to be here so you might as well do something. I don’t care, do anything!

What I found is that often once they did something, even the smallest of actions, it would soon give them the inspiration and motivation to do something else. They had sent a signal to themselves, “OK, I did that, I guess I can do more.” And slowly we could take it from there.

Over the years, I’ve applied the “Do Something” Principle in my own life as well.

The most obvious example is running this website and my business ventures online. I work for myself. I don’t have a boss telling me what to do and not to do. I also often have to take major calculated risks in which I’m personally invested, both financially and emotionally (spending months writing a book, re-branding my entire website, ceasing promotions of my past products, etc.). It’s been nerve-wracking at times, and major feelings of doubt and uncertainty arise. And when no one is around to push you, sitting around and watching TV reruns all day can quickly become a more appealing option.

The first couple years I worked for myself, entire weeks would go by without accomplishing much for no other reason than I was anxious and stressed about what I had to do, and it was too easy to put it off. I quickly learned that forcing myself to do something, even the most menial of tasks, quickly made the larger tasks seem much easier. If I had to redesign an entire website, then I’d force myself to sit down and would say, “OK, I’ll just design the header right now.” But after the header was done, I’d find myself moving on to other parts of it. And before I knew it, I’d be energized and engaged in the project.

I also use this regularly in my own life. If I’m about to tackle a large project that I’m anxious about, or if I’m in a new country and I need to give myself a little push to get out and meet people, I apply the Do Something Principle. Instead of expecting the moon, I just decide, “OK, I’ll start on the outline,” or “OK, I’ll just go out and have a beer and see what’s going on.” The mere action of doing this almost always spurs me on.

Inevitably, the appropriate action occurs at some point or another. The motivation is natural. The inspiration is genuine. It’s an overall far more pleasant way of accomplishing my goals.

My math teacher used to tell us in high school, “If you don’t know how to do a problem, start writing something down, your brain will begin to figure it out as you go.” And sure enough, to this day, this seems to be true. The mere action itself inspires new thoughts and ideas which lead us to solving the problems in our lives. But that new insight never comes if we simply sit around contemplating it.

I recently heard a story about a novelist who had written over 70 novels. Someone asked him how he was able to write so consistently and remain inspired and motivated every day, as writers are notorious for procrastination and for fighting through bouts of “writer’s block”. The novelist said, “200 crappy words per day, that’s it.” The idea is that if he forced himself to write 200 crappy words, more often than not, the act of writing would inspire him and before he knew it he’d have thousands down on the page.

You may recognize this concept among other writings in different guises. I’ve seen it mentioned in terms such as “failing forward” or “ready, fire, aim.” But no matter how you frame it to yourself, it’s an extremely useful mindset and habit to adopt. The more time goes on, the more I realize that success in anything is tied less to knowledge or talent, and tied more to action supplemented by knowledge and talent. You can become successful at something without knowing what you’re doing. You can become successful at something without having much particular talent at it. But you can never become successful at anything without taking action. Ever.

Awesome post on David Hume, Desideri, Buddhism and how it helped someone's midlife crisis

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/how-david-hume-helped-me-solve-my-midlife-crisis/403195/

 How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis

David Hume, the Buddha, and a search for the Eastern roots of the Western Enlightenment

• Alison Gopnik
• October 2015 Issue
• 
  

In 2006, i was 50—and I was falling apart.

Until then, I had always known exactly who I was: an exceptionally fortunate and happy woman, full of irrational exuberance and everyday joy.
I knew who I was professionally. When I was 16, I’d discovered cognitive science and analytic philosophy, and knew at once that I wanted the tough-minded, rigorous, intellectual life they could offer me. I’d gotten my doctorate at 25 and had gone on to become a professor of psychology and philosophy at UC Berkeley.
I knew who I was personally, too. For one thing, I liked men. I was never pretty, but the heterosexual dance of attraction and flirtation had always been an important part of my life, a background thrum that brightened and sharpened all the rest. My closest friends and colleagues had all been men.
More than anything, though, I was a mother. I’d had a son at 23, and then two more in the years that followed. For me, raising children had been the most intellectually interesting and morally profound of experiences, and the happiest. I’d had a long marriage, with a good man who was as involved with our children as I was. Our youngest son was on his way to college.

I’d been able to combine these different roles, another piece of good fortune. My life’s work had been to demonstrate the scientific and philosophical importance of children, and I kept a playpen in my office long after my children had outgrown it. Children had been the center of my life and my work—the foundation of my identity.
And then, suddenly, I had no idea who I was at all.
My children had grown up, my marriage had unraveled, and I decided to leave. I moved out of the big, professorial home where I had raised my children, and rented a room in a crumbling old house. I was living alone for the first time, full of guilt and anxiety, hope and excitement.
I fell in love—with a woman, much to my surprise—and we talked about starting a new life together. And then my lover ended it.
Joy vanished. Grief took its place. I’d chosen my new room for its faded grandeur: black-oak beams and paneling, a sooty brick fireplace in lieu of central heating. But I hadn’t realized just how dark and cold the room would be during the rainy Northern California winter. I forced myself to eat the way I had once coaxed my children (“just three more bites”), but I still lost 20 pounds in two months. I measured each day by how many hours had gone by since the last crying jag (“There now, no meltdowns since 11 this morning”).
I couldn’t work. The dissolution of my own family made the very thought of children unbearable. I had won a multimillion-dollar grant to investigate computational models of children’s learning and had signed a contract to write a book on the philosophy of childhood, but I couldn’t pass a playground without tears, let alone design an experiment for 3-year-olds or write about the moral significance of parental love.

Everything that had defined me was gone. I was no longer a scientist or a philosopher or a wife or a mother or a lover.
My doctors prescribed Prozac, yoga, and meditation. I hated Prozac. I was terrible at yoga. But meditation seemed to help, and it was interesting, at least. In fact, researching meditation seemed to help as much as actually doing it. Where did it come from? Why did it work?
I had always been curious about Buddhism, although, as a committed atheist, I was suspicious of anything religious. And turning 50 and becoming bisexual and Buddhist did seem far too predictable—a sort of Berkeley bat mitzvah, a standard rite of passage for aging Jewish academic women in Northern California. But still, I began to read Buddhist philosophy.

In 1734, in scotland, a 23-year-old was falling apart.

As a teenager, he’d thought he had glimpsed a new way of thinking and living, and ever since, he’d been trying to work it out and convey it to others in a great book. The effort was literally driving him mad. His heart raced and his stomach churned. He couldn’t concentrate. Most of all, he just couldn’t get himself to write his book. His doctors diagnosed vapors, weak spirits, and “the Disease of the Learned.” Today, with different terminology but no more insight, we would say he was suffering from anxiety and depression. The doctors told him not to read so much and prescribed antihysteric pills, horseback riding, and claret—the Prozac, yoga, and meditation of their day.

The young man’s name was David Hume. Somehow, during the next three years, he managed not only to recover but also, remarkably, to write his book. Even more remarkably, it turned out to be one of the greatest books in the history of philosophy: A Treatise of Human Nature.
In his Treatise, Hume rejected the traditional religious and philosophical accounts of human nature. Instead, he took Newton as a model and announced a new science of the mind, based on observation and experiment. That new science led him to radical new conclusions. He argued that there was no soul, no coherent self, no “I.” “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself,” he wrote in the Treatise, “I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.”

How did Hume come up with these ideas, so profoundly at odds with the Western philosophy and religion of his day?

Hume had always been one of my heroes. I had known and loved his work since I was an undergraduate. In my own scientific papers I’d argued, like Hume, that the coherent self is an illusion. My research had convinced me that our selves are something we construct, not something we discover. I had found that when we are children, we don’t connect the “I” of the present to the “I” of the past and the future. We learn to be who we are.

Until Hume, philosophers had searched for metaphysical foundations supporting our ordinary experience, an omnipotent God or a transcendent reality outside our minds. But Hume undermined all that. When you really look hard at everything we think we know, he argued, the foundations crumble. Descartes at least had said you always know that you yourself exist (“I think, therefore I am”), but Hume rejected even that premise.

Hume articulates a thoroughgoing, vertiginous, existential kind of doubt. In the Treatise, he reports that when he first confronted those doubts himself he was terrified—“affrighted and confounded.” They made him feel like “some strange uncouth monster.” No wonder he turned to the doctors.
But here’s Hume’s really great idea: Ultimately, the metaphysical foundations don’t matter. Experience is enough all by itself. What do you lose when you give up God or “reality” or even “I”? The moon is still just as bright; you can still predict that a falling glass will break, and you can still act to catch it; you can still feel compassion for the suffering of others. Science and work and morality remain intact. Go back to your backgammon game after your skeptical crisis, Hume wrote, and it will be exactly the same game.
In fact, if you let yourself think this way, your life might actually get better. Give up the prospect of life after death, and you will finally really appreciate life before it. Give up metaphysics, and you can concentrate on physics. Give up the idea of your precious, unique, irreplaceable self, and you might actually be more sympathetic to other people.

How did Hume come up with these ideas, so profoundly at odds with the Western philosophy and religion of his day? What turned the neurotic Presbyterian teenager into the great founder of the European Enlightenment?
In my shabby room, as I read Buddhist philosophy, I began to notice something that others had noticed before me. Some of the ideas in Buddhist philosophy sounded a lot like what I had read in Hume’s Treatise. But this was crazy. Surely in the 1730s, few people in Europe knew about Buddhist philosophy.
Still, as I read, I kept finding parallels. The Buddha doubted the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God. In his doctrine of “emptiness,” he suggested that we have no real evidence for the existence of the outside world. He said that our sense of self is an illusion, too. The Buddhist sage Nagasena elaborated on this idea. The self, he said, is like a chariot. A chariot has no transcendent essence; it’s just a collection of wheels and frame and handle. Similarly, the self has no transcendent essence; it’s just a collection of perceptions and emotions.
“I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.”
That sure sounded like Buddhist philosophy to me—except, of course, that Hume couldn’t have known anything about Buddhist philosophy.
Or could he have?

I settled into a new routine. Instead of going to therapy, I haunted the theology sections of used-book stores and spent the solitary evenings reading. I would sit in front of my grand fireplace, where a single sawdust log smoldered, wrapped in several duvets, and learn more about Buddhism.

I discovered that at least one person in Europe in the 1730s not only knew about Buddhism but had studied Buddhist philosophy for years. His name was Ippolito Desideri, and he had been a Jesuit missionary in Tibet. In 1728, just before Hume began the Treatise, Desideri finished his book, the most complete and accurate European account of Buddhist philosophy to be written until the 20th century. The catch was that it wasn’t published. No Catholic missionary could publish anything without the approval of the Vatican—and officials there had declared that Desideri’s book could not be printed. The manuscript disappeared into the Church’s archives.
I still couldn’t think or write about children, but maybe I could write an essay about Hume and Buddhism and include Desideri as a sort of close call—a missed connection.
I consulted Ernest Mossner’s classic biography of Hume. When Hume wrote the Treatise, he was living in a little French town called La Flèche, 160 miles southwest of Paris. Mossner said Hume went to La Flèche to “rusticate,” probably because it was cheap. But he also mentioned that La Flèche was home to the Jesuit Royal College.
So Hume lived near a French Jesuit college when he wrote the Treatise. This was an intriguing coincidence for my essay. But it didn’t really connect him to Desideri, of course, who had lived in Rome and Tibet.
When I searched the library databases at Berkeley, I found hundreds of books and thousands of articles I could read about David Hume, but only two about Ippolito Desideri: one article and a drastically abridged 1932 English translation of his manuscript. The article had appeared in Indica, an obscure journal published in Bombay, in 1986. I had to get it shipped down from the regional storage facility, where millions of books and articles in Berkeley’s collection languish unread. Ever since my love affair had ended, I had gone to bed each night dreading the next day. But now I found myself actually looking forward to tomorrow, when the article would arrive.

It mostly recapitulated what I had read before. But the author, an Italian named Luciano Petech, mentioned that he had edited a 1952 collection of missionary documents, I Missionari Italiani nel Tibet e nel Nepal, and that it included some Desideri manuscripts. And, in passing, he provided me with an interesting new detail. “In January 1727,” Petech wrote, “he left India, once more on a French ship, and arrived in Paris.”
Desideri had come back to Rome through France—one more intriguing coincidence.
The abridged Desideri translation could be read only in the Rare Book Room, so I headed there the next day. It was a beautiful book with red capital letters and romantic tipped-in photographs of majestic Buddhas and tranquil Himalayan valleys. I began to read eagerly.
I had been obsessively, ruminatively, fruitlessly trying to figure out who I was and what I would do without work or love or children to care for. It was like formulating an argument when the premises refuse to yield the conclusion, or analyzing a data set that makes no sense. But if I couldn’t figure myself out, I decided, I could at least try to figure out Desideri, and so I lost myself in his book, and his life.

It’s a remarkable story. In his 20s, Desideri conceived his own grand project—to convert the Indies to Catholicism—and in 1716 he became one of the first Europeans to go to Lhasa, and the first to stay. He was passionate, emotional, and easily exasperated. He was also curious, brave, and unbelievably tenacious. In an early letter written on his way to Tibet, he says he feels as if he is being torn apart on the rack. “It pleases his divine majesty to draw my whole heart away with sweet and amorous violence to where the perdition of souls is great,” he wrote, “and at the same time with fastest bonds are my feet bound and drawn elsewhere.” He kept up that intense pitch in everything he did.

Desideri sailed from Rome to India in 1712. In 1714 he began walking from Delhi across the Himalayas to Lhasa—a trek that lasted 18 months. He slept on the ground, in the snow, and struggled with snow blindness and frostbite. At one point he made his way over a rushing river by clinging precariously to a bridge made of two vine ropes. To get through the Ladakh desert, he joined the caravan of a Tartar princess and argued about theology with her each night in her tent.
When he finally arrived in Lhasa, the king and the lamas welcomed him enthusiastically, and their enthusiasm didn’t wane when he announced that he was a lama himself and intended to convert them all to Catholicism. In that case, the king suggested, it would be a good idea for him to study Buddhism. If he really understood Buddhism and he could still convince the Tibetans that Catholicism was better, then of course they would convert.
Desideri accepted the challenge. He spent the next five years in the Buddhist monasteries tucked away in the mountains around Lhasa. The monasteries were among the largest academic institutions in the world at the time. Desideri embarked on their 12-year-long curriculum in theology and philosophy. He composed a series of Christian tracts in Tibetan verse, which he presented to the king. They were beautifully written on the scrolls used by the great Tibetan libraries, with elegant lettering and carved wooden cases.

But his project was rudely interrupted by war. An army from a nearby kingdom invaded, laid waste to Lhasa, murdered the king—and then was itself defeated by a Chinese army. Desideri retreated to an even more remote monastery. He worked on his Christian tracts and mastered the basic texts of Buddhism. He also translated the work of the great Buddhist philosopher Tsongkhapa into Italian.
In his book, Desideri describes Tibetan Buddhism in great and accurate detail, especially in one volume titled “Of the False and Peculiar Religion Observed in Tibet.” He explains emptiness, karma, reincarnation, and meditation, and he talks about the Buddhist denial of the self.
It’s hard to imagine how Desideri kept any sense at all of who he was. He spent all his time reading, writing, and thinking about another religion, in another language. (Thupten Jinpa, the current Dalai Lama’s translator, told me that Desideri’s Tibetan manuscripts are even more perceptive than the Italian ones, and are written in particularly beautiful Tibetan, too.) As I read his book, I could feel him fighting to retain his missionary convictions as he immersed himself in the practices of “the false and peculiar religion” and became deeply attached to its practitioners.

That sounded like Buddhist philosophy to me—except that Hume couldn’t have known anything about Buddhism. Or could he have?

Desideri overcame Himalayan blizzards, mountain torrents, and war. But bureaucratic infighting got him in the end. Rival missionaries, the Capuchins, were struggling bitterly with the Jesuits over evangelical turf, and they claimed Tibet for themselves. Michelangelo Tamburini, the head of the Jesuits, ordered Desideri to return to Europe immediately, until the territory dispute was settled. The letter took two years to reach Tibet, but once it arrived, in 1721, Desideri had no choice. He had to leave.

He spent the next 11 years writing and rewriting his book and appealing desperately to the Vatican to let him return to Tibet. It had clearly become the only place where he really felt that he was himself. In 1732 the authorities finally ruled—in favor of the Capuchins. His book would not be published and he could never return. He died four months later.

Almost at the end of Desideri’s book, I came across a sentence that brought me up short. “I passed through La Flèche,” he wrote, “and on September the fourth arrived in the city of Le Mans.”

La Flèche? Where Hume had lived? I let out an astonished cry. The librarians, accustomed to Rare Book Room epiphanies, smiled instead of shushing me.
I headed to a café, wolfed down a sandwich (I was suddenly hungry again), and took stock of this new discovery. Could there be a connection after all?
The English Desideri was abridged. Could I find out more in the Italian book of missionary documents that Petech had described in his article? The seven volumes of the 1952 I Missionari Italiani nel Tibet e nel Nepal, never translated or reprinted, arrived from the storage facility the next day.
I called my brother Blake, an art historian who knows Italian (and French, German, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon), and got him to translate for me. Blake had been my mainstay through my darkest days, and I think he was immeasurably relieved that this time my late-night emergency phone call was about an obscure manuscript instead of a broken heart.
With Blake’s help, I made out a longer version of the passage about France. “On the 31st (August) around noon,” Desideri wrote, “I arrived at our Royal College at La Flèche. There I received the particular attention of the rector, the procurator, Père Tolu and several other of the reverend fathers. On the 4th I left La Flèche.”

So Desideri not only had been to La Flèche but had also talked with the Jesuits at the Royal College at some length. Reading Petech with Blake, I realized that the Jesuits at La Flèche might even have had a copy of Desideri’s manuscript. Petech described the history of Desideri’s manuscript in detail. He explained that Desideri had actually written multiple manuscripts about his travels. He wrote the first while he was sailing from India to France, and evidence suggests that he had this manuscript with him as he made his way from France to Rome in 1727. When he got back to Rome, he revised his text considerably, and six months later he produced a new manuscript. In this version, Desideri writes, “When I returned through France and Italy to Tuscany and Rome, I was strongly urged by many men of letters, by gentlemen and by important personages, to write down in proper order all I had told them at different times.” The reason? The religion of Tibet was “so entirely different from any other,” he wrote, that it “deserves to be known in order to be contested.”
So it was possible that Desideri had sent the Royal College at La Flèche a copy of this revised manuscript; the Jesuits regularly circulated such unpublished reports among themselves.
But Desideri visited in 1727. David Hume arrived at La Flèche eight years later, in 1735. Could anyone there have told Hume about Desideri? I couldn’t find any trace of Père Tolu, the Jesuit who had been especially interested in Desideri.

Maybe Hume’s letters contained a clue? I sat on my narrow sofa bed, listening to the rain fall, and made my way through his voluminous correspondence. To be immersed in Desideri’s world was fascinating but exhausting. To be immersed in Hume’s world was sheer pleasure. Hume writes better than any other great philosopher and, unlike many great philosophers, he is funny, humane, fair, and wise. He charmed the sophisticated Parisian ladies of the grand salons, though he was stout, awkward, and absentminded and spoke French with an execrable Scots accent. They called him “le bon David”—the good David.
Hume always described his time at La Flèche with great fondness. In the one letter of his that survives from his time there, he says he is engaged in constant study. La Flèche’s library was exceptional—reading books was a far better way to learn, he notes, than listening to professors. As for reaping all the advantages of both travel and study, he writes, “there is no place more proper than La Flèche … The People are extremely civil and sociable and besides the good company in the Town, there is a college of a hundred Jesuits.”
A later letter shows that Hume talked with at least one of those Jesuits at some length. He recalls walking in the cloister of the Royal College, his head “full of the topics of my Treatise,” with a Jesuit “of some parts and learning.” The Jesuit was describing a miracle, and this inspired Hume to come up with one of his cleverest skeptical arguments. A real miracle, he said, is by definition highly improbable, which means that deception or delusion is always a more likely—and therefore better—explanation. The Jesuit understood this reasoning (he was “very much gravelled,” Hume wrote) but said that it simply couldn’t be right, because if it were, you would have to reject not just the miracle in question but all the Gospels. “Which observation,” Hume the skeptic noted drily, “I thought it proper to treat as a sufficient answer.”

Who was this Jesuit “of some parts and learning?” Could he have been one of the fathers who had met Desideri eight years earlier? And whoever he was, what else did he and Hume talk about?

When you’re young, you want things: work, love, children. When you reach middle age, you want to want things. When you’re depressed, you no longer want anything. Desire, hope, the future itself—all seem to vanish, as they had for me. But now I at least wanted to know whether Hume could have heard about Desideri. It was a sign that my future might return.

I had thought I would spend that future alone; I was realistic about the prospects of a 50-year-old female professor. But then I had a romantic adventure or two.
They were adventures with both women and men. In my period of crisis I had discovered that I could have deep, sustaining friendships with women, as well as romance. I had been wrong about that part of my identity, too.
I was still fragile. A one-line e-mail from my ex-lover enveloped me in black depression once more. But the adventures were invigorating.
One of them happened in Montreal. I had grown up there, and went back to give a lecture at my old university. One evening I walked up St. Lawrence Boulevard in a swirling snowstorm toward a rendezvous. Suddenly, my 16-year-old self appeared, in a memory as vivid as a hallucination, striding through the snow in her hippie vintage fur coat, saying eagerly, as she often did, “I wonder what will happen next?”

Something was going to happen next, even if it wasn’t the new life I had longed for.
I got back to work. In 2007, I began the Moore Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, glad to get away from my dark, cold room and melancholy memories. The school gave me a big sunny apartment looking out at the San Gabriel Mountains. I found myself able to write about children again, and I started my next book, The Philosophical Baby. But I kept working on the Hume project, too.
My philosophical detective story had driven me to find out more about the Royal College at La Flèche. If my atheism made me suspicious of the Buddhists, I was even more suspicious of the Jesuits. After all, at least in the traditional telling, the whole point of the Enlightenment had been to dispel the malign influence of the Catholic Church.
The Berkeley library had only one book about the college at La Flèche: Un Collège de Jésuites aux XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles, 1,200 pages in four fat volumes with marbled covers, printed in 1889. I had waded through them before I left for Caltech, and had started to get a picture of the place. And then, fortuitously, my neighbor down the hall at Caltech turned out to be the historian of science Mordechai Feingold, one of the world’s leading experts on the 17th- and 18th-century Jesuits and their contributions to science.
For a long time, the conventional wisdom was that the Jesuits were retrograde enforcers of orthodoxy. But Feingold taught me that in the 17th century, the Jesuits were actually on the cutting edge of intellectual and scientific life. They were devoted to Catholic theology, of course, and the Catholic authorities strictly controlled which ideas were permitted and which were forbidden. But the Jesuit fathers at the Royal College knew a great deal about mathematics and science and contemporary philosophy—even heretical philosophy.

Hume had said that Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, and Pierre Bayle inspired the Treatise. Descartes, I learned, graduated from the Royal College, and Malebranche’s most dedicated students had taught there, although the most-fervent Malebranchistes were eventually dismissed. Books by Descartes, Malebranche, and Bayle were in the college library—although they were on the Index, the Vatican’s list of forbidden books. (Hume’s Treatise would join them later.)
La Flèche was also startlingly global. In the 1700s, alumni and teachers from the Royal College could be found in Paraguay, Martinique, the Dominican Republic, and Canada, and they were ubiquitous in India and China. In fact, the sleepy little town in France was one of the very few places in Europe where there were scholars who knew about both contemporary philosophy and Asian religion.
The Jesuits documented everything, Feingold told me. If I wanted to know who had talked with Hume at La Flèche, I could go to Rome to find out.

Toward the end of my Caltech stay, I gave a talk at one of those TED-like conferences where successful people from different fields gather to inspire the young and impress one another. A large, striking, white-haired man in the audience nodded and laughed in an especially enthusiastic way during my talk. He turned out to be Alvy Ray Smith, a co-founder of Pixar.

Unlike me, Alvy had leapt into new lives many times. He had started out as a Southern Baptist boy in small-town New Mexico, and then had plunged into the wildest reaches of San Francisco’s counterculture. Later, he impulsively abandoned his job as a computer-science professor at NYU and took off again for California, because he felt “something good would happen.” Something did: Xerox PARC, where he helped invent the first color computer graphics, and then Lucasfilm, where he helped invent the first computer-generated movies. He leapt into entrepreneurship and created Pixar—and then left Pixar, to found a new company, which he sold to Microsoft. He retired on the proceeds. Now he lived in Seattle, where he collected art, proved mathematical theorems, and did historical research for fun.

His favorite motto came from Alan Kay, another computer pioneer: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” The conference went on for two days, and by the end of it, after a few long conversations but without so much as a kiss, he took another leap and decided that his next life would be with me. If I was a bit slow to realize it, that was okay. He was used to the fact that it took other people a while to catch up to his visions of the future, especially poky academics.
When my time at Caltech was up, I returned to my old beloved Berkeley house; my ex-husband had moved to Boston, and I had bought out his half. Alvy came to visit one weekend, and we began talking on the phone every night. I had decided to follow Feingold’s advice and go to the Jesuit archives in Rome, and I asked Alvy, rather tentatively, whether he would like to come along. It was an unusual venue for a date, but he found the prospect far more romantic than sitting in the sun by the Trevi Fountain. It seemed a good omen.
The archives are not easy to find—they are, appropriately, tucked away behind a corner of St. Peter’s Basilica. Finding the actual records was not so easy either. But on our very last day there, we discovered the entries in the Jesuit catalogs that listed everyone who lived at the Royal College in 1726, 1734, and 1737: some 100 teachers, students, and servants in all. Twelve Jesuit fathers had been at La Flèche when Desideri visited and were still there when Hume arrived. So Hume had lots of opportunities to learn about Desideri.

One name stood out: P. Charles François Dolu, a missionary in the Indies. This had to be the Père Tolu I had been looking for; the “Tolu” in Petech’s book was a transcription error. Dolu not only had been particularly interested in Desideri; he was also there for all of Hume’s stay. And he had spent time in the East. Could he be the missing link?
When I got back to California, I found nothing at all about Dolu in the Berkeley library catalogs. But Google Books had just been born, so I searched for Dolu Jesuit in all the world’s libraries. Alvy kept track of what we found, in an impressively thorough and complex spreadsheet.
We discovered that in the 1730s not one but two Europeans had experienced Buddhism firsthand, and both of them had been at the Royal College. Desideri was the first, and the second was Dolu. He had been part of another fascinating voyage to the East: the French embassy to Buddhist Siam.

In the 1680s, King Narai of Siam became interested in Christianity, and even more interested in European science, especially astronomy. Louis XIV dispatched two embassies to Siam, in 1685 and 1687, including a strong contingent of Jesuit scientists. Dolu was part of the 1687 group.

These characters were more fluid than they appeared, even to themselves. Hume and the Buddha would have nodded sagely at that thought.

One of the other ambassadors was another extraordinary 17th-century figure: the abbé de Choisy. The abbé was an open and famous transvestite who gave the ladies of the French court fashion tips. He wrote a very popular and entertaining account of his trip to Siam. Hume had it in his library, along with de Choisy’s scandalous autobiography, The Memoirs of the Abbé de Choisy Who Dressed as a Woman. The abbé’s sexual fluidity was a good example of the adventurous, boundary-crossing spirit of the 17th century, which often leaves the 21st looking staid by comparison.

The Jesuits in the 1687 embassy, including Dolu, stayed in Siam for a year and spent a great deal of time with the talapoins—the European word for the Siamese Buddhist monks. Three of them even lived in the Buddhist monastery and followed its rules.
Like Desideri’s mission, the Siamese embassy ended in bloodshed and chaos. In 1688 the local courtiers and priests revolted against the liberal king and his arrogant foreign advisers. They assassinated King Narai, the new bridge between the two cultures crumbled, and the Jesuits fled for their lives. Several of them died. Dolu and a few others escaped to Pondicherry, in India, where they set up a Jesuit church.
In 1723, after his extraordinarily eventful and exotic career, Dolu retired to peaceful La Flèche for the rest of his long life. He was 80 when Hume arrived, the last surviving member of the embassies, and a relic of the great age of Jesuit science.
I had to piece together a picture of Dolu from contradictory fragments, mostly from his time in India. To Protestant English writers, he was a typical Catholic zealot. On the other hand, Catholic Capuchin writers, Desideri’s adversaries, attacked Dolu and his fellow Jesuits for their sympathy toward Hinduism. Dolu joined two other priests to break down the doors of a Hindu temple and destroy lamps and torches. But with Jean-Venance Bouchet, the head of the Indian mission, he also designed Catholic ceremonies that integrated Hindu traditions, and the Vatican disapproved. In fact, Bouchet became a noted scholar of Hinduism and adopted Hindu dress, ascetic practices, and even vegetarianism.

I also caught glimpses of Dolu the scientist. “There was never a more polite and generous man, nor one more learned about the natural world,” reported a periodical of the time. The Jesuits brought state-of-the-art 12-foot-long telescopes to Siam and then to Pondicherry, and they made important astronomical discoveries. I saw an engraving of King Narai of Siam gazing through one of the telescopes at a lunar eclipse.
Dolu had a sense of humor, too, and wrote satirical squibs and plays. An aristocratic intellectual named Saint-Fonds wrote to a friend that as an amusement, back in France, he had invited Dolu to lunch with Robert Challes, an intensely anti-Jesuit writer—indeed, an atheist—who had also traveled in Siam and India. Saint-Fonds hoped, he said, to enjoy the furious storm of controversy that would surely result. But instead, “I found myself in the midst of the gentlest breezes,” he wrote. “P. Dolu, the name of the missionary, under a wild beard, is a Jesuit per omnes casus, that is to say, polite and politic, and he understands witty repartee better than a man of the world.”
Dolu was an evangelical Catholic, and Hume was a skeptical Protestant, but they had a lot in common—endless curiosity, a love of science and conversation, and, most of all, a sense of humor. Dolu was intelligent, knowledgeable, gregarious, and witty, and certainly “of some parts and learning.” He was just the sort of man Hume would have liked.

And I discovered something else. Hume had said that Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary was an important influence on the Treatise—particularly the entry on Spinoza. So I looked up that entry in the dictionary, which is a brilliant, encyclopedic, 6 million–word mess of footnotes, footnotes to footnotes, references, and cross-references. One of the footnotes in the Spinoza entry was about “oriental philosophers” who, like Spinoza, denied the existence of God and argued for “emptiness.” And it cross-referenced another entry about the monks of Siam, as described by the Jesuit ambassadors. Hume must have been reading about Buddhism, and Dolu’s journey, in the very building where Dolu lived.

What had I learned?

I’d learned that Hume could indeed have known about Buddhist philosophy. In fact, he had written the Treatise in one of the few places in Europe where that knowledge was available. Dolu himself had had firsthand experience of Siamese Buddhism, and had talked at some length with Desideri, who knew about Tibetan Buddhism. It’s even possible that the Jesuits at the Royal College had a copy of Desideri’s manuscript.
Of course, it’s impossible to know for sure what Hume learned at the Royal College, or whether any of it influenced the Treatise. Philosophers like Descartes, Malebranche, and Bayle had already put Hume on the skeptical path. But simply hearing about the Buddhist argument against the self could have nudged him further in that direction. Buddhist ideas might have percolated in his mind and influenced his thoughts, even if he didn’t track their source. After all, contemporary philosophers have been known to borrow ideas without remembering exactly where they came from.
I published an article about Hume, Buddhism, and the Jesuits, long on footnotes and short on romance, in an academic journal. As I was doing my research, many unfailingly helpful historians told me that my quirky personal project reflected a much broader trend. Historians have begun to think about the Enlightenment in a newly global way. Those creaky wooden ships carried ideas across the boundaries of continents, languages, and religions just as the Internet does now (although they were a lot slower and perhaps even more perilous). As part of this new global intellectual history, new bibliographies and biographies and translations of Desideri have started to appear, and new links between Eastern and Western philosophy keep emerging.
It’s easy to think of the Enlightenment as the exclusive invention of a few iconoclastic European philosophers. But in a broader sense, the spirit of the Enlightenment, the spirit that both Hume and the Buddha articulated, pervades the story I’ve been telling. The drive to convert and conquer the “false and peculiar” in the name of some metaphysical absolute was certainly there, in the West and in the East. It still is. But the characters in this story were even more strongly driven by the simple desire to know, and the simple thirst for experience. They wanted to know what had happened before and what would happen next, what was on the other shore of the ocean, the other side of the mountain, the other face of the religious or philosophical—or even sexual—divide.
This story may help explain Hume’s ideas. It unquestionably exemplifies them. All of the characters started out with clear, and clashing, identities—the passionate Italian missionary and the urbane French priest, the Tibetan king and lamas, the Siamese king and monks, the skeptical young Scot.
But I learned that they were all much more complicated, unpredictable, and fluid than they appeared at first, even to themselves. Both Hume and the Buddha would have nodded sagely at that thought. Although Dolu and Desideri went to Siam and Tibet to bring the wisdom of Europe to the Buddhists, they also brought back the wisdom of the Buddhists to Europe. Siam and Tibet changed them more than they changed Siam and Tibet. And his two years at La Flèche undoubtedly changed David Hume.
Hume and the Jesuits and Siam and Tibet changed me as well. I’d always thought Hume was right about the self. But now, for the first time, I felt that he was right.
In 2010, Alvy and I got married—the future reinvented. Once again, I was an exceptionally fortunate and happy woman, full of irrational exuberance and everyday joy. But that’s not all I was. I’d discovered that I could love women as well as men, history as well as science, and that I could make my way through sadness and solitude, not just happiness. Like Dolu and Desideri, the gender-bending abbé and the Siamese astronomer-king, and, most of all, like Hume himself, I had found my salvation in the sheer endless curiosity of the human mind—and the sheer endless variety of human experience.

Unresolved questions

“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Rilke, Frederick, Gift of the sea and more.

How I wish I could read so many books and absorb them fast!

Every other day, a new author beckons..teases me to read him/ her and savour their flavour.
Yet, given my incompetence, I have to disappoint many.

Some people I'd like to read:
http://www.carrothers.com/rilke_main.htm - Rilke.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFCLWytjcUY

 http://www.amazon.com/Gift-Sea-Anne-Morrow-Lindbergh/dp/0679732411

Habits free our cognitive capacity

You need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. ‘You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,’ he said.'I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.’ He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. 'You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.’

Barack Obama on optimizing decision-making, excerpted from Michael Lewis’s fantastic Vanity Fair profile of the President.

Lyric Engineering!

Today I read a little about Madan Karky and boy, I was surprised.. He's Vairamuthu's son!
Never had I known this! Also he is a PhD in Comp Sci.
How I got interested in him? He invented the Kiliki language in Baahubali and it's a scientific invention process.

Reading more,  I stumbled on his explanation and invention of Lyric Engineering.
I had also read from GVM's post abt his Agaraadhi - a Tamil English Dictionary.
So fascinating! One of the best innovations I'd say.
Also he's an Associate professor in Comp Sci and runs many interesting projects!. Very impressed!

http://madhankarky.blogspot.in/2009/11/lyrics-lyric-engineering.html

http://lifeandtrendz.com/in-an-exclusive-chat-with-madhan-karky-vairamuthu-lyricist-research-associate-software-engineer-and-film-dialogue-writer/

http://www.thehindu.com/features/lit-for-life/all-about-lyric-engineering/article6802046.ece
 

Manu Joseph's excellent article on the rise and fall of Anna Hazare

http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/the-obituary-of-a-movement

The Obituary of a Movement

It was good, it was brief

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BY Manu Joseph EMAIL AUTHOR(S)

What killed the revolt was not its inherent hypocrisy but the fact that the movement could not escalate from a farce to something substantial. (Illustration: VIVEK THAKKAR)

There is a type of talented Indian who lives in the United States with his austere wife to whom he lost his virginity, and has two children who are good at spelling. He walks with a mild slouch. He is still intimidated by White waiters, but not Black waiters. In an elevator, chiefly in an elevator, he suspects he is probably small. He does not drive a Prius. He is acquainted with the word ‘generalise’ as something other people should not do. He is often a she. He is fundamentally a good person by almost all the definitions of that human condition—he is against genocide, burning people alive, including Muslims, and stabbing children, including Muslim children. And he loves Narendra Modi. ‘And’ not ‘but’, for ‘but’ will mean that he has considered all the facts and has made a moral decision. He loves Modi for honourable reasons. He loves the idea of a smart, tough and proud Hindu. He loves him because he loves Mother India. He was not always so traditional and patriotic.
He will give many reasons why he is so now, he will give abstract reasons. He will say love is abstract, love is inevitable. It is not, in reality. Love is calculated, always. In America’s caste system, he is nowhere at the top. In fact, at times he feels he is at the bottom. There are moments, he knows, when brown is the new black. Back home he was something by virtue of his birth, his lineage and education, which was clear to all in plain sight. And the riffraff, which knew its place, readily granted him his, unlike in the United States. That is why he loves India. That is why the Third World middleclass and the rich who live in the West are deeply in love with their homelands. Nations that are filled with the poor are feudal in nature, and so excellent homes for the middleclass. India is probably the best.
Resident Indians, despite all their reasonable grudges, experience the privileges every day. That is at the heart of the collapse of Team Anna’s apparent revolution, which called for a battle to the brink to overturn Indian politics, and asked informed Indians to dismantle what ignorant voters had erected. But then there is no genuine trauma in the Indian elite for them to soil their lives with strife. The Indian middleclass (the not-poor and everything above) does daydream about lining up downmarket politicians and shooting them, but they simply cannot be angry enough and angry too long. What reasons do they have really to be angry in this paradise of the middleclass? They are, after all, the easy beneficiaries of India’s inequities. It is not just about the maids, the baby maids, the cooks, the gardeners and the drivers, who come at laughable rates. The comfort is much deeper. As long as one is from a certain background, one does not have to be exceptional to go a long way in the private sector, academics, arts, media, anything really. In fact, one can even be a low-grade tennis player and still be considered a sports star in India.

But when it all began in April last year, when Anna Hazare arrived in Delhi to fast until he died or achieved the Lokpal, the middleclass assumed they were the predominant victims of the Indian way of life. And they thought the moment had finally come, when they could finally disrupt the political establishment by cheering one old man as he performed his only trick, which is to starve until the orange juice materialises.
At the time, he was not known to most Indians. He had by then won the Padma Bhushan for social work, but such award winners are usually known only to those who gave them the awards and their small constituencies of miserable people. In Hazare’s case, that constituency was a portion of rural Maharashtra. Before April 2011, his name usually evoked amused smiles from Mumbai’s political reporters. There was no doubt that he was financially incorruptible and that his fasts against corruption were not entirely farcical movements. But there was something material that Hazare adored. He liked the idea of the powerful taking note of him, his protests, and like all simple old men of his type he could be a terrible pain when slighted. This, Maharashtra’s politicians knew very well. At the first hint of a Hazare fast, they would run to his feet, make vacant promises and from somewhere the juice would materialise, and everything would be alright. Sonia Gandhi, if she were advised by men who were not so hopelessly arrogant, could have probably avoided Hazare’s movement. Hazare himself carelessly hinted at it the very first day of his dramatic April fast in Delhi.
He said he had written letters to Sonia Gandhi about the Lokpal, but she never responded. It was as if he were not important enough. That inspired him to come to Delhi. (Eventually, he stopped mentioning this.) He delayed the start of his fast to let the cricket World Cup fever subside. By the time he sat by the wayside, swearing to die until the bill was passed, several forces had aligned in his favour—the growing public disgust over the Commonwealth
Games scam and 2G scam. Also, though the number of those who walked miles holding the accusatory white candles was growing in several Indian cities, the idea of a massive, festive public demonstration against crooked politicians was still new to the educated urban middleclass, and it was an intoxicating experience for them.
Some families arrived in their luxury sedans to be part of something they imagined was important. Good fathers carried their daughters on their shoulders and showed them the distant introspective image of Hazare. Lovers held hands and sang songs. It was all very joyous. In states like West Bengal and Kerala, where the middleclass has always been a part of the political process and were not amateur citizens, people were not so stirred, but they took Hazare’s name with affection. On Arnab Goswami’s Times Now television channel, when I defended my report in Open of the first two days of the fast, which had described it as ‘a comic revolution of an obsolete man’, one of the guests on the show, an angry young man who was setting out on an ‘indefinite fast’, said, “Get out, get out, all you cynics, get out.” Which was baffling because I was sitting in my house.
Television news loved the revolution for reasons other than just business. After the revelation of the Niira Radia tapes, some anchors were facing a crisis of credibility—were they merely agents of politicians? And Anna Hazare presented them with a sexy story through which they could appear to trash the political system.
It is true that mass movements need the assistance of farce. Common sense and rational analysis do not have the profound influence that farce has on a large body of people. And for some time, it did appear that the farcical beginnings of the movement were indeed coming together to become a more meaningful and cunning parallel political force. An inner circle of Hazare rose and came to be called Team Anna. It was a circle of unlike minds—Hazare is a villager, infatuated with the right wing, who hates corrupt politicians who do not respect him and likes tainted politicians who flatter him (Vilasrao Deshmukh, who is facing graft charges, is an agreeable politician in Hazare’s eyes). Arvind Kejriwal has a discreet contempt for reservations in colleges and jobs (he was once driven away from the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University by Dalit students). And Prashant Bhushan is the human embodiment of Arundhati Roy’s prose. He has deep socialist tendencies, is suspicious of capitalism, and appears to believe that the efforts of modern economists to put a huge mass of humanity firmly in the saddle is a conspiracy of saddle manufacturers.
Team Anna was not composed of natural allies but it was held together by the common cause of the fight against political corruption. It was inevitable that such a battle in India had flaws in its very reasoning. It assumed that corrupt Indian politicians are an unnatural phenomenon while the fact is that they are merely the success stories in a republic where savage practicality has always been valued more than ethics. Is there anything in the Indian system, in the Indian way of life that will help a clever impoverished child from a remote village reach the top layers of society through honest hard work?
Also, as Sharad Pawar showed in the municipal elections in Maharashtra, even as the Hazare movement reached its peak, the shame of corruption is not a disadvantage at the polls. All Indians, including voters, lament that corruption is destroying the nation, but again and again they return the corrupt to power. The middleclass, through the media and films, has made corruption appear to be the most loathed aspect of Indian society. Yet, circumstantial evidence suggests that when they have to make a decision, Indians not only consider other issues more important than corruption but also rate corrupt politicians as more efficient, impressive and useful than the soft good folks, of whom there are not many in politics anyway.
Despite all this, Hazare’s war against political corruption received massive support in 2011. Who can deny that it was a greatly enjoyable war—the underdogs on one side and the arrogant, filthy politicians on the other.
What killed the revolt was not its inherent hypocrisy but the fact that the movement could not escalate from a farce to something substantial. For an enjoyable revolution, and it is important for a revolution to be enjoyable, the scenes have to keep changing. But Indians were stranded with the same old man and his inner circle, doing the same things and saying the same things for several months. The middleclass, whose primary instinct is to be an island untouched by India, lost interest in the revolt and went back to its life — among other things, bribing government officials and accepting huge amounts of black money while selling homes. It was inevitable that television anchors, including the delightful evening patriot Goswami, should abandon the movement. And the comic revolution of an obsolete man finally died.

Mourners say that it was all still worth it. At least, the political establishment knew that there are dangerous adversaries lurking around. That is not true. What the brief life and death of the farcical revolt has done is ensure that a more substantial and potent rebellion against Indian politics will not come anytime soon. 

Wonderful talk on being an average programmer and why so few women are in tech

Loved this talk!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIJdFxYlEKE

Gratitude letter exercise. Who am I most grateful to?

While attending the Week 2 lectures of the coursera course "A life of happiness and fulfillment" - I had to do one exercise.
I had to write a gratitude letter to someone who'd had a very positive influence in my life.

I was thinking who could it be?
Teachers? I had 2 school teachers who'd backed me quite a lot and supported me but that was a different influence. It did not make me a better person or whetever.
Parents - No.
Relatives - No.
Co-workers - No.
Spouse? - One very big influence I should say. I am a totally different person because of him.
His interests, patience, forgiveness, etc have rubbed off on me. I am experiencing a different life because of him. If I'd remained in my Tam Brahm family, I would not have turned this way.
Still - don't feel 100%. 
Boss - Jayanthi ma'am has definitely been an inspiration at many levels but again, as a single biggest influence, no.

Then I quickly realized, how did I come out of depression?
3 years back, I was a bag of issues - low self esteem, too less emotional resilience, unable to handle relation hiccups, etc.
Today, I feel I am quite stable. I have become mature in dealing with people. I understand what I am and my limitations to quite an extent. I want to change a few things definitely but that can happen only when I completely accept who I am today.

Acceptance takes time and effort. It looks like the last 3 years I have literally wasted or learned just this - acceptance. Accepting I am not an IT kind of person. Accepting that I am not too self motivated. Accepting that I lack discipline and perseverance. Also, accepting that I have tried my best most of the times. There have been so many wars inside, so much turbulence.
It was so difficult to handle those days. Everything that I tried was failing. I was in deep depression. I could not get up. I could hardly do any work.

By then I had been to Isha and my spiritual journey began there. I read a lot of spiritual posts. I read Sadhguru, Osho, JK, Swami Sivananda, nithyananda, swami rama, buddhist psychology, etc. I slowly evolved. I cut off interacting with people whom I was not comfortable with. I slowly built a foundation for self esteem. I slowly accepted some of my limitations. I knew that I could not just keep pushing myself. Nobody could help me. I had to help myself. So I read a lot of self-help blogs and books.Whenever I read any spiritual thing I used to feel peaceful. The turbulence would stop for a while.

Slowly - very slowly, changes happened. I think right now I am out of depression.
A part of me chose to help the wounded part. That transcendental part is what helped me. It's a piece of god. A piece of heaven. Something that probably all of us share. That part, worked overtime to help me recover to whatever extent I have recovered. No other force has been this powerful in healing. But for many of us, we have no way to access it. I too don't know how to activate it. Maybe extreme happiness or extreme sadness activate it. I had slipped to rockbottom. So that process kicked in and I took the cues and started reading a lot, which helped me get better. So, that is what I am grateful for. It saved me. Atleast this time.

Labyrynth of Life - Martha Beck

http://marthabeck.com/2013/03/the-labyrinth-of-life/

The Labyrinth of Life… Insight from Martha

March 10, 2013 in Living & Wellness 48 Comments

For the past few days, I’ve been busy helping to build a labyrinth. My awesome friend Chris Brandt, master coach and landscape design artist, came and spray-painted an ancient pattern onto a 40-foot circle of earth under some huge oak trees near my house, and then everyone got busy finding rocks to mark the pattern as the rain washed it away. We put a statue of Kuan Yin, an ancient Chinese goddess representing compassion, at the entrance to the labyrinth. It’s like a gigantic human brain, all folded into itself.
I told a friend about this on the phone and she said, “I know how to solve those. You just keep your hand on one wall, and you’ll find your way out.” She thought I meant a maze. This is how our culture sees things: you’re in a place full of tricks and blind alleys, but if you’re clever enough, you’ll “solve” it and get out. That’s not what a labyrinth is. It’s a path you walk as a kind of meditative practice. You could walk out of it at any time, but you follow the patterns at your feet while releasing the patterns in your mind. Walking labyrinths is an ancient custom. Now I know why. I’ve walked my own labyrinth just a few times, and its curving lines have taken me straight to the truth about the way I live my life.
About halfway through my first walk, I found myself feeling terrified and angry. My thoughts went something like this: “This is such a waste of time. What am I doing here? I was two feet away from here before, now I’m doubling back for no reason—where is this taking me? What’s the goal? I can get there faster than this if I just jump….” on and on, ad nauseum.
As every life coach knows, the way we do anything is the way we do everything. The same thoughts that make me squirm in the labyrinth torture me when I’m writing, emailing, even sleeping. I should be going faster, getting somewhere. I should have more to show for this. I shouldn’t have to double back, to revisit old emotional issues, to wipe the same damn kitchen counter every day. These thoughts burble along just under the surface of my consciousness every day. They make me slightly anxious—okay, some days irrationally terrified—and lend a driven quality to moments when I could be relaxed and present.
I’ve heard the same comments from countless people, all schooled to the same obsession with forward progress. We set goals, draw flowcharts, march forward, criticize ourselves if we have to go back, if the same old stuff comes back to haunt us. We want to be DONE with things: the chronic pain, the haunting doubt, the bad relationship patterns, the grief of loss. We want to solve the maze and get out, to the place where we imagine there will be no problems to solve.
The labyrinth is teaching me to question the bits of driven, linear, achievement-based dysfunction that can make me miserable in a life of incredible blessings and good fortune. We didn’t enter life to get it done. There is no place not worth revisiting. We double back to find the pieces of ourselves that still clutch the same issues like a baby clutching its pacifier. Compassion invited us to this unbearably repetitive, slow, complex path of self-discovery, to show us that only when we surrender our idea of how things should be going do we notice that the entire thing is breathtakingly beautiful.
My loved ones and I are still building the labyrinth. Our land is not particularly rocky, so we’ve become obsessed with rocks the way a teenage starlet is obsessed with shopping. We cruise slowly past areas of nearby roads marked with “falling rock” warning signs, then stop the car, heave a few mini-boulders into the car, and speed off feeling the joy of acquisition. We have a goal (finish the labyrinth), we have a process (find rocks and arrange them), and the sense of purpose that comes with that is so familiar, so comfortingly linear. But in the end, what we’re building is a circuitous, contemplative, enfolded path that teaches us to be comfortable with the circuitous, repetitive, contemplative aspects of our lives.
Today, if you’re confronting an issue for the ten thousandth time, or feeling that your life is going nowhere, or panicking over how little you’ve achieved, stop and breathe. You’re not falling behind on some linear race through time. You’re walking the labyrinth of life. Yes, you’re meant to move forward, but almost never in a straight line. Yes, there’s an element of achievement, of beginning and ending, but those are minor compared to the element of being here now. In the moments you stop trying to conquer the labyrinth of life and simply inhabit it, you’ll realize it was designed to hold you safe as you explore what feels dangerous. You’ll see that you’re exactly where you’re meant to be, meandering along a crooked path that is meant to lead you not onward, but inward.
As Proust wrote, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Stop now, right now, and look around you. This is your place in the labyrinth. There is no place else you need to be. See with eyes that aren’t fixed on goals, or focused on flaws. You are part of the endless, winding beauty. And as you learn to see the dappled loveliness of your life, as your new eyes help you begin loving the labyrinth, you’ll slowly come to realize that the labyrinth was made solely for the purpose of loving you.

Inside Out movie reviews

Imagine a movie that talks about the brain and emotions.
How wnderful would that be.
I'm just waiting for the movie.
Here are some reviews.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-06-pixar-memory.html

http://time.com/3925611/inside-out-pixar-movie-review/

Habits.. changes

I've personally wrestled a lot with changing myself - certain behaviour - bringing better ones.
Change is always difficult but unless we change, life remains stagnant.

There is no transformation. Every day starts to look the same.
But when we bring in changes, we notice freshness. We anticipate life.

I have heard about Charles Duhigg from R. I read up a bit and it sounded neat.
Then came Ms Gretchen's whole book - Better than before.
So, yesterday I read a little more about habits.
I keep reminding myself about a few key points. I try to bring in changes but they do not stick long.
This time around I want to make positive changes. Else I'm done.
So, I scoured the internet for some tips. Why is it so hard to change?

The road to failure is paved with good intentions.

I read about the success of implementation intentions (http://jamesclear.com/implementation-intentions),
http://jamesclear.com/three-steps-habit-change
http://www.success.com/article/tiny-habits

Important things:

1) Pick things that are easy. Make it so simple that you will definitely do it. You should arrange the world around you to make your new habit easy to do.
Simplicity changes behavior.
2) Easy means, you do not depend on motivation. Well, motivation is not very reliable, going up and down, often unpredictably. And it often takes a lot of work to sustain motivation. In the end, I’ve concluded that relying on motivation to create a habit doesn’t work. 
3) Tiny Habits are designed to be on a schedule -- they come after an existing habit. This existing habit should be something you always do, or it’s a cue that always happens in your daily life. I call the existing habit or cue an “anchor.” In my method, you use your existing anchor to trigger the new tiny behavior you want. 

4) You need to celebrate your success.

Because you are reinforcing yourself.

The stronger you feel a positive emotion after your Tiny Habit, the faster it will become automatic in your life. “Our brains are very bad at distinguishing between I did this huge thing and I’m feeling awesome about it and I did this tiny thing and I’m still feeling awesome about it,” Fogg says. “Somehow in our heads we exaggerate, which is a good thing. That’s part of the hack—building success momentum, allowing yourself to feel successful, allowing that success to be larger than it rationally should be, then growing and leveraging that attitude into bigger things.”

5) It’s important that you not feel pain when you do your new habit.

Because if you feel pain, your brain will find ways to avoid the behavior in the future. In contrast, if you feel happy after you do the behavior, then your brain will remind you to do it again in the future.
We avoid pain and we seek pleasure.

6) Perhaps more helpful than the tiny habits themselves is the success momentum they build. There’s a snowball effect: When you achieve a goal by integrating simple daily habits into your life, no matter how small, you gain a confidence that helps pave the way to reach bigger goals. The success momentum you gain from creating positive habits is the method’s secret sauce.

Every time a company convinces you to try its new health platform and you don’t succeed, you come back worse. The only way to make behavior changes that actually work is through tiny steps, performed patiently and methodically.

“When you [create a habit], you’re signaling to yourself, Yes! I can change my behavior. I’m doing it right now! You’re telling yourself this at least once a day. Just have patience, keep going and don’t give up.”

“I think every good business is about helping people do what they already want to do,” Fogg says. “That’s what we’re figuring out: What do people want to do and how do we make it simple for them to do it? That’s one of the things I teach a lot now to my students—help people do what they already want to do.”

Somehow I had realized a few of these myself over the last 2 years. Things should be so easy that you can not not do it. 

Also, don't pick things that u can fail in, coz success triggers more success - testosterone effect.

But didn't know that even small success counts so big-ly.

And..  I was always punishing myself for not being inspired and motivated.

No, no one.. not even the greatest artists got through 365 days with just motivation. They relied on habits. We need to automate some part of our work. When we've spent like 10000 hours, lightning strikes, even with automated work!.

Managing our emotions is key. Emotional resilience is extremely important to us sensitive souls.

We should, to start with, avoid any suckers.. avoid paths of failures.. avoid difficult people, till we become strong. No point falling before the 10th step, right? Though not a good formula, this is all we've got. We want to maximise success. If all we want to so is build emotional resilience then we could get the most difficult people every day.. but if that is not the end goal, save some heartache..choose a path which has least resistance.. which offers better prospects of success. 

 

 

The cost of unhappiness

Many have put a tag on happiness but we miss how much we pay for being unhappy.

I was just tracking how we'd spent money over the last 10-12 years.
What were the major expenses. Ofcourse we'd gotten married and a lot of the cost we bore ourselves.
We furnished the house. Then we constructed a house - the interiors, etc cost us.
In between I was down with cancer and we had quite a lot of expense that time.
Illness is something that we can do nothing about.. but there are some things..which are strange.
In between all this.. we had spent quite some money on my in-laws.
They're always at war. Yearly we do one trip and they come here once. When they come we take them some place, do their medical etc. Usually it comes to 75K per trip atleast.

There was a time when we both were jobless - just after Ciel Pur and we had no money and at that time they both fought so much and my father in law threatened to commit suicide.
Thrice in a row my husband spent so much money going to Assam. It was a taxing time for us.
So much money on something totally avoidable!. Cost of unhappiness.


These incidents happen quite frequently at their place.
My co-sister and even brother in law have probably slipped into depression due to the 2 parents.
I don't mean to insult or denigrate them. That is not the point.

The point is - how much pressure - financially and mentally they put on those who stay with them and take care of them. The maid will always be overburdened with chores.. even till 11 PM.
If something is missing (which will usually be right in the table) there will be a huge hullaboo.
If the maid doesn't turn up there will be a hundred phone calls to all the children. It would be national news. When they have to go somewhere, people around should do so much.
When we take them out, it's many a times unpleasant for me, because I have to become the nurse.
You need to carry safe food for them.. tea bags, sugar, kettle,etc.
When you're planning to have a romantic time they will shout for tea or for blankets.
They are totally dependent on others now. Sometimes they do quite a bit of work but many a times the burden falls on people around. It would be acceptable if the people concerned are really old and helpless but in our case it's unhappy people...people who have psychological problems... who have made life terrible for themselves and those around.

I am sure many such cases or rather worse cases exist.
The point is, there is a huge cost to being unhappy. Both to yourself and to others.
Unhappy people cannot do a lot of work.
They do not empathise with others. They are lost in their own worries. They have no time for others.
So, when people call you up - you end up worrying them and slowly people stop calling. Who'd love to hear unhappy voices all the time? They won't even enquire after you. It's all about them - always.
They demand unusual things to make themselves happy. They fail to see how much taxing it is for those around.. their eternal demands and requests. They demand attention all the time and that is fatiguing for anyone.
Since they are in psychological pain it will manifest physically as well. So they need constant medical care. They may have to visit the doctor multiple times. The tests will all show up normal but the person is still in pain so the doctor can do nothing.

I have seen unhappy moms, unhappy wives. They suffer and their suffering affects others as well. They beat the children, they scold them unnecessarily, they restrict the child's actions a lot.
They get irritated with the spouse. They complain too much.

I hardly remember good times at home. There were so many rules and we were beaten up so often. When parents have stressful days they take it out on children. If they're unhappy with each other they take it out on children. I don't have any beautiful memories of childhood at all. I am ashamed to say that but yes, we were hardly given the right emotional care. My parents were fighting for survival. Doing jobs and running the house, supporting a huge family. I don't remember kind words or desires being fulfilled. I don't remember happy holidays. It would always be rushed and always about saving money. I don't remember thoughtful gifts. I don't remember being introduced to books or hobbies. I don't remember our birthdays being celebrated. I don't remember a party when I scored well in 10th and 12th or when I got a job. I don't know how I grew up. I hardly had good friends. In college I had a few friends. But they were not deep bonds. Many were broken.

There is a huge cost to being unhappy. We poison our bodies. We poison our minds.
It's not easy to be happy always and I myself have been depressed for more than 6 years.
I know how hard it is. But the least one can do is, have a perspective.
Accept that you're sad but still try to do the right things. Don't stop caring for others.
Don't take everyone around for granted. They may be fighting their battles... don't drain them with yours all the time.

We stop being kind when we're unhappy. We stop caring for others and we distance people.
We will stop receiving the support that we so badly need.

So, it's very important to keep an inventory of our emotions.
It's ok to be sad; It's ok to be unhappy; But its not ok to be unkind and uncaring.
It's not ok to be an unnecessary burden on others.
Life should be pleasant.