Mysticism; Metaphysics

April 29, 2012
Metaphysics, Religion, Science, Zen
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From an ongoing discussion with a fellow I randomly met at a restaurant, who had overheard a philosophical conversation I was having with my brother:

I think that God cannot be understood rationally, through logic. Logic can only “point at” God in a completely inadequate way, such as the words “the moon” point to the actual moon, or “anger” points to an emotion of anger. If you have not experienced anger, then the word means little to you. If you were an alien and saw humans being angry at each other, then you might build some kind of logical model for the causes of anger and what it does to an organism that is in a state of anger, but you would not know anger, you would just know about it. Certain things you need to experience for them to really be meaningful.

So I think that we have made models about God, but that they are even less adequate towards understanding the experience of God than “anger” is towards understanding the experience of anger, or “the color blue” is towards understanding the experience of the color blue. Similarly, radio waves are just part of the electromagnetic spectrum. If we could “see” radio waves or X-rays, we would see some other “color” we can’t conceptualize, but we’re limited towards a scientific (model) understanding of it.

So we build models about God, yes. Where do they come from? They come from rare individuals’ actual experiences with different kinds of perception. It seems clear to me now that at key moments in history, individuals’ brains became wired a little bit differently, or something shifted, and they were able to experience directly something which is barely even hinted at by the words surrounding the experience, anymore. Were they actually experiencing God, or merely a part of themselves? Diverse traditions which spring up around these experiences differ vastly. For example, there is the Buddhist concept of “enlightenment”, where the Buddha himself was an ordinary man who, through years of meditation and asceticism achieved what is almost directly described as an altered mental state, a different brain wiring. It seems clear that Jesus also had radical change-of-consciousness experiences, as did other figures in the past. Mind-altering substances often also played a great role in inducing these states older civilizations (e.g. the Eleusinian Mysteries), when found in their natural forms, and do often achieve these states in the present. [The conservative forces (that is, the normal culture) of society deemed such experimentation, when these substances were not already part of the culture, extremely dangerous in the 60’s and reactively outlawed substances like LSD with extremely harsh penalties– not because that substance itself was particularly dangerous or physiologically harmful, but because used widely it facilitated a kind of self-transcendent experience that led to a radical social movement where individuals were questioning, casting aside the strictures of society (that is, their “programming”) and “dropping out,” with groups (see hippies) not-quite-yet beginning to redefine and build up sustainable rules for themselves, or testing rules which made mainstream culture uncomfortable.]

Books I recommend:
  1. Zen and the Brain by James Austin.
  2. Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judiasm by Douglas Rushkoff (about Judaism, but takes a human-centered viewpoint on the origins and purpose of the religion, and the definition of God).
  3. Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Williams (also freely available on the Web as a PDF; I just finished and highly recommend this one).

I also recommend seriously attempting meditation and giving it a chance, to see if there is “anything there” for you. After a very small amount of progress I can understand the greater progress that those who have devoted very great amounts of time to it. It is not something that can be explained in words, just like “blue” cannot be explained.

Ask yourself the question: “Who is the one who is living me now?” constantly, and try to focus deeply on experiencing the answer, not just through your logic, but through direct experience.

Regarding meaning, purpose, programming, et cetera: we are programmed by society around us. Prometheus Rising attempts to explain this. As human beings we have a particular “reality tunnel” as a species. This and our individual reality tunnels are what lead us to picking those things which give us meaning and purpose. Because our reality tunnel is not that much different from that of our parents, you can visualize humanity as “growing” like a giant complex plant on the planet.

Regarding what is real: the universe is empty without us, just like there is no color blue without us. Wavelengths exist (but not at all as we conceive them), but no color, no sound, no smell, no thought. Therefore every being creates these things for itself. You create the color blue by seeing. Does that make you God?

There is objective reality but it is meaningless; we create meaning. The same goes for more complicated concepts, like all ideas, or the idea of God, which is ultimately an abstract model. Does that make sense? Without humans, there is no God. We create God in our own minds, when we create the model, like we create blue.

[ Maybe “experiencing God” is experiencing the process of creation itself more directly as it exists in our own minds. ]

What is it a model of? What’s the objective reality? Keep in mind that you can think anything you want. There are a lot of ideas out there. You can imagine the earth balanced on the back of a giant sticky ten-legged frog standing on a lilly pad floating in space. Then you can imagine that the frog is invisible, or whatever you want to do in your mind. Does that make it real? The only way to know in a rational sense, is to test that model, somehow. Otherwise it’s “as good as” any religion’s model of God, but no more or less true.

Clearly people have experiences of the divine, of the infinite, of God, as real in these moments as “blue”. Does that mean they are perceiving what religion crudely depicts (for the rest of us) as God, or something else about the universe, something about its fundamental nature which we don’t ordinarily perceive? Or something about themselves? I think the religions which have sprung up around these experiences very quickly convert the actual experience into something blatantly inaccurate (and politically tainted), like a game of broken telephone. The biggest mistranslation by far occurs between the individual who had a mystical experience, and those surrounding him or her, because the experience can only vaguely be hinted at with language. Thus, the major religions of the world each tell us nothing about God besides giving us an untestable and crude model, which somehow has the people following it in its thrall, for both social reasons, and for reasons that we cannot (typically, in our society) understand because we have not had such experiences. These experiences (especially when they happen spontaneously) sometimes transform individuals who have them, in ways which make them charismatic (because surety is charismatic, and you are sure of your own experience). But again, language itself can barely touch these experiences, so the logical model constructed for transmission to others is pretty meaningless. Meta-study of the world’s religions (and all human experience, for that matter) would point us in the right direction, but again only in an “understanding wavelengths” way and not a “seeing blue” way.

Regarding free will: as I’ve said, it’s not something we can conceptualize. Free will versus determinism is like quantum mechanics versus large-scale behaviors. Everything can be modeled deterministically except at the lowest level, where the “particles” of choice seem to be unpredictable. When you think of another person deciding something, you can make a model to predict what that person will do. As accurate as your model is, you come to a point where whether the person will do something or not do something, when it’s right on the line, needs to be represented as a probability.

When you think about yourself, you are actually thinking about a model of yourself, not running your actual self. You have a model of yourself in your thoughts, and you run the model, just like you run the models of others. Clearly you end up with the same types of uncertainty as when modeling other people. So you cannot conclude that you have anything other than “free will”, which just means that you cannot know what you or your “self” will do, just as you cannot know what anyone else will do.

With respect to the universe itself, we build models of it, but we also cannot know what it will do, at the lowest level of our models (we can only resort to probabilities). Consider that our minds exist to perceive the universe and give meaning to it. (E.g., we create blue, which does not exist without us.) But we cannot fully model ourselves or each other, thus the necessary perception of having free will, regardless of whether it “really” exists or not. Does our own free will have anything to do with the apparent “free will” of the universe, the fact that we can’t pin down reality (at its lowest level) to anything other than probabilities?

I.e., in a probabilistic universe (such as one you simulated on a computer), could beings in it construct equipment to measure the deterministic behavior of its “fundamental particles”? Assuming that they could, then what would be the consequence(s) to them?

Assuming there were consequences, then it would make sense to “shield” the beings in the simulated probabilistic universe from being able to measure their own fundamental particles, by making the behavior of those particles random. (“Random” in what way? Using sampled natural data from the enclosing (e.g., “our”) universe?)

That’s something interesting to think about, for the time being.

The End of Faith

April 25, 2012
Books, Religion, Science, Zen
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The End of Faith CoverOn The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris. I wrote this in response to a discussion with my friend Keith Cascio, and some comments he had made after watching Harris’ TED talk, when I was midway through the book.

What strikes me is the absolute desperation, the deep frustration that Harris injects into his text, in trying to get his points across. He’s peered long and deep into the tortured and bloody paths of history, at the chain of effects that faith-based thinking has had on U.S. policy, and seen the sheer magnitude of the utter waste of human potential, destroyed lives, misery and retarded progress across entire cultures which pervades the world (and our own culture) as consequences of ideas coming to us from our great religions– the “how could people possible be so absolutely dumb” exasperation, outrage and empathy with the victims of this machine is apparent.

I just finished the chapter on drug policy: We spend $4 billion a year prosecuting marijuana cases (at one end of a slippery slope); 50% of all U.S. court time is tied up in drug cases. …Which might seem somewhat tangential, except when we look at the parallels– it is a sort of pervasive religious type of thinking that continues to criminalize marijuana, both from refusal to rationally look at scientific facts, and, coming from Christianity, a puritanical national obsession with “sin” and the idea that other people might be enjoying themselves somewhere inappropriately (fornicating, smoking dope, seeking “alternative” spiritual experiences, et cetera). This is (mostly) nothing new to us liberal west-coasters, though, but it’s “fun” in a perverse way to see such idiocy taken on, while simultaneously sobering: this is the state of our world, and we’re in a somewhat more enlightened part of it.

Now, your concerns [about sloppy metaphors]. I conjecture that Harris has been so long steeped in his (justified) outrage towards the illogic of the world, so frustrated by the dimness and stupidity of those around him who “do not see” and either intentionally or not cause great human suffering, that he has become a little bit “tainted” by it. He has come to use hyperbole for emotional impact, because he has made a (probably subconscious) calculation that no progress will be made if he does not beat the sheep around him over the head a little bit with talk of wolves. His deepest fears (e.g., a nuclear-armed Islamic state, which he argues will show little restraint) lend a sense of urgency to his arguments: “they must be made to be able to see; I will reach for and use sensationalized (and even iffy) metaphors in the service of my argument because it is the only way it is going to get across and have some sort of agency in the world.”

[The following is regarding a statement Harris made in his TED talk: “The distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear and consequential as any we make in science.” Keith took objection to this, arguing that the comment represented sloppy thinking because the precise point of death is in actuality not at all clear-cut.]

We draw lines everywhere: between life and death, between being a child and being an adult, between sanity and insanity. Sometimes we know the lines are artificial, but they’re based on easy measurements, and so we accept them. E.g., you become an adult legally at 18. Same with life and death. There is the reality (some state of the body) and the definition (alive or dead, according to some guidelines, which we are apparently trying to make as precise as possible, erring to the side of caution). It’s nothing new that defining death is messy. E.g., I don’t remember if I shared an article I read recently about new techniques for reviving patients in cases of drowning along with hypothermia (where cold had preserved tissue and prevented oxygen-starvation damage), something that had not previously been thought possible. New medical technologies will keep pushing back the threshold of death’s door until someday, only the brain’s health will matter.

(Also, the definition seems to imply that if you are “potentially revivable” [with complex current technology] then you are not “dead”. What if said technology couldn’t revive you? Then do we move the time of “death” backwards to some newly determined point? Is a cryogenically preserved body alive in the face of potential future technology, or dead because it can’t be revived now? Messy.)

To Harris’s imprecise statement to which you take objection, I am willing to write it off as hyperbole. At the same time, though, note that he’s not comparing a living person to a dead one, rather a healthy person. I’m having a hard time thinking of an example where the line is blurred, since presumably we would need to create a definition of “health”, and it would include criteria which unambiguously classify persons into “healthy”, and once there, they could logically not be classified as “dead”.

What if the statement were: “the distinction between day and night is about as clear and consequential as any we make in science”? Or “solid” and “liquid”? Are there cases where we’re not sure if something is one or the other? Sure. We tighten the definitions as much as we can so we can operate using logic, but in reality there are ambiguous cases along the edges, everywhere. Any scientific field is full of them (e.g., classifying animals into species, physical effects into mathematical laws which mostly describe them, etc). So I don’t see the problem with the statement, other than reliance on the fuzzy term “healthy” (which is just hard to define, but conveys a strong image, thus: rhetoric).

After completing the book, I wrote this follow-up:

There is a chapter on torture about which I’m not sure how I feel. Something feels incomplete about its conclusion, but I need to think about it more, because Harris himself warned that the chapter’s conclusions will not feel right, rather that logic demands a scientific yardstick for assessing and decreasing human suffering and in this, explicit torture in rare cases might be justified (e.g., to prevent war and dropping bombs which will with certainty kill and maim large numbers of noncombatants). I sense the empathy which led to his conclusions, and I appreciate the sharp outlines of the position he’s willing to stake, but I do not have faith that there is not a corner of the argument that he has not missed. [And note that this is not the kind of faith that Harris attacks in the book.]

The final chapter is about Eastern religious traditions (their relative value), and shows an open-minded rigorousness of thought which I appreciate.

It’s hard to quantify what people know, but I think it’s safe to say that some fraction of the public are profoundly ignorant across multiple dimensions. I think we have a particular failing with respect to the public’s knowing what science is and what it isn’t, what it’s for, etc. Like the Christian preoccupation with sin, there’s also a general deep religious fear of science, and therefore a certain way that it is cast (e.g., there’s that old anxiety that science is somehow antagonistic to beauty), so as in effect to discourage genuine inquiry and understanding in many areas– a problem in practice, probably more than in principle, of faith in its most general.

“Traits” Available

March 14, 2012
Products
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Although “Traits” was originally approved a few weeks ago, I couldn’t find it in the App Store. I was about to contact Apple (“my app is not listed” is a standard item in the support dropdown), but during the week between submission and approval I’d found a few minor issues I wanted to correct. Since I had never been able to find version 1.0 in the App Store, presumably few people (if any) managed to download it. And now… an updated version along with the requisite approval interval later, and we’re live at last, with version 1.01!

“Traits” Submitted

February 23, 2012
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I submitted my first solo iOS game, “Traits,” to Apple for approval. It’s essentially an updated version of “Tripod,” which I wrote in 2001 as a Java applet: better graphics, sound effects, and more refined gameplay and options. The touch screen really adds a lot to the game. I made sure you can select tiles simultaneously with multiple fingers.

My goal here was to write and submit something, start to finish, in about a week. I’m taking to heart a number of ideas, often expressed as aphorisms: (a) that finishing is more important than starting, (b) that the perfect is the enemy of the good, (c) that premature optimization is the root of all evil. The overarching idea is well expressed by the pottery study described in Art & Fear:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot– albeit a perfect one– to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work– and learning from their mistakes– the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

So my observation was that I should just make lots of apps. Lots of art. And by “make”, I mean “complete”. Finish each project, and put it out there to be “judged”, or “received” if we’re looking for a gentler word.

“Traits” took me a little longer than I’d planned, since I ended up adding more polish than originally intended, and I hope that shows in the product. For example, I spent a lot of time trying to get the selected/unselected tile graphics right, and tweaking the specific shades of red, green and blue used for the shapes. I’m not colorblind, but I became aware that peripherally, certain shades took a little bit longer to distinguish from each other. For example, I could have used “pure” red, green and blue color values, but pure green is much brighter than blue or red (so this didn’t look balanced); it was also harder to recognize the green shapes, since the edges had less contrast. The pure RGB color values also simply didn’t look as pleasant. However, if I adjusted any of the three colors, that put it closer to one of the other two, making it and the other a tiny bit harder to distinguish. So finally, what worked was what turned out to be roughly a slight hue rotation: you’ll notice that the red used is slightly purplish, but not enough to be called anything other than red; the green is slightly orange-ish (but definitely still green), and the blue is slightly greenish. It seems trivial, but discovering the perfect colors was a bit of a “eureka!” moment. The image here isn’t even an accurate representation of what you see on the iPhone/iPod screen, which seems to have a different color gamut. (E.g., the red looks redder and less pinkish.)

I put together a “marketing/support page” which Apple required, with more screenshots and gameplay notes.

I hope you enjoy playing the game, when it’s approved. If enough people like it, I’ll consider doing an Android port.

Meditating Selflessly: Practical Neural Zen

February 10, 2012
Books, Zen
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Book CoverThis book examines, from a scientific point of view, the neural mechanisms which support attention and the sense of self, and how meditation harnesses those mechanisms to change the brain, slowly, over time. What I learned fills in a piece of a puzzle I’ve been working on, lately, and I’m still refining my understanding of how all the pieces fit. The book starts with the idea that we have two ways of focusing on things, in general; these correspond to different styles of meditation, or two “schools” in the Zen tradition:

(1) “Top-down”: We pick something to focus on, like a small object or spot, and can put varying degrees of attentiveness towards that spot. One style of Zen meditation involves training that focusing-in ability. The book looks at what structures in the brain are responsible for focus and which allow us to move our focus around, at will; to willfully narrow focus on something we select. This top-down kind of meditation is one in which that focus-muscle is exercised by holding focus on a chosen spot (or even something non-physical, like an idea or concept) for long periods of time.

In my own words, I observe something interesting happen when I do this: The more intently I focus on one thing, the more the background fades out. Those “word thoughts” which happen all the time start to come up as usual, but then are quickly washed away by the flood of my attention towards this one thing. For example, I was looking out the picture-window in the living room, focusing on the top of a tree. I looked at its shape, its color, its form. I didn’t consider any particular aspect of it, just made the top of that tree the spot I was focusing on attentively. I noticed how my thoughts stopped being able to bubble up, how that tree became all-consuming to my mind and almost completely blocked out other thoughts. After some amount of time had passed, I began to feel very comfortable, and I believe this is because my mind had let go of any negative emotions or discomforts related to a typical smorgasbord of thoughts, which had been percolating subconsciously. By placing my focus onto the top of this tree, after a while I had let go of most everything except… the top of the tree.

I noticed that for some time after this, and after having exercised my focus-ability similarly for just a short duration (less than 15 minutes) the day before, I was able to be much more present to the people around me. I could apply my focus to a person’s face, while listening to them, if I chose. I observe in general that other people seem almost pleasantly surprised, and may think very kindly towards, someone who pays them such full attention. Others are usually not used to this kind of non-mind-wandering attentiveness towards them and on what they are communicating. Further, although admittedly this could have all been “in my head”, I felt a subtle mental “tiredness” after practicing focus in this way the first few times, as if my ability to do so had been so weak that these short practices had strained (and strengthened) it.

(2) The other “school” of meditative training in Zen, which is initially a harder path, relates to “bottom-up” focus. This is the background awareness which causes us to turn involuntarily towards a noise, or towards something that moves in our otherwise-still visual field. Or to simply “notice” something in our peripheral vision. What part is paying attention to the larger visual field, and understanding what is happening in it? It is some part of us that is subconsciously aware. And further, beyond mere visual changes that we notice, some part of the mind is actively processing, in parallel, the entire scene. It is subconsciously drawing inferences and creating insights, each of which might call our attention and awareness in a given direction. Because the part of the brain which does this processing and associating is not dominant (our symbolic, language-processing half is dominant, as well as our Self-related, “I am here” -type of thinking, and connected with those the explicit “sharp” attention which we can consciously direct), we are generally cut off from these wordless insights (about what is happening around us; about what might be worth turning to look at) without becoming ever aware of them. Or else, the insights are stored, but generally don’t bubble up into conscious awareness. (Something may even call our attention in a given direction, but we may not yet “know” why.) A bottom-up meditative style means casting focus on the whole picture, and being receptive to what that massively more parallel kind of awareness is ascertaining. We’re used to that awareness “firing” (triggering us to look at something), but we don’t spend time strengthening that awareness of “everything” or being “in” it. It’s hard to learn how to “look at everything all at once” explicitly, let alone remain in that state for an appreciable period of time, but this is what the bottom-up style of training requires.

An eventual goal of meditative training, or perhaps a side-effect, or a marker of progress along the path, is the achievement of a momentary state of consciousness where attention itself becomes so saturated with insight and input and meaning that awareness relating back to the ego-based Self– to the idea that “I” am here– drops out completely, leaving a direct and vivid awareness of the world, in the “language” of the non-dominant parts of the mind we don’t get to experience by themselves. In Zen, this is called “kensho” or “satori”, although the two mean slightly different things. These states are usually not encountered during meditation itself; meditation merely is the “weight-training” that strengthens the mind’s attentional systems so that they can be more present to the world around us, to the present moment, and not stuck in cycles of thought; these peak experiences are usually triggered by natural scenes of beauty and sublimity, and are very rare.

The book describes the rough neurological basis for how the two attention systems work. It talks about neuroplasticity and how meditative training actually alters the structure of the brain, so that practice is accumulative over a lifetime. It emphasizes that although there are different schools of Zen, those that emphasize top-down attention; and those that emphasize bottom-up attention, that a balanced approach, training both methods of focus, is most productive. The everyday benefits of meditative practice are a decreased Self-centered-ness, and consequently a greater awareness of what one is doing, what one is casting attention towards and engaging in, with less fear, worry, et cetera, and more confidence stemming from greater understanding of reality. Learned tasks which should remain on autopilot can more easily remain such, allowing us to appreciate what is actually around us. (As in: “I will let me body take care of this, and I will watch and appreciate what it is doing.”) By focusing what comes into our awareness, then, we become more interested in others and in the world itself than on how the world relates directly back to the ego-based Self, and on our momentary thoughts (especially those we unnecessarily put into words, mentally) which give us little insight. In general by being able to examine our own thoughts we can recognize that the “I” is something separate from the thought: we are not our thoughts. What is doing the thinking? Why does this thought cause this emotion? What is experiencing the emotion? Oftentimes the cause of the emotion is Self-centered; it is then possible to objectively decide that some attachment which generally leads to that emotion is not useful, and because we have increasing power over what we decide to pay attention to, it’s possible to let the thoughts which bring about negative feelings dissolve, or be understood within a sandbox that allows us to not have to suffer and be servants to them. Rather than “detachment” from life (it’s difficulties and joys), meditative training allows us to be far more involved, far more intimate with it– but in an examined, intentional, increasingly wise and aware way– rather than a blind, uncontrolled, unengaged or absent way, or where one is present mainly just to one’s own Self-related thoughts, or thoughts that come from the ego. Detachment does not mean disengagement– on the contrary, it allows deeper, wiser, more productive and satisfying engagement.

“Zen” has many meanings; at its most basic, it’s simply a form of meditation (that’s what the word literally means), but I believe there’s a popular misconception about what meditation is. I used to think it was just mental relaxation. Or visualization, which the aim of relaxation. I didn’t expect to get much out of it, and I already felt like a pretty calm, relaxed person. That was before taking a basic meditation class, where I realized that the calm one feels in an ordinary mindset (with thoughts wandering, even if one doesn’t feel like these are emotionally-heavy ruminations) does not compare to the magical “empty, clear and light” state which descends during basic meditation. Even that takes patience and self-discipline. What this book argues, though, is that meditation is much more than even that (a temporary mental state, which may leave one feeling refreshed or renewed). It is rather a sort of weight-training regimen for the attentional systems of the mind, which trains both the narrow and the wide systems, and which influences detectable changes in the physical brain as long-term practice proceeds. Further, because meditative training also trains the habit systems which control how we re-focus and re-adjust our attention, it brings us the ability to tune ourselves (largely our reactions, regarding which we were less consciously aware) voluntarily to be in greater accordance with our values. This in turn accelerates a general lessening of fear and an increase in confidence in all areas of life.

Welcome Back

February 5, 2012
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Although I’ve let this blog and my site itself languish for a long time, I think it would be nice to have a place where I can post and collect my thoughts, which is not Facebook or Google+.

I deleted this blog a while back because the version of WordPress I had running probably was susceptible to a hack which was allowing a bot of some kind to inject malicious code into PHP files on this site; also, I wasn’t using it. Further, the majority of my old entries seem somewhat silly to me now. So I didn’t see value in tracking down the WordPress problem, felt it was simply time to move on, and deleted the site.

On the other hand, there’s value to us in seeing “where we’ve come from”. So as painful as some of these posts are, that’s just what I was thinking at the time, and for the most part, I will let them be.

The War of Art

December 31, 2011
Art, Books, Process, Reflection
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Cover PhotoThe solution to writer’s block? Lower your standards. I read that on the Web somewhere, and followed a series of links to a particular book on productivity at Amazon. The reviews for that book were lauding this one, by the same author, saying it should be read first. I was intrigued and ordered The War of Art.

It was a fast read; I completed it in a couple days. Very poetically written and rang true. A book about the nature of art, and about the nature of the mind when that mind’s owner desires to create art: To write a book; to undertake any endeavor which represents an expenditure of creative energy.

The author, Steven Pressfield, claims that the most important thing to overcome is one’s own internal resistance. And that this is a natural feeling, a reaction of the mind when confronted with something that is difficult for it. It is the self-doubt, the nagging thought that “maybe I should be doing something different”, the desire for procrastination.

The book opens with a powerful example. Hitler himself went to art school, but he didn’t / couldn’t paint because he experienced resistance towards it. Maybe he thought he had nothing to paint. Maybe he saw himself as a failure as a painter, and could not envision a future in which he was respected for the craft. And so he turned to politics instead.

As I write this, I am experiencing resistance. I just woke up; I’m a little sleep deprived; my mind is cloudy. “Go get some breakfast, first!” my mind says. “You’ll be able to write this much more effectively later.” There may be truth in that. But if I stop now, then who’s to say I’ll come back and finish this later? This essay may turn out like almost everything else I’ve had the initial impulse to write: I “never got around to” finishing it, or “never had the time”, or some such. So I lower my standards and push on.

The War of Art (I have to think of “The Art of War” and flip the words, every time I want to state the book’s name) calls out this internal resistance, defines it. Why is art so difficult? Why do we become “stuck”? Why do we give up on those creative endeavors, in the name of something practical? The answer is simple but nuanced.

Pressfield describes an internal conflict between the “self” and the “I”. The former is the entire mind, that which strives for something greater, something more divine, artistic, self-realized. More animalistic. More “real”. The latter is the ego, the experience of the self, which is concerned with the practical, with keeping the mind in check, with making us self-conscious and concerned for our physical safety and basic needs, among other things. The ego makes us doubt. “Is this the best thing for me? Is this the best way to be spending my time?” Ego says: The best way to spend my day is not to waste time doing something “artistic” (writing, dancing, composing, painting…) but rather to get a well-paying job, to fit in with society’s ideals, to contribute to society, to be safe, secure and successful (but by others’ standards). To be respected. Perhaps an artistic pursuit can lead to that kind of success. “But it is unlikely to be able to sustain me”, the ego says. “Earn money first, then pursue your art as a hobby; it’s unlikely you can become successful as a _____”.

What is a hobby? What distinguishes a professional from an amateur? Pressfield writes about this. The mark of a professional is that he has a craft. He doesn’t need to love it; that is irrelevant. What matters is that it is his craft, what he defines himself by. Arnold Schwarzenegger may not love working out; that is irrelevant to him. But he still (let’s rewind time quite a bit) clocks in his time at the gym. When he’s feeling down (the book had a better word, here), he deals with it by going to the gym. If he doesn’t feel like working out on a given day, he works out anyway. I’m losing this train of thought.

I continue to experience resistance as I write this. My writing is choppy; I’m having trouble finding the words to express myself. Yet, I push on. Let this be a draft. Then I’ll revise it, polish it a bit more. But let me not sit here and be stuck, feeling like I don’t know the words to write next, or give up in the middle.

Creativity is a different part of the self, which we need to invite in if we wish to let her use us to produce art. We need to give this internal muse free reign to use us, to not suppress her. Perhaps my muse is foggy, now? But that’s okay, I don’t mind if what she produces isn’t particularly polished. I still value the output. I’m not going to say, “not now, maybe later…” to her because she might not come back, later.

There will always be something that is hard to do, for which you experience resistance. You want to do it, but something inside says “not now…” This happens all through life. It applies to dating… if you’re in a coffee shop and see a cute girl, you’re probably not going to talk to her. “She probably has a boyfriend…” or “she’s probably not interested in me…” or “I don’t have time…” Your mind (the “I”) invents a million excuses. Reverse the genders, of course, if that works better for you. The self feels the pull of something greater and urges you to talk to her. But the mind usually wins. (This example did not come from the book, but it is very illustrative.) I should also point out that the ego has a stake in talking with this theoretical girl, too, and to talk to her for reasons of satisfying the ego would not result in satisfying something of the self. (Or perhaps there are darker aspects of the self?) And yet, this is another trick the ego plays. It makes us consider itself, the ego, as a line of defense. The ego says: “Don’t do this, because if you did, you’d just be feeding your own ego…” That is a trap, and giving in to it feeds the ego.

Do those things which are hard. Which your mind rebels at. That is The War of Art. An internal war, between two opposing concerns. Between the mundane and practical, and the artistic and divine.

And now, I have to polish this up. But first, I’m going to have breakfast.

Wait! I’m not. There is more that I want to say. There are nagging thoughts in my mind, and I want to give them a chance to be expressed. Yet a part of me actively suppresses those. “You should get your day started, already!”. Wait. Not yet.

Another mark of the professional is that he shows up for work, day in and day out. Whether he feels like it or not. When art is your work, you have to do it even when you don’t feel like it. Those difficult times are when you truly battle your resistance. Then that resistance starts to melt away.

But when something becomes easy, there is probably little growth left in it. Art is the struggle. If the struggle doesn’t exist, then the art will become routine, will not advance. Others may like it; you have have developed “your style”, but you will not be working at the level of your potential. You can always improve, but you will feel resistance to improving. Your ego wants you to stay comfortable.

So the exercise of identifying things which are “hard”, for which we experience the greatest psychological resistance, is important. Think of those things which are difficult for you to do, over which you are drawn to procrastinate the most, and among those things are those which are most important to do, for your growth. I was thinking of a silly example of this in relation to my desk. Why? It’s too much work to clean it up, to file everything away, to figure out where all these little bits and pieces go. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a clean desk surface? Yes… But I experience resistance towards even starting, and clutter remains. “There are other, more important things to do…” And so this one never gets done. Prioritize the things you most want to procrastinate over. Get over that resistance. Then your mind will be free. Free to experience and conquer resistance over greater challenges.

What would happen if I kept writing? What if I wrote all day? I’d probably “become” a writer. I also probably wouldn’t be paid for it. Or perhaps I would, eventually. But those thoughts are irrelevant towards the task of writing, itself. I do it because I want to do it, not because it has some practical value (despite the fact that the my ego chimes in every once in a while and proposes a practical value; that doesn’t matter, though).

I had a very rudimentary form of this idea back in college. I thought about the way that I wrote, how I would constantly re-read everything I’d written so far in trying to figure out the best way to attach the next sentence and retain the “polished jewel” which existed thus far. I would write as if I had no way of changing a sentence after finishing it (beyond correcting the most rudimentary of errors in a proofread), and I would get stuck, reading and re-reading, waiting for inspiration to come, for an idea. What should I say next? Sometimes I’d have to get up and pace around the room, trying to think of some idea. Especially when writing an academic essay. We all talked about “b.s.” as a running joke; how it was a skill. How being a good “b.s.-er” was invaluable in college. What is the hallmark of a good b.s.-er? Does not get stuck. Is able to spew forth streams of thought/writing which make no sense, which seem logical on the surface until someone reads a little more into them and realizes that there is nothing worthwhile, that it is random babbling that gives an impression of having communicated something worthwhile. Perfect for test graders who would rather be doing something else. But within the bullshit, perhaps there are seeds of ideas. And it’s something you produced. It’s a start. Better to start from somewhere, then trim it down. Make your block of stone first, then carve off the unwanted pieces until you have a sculpture.

Anyway, my thought was, that there’s another way to write. To write without pause, almost as a stream of consciousness. To write fast, without over-thinking. Letting the thinking take place in the text. Writing as if style doesn’t matter, using one’s natural style. Letting the muse do her work, even though she may be extremely rusty. Even for a highly polished piece, a one-page essay, why not babble on for 20 pages, capturing every last nuance of thought, and then trim it down? Or write it out all over again, after gathering the key ideas out of the longer piece? Writing then becomes a process. It disengages the ego, the constant self-checking, the high standards which block progress. There is no resistance, because the bar has been lowered. The solution to writer’s block was to lower the standards, to think, I’m just going to write whatever comes to mind. To not self-analyze or think about the way it is being expressed; simply to express it in the way that it comes. Or to express something, if nothing comes. Just write. To try and center thoughts around the desired topic, but then even write down those mundane thoughts which don’t seem to be related. Because perhaps they are. Or perhaps they are not. But staring at the wall blankly, waiting for a thought to come, is probably the least effective way of inviting thoughts in. Lower your standards.

You can always revise. But you can’t get back time lost to paralysis.