Former Bundesbank Head Karl Otto Pöhl says Bailout Plan Is All About ‘Rescuing Banks and Rich Greeks’

Posted on June 1, 2010 by afurth

In an interview with Spiegel, former Bundesbank head Karl Otto says it as it is, reminding us what perhaps is the global financial crisis biggest elephant in the room:

SPIEGEL: Mr Pöhl, are you still investing in the euro — or has the European common currency become too unstable of late?

Pöhl: I still have money in euros, but the question is justified. There is still danger that the euro will become a weak currency.

SPIEGEL: The German government has said that there was no alternative to the rescue package for Greece, nor to that for other debt-laden countries.

Pöhl: I don’t believe that. Of course there were alternatives. For instance, never having allowed Greece to become part of the euro zone in the first place.

SPIEGEL: That may be true. But that was a mistake made years ago.

Pöhl: All the same, it was a mistake. That much is completely clear. I would also have expected the (European) Commission and the ECB to intervene far earlier. They must have realized that a small, indeed a tiny, country like Greece, one with no industrial base, would never be in a position to pay back €300 billion worth of debt.

SPIEGEL: According to the rescue plan, it’s actually €350 billion …

Pöhl: … which that country has even less chance of paying back. Without a “haircut,” a partial debt waiver, it cannot and will not ever happen. So why not immediately? That would have been one alternative. The European Union should have declared half a year ago — or even earlier — that Greek debt needed restructuring.

SPIEGEL: But according to Chancellor Angela Merkel, that would have led to a domino effect, with repercussions for other European states facing debt crises of their own.

Pöhl: I do not believe that. I think it was about something altogether different.

SPIEGEL: Such as?

Pöhl: It was about protecting German banks, but especially the French banks, from debt write offs. On the day that the rescue package was agreed on, shares of French banks rose by up to 24 percent. Looking at that, you can see what this was really about — namely, rescuing the banks and the rich Greeks.

Hat tip: Mish

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Clarke and Dawe on Europe’s lending merry-go-round

Posted on June 1, 2010 by afurth

My favorite line: “How can broke economies lend money to other broke economies, who haven’t got any money, because they can’t pay back the money the broke economy lent the other broke economy and shouldn’t have lent it to them in the first place because the broke economy can’t pay it back?”

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Is Google making us stupid, or is Google thriving on our stupidity?

Posted on March 16, 2010 by afurth


BlogLess brought to my attention Nicholas Carr’s cover story on The Atlantic about how Google, and the Internet, can make us stupid:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that… My mind [is] changing. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy…. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages… The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer… But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media… supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought… My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

I have experienced something very similar to what Carr describes. But ever since I started meditating and studying Tai Chi Chuan I noticed that I have re-gained much of my capacity to concentrate for long hours, and what’s more, my overall appetite for information consumption has shrinked. This had a big impact on my websurfing habits.

Nowadays I am much less likely to get stuck for hours roaming in cyberspace. I read a much lower number of blog posts and articles on a given session, and the ones that I do read are much more likely to hold my attention from beginning to end.

This attitude blends well with my recently-implemented, Evernote-based GTD system. Whenever I come across an interesting headline, I clip the entire page to my Inbox with the click of a button, where it will sit until I have the time and mindset to process it. Only then I will decide whether it merits a full read.

Somehow meditation has helped me to strike a much better balance between a confidence in what I already know, and what I feel I need to know.

I wonder whether there is a broader principle at work here. While much of the Internet is designed in a way that is conducive to scattered patterns of attention, in my view this is both a cause and a consequence of the frenetic overall lifestyles prevalent in modern societies. As Carr points out, the more frenetic our websurfing, the more dispersed our attention will become in other areas of life.

But I also feel that the more we modify our offline lives through meditation, long weekends in the beach or mountain, shorter working hours, and simply doing less stuff overall–and the more aligned our society is with these lifestyles–our websurfing habits will change accordingly: We will spend more time at Project Guttemberg, read a lower number of pots per session, finish reading the posts we have started, and favor bloggers who write longer posts.

It may be true that media has the power to influence our cognitive processes down to the biological level. But there are strong grounds to believe that our lifestyles and societies do so too.


Google’s creepy ideology

What I found most revealing about Carr’s article is his observation of Google’s ideology as a crass form of information-age Taylorism:

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google… speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back… In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ…

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

This is the sort of intellectual hubris that pervades so many science-based industries. As I have argued before, it is the same ideology that led Wall Street to believe in mathematical models that yielded triple-A ratings for bizarrely complex financial instruments they didn’t truly understand.

If the power of money corrupts people by stoking their instinct for greed, scientism corrupts them by excessively inflating their drive for understanding, predicting, and ultimately controlling the environment, society and other human beings.

As a Taoist, I find the idea of trying to do away with ambiguity particularly disturbing — there seems to be not much of a place for Ying-Yang paradoxes in Google’s view of intelligence.

Carr is afraid this ideology might lead to a world similar to that of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odissey.

And I thought Google would prevent Microsoft from taking us there. Sigh.


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Getting Things Done (GTD) and the Zhuangzi

Posted on March 4, 2010 by afurth


In my previous post I argued that there was a striking match between Getting Things Done (GTD) and the way Taoists see the world.

I woke up early this morning with the memory of a bunch of Taoist metaphors that further clarify this match. So I picked up my copy of Edward Slingerland’s outstanding book on efortless action, which compiles and analyzes these metaphors in an exhaustive way.


Emptying the mind

As Slingerland points out, the very first step for achieving effortless action according to Zhuangzi is the “emptying” of the heart/mind, understood as loosening our attachment to ego-related concepts such as social rewards, social values and rigid pre-conceptions of right and wrong.

At a deeper level, the emptying process also implies freeing ourselves from the effects of our biased perception, getting rid of knowledge, and at the highest levels of enlightening, of the existence of our physical bodies.

While this sort of emptying of the mind might be achieved through meditation techniques and contemplation of the scriptures within the Zhuangzi, the mundane act of writing down our to-do’s in a comprehensive system, and setting up reminders that allow us to “forget” about all the stuff we need to keep track of in our day-to-day, is what amounts to “emptying the mind” in the GTD paradigm.


Mind like water and the mirror-response

As discussed in my last post, David Allen argues that the key benefit of emptying the mind by implementing GTD is achieving a “mind like water” state that allows us to react in the appropriate measure to the challenges we naturally face while pursuing our goals:

In karate there is an image that’s used to define… “mind like water.” Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn’t overreact or underreact…

The Zhuangzi metaphorically describes this mental state of appropriate response to the environment that comes with the clarity of an empty mind in terms of the functioning of a mirror:

The Perfected Person in using his heart/mind is like a mirror: he does not lead, nor does he welcome; he responds… but does not store. This is why he is able to win over things and not be harmed.

This is how Slingerland interprets this passage:

… a mirror works only because it is itself “empty” and merely responds spontaneously to what is put in from of it. Similarly, the heart/mind of the Perfect Person–once emptied through psychic fasting–is completely open and responsive to things. The mirror response is thus the behavioral correlate to cognitive emptiness or clarity.


The workings of Spirit

According to Allen, once mind like water is achieved, a large amount of psychic energy is freed up and one should experience a spontaneous increase in the creative ability to deal with higher order, meaningful goals:

Many executives I have worked with during the day to clear the decks of their mundane “stuff” have spent the following evening having a stream of ideas and visions about their company and their future. This happens as an automatic consequence of unsticking their workflow.

There is a clearly analogous process portrayed In the Zhuangzi. Once an empty heart/mind is achieved, the Perfected Person not only achieves a mirror-like mind that responds appropriately to the world, but also experiments a spontaneous shift of focus towards a spiritual perspective. This happens as a direct result of the workings of the qi, which was believed by Daoists to gain an increased dynamism within the body when the mind was emptied through meditation and other forms of physical cultivation.

Furthermore–and this is a key theme of Daoist thought in general, not only of the Zhuangzi–, this spiritual awakening provides the person not only with inner peace and joy, but is the key for effortless achievement of higher-order goals through inspired work.

Allen doesn’t talk in terms of spiritual awakening of course, but he does believe in a spontaneous process of inspired action that, though the workings of the Reticualr Activating System of the brain, provides a sort of automatic, subconscious “guidance” for goal achievement. To illustrate this, Allen cites a passage by Maxwell Maltz:

Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than “you” ever could by conscious thought. “You” supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby.


Butcher Ding

The spirit as a fundamental force for inspired work that goes beyond technique or intellectual skill is perhaps best illustrated in one of the most important metaphors of the Zhuangzi, that of butcher Ding cutting up an ox.

Butcher Ding was cutting up an ox of Lord When Hui. At every touch of his hand, every bending of his shoulder, every step of his feet, every thrust of his knee–swish! swoosh! He guided his blade along with whoosh, and all was in perfect tune–one moment as if he were joining in the Dance of Mulberry Grove, another as if he were in a performance of the Jingshou symphony.

Lord Wen Hui exclaimed, “Ah! How wonderful! Can technique really reach such heights?”

Bucher Ding put down his cleaver and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond mere technique. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years, I no longer saw the ox as a whole. And now–Now I meet it with my spirit and don’t look with my eyes. My sensory knowledge is restrained and my spiritual desires are allowed to move/act. I follow the Heavenly pattern, thrusting into the big hollows, guiding the knife through the big openings, and adapting my movements to the fixed nature of the ox. In this way I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint…

Lord Wen Hui exclaimed, “Wonderful!” I have heard the words of Butcher Ding and from them learned how to cultivate life!”


Woodcarver Qing

A similar theme is found in the story of woodcarver Qing, who creates bellstands of such beauty that people think them the products of ghosts or spirits. He explains to the Marquis of Lu how he prepares for his work:

When I am going to make a bellstand, I am always careful not to exhaust my qi in the process, so i fast in order to still my heart/mind. After fasting for three days, I no longer dare to cherish thoughts of congratulations or praise, of titles or stipends. After fasting for five days, I no longer dare to cherish thoughts of blame or acclaim, of skill or clumsiness. After fasting for seven days, I am so still that I forget I have four limbs and a physical body. Once I’ve reached this point, there is no more ruler or court. My skill is focused and all outside distractions dissappear. Only now will I enter the mountain forest and observe the heavenly nature of the trees. If I come across one of perfect shape and form, then I am able to see the completed bell stand in it and simply apply my hand to the task; if not, I let it go. In this way I am merely taking the Heavenly [within] and joining it with the Heavenly [without]. This is probably why people suspect that the final product was made by spiritual beings.”


The notion of freedom in the Zhuangzi

Another way of seeing the striking similarity between GTD’s mind like water state and Daoist philosophy, is through the very particular notion of freedom implied by the Zhuangzi.

Just like GTD states that a mind like water allows one the flexibility to deal with the day-to-day stuff without underreacting or overreacting, and a simultaneous state of focused inspiration to pursue our most meaningful goals, Slingerland argues that according to the Zhuanzi, the freedom that comes from spiritual enlightenment doesn’t imply that the sage completely transcends the material realm,

… but is rather for the first time actually able to perceive and spontaneaously accord with its dictates… [This is well illustrated by] the feeling of inevitability that accompanies certain artistic achievements: when an artist is successful, it often seems to her that the lines she has drawn and the colors she has chosen could not be otherwise. This sort of activity is felt not so much as a creation of order out of nothing, but the discovery of something–of the proper way pigments on a canvas are to be combined to reflect a landscape, or the way a knife is to be wielded if an ox is to be butchered. As Alan Fox 1996:64 notes: “[Butcher] Ding does not decide where he wants to cut–he finds the space between the bones.” The freedom that Zhuangzi advocates is a freedom to act properly in response to a given situation, and thus represents a subtle combination of freedom and constraint. (The bolds are mine)

It would thus not be accurate to say that the Daoist sage is free to do anything whatsoever that he wants; rather, he is free to do what he must, and do so with joy and a sense of ease.

In exhorting people to “use to he fullest all that you have received from Heaven,” while at the same time realizing that it is necessary to act in the physical and social realms, Zhuangzi is calling for a metaphorical “walking of the two paths” with regard to the Heavenly and the human.

The Zhuangzian ideal thus somewhat resembles the vision of being “in the world but not of it” presented in the New Testament (John 17).


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Achieving “mind like water” through Getting Things Done

Posted on March 2, 2010 by afurth


I was surprised to find that the most important benefit that Getting Things Done (GTD) claims to provide is an increased capacity to focus on and think creatively about our higher-level goals and values.

In other words, more than a methodology for getting things done, GTD is a system for aligning ourselves with meaning.

The argument is that by providing a reliable system for recording all our to-do’s and setting up appropriate reminders, we “empty our heads” of all the mundane stuff that we inevitably need to take care of in the here and now, freeing up lots of psychic energy that can now be used to think (consciously or unconsciously) on more meaningful stuff.

From the book:

Many executives I have worked with during the day to clear the decks of their mundane “stuff” have spent the following evening having a stream of ideas and visions about their company and their future. This happens as an automatic consequence of unsticking their workflow.

I totally buy this argument. Above and beyond what I have experienced during the few weeks since I adopted GTD to manage my day-to-day, the key benefit of my Year of Nothing was a spontaneous shift towards a life based on meaning.

I think that the key here is the “emptying of the mind” that occurs both by doing Nothing, or by the process of writing context-based to-do lists and reminders advocated by GTD.

Allen describes this mental state as “mind like water,” and uses metaphors from the martial arts to convey the idea of a mind that is highly focused in the here and now, yet flexible enough to deal with the bigger strategic picture, reflect on the higher issues that we consider truly meaningful, and therefore keep our actions consistent with core values and crucial goals.

The “mind like water” and martial arts metaphors used by Allen are specially significant for me after the insights on the Taoist concept of wu-wei or “effortless action” gained throughout my Year of Nothing:

In karate there is an image that’s used to define… “mind like water.” Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn’t overreact or underreact…

The power in a karate punch comes from speed, not muscle… So the high levels of training in the martial arts teach and demand balance and relaxation as much as anything else. Clearing the mind and being flexible is key.

Anything that causes you to overreact or underreact can control you, and often does. Responding inappropriately to your e-mail, your staff, your projects, your unread magazines… will lead to less effective results than you’d like.


Mind like water and synchronicity

I had been postponing reading Getting Things Done for a long time. Then, right after my Year of Nothing I felt naturally drawn to it as I got back in touch with goal-oriented action. This makes perfect sense from a Taoist perspective: according to the concept of wu-wei, once “mind like water” and an enlightened focus on higher purpose is achieved, we should expect lucky, synchronistic events that bring us the right resources, at the right time, for to achieving our goals effortlessly.

I wonder what Allen would think of the link between “mind like water” and synchronicity. His core audience of business executives would perhaps find the concept to be too esoteric, but he definitely is a firm believer in a psychological mechanism that resembles the Taoist paradigm of synchronistic luck.

Because a mind like water state automatically shifts our focus towards higher-order goals and values, Allen thinks that this (with the help of simple, positive visualization exercises of desired outcomes) has a direct impact on our brain’s Reticular Activating System (RAS):

[The RAS] is basically the gateway to your conscious awareness; it’s the switch that turns on your perception of ideas and data, the thing that keeps you asleep even when music’s playing but wakes you if a special little baby cries in another room…

It seems to be programmed by what we focus on and, more primarily, what we identify with… We notice only what matches our internal belief systems and identified contexts.

From this, it follows that by applying GTD to our lives we should automatically start noticing all sort of resources in the environment that can help us in the achievement of our higher goals. According to this view, it is not synchronicity that “brings to us” these resources: they were always around us, we just failed to notice them due to our RAS’s lack of proper focus, and is part of the same process that strengthens our creative imagination and subconscious capacity to experience aha! moments mentioned in the beginning of this post.

The similarity of this process and synchronicity is very well captured by a passage by Maxwell Maltz quoted by Allen in the book:

Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than “you” ever could by conscious thought. “You” supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby.

Regardless of what David Allen thinks of Taoism and synchronicity, one thing is for sure. If Lao-tzu would live in our day and age, he would definitely be a total fan of Getting Things Done. I can picture him in his Taoist robes, having green tea for breakfast after early-morning meditation, checking the “next action” folders in his Evernote-GTD system on his laptop…

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Getting Things Done in Evernote with one or two notebooks

Posted on February 18, 2010 by afurth

With the arrival of 2010 coinciding with the end of my Year of Nothing, I found myself with an unusually large pile of new projects to launch, and a bunch of old projects to re-launch.

On top of that, my head is bursting with a million ideas for possible business ventures, books I want to read, skills I want to learn, articles I want to write, character traits I want to develop, movies I’d like to watch, countries I want to visit…

So the timing couldn’t have been better for me to pick up a copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD). Well, yes — there could have been a better time: this is the kind of book you always wish you would have read a few years earlier.

The final push came from the awesome reading list recommended by Josh Kaufman in his equally awesome website, The Personal MBA. GTD is No. 3 in the overall list, and for good reason.

Being such an uber-popular personal-productivity classic, I will assume that you already read the book, or that you have picked up a pretty god idea of the gist of the GTD method from friends, co-workers, or the Internet. If you haven’t, I’d recommend that you read the book, or at least google “GTD” before reading the rest of this post.


Marrying GTD with Evernote

I have been playing around with Evernote for a couple of years, but it wasn’t until I read Allen’s book that I got the motivation and framework I needed for it to become the central, indispensable, all-encompassing, hologram-of-my-brain tool that it finally turned into during the last few weeks.

All credit is due to a post by Bobby Travis at 40Tech that shows the magic simplicity of implementing GTD using only one Evernote notebook.

The only thing I modified from Travis’s method is that I use an additional notebook for my Inbox instead of a tag, and another one for stuff I want to share with the world, the URL of which will be published shortly in this blog.

So while Travis’s Evernote-GTD system looks like this:

Evernote 2

Mine looks like this:

Evernote 1

In Travis’s one-notebook method new, untagged notes are automatically placed at the bottom of the notebook’s notes list. This makes it easy to locate the notes that need to be tagged as “Inbox” at any particular point in time; but I was annoyed by the extra task of erasing the “Inbox” tag from the notes once they are “taken out of the inbox” and assigned to other “folders” of the GTD system.


With my two-notebook system, all I need to do for taking a note out of the Inbox is to drag it twice: first to the relevant tag, and then to my main GTD notebook.

The clean simplicity of this productivity management tool is part of the reason why I became a big fan of it so quickly. But in an upcoming post, I will argue that there is more to my GTD-fanaticism. And it has to do with the mindset I developed during my Year of Nothing.


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Learning from what is not

Posted on February 4, 2010 by afurth


Reading Wayne Dyer’s Change Your Thoughts — Change Your Life towards the end of my Year of Nothing was remarkably revelatory. Both the chain of events that led me to the book and its content helped me put in perspective what I gained during this year, and made me realize that I had become a Taoist without noticing.

Here are the most important Year-of-Nothing lessons, and the corresponding passages of the book that clarified each of them.


Contentment

Doing nothing for a whole year detoxed my system from “achievement addiction.” It developed my capacity to be content with who I already am, the serenity to appreciate all the positives that already exist in my life.

The 3rd verse of the Tao Te Ching hints at the connection between non-doing and contentment.

…

The sage governs by emptying minds and hearts, by weakening ambitions and strengthening bones.

Practice not doing… When action is pure and selfless, everything settles into its own perfect place

Taking a long enough break from goal-oriented action seems to have a taming effect on the ego, isolating us from its constant push to move things forward, and therefore allowing our better appreciation of the blessings of what we already are and have.

Here’s Dyer’s interpretation of this part of the 3rd verse, which he entitles “Living Contentment”:

You may have a long list of goals that you believe will provide you with contentment when they’re achieved, yet if you examine your state of happiness in this moment, you’ll notice that the fulfillment of some previous ambitions didn’t create an enduring sense of joy… “Stop pushing yourself,” Lao-tzu would say, “and feel gratitude and awe for what is. Your life is controlled by something far bigger and more significant than the petty details of your lofty aspirations.”


Humility

Doing nothing for so long somehow directed a lot of my psychic energy inwards, building my courage to take hard looks at myself. I now am clear about what made me deviate from my core values in the past. I feel more compassionate.

I am also more able to accept that many of the things we assume as “achievements” are due to factors out of our control — for instance, the huge material abundance in our lives is in large part a result of simply having been born in the Western hemisphere of the world.

In this regard, the 9th verse of the Tao Te Ching reads:

To keep on filling is not as good as stopping.

Overfilled, the cupped hands drip, better to stop pouring.

…

Retire when the work is done; this is the way of heaven.

Dyer interprets the central message of this verse to be “Living Humility”:

Cramming life with… activities when we’ve obviously reached a point where more is less indicates being in harmony with ego, not the Tao! Living humility knows when to just stop, let go, and enjoy the fruits of our labor. This verse clearly analogizes that the pursuit of more status, more money, more power, more approval, more stuff, is as foolish as honing a carving knife after it has reached its zenith of sharpness. Obviously, to continue would just create dullness, and it is obvious that a keen edge represents perfection.


Giving

Our happiness comes mostly from the relationships we build. We cannot really say that we “achieve” truly meaningful and fulfilling relationships, for what works best in that department is to allow our capacity for joyful giving to emerge. This is a state that by definition cannot be willed. It comes about as a spontaneous byproduct of contentment and humility, both also elusive to our conscious efforts. Try too hard, and you break the spell.

But there’s something to doing nothing for a while, either by meditating or taking a quiet walk in the park or surrendering to a Year of Nothing, that does the trick.

In this regard, the 7th verse of the Tao Te Ching reads:

…Why do heaven and earth last forever? They do not live for themselves only. This is the secret of their durability.

For this reason the sage puts himself last and so ends up ahead. He stays a witness to life, so he undures.

Serve the needs of others and all your own needs will be fulfilled. Through selfless action, fulfillment in attained.

Dyer interprets this verse as “Living Beyond Ego”:

The more you pursue desires, the more they elude you. Try letting life come to you and begin to notice the clues that what you crave is on its way… Stay appreciative of all that you receive… Stop the chase and become a withness — soothe your demanding habits by refusing to continue running after more. By letting go, you let God; and even more significantly, you become more like God and less like the ego…


Luck

Soon after I took the plunge, quitting a business and lifestyle that were clashing with my most important values, and let myself go with the flow without specific expectations, I was surprised with a very particular sense of self-confidence. Not the kind that comes from reinforcing the ego, but from faith — a conviction that whatever was going to happen, I would be just fine. I felt happy to live with the worst case scenario if I ever needed to, in order to stay true to myself and do the right thing.

Gradually, all sort of synchronicities started to happen, as if by meaningful coincidences the right people, information, opportunities and resources stumbled into me at the right time and place. I started feeling incredibly “lucky.” And yet, I sensed that somehow this luck was the result of my having become less fearful towards the fuzziness of life’s adventure.

The 55th verse of the Tao Te Ching states that

He who is in harmony with the Tao is like a newborn child. Deadly insects will not sting him. Wild beasts will not attack him. Birds of pray will not strike him. Bones are weak, muscles are soft, yet his grasp is firm.

In his interpretation of this verse, entitled “Living by Letting Go,” Dyer elaborates:

Verse 55 of the Tao Te Ching incites you to realize that what you call luck isn’t something that randomly happens–it’s yours for life when you decide to live by letting go… letting go for protection sounds paradoxical… But try seeing it as a way of allowing life’s natural rhythm to flow unimpeded through you. Living by letting go means releasing worry, stress and fear. When you promote your sense of well-being in the face of what appears as danger to others, your alignment with your Source frees you from pushing yourself to act in a forceful manner. La-tzu reminds you here that “things that are forced grow for a while, but then wither away.”

Living by letting go will allow you to appreciate Lin Yutang’s wry observation in The Importance of Living: “If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.”

The notion of luck postulated in this verse of the Tao Te Ching resonates much stronger with me than the Law of Attraction and similar concepts preached by all sorts of personal development gurus these days. There’s no way that “the universe will conspire to get us what we want” until we loose our attachment to whatever it is that we want so badly, are content with what we already have and who we are, and have faith that as long as we let go and let our actions be guided by a sense of higher purpose, we will be OK with whatever life puts us through.


Action

During the last 2-3 months of my Year of Nothing, my desire for pursuing goals again started growing fast. But I noticed important changes in the way I approach the concept of action. Paradoxically, there is something to non-doing and trusting your “luck” that also brings clarity as to how simple (yet not easy) it is to voluntarily bring about change in the world through action. It’s as if I can see the chain of causality from action to results much more clearly. That fresh clarity gave me a huge motivational boost.

This goes as well for the negative consequence of our actions in the world — I can confidently say that today I am much more conscious of the environmental impact of my lifestyle, and of the unintended consequences for others that my actions might have.

Also of crucial importance has been a strong intuition on the value of following the path of less resistance in life. As it happens to be, I also discovered that traditional Chinese thinkers regarded this principle as the key to enlightenment, the concept of “effortless action” or wu-wei being an analogue to the Buddhist notion of Nirvana.

This is very much in line with modern notions of personal development and business thought that advocate a motivational focus on personal strengths, passions and meaning instead of profit and other external forms of reward. Action that is in line with our talents or level of skill, is exciting, and/or meaningful cannot be said to involve effort in the sense of struggle, tedium or moral torment.

Doing nothing and wu-wei are so interlinked in the traditional Chinese psyche that both are sometimes identified and referred to as “non-action.”

The Tao Te Ching’s 43rd verse is particularly straightforward on this subject:

The softest of all things overrides the hardest of all thigns. That without substance enters where there is no space. Hence I know the value of non-action.

Teaching without words, performing without actions–few in the world can grasp it–that is the master’s way…

And Dyer’s commentary:

[The principle of non-action] is clearly seen when you look at great champions as they perform their chosen activities. The greatest golfers are effortless in their swing… they don’t use force, nor can they find words to describe how they do it. The most talented artists dance softly, without effort; paint quietly, without force; and write easily, without struggle, by allowing the words to come to them.


…Some marathon runners say that they’ve learned to relax and stop pushing, letting their legs, arms and torso simply be as their bodies begin experiencing extreme exhaustion with only only a few miles to go. They report that when they shut down the mental interference and instructions they magically cross that finish line.


Apply this way of seeing everything in your world: Tasks will be simplified, your performance level will increase, and the pressure to be better than others by using superior hardened strength will cease to be a factor.

As a result of my Year of Nothing, I have also gained a much tighter control over my urges to be active for its own sakes, which more often than not is simply a modern form of procrastination.

In a nutshell, having spent such a long period of time in non-action, paradoxically gave me a much better sense of the value of action.


Patience

Equally important in the Taoist notion of wu-wei is the concept of timing. In order for action to be effortless, we must learn to act only when the time is right. Doing nothing for such long time allowed me to appreciate the value of dwelling in non-action for as long as it is needed, until the right time to act arrives.


Living from the void

Last but not least, doing nothing for a whole year somehow infused me with a sense of spirituality, with the notion that there is a creative, overarching consciousness “out there” that nurtures every single thing in the universe. I can’t help but wonder about the possibility of synchronicity and “luck” as discussed above being mechanisms by which this higher consciousness communicates with us.

With hindsight, I think I now have a better idea of how this process of “illumination through non-action” might occur. In the Taoist view, “emptying” the mind of thoughts and desires through meditation and other techniques, takes us from doing nothing to being nothing — and nothingness is at the core of the “nameless,” “formless” source of everything that they called the Tao.

That’s why meditation is viewed by Taoists as a means to “harmonize people with nature:” making us more spontaneous, allowing us to discover our true vocations, more respectful of other life forms by becoming empathetic, compassionate and less judgmental, etc.

But above and beyond all these positive effects, there is a deeper experience of transcendence, a sort of heightened awareness about the Tao as that higher form of consciousness that is so appealing to me nowadays. A deeper inner conviction that in ancient Chinese thought was the spiritual anchor that allows one to “live by letting go” as discussed above.

That is the principle embodied in the 11th verse of the Tao Te Ching:

Thirty spokes converge upon a single hub; it is on the hole in the center that the use of the cart hinges.


Shape clay into a vessel; it is the space within that makes it useful. Carve fine doors and windows, but the room is useful in its emptiness.


The usefulness of what is depends on what is not.

These are Dyer’s words on the meaning of this verse, which he interprets as “Living from the void”:

A composer once told me that the silence from which each note emerges is more important than the note itslef. He said that that it’s the empty space between the notes that literally allows the music to be music — if there’s no void, there’s only continuous sound. You can apply this subtle awareness to everything that you experience in your daily life. Ask yourself what makes a tree, a tree. The bark? The branches? The roots? The leaves? All of these things are what is. And all of them do not constitute a tree. What’s needed to have a tree is what is not — an imperceptible, invisible life force that eludes your five senses. You can cut and carve and search the cells of a tree endlessly and you’ll never capture it.

***

This is the fifth, and last post of the “Year of Nothing” series. For the fourth post of the series, click here.

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Amy Tan on creativity

Posted on December 11, 2009 by afurth

I watched this TED talk by Amy Tan for the first time earlier this year and immediately felt identified with it. And watching it again now that my Year of Nothing just finished, it makes much more sense.

Here are the elements of Tan’s personal philosophy and approach to creativity that I found most interesting:

  • Embrace uncertainty, ambiguity and paradox with an adventurous attitude. Try to approach all situations with an open mindset that allows you to immerse yourself in “the specifics of the story.” This stance is more conducive to the truth than when we thrust forward in life with too much attachment to a particular paradigm.
  • Imagination is as much a tool for creative work as it is for understanding the world and getting ourselves more aligned with truth. Because through imagination we can put ourselves within “the specifics of the story” that other people go through, it is also a means to becoming more compassionate.
  • For getting creativity flowing, Amy goes out to the world and wanders around until she’s hit by some uncanny incident that “delivers” crucial information that she was missing, or that “validates” the direction taken by a particular story she’s working on. Whether this is the work of synchronicity or of a “wider mental filter” caused by her immersion in the particulars of a story, the fact is that the more she’s aware of these meaningful coincidences, the more they happen, and the more she’s able to learn from them. My hunch is that this approach is applicable beyond artistic work.
  • “What’s our place in the universe? Did the universe intend for us to have a particular role, or is it all an idea we just come up with?.” While these are perhaps unanswerable questions, truly creative, meaningful work often feels like walking on a path that will enable us to grasp, at least, “particles of truth” in this regard.
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When synchronicity works better than Google (or The Year of Nothing, Part 4)

Posted on December 5, 2009 by afurth


“It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences… but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being


In his book Change Your Thoughts — Change Your Life, Wayne Dyer gives a personal interpretation of the 81 verses of the Tao Te Ching.

“Living from the Void” is the title of the chapter in which he interprets the eleventh verse, and inspired me to write this post.

But as I started writing, I realized I had to write two posts.

In this one, I’ll give you some background on how I stumbled into the book, and the uncanny “relationship” I developed with it and the Tao Te Ching itself.

In the next post, which will be the last one of my Year of Nothing series, I’ll talk about the content of the eleventh chapter of the book.


Hater of all things new age

I used to identify with that phrase until not too long ago. I would have never bought Dyer’s book back then.

But then, six months ago I was in New York, half way through my Year of Nothing.

One afternoon I visited Steve Pavlina’s blog to find that he had just published a post entitled The Afternoon of Life, inspired in a new DVD by Wayne Dyer, of the same title.

The post didn’t go into much detail about what the DVD was all about, but Steve’s post hit home for two reasons.

First, during my early teens I read Your Erroneous Zones, Dyer’s self-help classic, and it had a big impact on me, specially a chapter entitled “You Don’t Need their Approval,” on how one should live life without seeking the approval of others.

It was the very first self-help book I read. I got it from my father, who read it despite being the most anti-self-help person I know.

I never read any other book by Dyer after that, in part because his later titles drifted from the commonsensical pragmatism of Your Erroneous Zones towards subjects that seemed to be too newagey for me.

Second, Steve’s post emphasizes the role of synchronicity as a guiding principle in life:

Interesting synchronicities… happen all the time when I stay in the flow of being happy and doing what I can to help people. But when I get too caught up in personal ambition and lose sight of meaning, fulfillment, and purpose, the synchronicities go away. I can tell when I’m back on track because the synchronicities immediately start flowing again. It’s magical how that happens.

Dyer’s movie ended up having a life-changing impact on me. But I didn’t buy it right after reading Steve’s post. I was still too skeptical about “spiritual stuff”.


A year of synchronicity

I have always been curious about the concept of synchronicity. In a way, my incipient faith in it inspired me to go for my Year of Nothing — the experiment was all about going with the flow and allowing myself to be surprised by whatever I discovered along the way. After reading Steve’s post, I started thinking more often about it and opening up to the possibility of experiencing it.

And as Steve says, it really worked like magic. The very best things that happened to me during this year were the result of a series of meaningful coincidences.

Among the most important ones was meeting Master C.K. Chu in New York, with whom I started studying Tai Chi Chuan, Nei Kung, and Taoist meditation.

Three years before, and completely by chance, I met Jim Borrelli, one of the very few people in the world certified by Chu as a Nei Kung instructor, while taking a short break with my brother in Los Angeles. I wasn’t even thinking of basing myself in New York at the moment.

The only reference I had of Taoism until then was a Spanish translation of the Tao Te Ching I bought eight years ago while living in Barcelona, which I left behind with my best friend and roommate when I moved to Dubai.

Despite my skepticism, I couldn’t help feeling attracted to the book when I saw it. There was something about its ancient, majestic flair that poked my curiosity. So I bought it, skimmed through its pages a couple of times, and left it to accumulate dust in my library.

When I met Jim and started reading about Nei Kung on his web page, I had a flashback of the curiosity I felt for the Tao Te Ching in Barcelona and decided to give it a try.

I got hooked since my very first lesson. I had never felt so good after any other form of physical activity in my life.

During one of my classes with Jim, the subject came up that my next stop after LA was Caracas, Venezuela, where I was going to visit my family. Jim told me that from all the places in the world, there was another Chu-certified instructor in Caracas: Eka Markez, with whom I study to this day every time I go back home for a holiday.

So as soon as I was back in New York, it was natural for me to go look for Master Chu.


Re-encountering the Tao Te Ching

After a couple of weeks in New York, I flew to Buenos Aires to meet up with my best friend, who was coming from Barcelona to visit his Argentine family. I asked him to bring me the copy of the Tao Te Ching. I just felt curious about giving the book a fresh try now that I was practicing Tai Chi Chuan and Nei Kung.

When I got the book and opened it up, I found that that particular Spanish translation of German scholar Richard Wilhelm’s 1923 version, opens with the poem “For a Version of I Ching”, by none other than Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

I either hadn’t noticed the poem when I bought the book, or had completely forgotten about it. The fact is that getting the book back in Buenos Aires after so many years and suddenly finding Borges in it, felt like an irrefutable sign that I was on to something.

But that initial surprise was nothing compared to the shocking revelation I was about to go through. A couple of pages after the poem by Borges, I found that the book’s prologue had been written by Carl Jung, who was a close friend of Wilhelm’s. It is an essay on the concept of synchronicity. Jung thought of it as essential for understanding the Chinese worldview, and the Tao Te Ching.

The essay stands today on its own as a classic on the subject. A full explanation of synchronicity had arrived to me by the workings of synchronicity itself!


Back to New York, and to Wayne Dyer

A couple of weeks later, I was back in New York in the middle of August’s heat. One afternoon, I’m walking down 5th Ave with another of my very best friends and ex business partner in Dubai. We walk into East West Cafe, which is inside a huge spirituality, holistic health and esoteric philosophy bookstore.

As we walked towards the coffee shop in the second floor, my friend strays and starts browsing the books. I didn’t feel like browsing myself much. Despite my gradual opening towards the concept of synchronicity and the Tao Te Ching, the bookstore still seemed too airy fairy for me. So I kind of stood still there in the middle of the room.

All of a sudden my friend calls me from the opposite side of the aisle. She wanted to show me something. When I got close enough to her, I almost choke out of an attack of hysterical laughter.

She was holding in her hand a DVD by Wayne Dyer entitled “The Shift”, asking me if I knew anything about it. It was the movie that I read about in Steve Pavlina’s blog a few weeks before, but the title had been changed!

I told my friend about my reading of Steve’s post on the movie and my initial reticence towards it. She had absolutely no clue about that, no previous reference of the movie whatsoever. But she picked it out from the thousands of products that could have caught her attention. We quickly agreed we had to by it.


The Shift

Watching The Shift was, again, a revelatory experience. The movie opens with a scene where Wayne Dyer is writing on a desk. The camera zooms right away on a book besides him written by, Abracadabra, Carl Jung. The phrase “the afternoon of life” is his.

The central theme of the movie is the sudden shift from a life based on ambition to one based on meaning and higher purpose that many people go through.

I felt identified all the way: I was going exactly through that process. The movie also made me understand Dyer’s shift, and how it reflected back into his writing. How and why he went from the pragmatism of Your Erroneous Zones to the spirituality of his later books.

The movie alludes many times to Lao Tzu, legendary author of the Tao Te Ching, as one of Dyer’s spiritual masters.

But it wasn’t until a couple of days ago that I stumbled into Change Your Thoughts — Change Your Life. As you might have come to expect by now, again, this was due to total coincidence, while doing a search for books on Amazon.com on a completely unrelated subject.

And to top it all off, the process of writing this post was itself a good case of how synchronicity keeps knocking at my door.


Telling the Resistor to suck it

Synchronicity is seen by many as an esoteric subject, so at first I felt queasy about people thinking I was crazy after reading it. It was my good-old-anti-new-age reflex kicking in. Almost everyone I discuss synchronicity with reacts positively, or at least with an open mind about it, leading to interesting philosophical discussions. But writing a blog post on the subject, somehow, felt different.

As I pondered these issues in a bout of indecision that was about to make me file the first draft in the “Writings You Better Keep To Yourself” folder, I got this blog post by Communicatrix in my inbox which, surprise surprise, opens with a paragraph on a clear-cut synchronicity that inspired her to write it.

And it’s also about a self-help book, Way of the Peaceful Warrior, which was deeply revelatory to her. The way she describes the book almost fits perfectly with the way I feel towards Dyer’s book, or for that matter, any book, movie or information resource that enters into mystical territory a bit farther than I’m perfectly comfortable with:

[Way of the Peaceful Warrior] is a a parable of awakening that’s derived from real life… containing mystical elements that may or may not be true. As with the consumption of most myths and parables, that sort of stuff is beside the point: what matters is what the stories in the book do to you as you take them in. Are you intrigued? Do you feel questions bubbling up? Recognition, self- or otherwise? Do you feel tumblers falling into place or a coating of dust being blown away? Do you want to climb in and disappear, or pull the characters out and ask them questions?

…if it is the right book for you, it will ring a bell that cannot be unrung: that reminder that yes, there’s something else and yes, one foot after the other—given some purpose, luck and assistance—will get you there…

After reading Communicatrix’s blog post, I logged into Twitter. I wanted to see if I could find a final bit of anti-writers-block encouragement. And because synchronicity has its ways of working better than Google to find the right information at the right time, I came across this made-in-heaven-for-Alan tweet by Communicatrix herself:

“Before dismissing something as newage-rhymes-with-sewage”, check for the baby in that filthy bathwater.

That was it. My resistance was gone. Or, again, as Communicatrix said it in that very same blog post, “I told the Resistor to suck it, because I knew what I had to write about.”

***

This is the fourth post of the “Year of Nothing” series. For the third post of the series, click here. For the fifth post, click here.

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26-year-old Venezuelan on Hugo Chavez’s video game ban

Posted on November 29, 2009 by afurth

The essay addresses what are perhaps the two most destructive problems of today’s Venezuela: the rampant wave of crime that cuts a swath through the country, and Hugo Chavez’s ever-growing megalomaniac tendencies.

Being a Venezuelan myself, having grown up playing video games in Caracas, and having had close friends assaulted and killed by common criminals in the city, I couldn’t help feeling deeply identified with Guido’s point of view.

I will be spending Christmas with my family in Caracas and will blog about my own personal observations, so for now, without further ado, I invite you to read Guido’s piece.

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