Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on September 13, 2013| 1 Comment »
I saw this on the wall of a little village house down at the end of a long track to the East of Marseille. I love it. I’m going to adopt it as my motto.
Roughly translated it means, “slowly, gently in the morning, not too fast in the evening”
I’m a great fan of the slow movement – the idea that we should take our time to be present, to savour the details of our lived experience, and to be fully open to the wonder of the every day.
I think this saying captures all that for me.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on August 10, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Look at this wonderful cluster of seeds with the sun shining through…..simply bursting with potential…..this is me, today. This is you, today…..
simply bursting with potential
Which seeds will you water?
Reminds me of Thich Nhat Hahn’s teaching on watering the seeds…..
If you live in a couple, if you live in a family, if you live with another person or several persons, you may ask them to be careful. You may ask them to be aware of the seeds you have in your store consciousness. “Darling, I know that I have these negative seeds in me. And every time these seeds manifest, I make myself suffer and I make you suffer, also. So, please, if you love me, if you care for me, be careful not to water these seeds in me.” Among lovers, there should be such an agreement. That is the practice. “Darling, if you really love me, water the positive seeds in me, because I do have the seeds of understanding, of compassion, of forgiveness, of joy in me. Even if they are still small, if you know how to touch them in me every day, I become a much happier person and when I am happy, you don’t have to suffer as much.”
Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, philosophy on August 3, 2013| 1 Comment »
I came across this the other day –
The Atheist Credo
I believe in one method
of data, hypothesis, and experiment
which was conceived by ancient Greek thinkers,
born in the Age of Enlightenment,
suffered under superstition
is struggling under religion
is bound to make people’s lives better
and will one day bring about a perfect world.
I found it on the blog of a neuroscientist called Kathleen Taylor, having read about her in a French magazine article.
My first reaction was what?!
“data, hypothesis, and experiment” ………. “will one day bring about a perfect world”
Really?
It’s niggled away at me since. Here’s my problem. Well, two problems actually. I’ll start with the last one first. What’s a perfect world? I wonder what the author imagines a “perfect world” would look like?
Do you have an idea what a perfect world would be like?
Do you have an idea of how to bring that about?
But before we get to that closing sentence, its the earlier statement that really worries me. Right from the outset.
“I believe in one method”
OK this “one” anything always worries me. It worried me when Mrs Thatcher said “there is no alternative” (“TINA”). It worried me because it made me think of totalitarian regimes, from Stalin to who knows who else? It made me think of fundamentalists – theists, as well as atheists. Nature loves diversity. The “one method” stance strikes me as being about power over others.
It brought back to mind Deleuze and his “three ways of thinking” – science is thinking about function, philosophy is thinking about concepts and art is thinking about percepts and affects. (I know I’m way over-simplifying what he said here, but that’s the gist of it as far as I’m aware). And that quickly led me onto to that second line – “data, hypothesis and experiment” – she means, of course, “the scientific method” – as interpreted by modern day materialists. And again, I find myself thinking “Really? Is she having a laugh? Is this tongue in cheek?” …… maybe it is. But I suspect there are people who would resonate with this all the same.
So what about music, and painting, and poetry, and novels, and the theatre, and love, and laughter, and passion, and relationships? We can make those perfect through this one method too? This one method is enough to create a perfect world full of love, laughter and flourishing?
What do you think?
Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, philosophy, science on July 19, 2013| 1 Comment »
There’s an old Scottish phrase, “A hae ma doots”, which roughly translates as “I have my doubts”. We use it when we don’t agree with another person’s view, but we think there might be something in what they say. Fundamentally, it’s the essential Scottish expression of skepticism.
I haven’t been very impressed with the modern version of skepticism which seems to have evolved from something people refer to as “scientific scepticism”. There are a number of “skeptics” societies around in the UK, and one of their main activities has been to organise attacks on homeopathy and “alternative medicines”. What’s always struck me about the pronouncements and activities of these groups is their utter conviction, their complete, unflinching sense of the rightness of their own opinions, and their often contemptuous dismissal of the opinions or beliefs of others. In fact, it seems that the only thing they are really skeptical about is any view they don’t agree with. When it comes to doubting their own conclusions, their skepticism flies out the window.
Scientific scepticism (you’ll see I use the two spellings interchangeably), has a distinct characteristic. In some ways, its the attitude of “doubting Thomas”…..”I’ll only believe what I can see with my own eyes”. There seems to be some core to scientific scepticism which is materialistic. Objective, measurable data is what counts for the scientific sceptic, and they are likely to dismiss, or at least to be sceptical of, any perspective, view or opinion which isn’t based on a physical reality.
Not all scientific scepticism can be reduced to materialism of course. There’s a scepticism which is intertwined with humility and curiosity. Humble, curious scepticism is based on believing that we can never know everything about anything. There will always be something new to discover, some further research, or exploration which will deepen or even radically change our understanding. Modern physics, it seems to me, is even sceptical about the physical basis of the universe (at least in the sense that the universe can be understood to be made of “things” which exist independently of each other)
It’s this latter kind of skepticism which we find in the writings of Montaigne. His essays are peppered with phrases like “peut-être”, “je crois”, “ce me semble”, and even “encore ne sais-je” (“perhaps”, “I believe”, “it seems to me” and “again I don’t know”).
I am very attracted to this kind of healthy skepticism. It’s about keeping an open mind; remaining curious; desiring to hear, and being respectful of, the views of others.
So when modern day “skeptics” campaign on the basis of their convictions, I have to say that “A hae ma doots” about their claim to be skeptics! But then, what do I know?
Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, philosophy, science on July 15, 2013| 4 Comments »
Howard Bloom, in his excellent, “The God Problem” [ISBN 161614551X] starts by highlighting what he calls “five heresies”, or “five tools” which we can use to try and understand how our universe of everything was created, apparently, from nothing. I think they are all useful. Here they are –
1. A does not equal A
This is a challenge to dominant Aristotlean logic. Aristotle couldn’t accept Heraclitus’ view that you can’t step in the same river twice. He wanted to nail reality down by reducing it to a simple logic of A = A. Trouble is, the universe is a dynamic, evolving universe, so nothing stays the same. Even once you’ve named something, that something has already changed since you named it. This is what I was referring to when I wrote “waves not things“.
2. One plus one does not equal two. Here, he is referring to the fact that complex systems cannot be explained by simply adding up their parts. When a vast number of components join together, they begin to exhibit behaviours which could never have been predicted by any of the parts themselves. This is the main reason I refuse reductionism. To reduce a human, is to deal with something subhuman. A whole human being cannot be understood by adding together his or her bits!
3. “The second law of thermodynamics, that all things tend toward disorder, that all things tend toward entropy, is wrong” Just consider how a human being grows from a single cell, and continues to develop ever greater order and complexity as it matures. Or consider what’s happened from the perspective of the universe story – where the universe hasn’t demonstrated a path towards ever greater disorder, but rather to ever greater complexity and order.
4. “The concept of randomness is a mistake”. The popular view that we live in a totally random universe is not supported by what we know about the universe. The Big Bang did not create a billion DIFFERENT elements. Our entire physical universe is made of the elements we’ve laid out on our Periodic Table – a surprisingly small number of elements for a totally random process! It’s not totally random, of course, chaos has been seriously misunderstood. There are underlying patterns influencing the creation of the details – from galaxies, to worlds, to human beings. The underlying pattern is not total randomness.
5. “Information theory is not really about information”….instead “meaning….which believe it or not is not covered by information theory….is central to the cosmos. Central to quarks, protons, photons, galaxies, stars, lizards, lobsters, puppies, bees and human beings”
Bloom concludes
The bottom line? Sociality. This is a profoundly social cosmos. A profoundly conversational cosmos. In a social cosmos, a talking cosmos, a muttering, whispering, singing, wooing, and order-shouting cosmos, relationships count. Things can’t exist without each other.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on July 10, 2013| 3 Comments »
Isn’t it amazing how being human involves unrelenting, constant change? My body feels like my body. It’s always felt like my body. But there isn’t a single cell in this body today which was here when I was a child. In fact all of the cells which make up this body are continuously being renewed. Some die off, others are born. So what is this “me”? And, at this point, I just mean my physical being. Goodness knows how you pin down the subjective “self” that is me! I create that every moment of every day.
With all this constant change, how come I retain a consistent identity?
I certainly don’t feel I am a “thing”……I’m not even sure what a “thing” is! What I mean is I am not an object. I cannot be reduced to my “substance”, my cells, my molecules, my DNA even. The totality of me is more than that, and the totality of me, right here, right now, had never existed before, and won’t exist exactly like this by the time you read this.
I think I’m a wave.
What I mean is I am more like a wave, than an object.
Have you ever stopped to think about what a wave is? You can spot a wave far out from the shore and follow it as it heads towards the rocks or the sand, but that wave is not an “it”. The water particles which make up the wave stay pretty much where they are. As the wave passes through the water, the particles just move up and down in a circular motion. They don’t actually head together towards the shore.
As you follow a wave, you are watching an energy complex consistently recruit particles into a distinctive pattern or forwards but it doesn’t bind those particles into an entity. It picks them up and drops them, moving its shape through the water……
Here’s a couple of quotes from other authors about waves.
The truth is that life is not material and that the life stream is not a substance.
Luther Burbank
You are a wave. Every minute you say goodbye to more than a billion combinations of post synaptic receptors in your brain and replace them with new ones. You do the same with the cells that line your digestive tract and make up your skin. And you constantly shift your mind from one obsession to another. Yet you retain an identity. Something more puzzling than mere substance continues to impose the shifting flicker of a you…..Your identity is a pattern holding sway over a hundred trillion cells that change constantly…….Your self is a dance that uses matter to whisk from the invisible and the impossible into the gasses, dusts, and jellies of reality.
Howard Bloom
Posted in from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, philosophy on June 6, 2013| 3 Comments »
Montaigne was pretty critical of doctors and the practice of Medicine. You probably think that’s hardly surprising given he lived in the 16th century and wasn’t Medicine a pretty dangerous practice in those days, with harms frequently outweighing benefits. Maybe that’s all changed since those days? With the technological advances of the 20th century doctors have a range of interventions they can use now where the benefits outweigh the harms (for some of the people, some of the time). And at least we don’t bleed and purge patients to death any more, do we?
OK, let me reflect on the current benefits outweighing the harms argument. Let’s deal with harms first of all, because in some ways they are more straightforward. Here’s a couple of interesting facts. Medical interventions are the third most common cause of death in the US. Numbers of deaths decreased when Israeli doctors went on strike. So, there is still plenty of potential for doctors to harm you.
What about benefits? Many infections which previously could overwhelm and even kill patients can now be successfully treated with antibiotics (although we are never far away from predictions that our fifty or so years of success in that area are coming to an end as bacteria adapt, develop resistance to the drugs, and spread that newly acquired ability far and wide). In Surgery there have been enormous improvements. I’ve talked to two patients this week who recently underwent cholecystectomy (removal of the gall bladder) using four small cuts in their abdomens, an extremely short hospital stay and very rapid, complete recovery. Cholecystectomies weren’t like that when I was a young doctor. People having a heart attack who have a clot in a major artery can have it quickly dissolved, or a stent inserted to break through the blockage within hours now. Montaigne’s last two years of life were spent bed ridden, in pain, from kidney stones. You wouldn’t believe how easily that can be dealt with nowadays. I could go on. I’m sure you can add your own examples from your own experience.
But.
There’s a problem. And I don’t mean the harms problem. The problem is that interventions, especially drugs, but surgical ones too, don’t result in the same benefits for everyone who receives them. Roses, of GlaxoSmithKleine, famously gave the game away when pushing the case for pharmacogenomics. He said – We all know that most drugs (90%) don’t work for most patients most of the time (less than 30 – 50%). Why did that statement seem so shocking? Don’t we all know that? Why have all pharmacies got shelves full of drugs which all claim to do the same thing? Whether they are pain relievers, treatments for cold symptoms, allergies, or tummy upsets? Every prescribing doctor will tell you they are glad they have a number of drugs to choose from because no single drug gets the results every time it is prescribed (this is true of EVERY drug, from painkillers, to blood pressure pills, to treatments for asthma, heart failure, epilepsy…..you name it). And here’s where the next aspect of the problem arises. It’s a version of if you give a man a hammer everything will look like a nail. There are drugs and surgical procedures which effectively alter diseases, directly changing the characteristics or behaviours of dysfunctional tissues or organs. (These interventions are often claimed as cures, but I think doctors should retain a little humility here – there are no cures other than through the human being’s capacity to self-heal and self-repair. Treating diseases can increase the chances that self-healing will work, but no drugs or operations directly stimulate or support self-healing.) But what happens when all the drugs tried don’t work? Often one or a number of them are continued, in reality because the doctor doesn’t have anything else to offer. But continuing a drug which is not working tips the balance between benefits and harms enormously. The longer most drugs are taken, the greater the risk of harm. Almost worse than this is that this form of Medicine is used completely inappropriately. Many, many drugs are not prescribed to cure, to heal, or even to control a disease. Instead they are prescribed to reduce symptoms. Reducing symptoms can reduce suffering and whilst we can be supportive of that, it can inhibit dealing with the causes of the symptoms. However, Palliative care in terminal illness can seriously reduce suffering completely appropriately. But when the cause of the suffering is not addressed, and is ongoing, then a symptom reduction strategy leads to the same problem as the ineffective drug one – the balance tips from benefit to harm.
So Montaigne’s experience and views are still relevant over four hundred years on. Dealing with doctors can be a dangerous experience, and giving them power over you is still not a great idea. I’m of the opinion that the less you have to deal with doctors, the better your life!
When I read some of Montaigne’s comments about doctors, one thing he said which particularly struck me was why don’t doctors have much better health than other people, given they claim specialised knowledge and skills in health?
So, I did some research to see if it was still true that doctors’ health and illness knowledge brings no advantages over others. It’s not entirely true. The famous phenomenon of doctors as an occupational group giving up smoking on reading of Richard Doll’s epidemiological work has resulted in doctors having less smoking-induced illnesses than others. However I can find no evidence that doctors live significantly longer than other people (of similar wealth, race and sex). Nor can I find any evidence that doctors are less likely to suffer from diseases over all.
Looks like Montaigne is right again – if doctors are the experts in health, how come they don’t have healthier, longer lives?
Posted in from the dark room, personal growth, philosophy, photography on May 29, 2013| 2 Comments »
The tower was the only part of Montaigne’s chateau to survive fire. On the ground floor is a beautiful and simple little chapel, with a blue ceiling studded with stars. Upstairs is his library where he wrote his essays, a lovely, simple room which was furnished with a large curved bookcase (sadly, long since gone)
I loved this visit. What an amazing thing that one man could sit here almost 500 years ago and try to get to know himself through writing, and still we read him and can be astonished at how relevant his thoughts are to us now.
I bought a little book in a bookshop in Agen, “Un été avec Montaigne”, which captured some of his key thoughts as “take time to live (preceding the “slow movement” by centuries), follow nature, enjoy the present moment, and don’t rush into anything”
Come and visit his place now….
Posted in creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on March 25, 2013| 4 Comments »
It’s common for us to experience loss, break down, destruction and disintegration.
In the middle of it, it can become hard to see the wood for the trees, and it can feel like this falling apart is not just inevitable but permanent.
As the leaves fall from the trees in the autumn, the bare branches of the winter woodland give the appearance of life being over for those trees.
Human beings know they don’t live forever, and although some have a belief in reincarnation, or lives of different forms from this life, nobody expects they are not going to experience loss, degeneration and death.
If the course of Life could be summarised as destruction and decline, then what kind of Life would that be? Is that really what we believe? That the direction of Life, the direction of the Universe even, is towards destruction and disintegration? Having begun with a Big Bang, are we heading for the final whimper (as T S Eliot wrote?)
But look again at the photo above. What do you see? Death and destruction? Loss and endings? Life and growth? Change and diversity?
The old mechanical, materialist view of the world teaches the idea that we try hard to resist destruction. “Entropy” is the term used to describe the inevitable run down of a system. But this view is more relevant to machines (which are “closed” systems), than it is to Nature (which is full of interconnected “open” systems).
Prigogine coined the term “dissipative structures” to better describe the reality of Nature and living organisms. He found that complex adaptive systems used dissipation to renew themselves, and in this renewal they grew, developed and adapted to changes in their environment. Indeed, Varela and others coined the term “autopoiesis” (self-making capacity) to describe the essential characteristic of a living system.
All living systems, ourselves included, are continuously breaking down existing structures and elements in order to create ourselves anew – in order to not just adapt, but to flourish. Not a single cell in our bodies lives as long as we live. In fact cells live between a few days and few months on average. It’s not the material, or the “stuff” of which we are made which makes us who we are. In that sense, we are much more like a river than we are like a machine.
I find this idea thrilling. Partly because I work every day with people who are experiencing loss and breakdown, people whose lives are falling apart. When a loved one dies, when your relationship or your job ends, when disease appears suddenly, or slowly in your life, it can all become quite overwhelming and it can be hard to see how any good can come of this experience. But here’s the key point, such continual change, such cycles of breaking down and destruction are not just inevitable but they are a necessary part of growth and renewal. These special times are times of renewal.
Spring time (not quite managing to appear yet here in the UK) is a good time to reflect on this. I’ve mentioned before how the Japanese celebrate transience through the cherry blossom festivals.
Renewal occurs through adaptation. As our lives change, if we take the time to become more aware, and we learn not to cling to current forms, we can see that in the midst of dissipation we discover the vast potential for creativity and growth. Just think of the universe story for a moment. Is it one of era after era of decline and destruction? No. It’s one of ever increasing diversity and complexity. It’s a story of cycles of joining together, breaking apart and forming new connections. It’s a story reflected in every single living being. Here’s the miraculous truth. The universe is not a closed machine heading day by day towards destruction. It’s a vast interconnected web of open systems producing the most elaborate, most complex and most amazing phenomena day after day after day.
Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, perception, philosophy, science on March 6, 2013| 4 Comments »
Margaret Wheatley works in the area of leadership and organisational change from the perspective of what we can learn from living reality. She has the complex adaptive systems concept at the core of her work. I recently stumbled across her writings, particularly her four “principles of living systems”. Here they are –
The first principle relates to the reality that everyone, every thing, every aspect of our world, our universe, exists inextricably embedded in the contexts of its existence. A living organism is an “open system”, with information and energy constantly flowing into and out of it. A living system is dynamic and perpetually changing and “co-evolving” with the other elements of the ecosystem in which it lives. You can’t change a part of a person without producing changes in the rest of that person, and you can’t change a person without setting off a cascade of unpredictable changes in the world in which that person lives (and vice versa – you can’t change something in someone’s world without setting off changes in that person). Participation is not a choice, it’s an inevitability.
The second principle is the core of adaptation. Every individual is unique and cannot be controlled like a robot or a machine. You can force people to behave a certain way for a period of time, but ultimately all the organisations and political systems based on force collapse. You can’t force the sun to shine, the wind to blow, the rain to fall, or Life to obey your commands.
The third principle is something we often forget. Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary, highlights how the left cerebral hemisphere is particularly well developed to “re-create” reality. It creates “re-presentations” of the raw information and energy which flows into the person. These representations allow us to make sense of the world and to literally to grasp things better. It’s a fantastic development and is probably at the core of our industrial and technological development as a species. We also know now that the part of the brain just behind the forehead, the mid-prefrontal cortex, has many, many functions, but amongst them is a map-making facility. It’s crucially involved in creating, what Dan Siegel calls, “a me map, a you map and a we map”. We never know any of this reality directly. Rather we constantly create our perceptions and our understandings, influencing those creations with our memories, our hopes, our beliefs, our values and our desires.
The final principle is Margaret Wheatley’s way of talking about integration. When a system is well integrated there are healthy, mutually beneficial relationships between all the connected parts. That produces coherence and harmony. It’s the basis of health.
When I first created this blog, I wrote a permanent page on “ACE” – “Adaptation, Creativity and Engagement“. It was really interesting for me, therefore, to discover this quote from Margaret Wheatley (which I believe, essentially highlights the same characteristics)
Over many years of work all over the world, I’ve learned that if we organize in the same way that the rest of life does, we develop the skills we need: we become resilient, adaptive, aware, and creative. We enjoy working together. And life’s processes work everywhere, no matter the culture, group, or person, because these are basic dynamics shared by all living beings
Heroes Not Zombies 