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Learning from what is not

The very last post on the Year of Nothing series, or the yearlong process during which I became a Taoist without noticing.

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.

Posted on February 4, 2010
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Amy Tan on creativity

Novelist Amy Tan’s insights on creativity are perhaps very much applicable beyond artistic work. My Year of Nothing allowed me to open up to a worldview similar to hers in many ways.

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.
Posted on December 11, 2009
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When synchronicity works better than Google (or The Year of Nothing, Part 4)

The most important lessons I learned during this Year of Nothing came through chains of haphazard, apparently disconnected events and circumstances.


“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.”

Posted on December 5, 2009
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Stefan Sagmeister: The power of time off

It’s always great to find brilliant people who understand the benefits of a Year of Nothing.

In this TED talk, renowned designer Stephan Sagmeister shares his rationale for closing down his New York studio for an entire year every seven years.

During his last sabbatical, he came to the conclusion that after a Year of Nothing:

  • His job became a calling again.
  • Over the long term, it was a financially successful exercise due to the positive impact on the quality of his work.
  • Everything his studio designed in the seven years following the Year of Nothing had originated in it.

I hope my Year of Nothing has a big impact on my next seven years of life too. And then I can go for another one. :-)

A big hat tip to @philippawhite for this one!

Posted on November 22, 2009
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How to become less judgmental in 5 minutes or less (The Year of Nothing, Part 3)

During this Year of Nothing I became more aware of my mind’s natural tendency towards judgmentalism. And I learned a 5-minute exercise to counter that tendency.

If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against.
The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.
Sent-ts’an


From the vantage point of the non-doer, during this Year of Nothing I became much better at detecting the petty little games I play with myself and others when caught up in the race towards achievement — a race we all inevitably participate in every single day of our lives.


Being right

The luxury of being able to spend long periods of time reflecting on my not-so-lovable traits allowed me to conclude that one of those petty little games I love so much, is that of being right.

If I consider a topic important enough to have a strong a opinion about it, I adore the feeling of proving to others that my opinion is supported by strong evidence and is logically coherent.

And I must confess, I get almost the same rush from proving that others who dare contradict me on these Important Subjects, are wrong. That their opinion on these Crucial Topics is biased, incoherent or otherwise flawed.

Having caught myself in the act more times than I would have liked to, I decided to do a bit more research on the subject.


Self-serving biases and natural selection

An hour of Amazon.com browsing and ten bucks less in my bank account later, I was reading The Happiness Hypothesis, an awesomely illuminating book by Jonathan Haidt. (Full disclosure: that’s an affiliate link.)

Haidt’s TED talk, to which I link below, addresses many of the book’s key arguments:

After reading for a while, I was comforted to confirm that I’m not alone in my addiction to being right. The book presents lots of research supporting the idea that humans are biologically wired to hold the belief of being right — regardless of the truth.

Actually, this tendency to think we are the Chosen Holders of the Truth is a special case of a genetically ingrained bias towards detecting the faults of others, and turning a blind eye on ours.

We’re programed from birth to see the speck in our brother’s eye, but not the log in our own. We have an instinct for hypocrisy.

The argument goes like this. Evolution favored those who played the game of life using a strategy of tit for tat: cooperate with others as long as they don’t cheat. And whenever they cheat, do not hesitate to retaliate.

React to what the other does to you, paying in kind.

But in real life we don’t react to what someone does to us. We react to what we think they did:

… and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management. If life itself is what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator?

Natural selection, like politics, works by the principle of survival of the fittest, and several researchers have argued that human beings evolved to play the game of life in a Machiavellian way. The Machiavellian version of tit for tat… is to do all you can to cultivate the reputation of a trustworthy yet vigilant partner, whatever reality may be.

… Machiavellian tit for tat requires devotion to appearances, including protestations of one’s virtue even when one chooses vice. And such protestations are most effective when the person making them really believes them (this last emphasis is mine).

As Robert Wright puts it in his masterful book The Moral Animal, “Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse.”


Naive realism

Our natural tendency to think that we are right is what Emily Pronin at Princeton and Lee Ross at Standford university call “naive realism”:

Each of us thinks we see the world directly, as it really is. We further believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, therefore others should agree with us. If they don’t agree, it follows either that they have not been exposed to the relevant facts or else they are blinded by their interests and ideologies… It just seems plain as day to the naive realist, that everyone is influenced by ideology and self interest. Except for me, I see things as they are.

Whatever the benefits naive realism gave us when we were subject to the forces of natural selection, its usefulness in our modern societies is much less clear:

If the only effect of these biases was to make people feel good about themselves the would not be a problem… Evidence shows that people who hold pervasive positive illusions about themselves, their abilities and their future prospects are mentally healthier, happier, and better liked than people who lack such illusions. But such biases can make people feel that they deserve more than they do, thereby setting the stage for endless disputes with other people who feel equally over-entitled.

And when naive realism gets a grip on group dynamics, things get much uglier:

If I could nominate one candidate for “biggest obstacle to world peace and social harmony,” it would be naive realism because it is so easily ratcheted up from the individual to the group level: My group is right because we see things as they are. Those who disagree are obviously biased by their religion, their ideology, or their self-interest.

As it seems, naive realism is similar to overeating. An instinctual drive to eat as many calories as physically possible gave an evolutive advantage to our pre-historical ancestors, who probably ate a couple of times per week, whenever the hunting or gathering session was successful.

But in a society flooded in caloric over-abundance, the instinct doesn’t favor our survival. Quite the contrary. So it pays to learn how to control it.


The antidote: taking a 5-minute hard look at ourselves

First off, Haidt advises us to humbly accept two basic facts about our nature. First, judgmentalism is, however harmful, a natural tendency of out minds. Second, we cannot change that by willpower alone:

[As stated by Chinese Zen Master Sent-ts'an in the opening quotation of this post] Judgmentalism is indeed a disease of the mind: it leads to anger, torment, and conflict. But it is also the mind’s normal condition — the [subconscious] is always evaluating, always saying “Like it” or “Don’t like it.” So … you can’t simply resolve to to stop judging others or stop being a hypocrite. But, as Buddha taught, [you] can gradually learn to tame the subconscious…

And a simple exercise for taming the subconscious, for changing our automatic judgmental reactions starts, as Jesus advised, with ourselves and the log in our own eye:

And you will see the log only if you set out on a deliberate and effortful quest to look for it. Try this now: Think of a recent interpersonal conflict with someone you care about and then find one way in which your behavior was not exemplary. Maybe you did something insensitive (even if you had a right to do it), or hurtful (even if you meant well), or inconsistent with your principles (even though you can readily justify it).

When you first catch sight of a fault in yourself, you’ll likely hear frantic arguments from your inner lawyer excusing you and blaming others, but try not to listen. You are on a mission to find at least one thing that you did wrong…

… When you find a fault in yourself it will hurt, briefly, but if you keep going and acknowledge the fault, you are likely to be rewarded with a flash of pleasure that is mixed, oddly, with a hint of pride.

It is the pleasure of taking responsibility for your own behavior. It is the feeling of honor.

I have been doing this exercise for 5 minutes, a couple of times per week during the last few months, and I’ve found it to be incredibly rewarding and effective.

I recommend you to keep a log of the times you catch yourself at being judgmental, wanting to be right, to prove others wrong, and all those petty little games we play. I did that for the first couple of weeks, and was impressed by how visible the results of the exercise were.

I meditate regularly, and sometimes perform this exercise after a formal meditation session, which has the effect of amplifying the “pleasurable feeling of honor” that Haidt talks about. And meditation itself, of course, can help us become less judgmental:

Meditation has been shown to make people calmer, less reactive to the ups and downs and petty provocations of life. Meditation is the Eastern way of training yourself to take things philosophically.

You don’t need to perform any formal meditation before the exercise, but definitely take a few extra minutes to sit down in silence, breathe and relax.

And of course, let me know how you feel afterwards.

I’d love to hear you say my advice was right on spot. But if you think I’m wrong, I won’t try too hard to prove I’m not. :-D

Posted on November 15, 2009
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The Year of Nothing, Part 2

This Year of Nothing allowed me to develop a razor-sharp sense of what I want to do next and what I want to be. Never before have I felt that I Get It as I do now.



Do not pull, do not push
And fortune will return of its own accord
And the Way will naturally come…
If you are still, you will get it,
If you are active, you will loose it.
Yang Zhu


Besides reminding me of the value of friendship, this Year of Nothing has provided me with a razor-sharp sense of self-knowledge.

Never before have I been clearer on what I want to do and what I want to be. Never before have I felt that I Get It as I do now.


Getting It

While it’s true that practicing formal Taoist meditation has helped me a lot in gaining this newfound clarity of values, the process has been simpler than that.

As soon as I stopped spending most of my waking hours doing something I didn’t find meaningful, eliminating the inherent cognitive dissonance, I started to Get It.

Not having a clear objective, nothing to achieve for a while, liberated a ton of psychic energy, and refocused it inwards.

Now I know that while I’m alive and awake, I want to do something that delivers genuine value to others — not just to myself.

I want to contribute, however humbly, to change the world for the better.


Money

An obvious question I’ve been pondering all this time is how to align my quest for meaning with the necessity of making a living out of it.

In the beginning, I was quite pessimistic about this. I was still working on the assumption that running a business was a fundamentally selfish thing.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this prejudice was in large part due to my training in Economics.

Traditional economic theory is based on the notion that people seek their narrow self interest, and that this is perfectly fine — the market’s Invisible Hand is supposed to ensure that selfish individual behavior translates into broad social gains.

But after some time I managed to break free from that prejudice.

The idea that business can be motivated by forces beyond profit is, of course, one of the hottest topics in the media today.

This Year of Nothing gave me the time to absorb the huge amounts of information available on- and offline on the subject, and to meet lots of people who have embraced the concept.

But most importantly, because I haven’t been involved with any particular business for a while, I was able to open my mind and truly ponder the validity of this idea against my previous conceptions.



###

The business guidelines

Here are a few rough guidelines I’ll be following for my upcoming income-generating initiatives. Of course, I’ll be updating you on their evolution through this blog:


Affiliate information products

Since I started sharing my insights and tips about creating a lifestyle based on meaning and personal development through this blog, I’ve had some tremendously encouraging feedback from readers about the value they receive from the project.

This feedback, and the steady increase in traffic that the blog has enjoyed since its launch, made me conclude that there is room for a little “store” section where readers will be able to buy information products that I endorse.

I will only endorse products that I have found to be extremely useful and empowering during this already 1-year old journey. Eventually, I will also offer information products created by yours truly.

A store section for the blog is the most obvious way I can think of for creating a small business based on meaning and real value.


Art

Throughout this Year of Nothing I have re-connected with my passion for art.

I have had plenty of time to listen to music again. That was one of the things I missed the most in my life, and I got it back.

Through my travels, I have attended all kinds of concerts, shows and music festivals. I have been stopped in my tracks by dozens of awesome street musicians in subways and alleys, and been able to take the time to properly contemplate their performances.

I even ended up one night hanging out with Farruquito (one of Spain’s most acclaimed Flamenco dancers) and his friends at El Taxidermista bar in Barcelona until almost 6 am the next day.

I don’t know what got me more drunk: the alcohol, or the insanely powerful energy emanating from these people when they’re offstage, partying, singing and dancing for themselves. :-D

Check out some of Farruquito’s incredible moves here:

I’ve been in many museums and exhibitions. I’ve attended cinema festivals and rented tons of old movies I hadn’t had the time to watch.

This Year of Nothing allowed me to truly appreciate art as the ultimate human activity aligned with higher purpose. Art can do so much good to the world at so many levels that it’s hard to think about a more valuable human activity.

So I have come to the conclusion that I want to launch a little project related to the art business. I still don’t have much of a clue about the form it will take, but I’ll keep you posted on its progress…

And to those of you who know about my frustrated musician background: yes, I have seriously started thinking about playing an instrument again. But that’s a bit of a longer term project — I will still probably do Nothing about it until mid next year :-)


Economics

During this Year of Nothing I have also re-connected with Economics, and I have revived the excitement that I felt for the discipline back in college.

I definitely think I can use my skills as an economist for dedicating some of my time to contribute to projects aligned with a higher purpose.

Before this Year of Nothing, whenever I read or heard someone say that quietness, idleness and meditation can be a big emotional amplifier, I used to discard it as New Age BS.

Not anymore. Somehow, a Year of Nothing hugely expanded my sensitivity towards poverty, the environment, and the myriad sustainability problems we must all deal with. It’s like I’ve developed a visceral repulsion towards them that goes beyond the rational understanding of their causes and nature. And I’ve decided that I want to deal with them indeed.

Again, this is all work in progress… stay tuned for updates in this area too.



So what do you think? Does my plan make sense to you? What are your plans for 2010 (resolution time is approaching!) in terms of aligning your business or career with a sense of meaning and higher purpose?



Posted on November 3, 2009
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The Year of Nothing, Part 1

It’s been a year since I quit the PR industry and took the plunge into an intense process of self re-discovery and growth. Through a series of posts, I’ll recap what I’ve achieved since then, and where I’m going from here.

The myriad things are born from Something.
And Something is born from Nothing.
Laozi

A couple of weeks ago, I realized that it’s been a year since I quit the public relations industry and took the plunge into the process of self re-discovery and growth that inspired the creation of this blog.

Dubai-NYC ticket

So through a series of posts, I’ll recap what I’ve achieved since then, and where I’m going from here.

Nothing

This year I learned the importance of stepping back, pausing, and “doing nothing” for a while.

Of course, it’s impossible to literally “do nothing”.

What I mean is that this year I have not executed any deliberate, purposeful action towards achieving any important goal.

Well, OK, I have done some of that. But very, very little. :-)

One of the things I did was to start practicing Tai Chi Chuan and Taoist philosophy more seriously. But as Laozi’s quote at the beginning of this post indicates, Taoism is all about the paradoxical virtues of non-doing as a creative force.

So, what do you do?

Whenever I’ve been introduced to people lately, my answer to the proverbial “So, what do you do?” has been a clear, straightforward and resounding “Nothing.”

After explaining myself a bit better about this Year of Nothing, people usually understand that I needed to take a break, recharge my batteries, and reflect upon what I wanted to do next.

At this point, they usually acknowledge that it takes time to discover what makes us tick, and that trying too hard might defeat the purpose. That true self-discovery arises much in the same way as genuine intellectual or artistic discovery: through spontaneous “aha!” moments.

But they’re usually still skeptical on the practicality of taking a whole year in order to do that.

And a key reason behind their skepticism, is the belief that they “just can’t afford” a Year of Nothing.

Stuff

And yet, I have spent close to nothing for a Year of Nothing.

One of the key lessons of this Year of Nothing has been that when it comes to consumption, the best policy is to keep it as close as possible to nothing. And that this is easier to do than what I used to think.

I certainly haven’t bought almost any stuff at all. That I can remember, only a pair of shoes, a piece of luggage, and a Kindle.

Actually, I got rid of most of the very few material possessions I still carried with me. The Kindle substituted for all my books, which I donated together with half of my clothes.

Nowadays, all my stuff fits in one piece of luggage.

Getting rid of stuff has been an incredibly energizing and liberating exercise that I started a couple of years before this Year of Nothing. But I won’t elaborate on this topic because the always inspiring Colleen Wainwright (AKA Communicatrix) wrote a brilliant series of posts about her de-cluttering experience that do just that.

Traveling on Nothing, and my biggest Something

During this Year of Nothing, I learned to travel on almost nothing.

I am truly lucky of having many wonderful friends spread all over the globe. And whenever I asked them for advice on accommodation in their cities, they have invariably invited me to stay at their homes.

So with a little help from my friends, I spent this Year of Nothing in New York, Buenos Aires, Caracas, London, Barcelona, Madrid, San Francisco and Los Angeles, spending close to nothing in accommodation.

But most importantly, having been able to spend so much time with friends and being in the state of calm mindfulness that comes so naturally from doing Nothing, has boosted my gratitude for friendship to levels I had never experienced. Sometimes to a crazy level of euphoria that makes me cry out of happiness.

This deeper connection with friends has pushed further down the value of consumption in my scale of values. I know now for sure that I really don’t need to buy any stuff to be happy. I need Nothing. Zero. Nada. As long as I have truly good friends, I will always have a reason for being happy.

This realization was for me the first, and biggest Something born from this Year of Nothing.

Posted on October 23, 2009
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