Who are you?

The following is from a rather long –but excellent– article on leadership. If you have to lead (or follow) I encourage you to read the full piece.

“People want to know your values and beliefs, what you really care about, and what keeps you awake at night. They want to know who most influenced you, the events that shaped your attitudes, and the experiences that prepare you for the job. They want to know what drives you, what makes you happy, and what ticks you off. They want to know what you’re like as a person, and why you want to be their leader. They want to know if you play an instrument, compete in sports, go to the movies, or enjoy the theater. They want to know about your family, what you’ve done, and where you’ve traveled. They want to understand your personal story. They want to know why they ought to be following you.”

I’m going to give this a little thought and see if I can answer that question here. I sort of think the answer IS here but it’s scattered over 9 years of posts. I need an elevator version. This is a follow-up to a post from a few days ago.

38 Life Lessons

From Leo Babauta. There are a few of my favorites. The entire list is worth a read.

“You can’t motivate people. The best you can hope for is to inspire them with your actions. People who think they can use behavioral “science” or management techniques have not spent enough time on the receiving end of either.”

“Let go of expectations. When you have expectations of something — a person, an experience, a vacation, a job, a book — you put it in a predetermined box that has little to do with reality. You set up an idealized version of the thing (or person) and then try to fit the reality into this ideal, and are often disappointed. Instead, try to experience reality as it is, appreciate it for what it is, and be happy that it is.”

“Do less. Most people try to do too much. They fill life with checklists, and try to crank out tasks as if they were widget machines. Throw out the checklists and just figure out what’s important. Stop being a machine and focus on what you love. Do it lovingly.”

via 38 Life Lessons I’ve Learned in 38 Years | zen habits

Scott Adams: “The sum of your actions”

“You’re a collection of molecules and those molecules are made of smaller bits, and those bits are made of even smaller bits. The smallest bits in the universe are all identical. You are made of the same stuff as the concrete in the floor and the fly on the window. Your basic matter cannot be created or destroyed. All that will survive of what you call your life is the sum of your actions. Some might call the unending ripple effect of those actions a soul, or a spirit.”

— Scott Adams, The Religion War

Scott Adams: Idea People

“There are two types of people in the world. One type is people-oriented. When they make conversation, it is about people — what people are doing, what someone said, how someone feels. The other group is idea-oriented. When they make conversation, they talk about ideas and concepts and objects. Idea people are boring, even to other idea people.”

“When a person talks about people, it is personal to everyone who listens. You will automatically relate the story to yourself, thinking how you would react in that person’s situation, how your life has parallels.”

God’s Debris 

The Information, by James Gleick

Publishers Weekly review on Amazon:

“In 1948, Bell Laboratories announced the invention of the electronic semiconductor and its revolutionary ability to do anything a vacuum tube could do but more efficiently. While the revolution in communications was taking these steps, Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon helped to write a monograph for them, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which he coined the word bit to name a fundamental unit of computer information. As bestselling author Gleick (Chaos) astutely argues, Shannon’s neologism profoundly changed our view of the world; his brilliant work introduced us to the notion that a tiny piece of hardware could transmit messages that contained meaning and that a physical unit, a bit, could measure a quality as elusive as information. Shannon’s story is only one of many in this sprawling history of information.  Gleick’s exceptional history of culture concludes that information is indeed the blood, the fuel, and the vital principle on which our world runs.”

The following got some highlighter during my read:

“In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.” pg 12

“With words we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for others to follow.” pg 31

“All known alphabets, used today or found buried on tablets and stone, descend from the same original ancestor.” pg 33

“The written word was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it.” pg 37

Continue reading

Living As A River by Bodhipaksa

living-riverFinding Fearlessness in the Face of Change


The ultimate act of letting go is to abandon the delusion that consciousness and the world are separate things.

Because we fear our own eventual extinction, we construct the idea of a permanent self.

(The Buddha) saw the self as composed of a number of ever-changing processes.

Knowing that I exist, it’s hard for me to imagine never having existed, and so in my own mind there’s a certain inevitability about my existence.

When we try to imagine death, what comes to mind is imagining an experience of nothingness, as if we’d still be around to have a non-experience. […] We simply cannot imagine not being able to experience anything at all, because experience is all we know, and so we’re forced to imagine experiencing non-experience.

Since we assume that the self existed before conception and will exist after death, we’ll inevitably imagine that it persists — unchanged — throughout life.

Once we start naming things, our language reinforces our underlying tendency to see them as fixed. We name things, and then we assume that because the name is static, so too is the thing named. The mind takes the language it uses to label reality as if it were reality.

It is (the) flow of events that constitutes what we call consciousness. Consciousness is not seen as being something separate that “has” experiences. Consciousness is the activity of experiencing.

The sage at peace recognizes that aging and dying are simply stories we weave for ourselves.

The opposite of suffering turns out not to be simple happiness, but something indefinable.

We may try to shelter ourselves from an awareness of impermanence by identifying with a nation or religion or with an abstract principle such as progress. […] To cling is to seek a stable refuge in the midst of a torrent of impermanence. […] The more our sense of well-being is dependent upon something impermanent, the more there is an undercurrent of fear. […] Fear leads to clinging, which leads to fear.

Insight is not the same as intellectual understanding but is a direct recognition of impermanence in our experience.

Everything that constitutes us is in fact a process, rather than a thing or object.

“Verbal thinking” – a scrolling tickertape of more-or-less connected words that streams endlessly through the mind.

(The body is) a process that has continuity rather than identity. […] There is no being, only becoming. There is no identity, only change.

In sensing my body as a river, I begin to realize that I do not know what I am. I begin to realize that there is nothing — “no thing” — to cling to or to identify with. One cannot hold onto a river.

If the earth were shrunk to the size of a soccer ball, the average depth of the ocean covering it would be sixty-five microns, or about twice the thickness of a grocery-store plastic bag.

Life is the sustainable self-organization of energy within the material world. […] Life itself is flow, and the energy of life cannot be grasped or possessed.

We need to hold definitions lightly, remembering that they are the map rather than the territory.

Despite Copernicus, we tend to think that we are at the center of the universe — that it all exists in order to serve us. But rather, we are scavengers of energy, peripheral to the vast processes unfolding around us.

Clouds make a good analogy for the illusory nature of the self. There’s nothing permanent in a cloud, just as there’s nothing permanent to be found in the self. The cloud is not separate from its environment, just as my self has no separateness. Just as the cloud lacks the essential qualities I assume a “thing” has, so too does my self lack the qualities I assume a self has. In looking at mists or a cloud; we can see a form, often with an apparently well-defined edge, and yet there’s nothing there that can be grasped. The fact that we name something a “cloud” often seems to create in the mind the assumption that the thing that’s being named is as static as the label applied to it. Often we’ll glance at a particular cloud and then look at it a short while later. Nothing much seems to have changed, because the human mind is not well-equipped to perceive change—especially not in something as amorphous as a cloud.

All concepts are simply labels superimposed upon the reality we perceive.

As we move toward the idea of abandoning the idea of a separate selfhood, we may need to go through a phase of treating the whole of creation as if it were us. […] Extend the idea of the self out far enough, and the idea of the self becomes meaningless.

As I sit breathing in my meditation practice, I might find myself wondering exactly at what point a particular molecule of air could be said to be “in” the body. Is it when it crosses some arbitrarily drawn plane enclosed by the rims of my nostrils? Is it once it’s crossed into the bloodstream? Or bonded to a molecule of hemoglobin? Any line I choose to draw would be purely arbitrary. I look for the boundary of my physical self and can’t find one.

Noticing how my gaze can often fixate on a narrow area in front of me, I become aware of the entirety of my visual field, allowing into awareness everything from the center of my visual field to the periphery. It’s like moving from a kind of “dial-up” connection between the world and my brain to a “broadband” one. Doing this generally has a very calming effect on my inner chatter, as if the sheer volume of incoming data I’m paying attention to leaves no bandwidth available for my inner dramas.

All experience takes place in the mind. […] We can know nothing beyond our sensory experience.

Consciousness is the activity of being aware of something. There can, by definition, be no consciousness separate from the things of which it is aware. […] We can never know objective things separate from our sense-impressions, which are interpretations rather than reality.

There can be no consciousness without something to be conscious of.

There is nothing stable within the mind. There is no permanent core. Perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and emotions are simply flowing through us, but are not us. Consciousness is an activity. It’s there when it happens.

Our identity depends on the internalization of the consciousness of others. Consciousness, like all the other elements, is therefore something that extends beyond the individual and that, in some sense, flows through us like a river.

Each event of cognizing is “a consciousness.” Since perceptions come and go, so too will consciousness come and go. Each response to a perception is another consciousness. There is no enduring consciousness, no permanent watcher at the helm of our being, observing everything that happens and making decisions. There are just the multiple overlapping waves of consciousness, rising and falling, rising and falling.

Our decision-making is a post-hoc conscious labeling of activities that begin outside of awareness.

Where is the self when conscious awareness is absent?

Memories are not etched permanently in the brain. Instead, every time a memory is retrieved, it is destroyed and then re-created, and it becomes a memory of a memory. Any current memories we have are copies of copies of copies… many times over depending on how many times we have recalled that particular experience. Because of this process of creating, destroying, and re-creating memories, our recollections are unstable and subject to alteration. Each time we recall an event from our lives, the memory of that event can change. […] We never have a full recollection of anything that’s happened to us, and our memories are constructed from hints, scraps and traces found within the mind.

“We are never conscious of anything but a particular perception; man is a bundle or collection of different perceptions that succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement.” — David Hume

The underlying principle of selfhood in Buddhism: there is continuity but no identity.

I am a field of awareness in which all my experiences arise.

It’s largely our thoughts, and the emotional qualities associated with them that create our experience. […] In every moment of perception, we are able to choose between (fear and love). Fear is marked by clinging, aggression, doubt, anxiety, and denial. Love is marked by letting go, being flexible, compassionate regard, confidence, and intelligent curiosity. We have these choices in every moment of our lives.

Every time we make a choice, we play a part in forming a new version of the self, and we also remind ourselves of the self’s unfixed nature. We begin to see more and more clearly that our present experience is produced by largely unconscious patterns of thought.

There is no succession of fleetingly short selves, but instead a never-ending process of change. (No self!)

We simply let go of identifying any part of our experience as the self. Since we don’t cling to anything as being the self, we also don’t think of anything as being other than the self. […] There is simply experience, with no absolute distinction between subject and object. There is no idea “I am perceiving.” there’s no idea that there’s a separate world being perceived. There’s just experience.

Unknowing

“…washing away accumulated layers of names, memories, associations, and leaving it all unfamiliar and fresh and sweet-smelling. It is the re-discovery of the obvious as very strange, the given as wonderful and precious.”

“This unknowing has no limits. It extends beyond what we perceive to all we feel and think and do. It is ceasing to know how to cope with life, where we are going, what to do after this immediate task is done, what’s going to happen to us tomorrow, next week, next year. It is walking one step at a time and blindfolded, in the assurance that the Space here –which is nothing and knows nothing but Itself– will nevertheless come up, moment by moment, with what’s needed.”

–On Having No Head by Douglas E. Harding

Buddhism Plain and Simple by Steve Hagen

buddhism-plain-simpleExcerpts from Buddhism Plain and Simple by Steve Hagen.


When the Buddha was asked to sum up his teaching in a single word, he said, “awareness.”

The Buddha never considered himself to be something other than a human being — only someone who was fully awake. […] Buddha is not someone you pray to, or try to get something from. Nor is a buddha someone you bow down to . A buddha is simply a person who is awake — nothing more or less.

Buddhism is not a belief system. It’s not about accepting certain tenets or believing a set of claims or principles. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s about examining the world clearly and carefully about testing everything and every idea. Buddhism is about seeing. It’s about knowing rather than believing or hoping or wishing. It’s also about not being afraid to examine anything and everything, including our own personal agendas.

“Don’t believe me because you see me as your teacher,” he said. “Don’t believe me because others do. And don’t believe anything because you’ve read it in a book, either. Don’t put our faith in reports, or tradition, or hearsay, or the authority of religious leaders or texts. Don’t rely on mere logic, or inference, or appearances, or speculation.”

The point of Buddhism is to just see. That’s all. […] We cannot approach Buddhism with any assumption or belief whatsoever. […] Buddhism begins with fact. It starts with perception — direct experience. […] Truth does not need any explanation. It only needs to be seen.

Belief is at best an educated, informed conjecture about Reality. In contrast, seeing — raw, direct, unadulterated experience — is the direct perception of Reality Itself. […] Base your actions on what you see, rather than on what you think.

We can only be here. We can’t leave. We’re always here.

No solid, unchanging “good” or “bad” can be established. Good and bad aren’t absolutes. They are beliefs, judgments, ideas based on limited knowledge as well as on the inclinations of our minds.

Generally our desire, our actions, our speech, and our thoughts are geared toward bringing about some particular end by exerting control. The buddha-dharma doesn’t ask us to give up control. Instead, it acknowledges that we never had it in the first place.

“I discovered one day that what I was calling “I” cannot be found, and all fear and anxiety vanished with my mistake.”

To hold onto any particular view is to freeze Reality, to try to encapsulate the world into thought.

What you really need and want will never appear as an object to your mind.

The only way we can be free in each moment is to become what the moment is.

We can’t comprehend Reality with our intellects. Reality simply cannot be put into a conceptual form — not even through analogy. […] You can’t conceive of it, but you can perceive it.

The right intention is simply the intention to come back to this moment — to just be present with no ideas of gaining whatsoever.

Meditation is nothing other than the intention to wake up.

The mind will not be ruled. Just attend to what you’re doing. Because in attending to this moment, you’re attending to your own mind.

A buddha recognizes that anything put into speech is never completely reliable. Whatever someone says to you about another person is skewed from the start. It comes through their filter, their likes and dislikes, their education their ambition, and the leanings of their own mind.

As long as you think enlightenment is something special, you won’t wake up.

When we see Reality we are completely beyond the realm of words and concepts. We experience what words cannot express, what ideas cannot contain, what speech cannot communicate. So, in a sense, there’s nothing to say.

Our only choice of consequence lies in whether or not we’re awake.

You can’t want enlightenment like you want other things. There’s absolutely nothing to go after.

Our thoughts and mental states are just as fleeting as the sensations of our bodies. (Like feeling hot or cold. And we have no control over them)

A key point in the practice of mindfulness is never to chastise yourself.

Do right meditation even though it’s useless. Do it for no purpose.

There are two kinds of knowledge and two types of views. One consists of beliefs, opinions, conjectures — having an idea of something. It’s an intellectual grasping of concepts. This is how we commonly think of knowledge.

There is a second type of view, what the Buddha called right view. Right view is not a concept or belief. In fact, it’s no particular thing at all. Right view is simply seeing Reality as it is, here and now, moment after moment. It’s relying on bare attention — naked awareness of what is before conceptual thought arises. It’s relying on what we actually experience rather than what we think.

It’s by our very desire to find meaning that we create meaninglessness.

The Buddha, relying on direct experience alone, not only found no evidence of beginnings or endings, he could find no evidence of any separate, persisting thing (self) that could have a beginning or end.

Our belief in non-existence (death) arises only as the result of hold the notion of existence (of the self) in the first place.

The awakened may have thoughts and concepts just like anyone else. The difference is that they’re aware that what they actually see differs from what they think.

What is Real and True is immediately perceivable without any abstract thought — any concepts — whatsoever.

Seeing doesn’t require conception, language, or memory.

Ultimate Truth can’t be conceptualized or imagined. You cannot hold Ultimate Truth in your mind at all. You can see it. You just can’t hold It as an idea.

Whenever we come up with any concept at all, we simultaneously create one or more opposite concepts.

We tend not to realize the extent to which we make up what we call the world.

Trying to make a leaning mind stop leaning is just another form of leaning. […] Forget yourself. Start noticing if your mind is leaning — showing preferences, making calculations, trying to bring about, trying to push away. […] When your mind is not leaning, it’s none other than Whole Mind.

To awaken is not to hold the idea of awakening. You can’t practice waking up.

Earth Rover

My human machine is 63 years old today. Like the Mars Rover, it’s holding up very well and making all sorts of discoveries, large and small.

I’ve had to replace no hardware but downloading updates to the OS almost daily.

The biggest mystery to date is to who (whom?) or what the “I” in the previous paragraph refers. It’s clearly not the machine nor all of the data (“memories”) accumulated and stored since the inception date.

The only thing that seems certain is “I” is/am ageless.