INTUITION IN-DEPTH

EMERGENCE AND POTENTIAL SPACE

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 20:25:00 +0000

Ouroboros

Sculture by Dan Gerhart http://www.dangerhart.com/

The word "Emergence" has intrinsic appeal. It immediately leads beyond itself---to a space of potentiality. The world is wide open after that final "e"---or at least sort of. For the most part emergence is evoked after the fact. I hope to look a little more at the space beyond the final e, but first things first.

Emergence provides a way to account for the development of higher life forms and even spirituality without requiring a master plan or planner. Emergence oversimplified means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A portion of its appeal is it provides an alternative to the reductive perspective, which holds that higher levels can be completely explained by lower levels. Thus biology can be completely explained by chemistry and chemistry in turn by physics. Emergence in contrast says that novel properties can appear at higher levels that are essential to complete understanding. It implies there is always something new under the sun---or rather the potential for something new is always there.

I work together on a science and spirituality blog with a Brandeis undergraduate that we call The Bridge: A Science and Spirituality Resource. I took on the task of summarizing an intriguing but challenging article by Terrence Deacon for the blog entitled “Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel's Hub.” At the end of my second time through the 40 page paper I had one of those experiences in which science and spirituality really converged for me. The moment of insight intensified during several subsequent readings. It marked a considerable deepening of my morning meditation and perhaps other aspects of my spiritual life as well.

The primary purpose of Deacon's article was not spiritual, but instead to impart some order to the promiscuous concept of emergence by characterized three different levels. However he brings all three together under the Eastern-seeming concept of absence, a potential shaped by what is not there. He quotes from the Tao Te Ching

Thirty spokes converged at the wheel’s hub to an empty space that makes it useful. Clay is shaped into a vessel, to take advantage of the emptiness it surrounds. Doors and windows are cut into walls of a room so that it can serve so some function. Though we must work with what is there, use comes from what is not there.

First something about the basic idea behind emergence. Thermodynamics tells us that the universe is running downhill and becoming increasingly random. In a state of randomness a change in one direction is balanced by change in the opposite; everything cancels everything else out. How then is life possible, to say nothing of the purposefulness on which we humans so pride ourselves? After all, we are---including our minds---part of nature.

The answer is that the way things fit together---relational properties---instead of a canceling each other out, may, depending on a confluence of events, build on each other. These relational or configural properties are responsible for the spontaneous production of order, such as the formation of whirlpools and also the origins of life. They explain why our organism can turn over most of the physical material it is made of and nonetheless persist.

Deacon’s three levels of emergence represent three critical transitions in the organization of matter. At the first level, higher order properties can emerge when separate elements become an aggregate. (These phenomena can be explained reductively, but including this level provides a complete sweep of the terrain.) For example, when H2O molecules aggregate, the properties of liquidity emerge. Becoming a liquid gives rise to characteristics such as surface tension and different kinds of flow that depend on the molecules’ relationship to each other. Not only H2O but many different kinds of molecules can become liquids. The characteristic behavior associated with liquidity, its “laws,” then become a higher level description of these systems.

The second level transition describes the emergence or self-organization of form. Here first-order emergence becomes unstable. An example is a Benard cell. When a shallow pan of water or other liquid is heated evenly from the bottom, hexagonal convection cells emerge. All different kinds of convection patterns occur initially but they cancel each other out. Only the hexagonal cells survive because their close packing is most efficient at bringing the heat to the surface.

The emergence of form occurs when random fluctuations at a lower level---here water molecules rising to the surface to remove the heat---give rise to relational regularity at higher levels that are beneficial to the system. These beneficial regularities in turn influence the lower levels to support this arrangement---the two work together so only hexagonal cells form. The kind of causality that occurs in these self-organizing systems is decidedly circular. As Deacon puts it, “interaction dynamics at lower levels becomes strongly affected by regularities emerging at higher levels of organization.”

Another example of a self-organizing system is the spontaneous generation of autocatalytic sets. Heterogeneous molecules form together into a cycle where, for example, A catalyzes the formation of B, B catalyzes the formation of C, and C of A. These cycles are very important in cellular metabolism. All that is needed to keep them going is the availability of raw materials and an energy flow through the system.

Check out this video which shows a very sexy autocatalytic cycle called a Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction.

With the third transition, some sort of informational memory is present, for example genetic material. This allows emergent forms to be reproduced over and over again. Think of it like a franchise with loose corporate control. Reproduction can then occur over time and even space. This memory is what makes development and evolution possible and by the same token gives a history to the system. The ability of self-organizing forms to reproduce---so their occurrence is no longer dependent on spontaneous self-organization---is arguably where life begins. These systems have a purpose of sorts---to reproduce and undergo change that enhances the possibility of not being canceled out.

These higher-level emergent systems are shaped by absence in several different ways. They are forged not by design, but by what is not canceled out. The forms that arise and then reproduce depend to a large extent on factors external to them, such as their fit with environmental conditions. Life and the mind to which it has given rise---in part because this passive selection goes on---is ever governed by the 'pull of yet unrealized possibility.'

Notice there is something quite startling to ponder here---should one be so inclined. The very notion of purpose itself implies an absence. Do we have it backwards?

Here is the passage close to the end that showed me how deeply this paper---which at that point I at best barely understood---had gotten to me.

Like something coming out of nothing, the subject of self is, in effect, a constitutive absence for the sake of which new constitutive absence is being incessantly evolved. In this sense, there is some legitimacy to the eliminativist claim that there is 'no thing' that it is. Indeed this must be so. The locus of self is, effectively, a negative mode of existence, that can act as an unmoved mover of sorts: a non-thing that nonetheless is the locus of a form of inertia---a resistance to change--- with respect to which other physical processes can be recruited and organized.

When I read that (the second time through) I had one of those powerful moments of knowing in which I could capture only a little of what was being known. As a student of intuition I suspect these are the best kind. I any case I am happy my unconscious was doing its job.

I felt myself to be a mere input/output tube. There was an intense focus of energy around my mouth, one of the ways into or indeed out of the devise. I enjoyed the minimalism and cleanliness of sensing myself as nothing more than this tube and the energy that served as its gate---of being largely without a self for an instant.

It was an experience of spiritual absence or emptiness, but not the kind of spiritual emptiness that verges on transcending the physical realm. Rather it was an emptiness that was pregnant with the most elementary aspects of human life---of feeding and of speaking, which lent it a hearty, almost animal-like vitality. It was also pregnant with everything I was not worrying about that would take care of itself. Finally it was pregnant with all that would flow through me and I might take in and perhaps transform. I felt very simple and very free. There was just potential space.

What is Real? Quantum Physics for Real Dummies

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:42:00 +0000

Let's warm up with this one. Do you know how radio works? I can't say I really do but I know this. Signals from a radio broadcast, like any other electromagnetic signals, are waves that travel in the atmosphere. Somehow recording a radio show sets a series of electromagnetic waves in motion that radiate out into space. They can be picked up by radios in the viewing area tuned to waves of that frequency. So all of space is packed full with electromagnetic waves, some from Garrison Keillor, some from Adolph Hitler, and some from the Big Bang.

The first time I really comprehended this I found it freaky. I was reading a book by the physicist Richard Feynman, who was my hero at the time. There I was being bombarded by waves of all kind carrying heavens knows what.

It helped me begin to understand a very strange experience I had a number of years before. One night my stereo tuner, which was turned off, started broadcasting music. It seemed to be coming from the back---from one of the connections. I thought the house was inhabited by ghosts. Why it happened then and only then is beyond me.

So much for the warm-up---which is actually a bit of priming. Here comes the quantum physics. Our physical experience is dominated by objects that have more or less clear boundaries, that are separate from each other. Also causality reigns. If I so choose, with my arm I can knock the folder next to my computer off my desk. This follows the laws of classical physics.

But at the quantum level, the level of subatomic particles, most physicists think that it is all chance and randomness. Probabilities rather than certainty or causality are supposed to rule. It is only when an observation is made that the function that determines these probabilities, the wave function, is said to collapse into a specific state. Before that all possibilities are said to coexist or are superimposed.

I highly recommend this video. It is a very clear presentation of the famous double slit experiment that helped demonstrate the very strange things that happen at the subtle atomic level. It is also very entertaining--- worth watching just to enjoy Dr. Quantum's facial expressions!

Not everyone was happy with the randomness that the usual interpretation of quantum mechanics enshrines at the core of reality. Einstein famously said, "God does not play dice." He was not willing to give up the elegant determinism of classical physics. So he proposed that there must be hidden factors, what he called hidden variables, which really control events at the quantum level.

In the 1930s, along with some colleagues, Einstein devised a thought experiment to show that the usual understanding of quantum mechanics is incomplete. It pointed out a paradox. If particles are governed by chance, then some of the predictions of quantum theory would also indicate that particles far apart from each other do not always behave independently. This would be like twins halfway around the universe instantaneously affecting each other. The notion that particles widely separated in space could communicate instantly is extremely problematic because it violates Einstien's own dictum that the speed of light is the fastest any information can travel. Einstein argued that this indicated that the irreducible randomness or chance quantum mechanics seemed to suggest at the base of everything also had to be wrong.

A younger colleague, David Bohm, in the 1950s became interested in developing a deterministic understanding of quantum mechanics. He did not like that the usual interpretation had no underlying theoretical framework. A strongly intuitive physicist, he favored models he could picture or experience at some level. Like Einstein, he also thought it impossible that information could travel instantaneously between particles--- or faster than the speed of light.

His answer was a model in which a quantum potential guides the behavior of particles in a deterministic but holistic way. (Bohm's work built on an earlier attempt by Louis de Broglie in the 30's to provide an alternate explaination.) For example the quantum potential tells the electron whether one or two slits is open--- see above video---and guides it so the observed results occur. The quantum potential is able to this because it contains what Bohm called “active information” about the entire system. In effect, it allows the particle to “just know” the big picture.

Meanwhile in the 60s another physicist named John Bell , influenced by Bohm, proved theoretically that to extend determinism to subatomic particles would necessarily imply what has come to be called non-locality---that particles far apart from each other would have to be connected or communicate at faster than the speed of light . (This is what Einstein could not accept, but 3 decades later it didn't bother Bell) In the 1980s a French team led by Alain Aspect demonstrated non-locality by performing an experiment proposed by Bohm and Bell (based on Einstein's initial thought experiment). Non-locality is sometimes called quantum entanglement, and it is now well accepted by physicist. In fact efforts are underway to exploit quantum entanglement technologically.

Bohm eventually proposed another whole realm, what he called the implicate order, as the source of the quantum potential. In the implicate realm, the two twins halfway around the universe from each other are actually connected. The implicate realm is unfolded or smeared out throughout our level of reality, what Bohm called the explicate order---like those radio waves that somehow caused my turned-off radio to broadcast music. He often used the idea of a hologram, in which every part contains an image of the whole to capture the relationship between the implciate and the explicate realm. But a hologram is static, whereas he saw the process of unfolding and enfolding between the realms going on continuously. He called it holomovement. To get a better sense of his ideas, check out this interview with Bohm.

This talk of other realms did not endear Bohm’s work to mainstream physics. To add insult to injury, he worked closely with the Indian teacher Krishnamurti for many years. Nonetheless a small number of physicists preferred his causal or ontological model and have worked to refine and extend it. It is now called Bohmian mechanics.

Even though the quantum potential reinstates causality, it leaves us with a universe very different from the commonsense world we experience. ( It is important to point out that none of this affects the laws of physics at the macroscopic level, but rather our picture of the subatomic realm.) In what we generally call objective reality, distant objects only affect each other when a signal of some sort, a communication, travels between them. To rescue locality as well as causality the way we usually think of them, like Bohm, we have to accept another level of reality where distant particles really are close together.

This is quite a trade-off! At the same time there is something that rings true about this situation. I mean this in the sense that things very often do seem to turn into their opposites. In any case, all us dummies can take comfort in something Richard Feynman said, "I think it is safe to say that no one understands Quantum Mechanics."

So far there has been no way to test Bohmian mechanics against the usual interpretation of quantum mechanics that claims that randomness rules. Just recently some preliminary data about the density of the early microwave radiation left over from the big bang seems to support Bohmian mechanics---according to Antony Valentini (also see first reference below and very end of post). If it is confirmed, it will cause quite a stir!

Additional Web Information:

Written in the skies: why quantum mechanics might be wrong, 2008, Nature On-Line (It is limted access, but important so I've reproduced the critical paragraphs below).

Quantum Randomness May Not be Random, 2008, New Scientist

David Bohm and the Implicate Order, by David Pratt

Do Deeper Principles Underlie Quantum Uncertainty and Nonlocality? 2005, Science

Interesting short video about the early history of quantum mechanics

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Written in the skies: why quantum mechanics might be wrong
Published online 15 May 2008 Nature doi:10.1038/news.2008.829
Zeeya Merali

'snip'

Almost all measurements of the cosmic microwave background seem to fit well with the predictions of quantum mechanics, says Valentini. But intriguingly, a distortion that fits one of Valentini’s proposed signatures for a failure of quantum mechanics was recently detected by Amit Yadav and Ben Wandelt at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (see 'Deflating inflation?'). That result has yet to be confirmed by independent analyses, but it is tantalizing, Valentini adds.

“It’s far too early to say that this is definite evidence of a breakdown in quantum mechanics — but it is a possibility,” he says.

Hiranya Peiris, an expert on the cosmic microwave background at the University of Cambridge, UK, is impressed by the new work. “This is a pretty cool new idea,” she says. “Nobody has ever thought of using the cosmic microwave background to look into really fundamental quantum questions — cosmologists just assume that quantum mechanics is correct,” she says.

But Peiris adds that Valentini must now come up with more detailed predictions about the types of distortion that will arise in the cosmic microwave background to convince cosmologists that they are really caused by a breakdown of quantum mechanics. “He has thrown some really exciting ideas out there, but now he needs to do the nitty-gritty calculations,” she says.

ANOTHER SLANT ON CONSCIOUSNESS (Part 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:52:00 +0000

Click here for Part 1

Salmon, Rice, and Peas--and Swiss Chard too

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:32:00 +0000

On weekend evenings when I was a child my family often had no-bother meals. One favorite was salmon, rice, and peas all mixed up together. The other was bagels and lox, which we had most Saturday nights. Bagels and lox are of course an ethnic tradition, but salmon, rice and peas seemed to be particular to my family.

The salmon and the peas were canned and the rice was Minute Rice. I can't say I loved the dish then, not like bagels and lox. But it was comfort food.

Over the years, every month or so I have had a yen for salmon rice and peas. I still use canned salmon but I’ve upgraded to frozen peas and longer cooking rice. At first I missed the special sweet, processed taste as well as squishy texture of the canned peas. But it's actually better with frozen peas.

Other than the above changes, I have been pretty faithful to the original recipe. This is not to say it always taste the same. To the contrary it’s not just one dish but a whole family of dishes---at least to my salmon-rice-and-peas-attuned palate. By adjusting the proportion, the salmon can dominate, the peas can dominate, or anything in between. Each of these endless variations can have tends to have subtly different overtones and undertones.

I just throw it together with minimum thought. However I cannot exclude the possibility that my unconscious mind is tailoring the mix to the needs of my palate (or my psyche) for the evening. Intuition can direct our actions whether or not we listen for that inner voice. Of course the best cooking comes about when we listen (see Intuition and Brussels Sprouts---what!?).

After a long abstinence, a few weeks ago it was a salmon rice and peas night. I had an idea for an alteration I just couldn't get out of my mind. My latest culinary enthusiasm is chard. I had a few leaves of chard in the refrigerator (with only one or two good days to go). Breaking all my year of salmon, rice, and peas near-purism, I considered cooking them up and throwing them in.

This was not something to be undertaken lightly. It seemed a sacrilege as well as a boundary crossing sure to have consequences other than the simple success or failure of the dish. Moreover why was I thinking of changing a trio that already played endlessly interestingly together into a quartet? Eventually I recognize that in spite of my careful conscious weighting of the pros and cons, the project was going forward. I started cooking the chard.

I usually do not add the juice from the salmon to the concoction. But chard has a strong taste. To balance it I decided I needed to add the juice as well as the whole can of salmon.

The first bite left me astounded. It was delicious; the flavors were bright and exceptionally well-balanced. But even more than that, it evoked my mother's palate—everything that was good about her cooking—perhaps more than anything I have tasted since her death.

I certainly crossed a boundary. But instead of moving further away from tradition it brought me closer to its core. Looking back, I guess I was never so crazy about salmon rice and peas, because it didn't have the brightness of my mother's weekday food (especially with those can canned peas).

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My mother wasn't a particularly skilled cook, but her food was tasty and she relished eating. She ate slowly and luxuriated in it perhaps more than anyone else I have ever known. All this was permission-giving to me. Learning to cook from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking was a prelude to my scientific career.(see Food and the Spirit: Rededicating My Thesis 27 Years Later)

My mother also became interested in the kind of cooking championed by Julia. She however had a severe handicap. She just could not grasp what it meant to sauté something. She was fascinated by the concept and often asked me to explain it to her. She would seem to get it, but a number of months later she would ask me again. She was an intelligent woman, and I was incredulous at her apparent idiocy about the concept of sautéing.

After my experience re-creating the essence of my mother's food, I decided to look up sauté in the dictionary. It says:

To lightly fry in fat in a shallow, open pan—n. [French, "tossed (in a pan)," from the past participle of sauter, to leap, from Old French, from Latin saltara, frequentative of salare (past participle), to leap....]

Food leaping from the pan is a lovely image for sautéing. But I began to see that it is also somewhat problematic of a concept. Leaping is a relative thing—or rather the time of cooking before leaping. I'm not sure we really want sautéed chicken breasts to leap from the pan until the chicken is cooked. We don't want sautéed mushrooms to leap from the pan until they give back their juices.

These legalities—although I can't say exactly how—helped give me some insight into my mother's problem with the concept of sautéing. She sautéed all the time. She just couldn't figure out how it was different from pan frying or browning. She already had categories and she couldn't fit a new one in, especially one that is, like the others, not so well defined.

At some level I suspect her question was less about sautéing than it was about the essence of French cooking. This new technique she thought she could learn—if she could figure out what it meant— just might help situate her in this celebrated cuisine. And indeed Julia does mention a large number of tips in Mastering Vol I, such as high temperature and drying food with a paper towel (Ug, See Intuition and Brussels Sprouts---what!!?). But it wasn’t really a new technique, rather just another name for what my mother on occasion already did.

In contrast I first learned to cook in the context of French cooking. I didn’t pan fry food but did that thing called sauté from the start. Also thanks to Julia, I had much of the context that went with it. I would not be surprised if other women of my mother's age felt the same way about sautéing, but were ashamed to admit it and kept their perplexity to themselves.

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My mother's difficulty was that a new word was used for a deeply familiar technique. Something similar can occur when familiar words are used in a new context. This happened to me around my first computer, a Mac. I was profoundly intimidated by frequent reference to “a finder” and to “a chooser.” I felt the same way when somewhat later a computer-savvy colleague said of a computer, “This machine has no security. I have to put some on.” I was dumbfounded. It was clearly important, but security meant men in uniforms. How could you put men in uniforms on a computer?

These words were chosen because they were considered intuitive in the sense of user-friendly. But I didn't know enough about computers (or computers with high-level languages) initially and then the internet to have a context for them. Because they were familiar words used in mysterious contexts, they seemed doubly impenetrable to me--- uncrossable barriers between those who were in the know and those who were not.

Our categories—the way we break the world up into kinds—are essential to our ability to construct meaning and hold onto it. After awhile it becomes hard to rename them, give them new context, or add another ingredient. To be sure “it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks.” But perhaps there is a more subtle lesson to be gleaned as well.

The categories that help one person or group make sense of the world can be different or have different contexts from those of another person or group. Sometimes it takes an act of intuition—along with some compassion for the way we all tend to hold on to familiar meanings—to translate in between. Good things tend to happen when we make the leap!

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Coincidentally, it turns out that the word Salmon is from the same root as sauté. The Latin name for Salmon is Salmo, hence the jumping or leaping fish!

I'd love to hear about your favorite comfort food---with or without embellishment.

ANOTHER SLANT ON CONSCIOUNESS: Vulnerability, Presence, and Power

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:34:00 +0000

A while back I did a post on Hillary (Hillary and the Woman Thing) in which I talked about her appeal to me when she allowed herself to feel and show vulnerability. She became a much more three-dimensional figure, and I felt her presence as never before. It was a wonderful complement as well as an antidote to her poised and tough persona, which strikes me as too image-bound. This, among other things, got me thinking about how female power might differ from male power and even more generally about the connection between vulnerability, presence, and power. I will flirt with the first question here but end up focusing on the second.

I knew I had to write about this, yet it is a challenging topic. On the face of it, vulnerability isn't power, its weakness. It's a bit like claiming that up is down. I had only a sketchy, nonverbal sense about why I felt so strongly that this conventional wisdom is wrong.

Then I attended a seminar at the Women's Studies Research Center, where I work, by my colleague Hilde Hein, a philosopher who studies museums. During her talk she presented a double analogy she had used years ago in a talk on aesthetics. She showed on one side of the screen a picture of a proud aggressive looking nail and on the other a more humble sewing needle just entering some fabric. Below is her eloquent description of these different implements, taken from her early paper. She writes that both are employed, “…to bind together diverse substances, both [are] progenitors of socially significant structures." You will have no difficulty knowing him from her.”

He is strong, rigid, and straight, with a point at one end, the better to penetrate resistance substances, and a strong head at the other. A few sharp and well directed strokes fix him firmly in place....He remains there, stalwart and unyielding until the material that he punctures softens and rots away and he himself becomes brittle and rusted. She, by contrast, is pliant, sleek and tapered, her purpose integrated continuously throughout her form, which is, however distinctively marked by a hole at one end. A thread, introduced through that orifice, is carried distributed and left behind to hold together and shape a unity out of separate fabrics, which, once joined,live out their collective identity long after she has passed to be of service elsewhere.

This fable of gender difference intrigued me---the commanding authoritarian male who actively maintains structures with iron force as opposed to the more generative female whose nurturing guidance leaves only an inter-psyche thread. I found myself thinking about it when I woke up the next morning and sensed that this was a way into what I wanted to say. Among other things, its truth/ non-truth quality---its aptness along with its limitations as a caricature---captures the ambivalence I feel about framing this issue through a gender lens.

In her paper Hilde focuses initially on the different kinds of artifacts and then art each produces. I will focus only (and only briefly) on the different kinds of sheltering each provides for us. The strong proud nail is essential to the outer boundary layer that separate us from the environment--- our building and houses. The more humble and well traveled needle is essential to creating a boundary layer closer in--- our clothing.

Yet we humans, both male and female, are made of the softer penetrable stuff on the outside at least. The boundary of our body with the external world, our skin and flesh, is soft and permeable like cloth. Because of this we can experience the kiss of a young spring breeze on our face and the joyful effervescence of bubble bath. Of course it also means we wound and tear. To keep out infection and to heal, we have to be sown together, with needles---and nowadays disappearing thread.

We are no crustaceans separated from the world by a hardened shell. Instead the tougher stuff, the more rigid part of our body, our bones, are hidden inside. When they break or fracture, nails---or even mental plates---may be required to keep them in place and maintain the integrity of our skeletal structure.

We are made to be permeable to the external world and to each other. (In fact what are called mirror neurons in our brain make us mirror the feelings of others even when we are unaware of doing so.) To the extent that we experience and reveal our inherent vulnerability, we paradoxically reveal the stronger stuff inside. When Hillary's face revealed her vulnerability when her opponent came over to her podium in a debate during her first Senate campaign demanding she sign a statement, she seemed not only more likable, but stronger and more resilient. We saw the bones of her Being. This moment of being seems to have been the turning point in the race.

When we defend against external forces we don't like and the feelings they bring up---something alas we all do---we pretend we can maintain ourselves inviolate. Like George Bush we hold the line and become the decider of what we will let in and what we will keep out. Instead of feeling our vulnerability to the vicissitudes of life and fate, we turn it around and preemptively---and/or indiscriminately---kick ass. (The more openly vulnerable the target, the better to deflect our own banished feelings.) Instead of strength, we show meanness or bravado. Instead of letting life reveal the bones of being human, we try to stage manage it so it becomes an endless photo op.

The truth is we can't keep out difficult feelings, and perhaps especially painful vulnerability. It is inherent in the curse and gift of consciousness. Even if we try to deflect them by projecting them outward and making sure others feel them instead, they still leave their mark on us---in our muscles and maybe even our bones. In some real sense we store the unpleasant feelings we wish to keep out inside our bodies. (Remember the old saying that you become what you resist.)

My chiropractor tells me that like muscles, bones can hold tension. I'm not completely sure how this works; it could be that bones can store blocked Ch'i, or life force. In any case, the muscles that hold the bones in place have to maintain tension to do their job. I suppose as a result they can hold a certain amount of unnecessary tension as well. Difficult feelings we refuse to feel also can be stored in the patterns of reaction of muscles, including presumably the muscles that hold the bones. Whatever the mechanism, unfelt feelings tend to make our bodies function in a rigid and stiff or otherwise maladaptive way---the very opposite of the resilience and flexibility we all desire.

Experiencing vulnerability is not the same as feeling victimized. Nor does it mean taking to heart what another is saying or doing. Being vulnerable in the sense I am using it means fully feeling whatever is happening and letting it reverberate through the bones of one’s being. What I found so magnificent about Hillary in the debate in her first Senate race I described above was that she was completely present to that difficult moment.

This is a more difficult task with a backlog of stored trauma, as many of us have, or just stuff. But it is not impossible, just more of a challenge. The trick, it would seem, is to be completely permeable. This means feeling whatever is happening, remaining present as it reverberates through both our bodies and our being as long as it needs to, and then letting it pass out through the other side.

This ability to be fully present in the moment---and the next moment and the next moment--- feeling one's vulnerability to the external world and whatever it brings and brings up, links vulnerability not only to presence, but to real power. In difficult situations, correct action---actions which will serve others as well as the self---can only come from being present to what is happening as it echoes through our being before it goes out the other side. This is true whether it calls for the forceful structuring of the nail, the more gentle guidance of the needle, or something in between. No doubt we will often get it wrong, but with the effort to stay conscious, perhaps we can get it right much more of the time.

WOMEN IN SCIENCE and...(an illuminating conjunction)!

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 18:46:00 +0000

One of a series of 36 posters by Pamela Davis Kivelson for the PDK Poster Project on Women in Science.

The title of the article on women in science was a little bit odd, "Why Can't a Woman Be More like a Man?" and there were some other clues as well. But my misgivings were allayed by the following sentence that appeared close to the beginning. "The research on gender and vocation is complex, vibrant, and full of reasonable disagreements; there is no single, sensible answer." I experienced a pleasurable crisp feeling as I read that.

I have been somewhat less condemning of the Lawrence Summers escapade (transcripts of his comments) than most of my colleagues at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis. (See also) As a scientist I feel that even controversial, "politically incorrect" data should get an airing, especially if it speaks to critical cultural controversies. However, I have to acknowledge that I cannot say how I would have reacted had I been at his presentation.

The facts seem clearly stated in the third paragraph of the article. “ Women comprise just 19% of tenure-track professors in math, 11% in physics, 10% in computer science, and 10% in engineering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 25% of the Ph.D.'s in the physical sciences---way up from the 4% of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields." This apparently clear statement of the facts along with the crisp sentence cited above helped set me up (primed me) to be more accepting of the author's argument than I otherwise might have been.

She argues that the low percentage of women in these fields reflects the female tendency to prefer careers connected to nurturing. She cites, for example, a survey in which 1500 professors (gender breakdown not given) were asked what accounts for the low percentage of women and 74% chalked it up to differences in interests. She also cites work by Baron-Cohen suggesting that autism is the far end of the male spectrum. He feels that the male brain on average is wired to be better at systematizing and the female brain better at empathizing.

In a skillfully presented case, the author suggests that the campaign to get more women in these as well as other aspects of science is not just a con, but a juggernaut completely out of control. Those on the gender equality in the sciences bandwagon have hoodwinked university presidents, the NSF, and now even Congress into making a nonexistent problem a cause célèbre. A Title IX program for the physical sciences analogous to the Title IX program for sports is in effect (although its requirements have apparently been unevenly enforced). They have been able to do this, she claims, because of:

… a body of feminist research that purports to prove (emphasis added) that women suffer from “hidden bias.” This research, artfully (emphasis added) presented with no critics or skeptics present, can be persuasive. A brief look at it helps explain the mind-set of the critics and their supporters. But it is a highly ironic story. For the three recognized canons of literature are, in key respects, travesties of the scientific method, and they have been publicized and promoted in ways that ignore elementary standards of transparency in objectivity.

Since I only had the information the author gave me, at first reading I found her arguments plausible against two of the three sources used to bolster the feminists perspective (see below however). Introducing the third source, she wrote “How in the face of women's clear tendencies to choose other careers and more balanced lifestyles, can one reasonably attribute the scarcity of women in science and engineering to unconscious bias and sexist discrimination? Valian showed the way.” Quoting Valian, she continues:

In white, Western middle-class society, the gender schema for men includes being capable of independent, autonomous action...[and being] assertive, instrumental, and task oriented. Men act. The gender schema for women is different: it includes being nurturant, expressive, communal, and concerned about others.

Continuing to describe Valian's work, she says:

Valian does not deny that schemas have a foundation in biology, but she insists that culture can intensify or diminish their power and their effect. Our society, she says, pressures women to indulge their nurturing propensities while it encourages men to develop "a strong commitment to earning and prestige, great dedication to the job, and an intense desire for achievement." All this inevitably result in a permanently unfair advantage for men.

I recognized some deep resonance with Valian’s claims. However just as I was starting to reconsider the easy pass I was giving the argument of the author of the article I was reading, I learned about mandatory gender bias workshops in which interactive theater about exaggerated situations is used to try to raise the consciousness of physicists and engineers who get government grants. This did seem over-the-top. I was also kept in line by a report of a Title IX review requiring a female physics professor to make a list of all the equipment in the lab and indicate whether women were allowed to use each item.

I finished the article and then noticed that what I had been reading was published in the American Enterprise Institute bimonthly newsletter. I also recognized that the author Christina Hoff Sommers had written an intensely antifeminist book (while claiming herself as a true feminist). Uh-huh, I thought to myself.

In retrospect, the last paragraph of the article made perfect sense.Sommer's wrote, "Americans scientific excellence is a precious natural resource. It is the foundation of our economy and of the nation's health and safety" She then points out that people from MIT have started more than 5000 companies in the past 50 years. She asks, "Will an academic science that is quota-driven, gender-balanced, cooperative rather than competitive, and less time-consuming produce anything like these results?"

Cooperative science works, and more of it sounds great to me. Moreover, as current events strongly argue, the well-being of our economy and our health and safety as citizens depends considerably more on having leaders capable of objectivity and willing to assure adequate government regulation and than it does on resisting any hypothetical decline in scientific and technological innovation that having more women in these fields might bring. Besides having more women might increase innovation!

**************************
Without thinking more about the article, I went on to my real task for the evening. It was once again rereading a paper by John Bargh and Melissa Fergerson on the automaticity of higher mental processes. They reviewed studies showing that researchers can prime all kinds of higher level behavior most of us generally assume depends primarily on conscious processes. For example just by giving subjects scrambled sentences containing several words relating to a stereotype they can prime subjects to identify with a stereotype and thereby influence their behavior. In one study subjects were primed with the stereotype of university professor or hooligan. In a second apparently unrelated task, those primed with the professor stereotype answered more Trivial Pursuit questions than those primed with hooligan.

Even as I have appreciated the growing body of work in Social Psychology on automatic behavior, I have been a bit resistant to it. For one thing, it seems that random priming influences would more or less cancel out in real life. Also this work is often used to make the point that introspection is useless since our behavior is governed by extraneous influences of which we are unaware. Certainly introspection, like anything else, has its limits, but it is often invaluable.

That night the words of the article almost danced on the page. I really got it, or the version of it that makes sense to me. Even very subtle consistent environmental influences can over time have a powerful and long-lasting effect on the psyche. Once again, the message about the power of conditioning hit home. Wow!

*******************

The next morning as I lay in bed, I was quite astonished when I recognized the relevance of the work on automaticity to the women in science problem. No wonder the words danced on the page! The women in science article had in a sense primed me to get the social psychology material on environmental priming (and vice versa as well--- why not reverse priming since things stick around in our head?).

As I lay there, my thoughts kept coming back to the female junior physics professor who Sommers claimed had been required to list for Title IX reviewers whether women were allowed to use each piece of equipment. I wondered whether she had instead been asked to report, on the basis of equipment logs, the percentage of time women got to use important pieces of equipment versus men? Such a question could provide data on one aspect of potential implicit gender bias in laboratories. (The other question, if it makes sense that all, would look at explicit bias.) So I decided to check out Sommers sources. Yes, I found that the female junior physics professor, not shy about her hostility to Title IX review,really did tell a reporter for Science Magazine that she was required to list all her equipment and say if female lab members could use each piece. (I still suspect this is not the whole story.)

I will not consider the second gender-bias-in-science source Sommers critiques, as the story is too convoluted. However Sommers was less than judicious in her comments about the summary of the in-house MIT report made available to the public---which was what got the "gender equality in science" movement going in the first place. For example, she quotes from an ungenerous source, conservative anti-feminist Judith Kleinfeld who calls it “junk science” for not obtaining confidential informationin some cases and not revealing it in others.

In contrast I was struck by the judicious and sincere tone of the report. For example, on page 8, it says, “Data reviews revealed that in some departments, men and women faculty appear to share equally in material resources and rewards, in others they did not.”

Sommers in addition claims that the summary, which was publicized as showing objectively that there was a woman in science problem, failed to do so. I disagree since it documented the most important piece of information. It shows that from 1985-1994 the proportion of women in senior faculty positions in MIT’s School of Science remained constant at roughly 8%.

She also suggests the authors of the report might be misconstruing the broader problem in a critical way. Quoting from the report, she writes: [The summary concedes]“Junior women felt included and supported by their departments." Sommers continues: "Instead of acknowledging that the problem might be generational and confined to a small group of senior women from three departments, Hopkins and the other authors of the report claimed that the Junior women were naïve and simply did not know what was in store for them: [Again quoting the report] "Each generation of young women began... by believing that gender discrimination was solved in the previous generation and would not touch them.”

Quite to the contrary, the scientists place this paradox close to the core of their understanding of the problem. It is what we call the glass ceiling.

An important finding to emerge from the interviews was that the difference in the perception of junior and senior women faculty about the impact of gender on their careers is a difference that repeats itself over generations. Each generation of young women, including those who are currently senior faculty, began by believing that gender discrimination was "solved" in the previous generation and would not touch them. Gradually however, their eyes were opened to the realization that the playing field is not level after all, and that they had paid a high price both personally and professionally as a result. (p. 9: from section called: What the Committee Learned)

Implicit gender bias increases as women climb the academic latter . [From the summary of the report by the chair of the MIT faculty, p. 3:] "It was only when they came together, and with persistence and integrity, that they saw that as their careers advanced something else besides competence came into play, which for them meant an accumulation of slight disadvantages, with just the opposite for their male colleagues.

Two other paragraphs struck me as I read the report, especially after having "got" the work on priming.

...While the reasons for discrimination are complex, a critical part of the explanation lies in our collective ignorance. We must accept that what happened to the tenured women faculty in the School of Science is what discrimination is. It defines discrimination in the period from the 1970s up till today. But we, including for a long time the women faculty themselves, were slow to recognize and understand this for several reasons. First, it did not look like what we thought discrimination looked like. Most of us thought that the Civil Rights laws and Affirmative Action had solved gender "discrimination". But gender discrimination turns out to take many forms and many of these are not simple to recognize. Women faculty who lived the experience came to see the pattern of difference in how their male and female colleagues were treated and gradually they realized that this was discrimination. But when they spoke up, no one heard them, believing that each problem could be explained alternatively by its "special circumstances." Only when the women came together and shared their knowledge, only when the data were looked at through this knowledge and across departments, were the patterns irrefutable.

They found that discrimination consists of a pattern of powerful, but unrecognized assumptions and attitudes that work systematically against women faculty in the light of obvious goodwill. Like many discoveries, at first it is startling and unexpected. Once you "get it," it seems almost obvious. Of (p.10-11: from section called: How Did Inequality Come about? “Gender Discrimination” in 1999).

By 1999 when the summary of the 1995 report was released as a result of its recommendations the percentage of female tenured faculty at MIT in the sciences had increased to 13%, representing a 40% increase. However as far as I can ascertain, the percentage seems to have remained relatively steady since. Certainly there are fewer women than men who want to go into these fields, no doubt in part because of innate preferences. But implicit bias against women in science, which women as well as men harbor, exacerbates the situation. (By the way, you might might want to test and see if you have unconscious bias that associates science more with men than women.)

Finally this brings us back to those over-the-top workshops on gender bias mandated by Title IX. Implicit gender bias, like other implicit bias, is nearly impossible for us to become aware of on our own. Workshops on gender bias using interactive theater and exaggerated situations, rather than indicating a feminist agenda out of control, may make sense as a way to shake up implicit as well as explicit bias. However I feel it might be even more important to have workshops in junior high, high school, and college that help counteract the bias against becoming a scientist in the young women themselves harbor.

KARL POPPER AS THE 'ULTIMATE WARRIOR'

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:04:00 +0000

About a year ago I took Conjecture and Refutation by philosopher of science Karl Popper (1902-1994) out of the Brandeis library (also see). I am a great admirer of Popper's work. He was among the first philosophers of science to suggest that scientific theories are a product of human imagination/intuition. He felt that theories come first and determine which experiments are done. In contrast, the logical positivists, whose views were prominent at the time and still are to some extent, believed that the data comes first and determines theory. Since for Popper theory is based on conjecture, he argued that falsification of theory, or disproof, not verification, is the proper work of science.

Flipping through Conjecture and Refutation, I saw that a previous reader had left me a gift. It was an exceedingly unlikely bookmark for a treatise on the philosophy of science---even one that was a reasonably good read. Sporting the rather terrifying image of the bulked-up Intercontinental Wrestling Champion Ultimate Warrior in full warrior regalia shown above, it revealed the human being at its least cerebral and abstract.Brandeis is a pretty lofty place. Is it possible, I wondered, there is a Brandeis student who reads philosophy of science by day but is obsessed by steroid-taking human gladiators of the least subtle kind at night?

The idea of calling Karl Popper 'the ultimate warrior' came to seem less strange when I started dipping into Conjecture and Refutation. One chapter in particular brought home to me that Karl Popper could rightly be seen as a champion wrestler.(By the way,eventually I read the medium-size print on the back of the card and the mystery cleared up. It is one of a series of wrestling cards given out with video rentals at Coliseum Video Stores. What do I know!?)

In the chapter that especially captivated me, called "Back to the Presocratics," Popper considers the early Presocratic Tradition in part in light of the question of the role of observation in scientific endeavor. The following passages are from close to the beginning of the chapter. They might surprise those who associate Popper only with the idea that scientific theories have to be falsifiable (and empirically so).

The questions which the Presocratics tried to answer were primarily cosmological questions, but there were also questions of the theory of knowledge.... All science is cosmology, I believe, and for me the interest of philosophy, no less than of science, lies solely in its bold attempt to add to our knowledge of the world, and to the theory of our knowledge of the world.

...[I] is good to remember from time to time that our Western science—and there seems to be no other—did not start with collecting observations of oranges, but with bold theories about the world.

The Presocratics were concerned with such issues as. "'How do we know that the world is made of water?'" or, "'How do we know that the world is full of gods?’" or "'How can we know anything about the gods?'" In contrast Popper expresses disdain for the kind of questions that tended to interest his fellow philosophers, such as, "'How do I know that this is an orange?'" an influence he attributes to Francis Bacon.

We must not forget that the function of the Baconian myth is to explain why scientific statements are true, by pointing out that observation is the 'true source' of our scientific knowledge. Once we realize that all scientific statements are hypotheses, or guesses, or conjectures, and that the vast majority of these conjectures (including Bacon's own) have turned out to be false, the Baconian myth becomes irrelevant. For it is pointless to argue that the conjectures of science—those which have proved to be false as well as those which are still accepted—all start from observation.

Popper uses two early Presocratic theories about what keeps the earth in place to illustrate his views. Thales (620-547 BCE), who is sometimes called 'the first Greek philosopher' and sometimes 'the father of science,' understood the earth to be suspended in water like a ship. During an earthquake, he thought, the disturbance of the water it is suspended in makes the earth shutter. Popper points out that Thales' theory was not directly based on observation, although it seems to have been inspired by analogy to the experience of the earth shuttering during an earthquake as well seeing (or being on) a ship rolling with the waves. Yet experience could have played no role in the theory of the brilliant student of Thales Anaximander (610-546 BCE) because his views ran directly counter to observation. According to Anaximander:

'The earth... is held up by nothing, but remains stationary owing to the fact that it is equally distant from all other things. Its shape is... like that of a drum... .We walk on one of its flat surfaces, while the other is on the opposite side.' [Popper continues]The drum of course, is an observational analogy. But the idea of the earth's free suspension in space, and the explanation of its stability, and have no analogy what ever in the whole field of observable facts.

Popper speculates that Anaximander came to his theory by recognizing that his teacher's Thales view, would lead to infinite regress. If being supported by water explains the stability of the earth, what in turn accounts for the stability of the ocean, and in turn what accounts for the stability of what supports the ocean?

From this we see intuitively that the stability of the world cannot be secured by a system of supports or props. Instead Anaximander appeals to the internal or structural symmetry of the world, which ensures that there is no preferred direction in which a collapse can take place. He applies the principal that where there are no differences there can be no change. In this way he explains the stability of the earth by the equality of its distances from all things.

This view of the earth as freely suspended in space but immobilized because of its equidistant position, Popper considers one of the boldest and most important breakthroughs in the history of human ideas. It made possible Copernicus’s views; but as the initial step Anaximander’s idea was an even bolder conjecture. We see echoes of it even in Newton with his mysterious and invisible gravitational force. However Popper is not easily satisfied. He inquires why did Anaximander not take the next step and postulate that the earth was a symmetrical globe rather than a drum.

There can be little doubt: it was observational experience which taught him that the surface of the earth was, by and large, flat. Thus it was a speculative and critical argument, the abstract critical discussion of Thales' theory, which almost led him to the truth theory of the shape of the Earth; and it was observational experience which led him astray.

Popper anticipates the argument against his views.

But, a follower of Bacon may reply Anaximander was not a scientist. This is precisely why we speak of early Greek philosophy rather than of early Greek science. Philosophy is speculative: everyone knows this. And as everyone knows, science only begins when the speculative method is replaced by the observational method, and when deduction is replaced by induction.

He answers:

This reply, of course, amounts to the thesis that scientific theories should be defined by reference to their origin—their origin in observations, or in so-called 'inductive procedures'. Yet I believe that few, if any, physical theories would fall under this definition. And I do not see why the question of origin should be important in this connection. What is important about a theory is its explanatory power, and whether it stands up to criticism and to tests. The question of its origin, of how it is arrived at—whether by an 'inductive procedure', as some say, or by an act of intuition—may be extremely interesting... but it has little to do with it scientific status or character.

Popper reveals that it is of little concern to him whether the Presocratics are called scientists, pre-scientists or philosophers. But just as the origins of a theory in observation or intuition has nothing to do with whether it is a scientific theory, likewise whether a theory turns out to be true or false has nothing to do with whether it is a scientific theory. A number of theories that have turned out to be false have been more generative in our search to understand the universe than less bold theories which still stand. Theories supported by many observations, just like theories based only on intuition, often turn out to be wrong. When this happens, Popper asks, should the historian or philosopher of science then reclassify them as unscientific?

A final comment----

Alas I suspect that in spite of the above, some will see Popper not as 'the Ultimate Warrior' but only as Hulk Hogan the runner up!

Hillary and the Woman Thing

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 18:39:00 +0000

Written after the Iowa Caucuses and before the New Hampshire Primary

Like many others, I have trouble imagining the United States electing a woman president. I certainly like the idea,--but. Hillary might make an excellent president, but she is too relentlessly perky, too full of high notes, and exudes too little feeling for me. I prefer subtlety and a sense of depth. After eight agonizing years of putting up with George Bush and his pseudo-Texan act, I want our president to be someone highly unlikely to ever, ever, grate on me.

I understand Hillary developed the public personality she has in part in response to her need to excel and to excel in a man's world. However it is not the only possible response. I began writing this in part to do whatever little I could to encourage her to reveal other sides of herself.

What I find so interesting about the Hillary situation is that it is very likely that a moment of public vulnerability got her elected to the Senate in the first place and thus started her own career in public office. In her first Senate race, her opponent Rick Lazio was giving her a good fight; they were even in the polls. A lightweight Republican, who seemed he would do anything to win, he came over to her podium in one of the debates and aggressively demanded that she sign a no soft-money pledge. (He meanwhile was benefiting from a lot of anti-Clinton advertising from Republicans.) She responded to this invasion of her space by looking very vulnerable, human, and un-slick. I found myself really liking and respecting her in that moment. I am convinced that instant of emotional honesty turned the tide, and for what it is worth a number of commentators agreed.

I've heard on network news, which I sometimes catch snippets of at the gym, that Hillary has been trying to show her softer side. I haven't seen the actual clips of her appearances I have to admit. However I suspect that this means being folksy, down-home, and open hearted. I think all these things are fine and I don't think she should stop, but this is not what I really want from her.

Nor am I suggesting that she go out of her way to express vulnerability. However along with the vulnerability in that pivotal encounter in her first Senate race came a moment of Presence. I felt I glimpsed her strength of character as well as humanness as never before. Yes experiencing---never mind showing---that vulnerability is probably something that only a woman would do. But the sense of Presence and essential humanness that came with it got her an elected position her own.

Besides being smart and politically savvy, isn't this sense of Presence, of beingness, what we want from our leaders, men or women. With it, good leaders become statesmen and stateswomen; they inspire us. If I got to see more of this and less shiny persona from Hillary, I would not hesitate to vote for her. I would even work enthusiastically to help elect her as the first woman President of the United States.

Written after the New Hampshire Primary and just before the Nevada Caucuses

I don't get to vote for a couple of weeks, but Hillary probably now has my backing. It was not her moment in the diner in New Hampshire, which didn't really impress me that much---probably too down home and folksy for me. Instead in part it was the picture of her that appears at the very end of the following ad, which I happened to see on television the day before the diner event. None of the pictures of her here are particularly glamorous or slick, but you will know the one I am talking about when you see it. She exudes a kind of depth that is really striking.(Click hard on the arrow in the center or the You Tube icon at the bottom right; it sometimes takes some patience).

Some might say it's only PR. But you can't fake an expression like this or this kind of depth. It is part of her repertoire and I am delighted to see it.

(By the way, I do respond to Obama's rhetoric. He often exudes the kind of Presence I hope for in a political leader, but not when talking policy. My intuition while watching the last New Hampshire debate was that his oratorical skills are somewhat ahead of his governing skills and he is not ready yet.)

There is another factor working in synergy with my newly confirmed sense of Hillary's potential soulfulness that seems to be nudging me into her camp. The Democratic primary, at one level, hinges on the politics of disadvantage. Even though I was leaning towards Edwards, when I heard polls saying Obama was 12 points ahead of Hillary in New Hampshire, I didn't like it one bit. I suspect a lot of women felt this way. I actually felt a bit depressed.

Perhaps it really is time for a woman---and a woman who has that wonderful deep and un-slick expression in her repertoire, even if it is very different from her ususal self-presentation---to shepherd this country. Don't forget Golda, who had 'the look' (see last post, where she makes a cameo appearance), and was among Israel's most significant leaders. My advice to Hillary is: Play the gender card, but in the process transform it into something profound!

You might find this amusing. I was tempted to use it at the top, but thought better of it. You have to scroll down to fully appreciate it.

The Way the Mind Works: Screens, Walls, and My Uncle Manny

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 16:55:00 +0000

Credit: Joseph A Carr-From Wikipedia article on Telephone Swithboards

I was speaking with my (almost) 97-year-old Uncle Manny recently, who lives in Florida. As we often do, we were talking about the old days when he and my father, who died a number of years ago, were boys. We were marveling at how easy it had become to stay in touch since then. The telegraph replaced letters as the only way to reach across distances, and then came the phone.

He told me that his grandfather had one of the first phones in the neighborhood. It was a pay phone of sorts. Neighbors could come and deposit their nickels to make a phone call. The phone company charged a set fee and also got a percentage of the take; my great grandfather got to keep the rest.

We discussed how phone technology had changed---from operators, like Lily Thomlin's "Ernestine," who connected calls on a switchboard, to rotary dial phones. He reminded me of how for a number years if you wanted to make a call overseas, you had to tell an operator, she would place it for you, and then call you back when she had the other party on the line.

We continued with touchtone phones, then cell phones and e-mails. (Great site on history of the telephone ) Keeping on with technological progress and communication, I told him about the voice activated wordprocessor I use because a repetitive strain injury limits my ability to type. It's called Dragon NaturallySpeaking. You can begin using Dragon right away to type text, but it takes awhile to learn to some of the more subtle maneuvers connected with word processing, such as formatting and moving files around. (See Voters Beware: A True Fable to learn about some of its more disarming idiosyncrasies.) It's taken a year or so, but I've now become quite good with it and can do most of what I want to.

One of the ways Dragon lets you move the pointer around on the screen is by saying commands like "start scrolling down," "move mouse right," "move mouse left." When you want the pointer/mouse to stop you simply say "stop." It can be a little tricky to get it to stop just where you want it to, because the voice recognition adds a delay. So you need to say stop just a little before hand.

I had an unusual experience the other day that suggests that technological innovation can go two ways. It seems as if my friend Dragon NaturallySpeaking is beginning to rewire my brain. I had been working very hard that day and late in the afternoon I slipped out to go to my local Whole Foods to go grocery shopping. I was going up and down the aisles, perhaps thinking about my work, while grabbing what I needed. I was in the frozen food aisle when apparently some part of my mind feared that another shopper going the other way down the aisle would soon be in danger of colliding her cart with mine. All of a sudden I found myself saying “stop,” but not to her, or even to her cart. Instead I was talking to an invisible screen, and rather quietly in my flat Dragon voice, which I doubt she even heard. Nonetheless she stopped at the entrance to the little cheese alley and no collision occurred.

I came to full alertness when I recognized what had happened and furthermore that she wasn't even really that close. I felt equal measures of amusement at what had happened and concern for my poor addled brain.

My uncle and I had a good laugh about my mistaking real-life for virtual reality. Then he said, "That reminds me of a story. I'm not sure exactly why it's coming to mind, but somehow it seems to fit."

"Former President Eisenhower went to visit Israel and was shown around by Golda Meyer. They went to the Wailing Wall, where he saw religious Jews in prayer shawls dovening, or moving back and forth as they prayed. He also saw people slipping scraps of paper into the cracks between the stones. Intrigued he asked Golda what was going on. She explained that they were leaving prayers on these scraps of paper.

Eisenhower said he would also like to leave one. He wrote something on a piece of paper and placed in the wall.

Golda tried to contain her curiosity, but eventually it got the best of her. She said, "Mr. President, excuse me for asking, but I am most curious about what you prayed for."

Eisenhower answered, "I asked for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians."

"Ah, Mr. President," Golda answered, "you know of course you are praying to a wall."

Additional thoughts: I don't for a minute believe that my "intervention" was the critical factor in averting a collision. But at the same time, I trust these unconscious responses, especially as they relate to traffic. See Running in Herds, Traffic, and Intuition. Not only do we read momentum, like other animals, we also read intention, and from many different cues. We somehow know, for the most part, if someone we are observing is planning to keep on going, or if they are thinking about making a turn. Nonetheless I would put my money on the fact that the woman just remembered at that moment she needed some cheese. At the same time some trouble-making part of my mind just won't let go of the possibility that something about “my response” to this situation---since she was looking right at me---triggered her stop.

While speaking to Manny again a few days ago, I learned that the Eisenhower/Golda Meier story I had heard for the first time from him was in fact very well-known a number of years back. Intriguingly, even though the story has faded, the situation it captured is unchanged. Everything moves on—technology gallops along, good stories are forgotten. Yet(as Golda intuited) the Israeli Palestinian situation remains essentially frozen in time.

I am going to proffer my own solution to the Israeli-Palestinian situation. How about if everyone on both sides started using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to help prevent repetitive strain injury. After all real-life reality, virtual reality, and metaphoric reality are all likely equidistant from each other.

EINSTEIN'S INTUITION

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 23:17:00 +0000

After reading Isaacson's book on Einstein, which I heartily recommend, I picked up a book I took out of the library a while ago and kept renewing. It is called Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man, by William Hermanns. Until Einstein came alive for me, came out from behind the myth thanks to Isaacson, I had no mental place for it.

It consists of four interviews with Einstein by Dr. Hermanns, who was initially Einstein's fellow Berliner and then his fellow exile. Hermanns is a sociologist and poet, who has strong mystical leanings and little understanding of physics. The first interview takes place in Berlin as the Nazis are gaining strength and becomes entwined with marching Brownshirts. It is both a wonderfully and terrifyingly bizarre piece, and it would make a striking movie or perhaps play.

The next three interviews take place in the United States during and after the war. Although lacking the drama of the first, they are equally informative. Hermanns continually goads Einstein to talk about things that he is not comfortable talking about, such as mysticism, and then pokes fun at his own obtuseness for continuing to press him. Nonetheless Einstein reveals a great deal to him. The interviews contain a treasure trove of information about Einstein's understanding of intuition. I thought I had the intuition bug, Einstein had it even worse!

Intuition can take many different forms. I identified deeply with a portion of what Einstein said about it. "Yes that's what it's like for me," I found myself saying with wonderment and even delight at the recognition. This kinship to some of what Einstein evoked no doubt comes from the fact that we share a personality type.

After I finished the book, I copied down some quotes I found particularly moving or informative. By putting them one after the other and pondering them a bit I came to see that they formed a coherent, profound, and provocative worldview.

Intuition for Einstein—be it about cosmic law or about predicting the outcome of the Second World War—is intimately connected with feeling. Many associate both feeling and intuition with the gut. But for Einstein, intuition is grounded primarily in the feeling of the heart—in its receptivity and its tendency to move out. It depends on a deep caring and receptivity that pushes him to go beyond what is currently known or thought or happening in order make contact with the cosmic order.

The following passage comes when Einstein and Herrmanns are talking about the Nazis and the flaw in the German national character that lead to Hitler's appeal.

Einstein nodded: he was a good listener. After a pause he said, "The cosmic man must be restored, the whole man who is made in the image and likeness of the arch-force, which you may call God. This man thinks with his heart and not with party dogma. As I've explained before, there is an order in the universe – a cosmic order – and humans have the possibility of understanding these laws."
Einstein leaned back in his chair; so did I,putting my writing pad on my knees. He added, "I have no doubt that the allies will win the war."
I smiled, "Oh, you are my prophet again."
"Prophet or not," he scratched his head, "what I say is more often felt through intuition than thought through intellect."

Hermanns is constantly pushing Einstein to acknowledge his inherent mysticism. He succeeds in getting Einstein to say something that probably few scientists today would say—that there is a vital force or energy in creation. Einstein is willing to associate energy with what are generally seen as spiritual concepts.

I pulled out some notes. "Once, in England, I was at dinner with people highly trained in meditation, among them Professor Suzuki who asked me to ask you if spiritual vibrations and electricity have the same original cause or force."
"I believe," Einstein answered, "that energy is the basic force in creation. My friend Bergson calls it élan vital, the Hindus call it prana."

This acknowledgment of at least certain types of energy that cannot, or not yet, be measured by instruments is noteworthy but it is perhaps not completely surprising. Einstein was responsible for showing us that matter and energy are interchangeable. He understood empiricism to be only a tool of intuition. Finally like Spinoza, he saw God, the universe, and all of life as a harmonious whole.

Einstein looked through the window and seemed to mumble more to the trees than to me, "I believe that I have cosmic religious feelings. I never could grasp how one could satisfy these feelings by praying to limited objects. The tree outside is life, a statue is dead. The whole of nature is life, and life, as I observe it, rejects a God resembling man. I like to experience the universe as one harmonious whole. Every cell has life."
He turned to me and smiled, "Matter, too, has life: it is energy solidified. Our bodies are like prisons, and I look forward to be free, but I don't speculate on what will happen to me. I live here , and my responsibility is in this world now..."

Experiencing the universe as a harmonious whole, there is no reason to fear either life or death. True religion depends only on holding the world in a receptive, caring, and judicious way—on conscience. This opens the door to intuition, which allows at least Einstein to glimpse the law conformability of the universe (and the rest of us too, although no doubt somewhat more dimly).

"The truly religious man has no fear of life and no fear of death—and certainly no blind faith: his faith must be in his conscience. Then he will have the intuition to observe and judge what happens around him. Then, he can acknowledge that everything unfolds true to strict natural law, sometimes with tremendous speed."

As a part of the cosmic order, certainly Einstein, and perhaps all of us, have a purpose which we can recognize with our intuition. Since our instructions or purpose comes from this harmonious whole, we are participating in eternity in the present.

"Indeed, it is not intellect, [which means book knowledge and empiricism for him], but intuition which advances humanity. Intuition tells man his real purpose in this life... I do not need any promise of eternity to be happy… my eternity is now. I have only one interest: to fill my purpose here where I am. This purpose is not given to me by my parents or my surroundings. It is induced by some unknown factors. These factors make me part of eternity. In this sense I am a mystic...”

As an inherent part of this totality, we are much larger than we usually experience. Einstein's religion, like Spinoza's, is that the universe is rational. The highest calling is to ponder its laws. Our usual ways of knowing are crude and cannot comprehend the coherence and beauty of the universe. Only the heart with its intuition can lead us beyond what we know of the universe and of ourselves.

Einstein leaned forward, "… it is not a religion that teaches that man is made in the image of God—that is anthropomorphic. Man has infinite dimensions and finds God in his conscience. This religion has no dogma other than teaching man that the universe is rational and that its highest destiny is to ponder it and co-create with its laws. There are only two limiting factors: first, that what seems impenetrable to us is as important as what is cut and dried; and: second that our faculties are dull and can only comprehend wisdom and
serene beauty in crude forms, but the heart of man through intuition leads
us to greater understanding of ourselves and the universe."

Although intuition is what allows us to move forward—is the most important part of thinking—it alone is not enough. Knowledge also has its place, but intuition is the gatekeeper at the most critical juncture. Even though the workings of intuition remain mysterious, it is a reality.

"Isn't truth inherent in man?" I interjected. "You once told me that progress is made only by intuition, and not by the accumulation of knowledge."
"It's not as simple as that," replied Einstein. "Knowledge is necessary, too. An intuitive child couldn't accomplish anything without some knowledge. There will come a point in everyone's life, however where only intuition can make the leap ahead, without ever knowing precisely how. One can never know why but one must accept intuition as a fact."

Bathroom Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:40:00 +0000

ON BEING JEWISH

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:06:00 +0000

This piece is composed of two separate but somehow linked powerful experiences of being Jewish. The first occurred on a recent trip to Budapest. The second occurred many years ago on a trip that began in Poland and continued in Israel.

1) Budapest: Summer 2007

It was my first day of sightseeing in Budapest. I had decided to leave the Jewish quarter until after the four day conference I was attending---the official purpose for my visit. I had been warned that the story of Hungarian Jewry just before, as well as during, the Holocaust was particularly dark. Hungary was an ally of Germany during the war, had passed its own exclusionary laws in the 20s, and until the very end took care of its "Jewish problem" on its own.

Much of the afternoon I walked around the inner city assiduously following a walking tour in my Frommer's guidebook to Budapest. Determined to pack as much into the day as I could, I crossed over the Danube to Buda and took the funicular up the hill to the castle district. In addition to its monumental buildings, the castle district consists of a number of streets with attractive small houses. The guidebook listed a number that were of note. One, at Tancsics Mihaly u. 26, had been a medieval Jewish prayer house. This is what Frommer's had to say.

This building dates from the 14th century. In the 15th and 16th century, the Jews of Buda thrived under Turkish rule. The 1686 Christian reconquest of Buda was soon followed by a massacre of Jews. Many survivors fled Buda; this tiny Sephardic Synagogue was turned into an apartment.

The house was distinguished by its color and a tiny bronze plaque saying it had once been a synagogue. I can visualize it now close to the corner of the street, painted a tasteful yet alive orange--- what I think is called burnt orange. I love that shade of orange; one of my first thoughts was that its inhabitants were lucky to live there.

Then I saw unbidden in my mind's eye men in long dark frocks and yarmulkes, wearing intelligent, worldly expressions, coming out of the building, perhaps after prayers. They did not seem exotic or even strange to me. Instead I experienced a striking kinship in consciousness with them, perhaps more so than with any other figures I have read about and/or conjured in my mind from the past. I felt I knew them---could feel their inner current, sense their joys and concerns and how they held them together. I continued on my tour, without even thinking of taking a picture.

While I was recounting my adventures to myself at the end of the trip, I left this one out. In the back of my mind I knew there was one more, of a slightly different kind. Indeed the image was among the most vivid I've ever had ---at least of things I have not actually seen or experienced.

2) Poland, Museum at Auschwitz: Summer 1979.

Close to the end of the exhibition, the photos gave way to canvases showing Jewish life. A tableau of a bar mitzvah boy reading from the torah, flanked on one side by his father and on the other by the rabbi, conveyed both in the treatment of the figures and the light, a strong sense of the sustained upward impulse of Judaism towards spirit. In it I discovered the basic religious urge that is at the core of the Jewish experience. From childhood on, even as a reformed Jew, I had experienced it again and again, but mythically in the sense that I could not abstract its meaning from the experience. I realized that even as an agnostic, I had been strongly influenced by this very gentle reach of my community upward toward the sacred. Before it had been somewhat comforting to unknowingly partake of it from time to time; here at Auschwitz I understood what it was, saw how much it had shaped me, and realized its sustaining power.

Israel---Summer 1979

After visiting Auschwitz, I longed to be in Israel. However, once there I felt dispirited and disoriented. I blamed the heat in August and being alone after having been so well cared for in Poland. From my current vantage point I recognize that my distress resulted from my recent encounter with the destruction of European Jewry and the impossibility of satisfactory integrating these events.

As I was going through the motions of being a tourist, I met an English actor, about ten years older than me, on a camping tour of the Sinai Peninsula. An orphan, he had been brought up by the Jesuits. When I told him of my visit to Auschwitz, he shared the Jesuit perspective on anti-Semitism. Christianity was viewed by his teachers as an advance over Judaism because it offered the hope of resurrection. The resurrection of Christ held the promise of the induction of individual souls into a heavenly life at death. The rejection by Jews of Christ was then a rejection of the concept of individual afterlife. The basic impulse of Western anti-Semitism, my friend felt, arose from an unconscious mechanism by which Christians who lack faith in the possibility of life after death combat their inner doubts about life after death by attacking those who do not believe in the resurrection of Christ.

I was intrigued by the ability of this theory in one deft stroke to account for so much. It seemed to explain Hitler's obsession with a "final solution" and his sense of it as righteous work in a particularly powerful way. At one level I was convinced, but at others harbored some doubts. Even though I knew Reform Judaism does not mention life after death, I was poorly informed about other Jewish views. Moreover, the Messianic tradition clearly implies a resurrection of a sort.

Later I found out that the focus of the Jewish tradition is indeed generally on present life: on reaching to God through ritual observance, prayer and even complaint, on acts of loving kindness, and on social justice. However various Rabbis over the centuries have spoken of individual resurrection and afterlife. The mystical arm of Judaism emphasizes the fate of the soul after death. But they teach that originally a spark of divine light, the soul at death merges with its divine source.

I returned to Jerusalem and said good-by to my actor friend. A day or two later, my eyes happened to meet those of a pleasant, simply dressed young man. In part from the extraordinary depth of repose I experienced when our eyes met, I realized in an intuitive flash that this man was a Christian---and a true one. I understood the tranquility and penetrability of this apparently simple young man to reflect his close grounding here in the Holy Land---possibly even unsullied by scientific thought---to a religion that holds at its core the view that individual life can continue in some manner after death.

Whether this man in fact was a Christian is not important. He embodied for me in its purest form a different organizing filter than my own and my tradition to the question of living. I am still engaged, and suspect I will be for a long time, in the process of reclaiming from that unconscious place where intuitions come from and are again stored all the insight inherent in that moment when my eyes met those of this young man.

In the years since I returned from this trip, I have become more involved in Judaism and spiritual life. I yearn, I question and I wrestle, in the manner of many Jews, to know first hand that organizing filter or psychic signature of my religion at its best. I first saw it fully amid all the death at Auschwitz.

************************************
These passages were part of an early version of a chapter for an anthology on growing up Jewish in America, called Daughters of Kings. In the end I decided not to include the story about my actor friend and his theory about anti-Semitism in my chapter, called "The Other Side." In it I write about growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust, attending a Trinitarian boarding school, and the trip I took to Poland, Auschwitz, and Israel after handing in my dissertation.

CONTEMPORARY ALCHEMY

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 19:47:00 +0000

Prague Castle, like most everything else connected to tourism in Prague midsummer, was too crowded. My guidebook warned me to get there early. Instead I spent part of the morning exploring the once funky, hidden-in-the-hill neighborhood above the castle. I was shown around by an older Czeck woman and her daughter I met by chance while asking for directions to the castle. They were delightful and happy at the opportunity to practice their English.

It was difficult even finding where to pay the entrance fee to the castle complex. The audiotour I purchased with the hope it would provide structure to my visit was so detailed, or perhaps poorly done, it left me more rather than less disoriented. I was more than relieved when my due diligence was complete and holes had been punched adjacent to the five or so sites included on my entrance ticket.

I continue to feel out of sorts even after my unofficial sightseeing ended. My rather pleasureless wandering in the gardens behind the castle was punctuated by two sights that at least momentarily pulled me from my funk. One was of a striking couple, both very thin and willowy, dressed alike and all in black. They fit together so well they seemed like twins--- like adjacent puzzle pieces. The other was of a nun dressed entirely in white walking meditatively halfway down the long peaceful grassy slope that went from the palace gardens back to the town.

Heading away from the crowds, I took an obscure wall-lined backroad down from the castle. I was not sure where it would lead, but the views were lovely and I hoped for the best.

Halfway down---there was the twin-like couple. They were peering intently through a gate, the woman taking pictures. My camera was ready and I took several shots of them.

I was intrigued by the idea of capturing this fascinating couple taking pictures of something unknown. They finished their shooting and moved on. Delighted to have caught them on film I forgot about everything else. Only when I came level with the gate did I remember the mystery. This is what they were looking at.

Wolfgang Pauli on Kepler and the Transition from Alchemy to Classical Science

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:52:00 +0000

When I opened my new guidebook at random, of all things, it happened to fall on a page listing an alchemical museum. I was delighted at the thought of visiting on my upcoming trip to Prague what was billed as the only alchemical museum in the world. Yet when I looked a second time I saw it was closed for the summer. Instead I had to satisfy myself with rereading an article on alchemy by physicist Wolfgang Pauli I had found very thought provoking. He uses the work of Johanus Kepler as a lens through which to view the transition from alchemy to the classical scientific perspective.

Pauli is best known for his work on the spin of elementary particles. As a particle physicist he grappled closely with the wave particle duality. He also was a patient and collaborator of Carl Jung. He worked with Jung to integrate the intuitive, imagistic, and feeling material that came through his dreams with his much stronger thinking side. Like Jung, he came to feel that both mind and matter were manifestations of the same primary material or force prior to both. The article called "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler" appears in a volume with an essay of Jung's on synchronicity. The book is entitled The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche and was first published in 1955.

Kepler (1571-1630) was a devout Christian with mystical tendencies as well as an important figure in the history of science. Converted to the Copernican heliocentric universe early in his career by his tutor, he became obsessed with proving that the planetary orbits were circular. He was strongly influenced by, among other things, neo-Platonic philosophy, which explored the harmonious mathematical relationships behind music and tried to generalize these to nature as a whole. Kepler saw the Divine in the regularity of geometry and saw the cosmos as what might be called Divine Geometry. The sphere was for him the most perfect geometric form. He felt its harmonious proportions encoded the Triune Christian God (with the Son standing for Creation), the relationship of the soul to the body, of God to the human soul, and, at least early on, of the sun to the planets. (The picture is a model of Kepler's early view of the solar system.) He thought the soul responded instinctively to the harmonies of the sphere because, as Pauli puts it, by virtue of its circular form [it] is an image of God, in Whom these proportions and the geometric truths following therefrom exist from all eternity. " Below are a few passages from Harmonices mundi, Kepler's book on "the harmony of the worlds."

... the movement of a point located in the center [of the sphere] to a single point on the surface, represents the first beginning of creation, emulating the eternal generation of the Son in that the center flows out towards infinitely many points of the whole surface, which, under the rule of the most perfect equality, is formed and described by infinitely many lines; and this straight line is, needless to say, the element of corporeal form.

The point spreads itself out over this extension so that point and surface are identical, except for the fact that the ratio of density and extension is reversed. Hence there exists everywhere between point and surface the most absolute equality, the closest unity, the most beautiful harmony[literally: breathing together!], connection, relation, proportion, and commensurability. And although Center, Surface, and Distance are manifestly Three, yet they are One, so that no one of them could be imagined to be absent without destroying the whole.

...the circle beautifully fits into the intersecting plane (of which it is the circumscribed limit) as well as into the intersected sphere by way of a reciprocal co-incidence of both, just as the mind is both inherent in the body, informing it and connecting with corporal form, and sustained by God, an irradiation as it were, that flows into the body from the divine countenance; whence it [the mind] derives its nobler nature.

Alas poor Kepler, working with the careful astronomical data collected by Tycho Brahe, found that the planetary orbits are not circular. However his commitment to geometry had not failed him since he eventually was able to show that they are elliptical. He also determined that a planet swept out equal areas of its orbit in equal time periods (click for an animation of Kepler's 2nd Law. Finally he recognized the mathematical relationship between the (mean) distance of a planet from the Sun and the size of its orbit. By doing so he found a much more complex harmony in nature, which finally enshrined the sun at the center of the universe. Kepler's work was essential to the formulation of the law of gravity by Newton, who lived from 1643 to 1727.

----------

The final part of Pauli’s article explores the vitriolic controversy between Kepler and his contemporary Robert Fludd, a practitioner of alchemy.

Kepler's understanding of a rational universe ultimately grounded in the harmonies of mathematics collided with the traditional alchemical view based on a “archaic-magical” apprehension of nature in which boundaries between the real and the symbolic were completely absent. Like Kepler, Fludd understood the Divine to be reflected in the cosmos, yet much more dimly. Thus the relationship between the Divine and his creation was not harmonious for Fludd and other alchemists. They saw a cosmic struggle between form as the light principle, and matter, or darkness, which dwells in the earth. This struggle could only be redeemed by the alchemical process, which releases from matter its latent light and by the same token transforms the alchemist. The pictures below, what Fludd called "hieroglyphic figures," demostrate his view of the cosmos.

Pauli writes, "Fludd never distinguishes clearly between a real, material process and a symbolical representation. Because of the analogy of the microcosm to the macrocosm the [al]chemical process is indeed at the same time a reflection of the whole universe.... After the withdrawal of the formal light principle matter remains behind as the dark principle, though it was latently present before as a part of God…. In the middle, the sphere of the sun, where these opposing principles just counterbalanced each other, there is engendered in the mystery of the [al]chymic wedding the infans solaris, which is at the same time the liberated world soul."

Quantitative measurement has no role in, and was indeed a threat to, Fludd's understanding of the universe. Pauli quotes Fludd's spirited attack on Kepler's Harmonicies mundi and defense of the alchemical approach.

...What he has expressed in many words in long discussions I have compressed into a few words and explained by means of hieroglyphic and exceedingly significant figures, not, to be sure, for the reason that I delight in pictures (as he says elsewhere), but because I…had resolve to bring together much in little and, in the fashion of the alchemists, to collect the extracted essence, to reject the sedimentary substances, and to pour what is good into its proper vessel; so that, the mystery of science having been revealed, that which is hidden may become manifest; and that the inner nature of the thing after the outer vestments have been stripped off, may be enclosed, as a precious gem set in a gold ring, in a figure best suited to its nature---a figure, that is, in which its essence can be held by eye and mind as in a mirror and without many-worded circumlocutions.

For it is for the vulgar mathematicians to concern themselves with quantitative shadows; the alchemists and Hermetic philosophers, however, comprehend the true core of the natural bodies.

...I contemplate the internal and essential impulses that issues from nature herself; he has hold of the tale, I grasp the head; I perceive the first causes, he its effects.

Kepler answers:

If you know of another mathematics (besides that vulgar one from which all those hitherto celebrated as mathematicians have received their name), that is, a mathematics that is both natural and formal, I must confess that I have never tasted of it, unless we take refuge in the most general origin of the word...and give up the quantities. Of that, you must know, I do not speak here. You, Robert, may keep for yourself its glory and that of the proofs to be found in it---and how accurate and how certain those are, that, I think you will judge for yourself without me. I reflect on the visible movements determinable by the senses themselves, you may consider the inner impulses and endeavor to distinguish them according to grades. I hold the tale but I hold in my hands; you may grasp the head mentally, though only, I fear, in your dreams. I am content with the effects, that is, the movement of the planets. If you shall have found in the very causes harmonies as limpid as are mine in the movements, then it will be proper for me to congratulate you on your gift of invention and myself on my gift of observation---that is, as soon as I shall be able to observe anything.

Pauli points out that Kepler, a transition figure, overstates the empirical impetus behind his ideas. Pauli is also unwilling to side completely with the quantitative mode that Kepler defends, lamenting what was lost in the transition to the classical science that was to come. (Even thought Newton was a devoted alchemist, he kept his scientific work and writing separate from his alchemical concerns.)

Whereas as Kepler conceives of the soul almost as a mathematically described system of resonators, it has always been the symbolical image that has tried to express, in addition, the immeasurable [emphasis added] side of experience which also includes the imponderables of the emotions and emotional evaluations. Even though at the cost of consciousness of the quantitative side of nature and its laws, Fludd’s "hieroglyphic" figures do try to preserve a unity of the inner experience of the "observer" (as we should say today) and the external processes of nature, and thus a wholeness in its contemplation....

Pauli felt psychology as well as physics was beginning to bridge the gap between the quantative and qualitative that Kepler's work helped bring about. My sense is that more than 60 years after Pauli's article, this important coming together of the quantitative and the qualitative is still just beginning.

Thank You Michael Chertoff: Intuition, Gut Feelings, and the Bush Administration

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 14:26:00 +0000

Thank you Michael Chertoff. I’ve been waiting for the chance to write about this administration and intuition. So you had a gut feeling that the Islamic terrorists are going to attack us soon. Don't we all. (Picture of Mr Chertoff and his gut from http://tildology.com/category/michael-chertoff/)

Yes you have access to more information than the rest of us. You could be integrating this below awareness and coming up with something more significant than the vague feeling we all have---even though you say there was nothing specific besides increased activity in Al Qaeda training camps. But balancing this is the proclivity of this administration to play the fear card when they want to change the subject. More and more Republicans are falling off the Iraq war bandwagon. Seems to me if this gut feeling were anything other than a political ploy you would have raised the terror level to the next color---silly as that might be. Instead you just tried to raise the fear level.

Whether or not you actually had a gut feeling about this---you are only a bit player. But your boss Bush is known for going with his gut and he has consequently helped give intuition somewhat of a bad name. I feel a need to defend my topic of study against his now infamous incompetence and the incompetence of most everyone on whom he depends.

Intuition has a very complex relationship to gut feelings. (For another take on this relationship from a different perspective---see Reason vs. Intuition.) The intuition of Bush and his administration seems effective only when geared to winning power. I would even say it is magnificent on that score. They are incredibly inventive, even uncanny in their judgment here. Also they appear to leave no stone unturned in their desire to seek their own political advantage. But their intuition doesn’t seem to work very well for them when the task is instead to look after the best interests of the country. Their gut feelings and whatever else they integrate into their decisions have been for the most part wrong and very often spectacularly so---with disastrous results.

I suspect part of the problem is lack of motivation at the deepest level. They seem not to care about the well-being of the country--- and certainly not about governing as an art. Instead it is all about their raw power. How could their gut feelings work so well for them some of the time and not at all at other times?

Gut feelings are grounded in emotions. Although emotions get a bad rap, they are essential to us. They are evolution's way of assuring that our survival needs are taken care of so that we will survive and even thrive. As Spinoza pointed out---way before Darwin--- thriving is our basic task as biological organisms, and emotions play an important role in this task---up to a point.

Emotions are closely coupled to biological drives at least to begin with---such as the need to satisfy hunger, avoid danger, to reproduce, and to gather information about the world. But with time, the positive or negative arousal---or constellation of bodily feelings---associated with different emotions get connected to many other things. Largely without our awareness, these bodily feelings have an important role in guiding behavior and decision-making ----just as is true with other animals. A recent NYT article titled Who's Minding the Mind? summarizes some recent work showing that experimenters can manipulate our unconscious feelings without our awareness and thereby affect our subsequent behavior---at least to a certain degree.

What these positive and negative feelings get connected to over time depends on the interaction of individual biology, training and education, and of course the vagaries of chance. Emotions eventually come to determine our most basic values--- what motivates us, or is important to us---what we care about. But these do not necessarily correspond to what we hold as values at a conscious level, although they might. Rather these unconscious values are reflected in some underlying consistency that characterizes our behavior over time--- and they can be very different.

Gut feelings are thus a generic term for largely unconscious bodily feelings that direct behavior according to our values. (The work of Antonio Damasio has been very important in establishing the importance of somatic feelings to decision-making.) The bottom line is that for the most part we only have trustworthy gut feelings about things that are important to us at this unconscious level---which I will stress again may or may not correspond to what at a conscious level we hold to be our values.

Bush and his lackeys care about power, not about governing or even about Democracy. (Who with a deep interest in democracy would label themselves “The Decider?”) When Bush goes with his gut about anything other than what bears on accumulating power, as far as I can ascertain, he is not interested in the subject. He seems to have instead simply incorporated into his visceral guidance system the need to further the aims of others who are likely to advance his power.

Our strange and dangerous President is unusually lacking in that aspect of emotion that motivates us to be interested in the world and its workings in what seems to be at first glance a more or less non-partisan way. Yet in the long run this capacity to be interested for interests’ sake has had an essential role in our survival both as individuals and as a species. It has certainly been responsible for our collective scientific endeavor and our technological prowess, which (at least up to this point) have been important to our ability to thrive.

Power, of course, like gut feeling and its relationship to intuition is a many sided issue. Technological power (independent of the uses which some put it to) is a less raw kind of power than the kind that tends to motivate the bullies of this world---such as George Bush. Alas his favorite nickname in some circles “the Chimp,” is surprisingly apt (with apologies of course to many Chimpanzees). Like many others, my gut feelings tell me that any President whose need for power may know no bounds is just as dangerous to America as an external attack.

&&&&&&&&&&

I was recently in Prague where I visited the Museum of Communism. The exhibit about the secret police stressed that wiretapping under communism, in contrast to what happens in Democratic Countries, required no court order!

Subliminal Perception---Old Hat or is There Something New?

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 15:41:00 +0000

There it was again and even more starkly put! "Researchers have found the first physiological evidence that subliminal images do registers subconsciously. Brain scans showed that even though volunteers were not aware of the series of quickly flashed images their visual-processing centers activated in response to the picture. The study from University College London did not address whether subliminal images could influence thought or behavior."

This time it appeared in Scientific American Mind, a relatively new spin off from Scientific American. A more complete PR blurb titled "Subliminal Advertising Leaves its Mark on the Brain" had come across my computer before. I read it quickly and considered putting it on the blog, since intuition may sometimes involve subliminal perception. It wasn't because I thought physiological evidence for subliminal perception was news. Rather it was for what appeared to be two almost contradictory reasons. It seemed an example of PR on overdrive and it provided an interesting summary of state of the art knowledge of subliminal perception.

I was under the impression that there was scads of evidence that subliminally presented images register on the brain. It seems to me that a full bibliography would take many pages, and that is probably an understatement. I’m not talking about subliminally presented pictures of popcorn at a movie theater increasing popcorn sales, nor flashing the RATS part of “Bureaucrats” in a separate frame in a Republican attack ad affecting votes. To the best of my knowledge such things have not been shown. This does not necessarily mean they cannot occur. (Related effects have been shown. For example, well-established work by Zajonc shows that picture flashed subliminally can influence subsequent preferences. The devil, as usual, must be in the details.)

Support for subliminal perception comes from brain imaging studies as well as behavioral studies. For example, a landmark paper published in 1998 demonstrated that presenting subjects with subliminal pictures of faces with fearful expressions activates their amygdala, the part of the brain that registers fear (Whalen et. al.) . A 2005 study went much further. It showed that threatening words that do not come to awareness nonetheless generate relatively long-lasting activity in the amygdala. Interestingly the amygdala did not begin to respond until about 800 milliseconds later (Naccache at al.). This delay makes sense when you think about it because words have to go through several levels of processing before their meaning is extracted.

Unconscious cognition has become a hot area of research. Researchers are interested in the topic for itself, and also because it is an approach to trying to understanding consciousness. To understand consciousness it helps to compare it to something. Often some kind of stimulus is presented that does not come to awareness ---for example because is flashed for too short a time. The brain activity is then compared to the brain activity when the stimulus is allowed to come to awareness. The difference is an indication of the neural activity associated with consciousness--- or the neural correlates of consciousness, as they are called.

It turns out that there are a number of ways to be sure visual images do not come to awareness---besides flashing them for too short a time. These techniques are called “masking.” In one technique a brief stimuli is presented and then an additional one is presented for roughly twice as long right afterwards. The second stimulus assures that the initial one does not come to consciousness. This is called backward masking. In another technique called the attention blink, attending to an initial conscious stimulus prevents another one presented from 200 to 800 milliseconds later from coming to consciousness. The University College of London experiment, by Bahrami et. al., used yet another technique. They presented faint pictures of tools to one eye and a continuous stream of high-contrast masks to the other eye, which suppresses conscious awareness of the tools.

This lab is very reputable, so I decided to read the paper. I am delighted I did. It confirmed something very subtle about the role of attention in subliminal perception---something well worth contemplating.

The researchers presented the faint images of tools under two different conditions. In the first, subjects were engaged in a relatively easy task---picking out a specific letter, such as a “T” from a continuous visual display of letter. In the second they were engaged in a more difficult task requiring more focused concentration---picking out a letter of a specific color, say a blue T. With the easy but not the hard task, activity associated with the tools showed up on the primary visual cortex. This suggests that information impinging on the retina at least under these conditions is only forwarded to the part of the brain that registers visual experience when the demands on attention are relatively light.

Researchers used to think that subliminal perception was independent of attention. Not only can attentional load interfere with sensory information coming to consciousness (check this out), it can also interfere with it even being recorded by the brain. Indeed the title of the paper---which unfortunately was not mentioned in either PR blurb---is "Attentional Load Modulates Response of Human Visual Cortex to Invisible Stimuli." (Other experiments had suggested this but had not proved it conclusively.)

How might the effect work? We have at least a partial answer. The brain is densely interconnected both within its different regions and between them. This allows it to integrate incoming information from the environment with other information. Sensory signals from the retina go through a relay station, in the thalamus---called the LGN, or lateral geniculate nucleus---on their way to the primary visual cortex in the back of the brain. It turns out that roughly 80% of the LGN's input is from higher brain centers. So, when demands on attention are high, subliminal sensory input somehow can get stopped at the LGN and will not advance to the visual cortex.

With respect to intuition one might be tempted to conclude that subliminal information only registers in the brain proper when it is not otherwise engaged in a demanding task. But is this really a fair conclusion? Let’s change the situation a little bit. For example, say faint pictures of enchiladas are flashed to hungry subjects who love Mexican food or frothing glasses of beer to thirsty beer-loving subjects ---under the same two conditions. Or how about instead flashing a definitive pictorial clue to an engaging and difficult insight problem the subject was given the night before. I have a strong hunch that at least the first two of these high valance, or emotionally charged, stimuli would compete more effectively with the ongoing attentional load and at least register in the visual center in brain. The third is a bit more complex. Especially here, I can hardly wait to see what happens.

FOOD AND THE SPIRIT (or Re-Dedicating my Dissertation Twenty Seven Years Later)

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 23:31:00 +0000

I have a rare chance to make up for a lost opportunity. I had wanted to dedicate my PhD thesis to Julia Child. The topic had nothing to do with cooking, at least in the way the word cooking is generally used. I was studying how digestive enzymes, which are large proteins that break down the food we eat, get from the pancreas where they are made into the gut.

Instead when push came to shove I decided to dedicate it to my younger brother. He had died my junior year in college of cystic fibrosis, just shy of the age of thirteen. Cystic fibrosis is a disease in which digestive enzyme secretion is impaired and children cannot breakdown the food they eat. That's him below at my older brother's wedding---capturing the action. Had Bruce lived, he---not I---would have been the scientist in the family. Not least because my dissertation happened to be on digestive enzyme secretion, it seemed right to dedicate it to Bruce. I am glad I did.

I was drawn to the idea of dedicating my dissertation to Julia because learning to cook from her exceptional cookbook gave me the courage I needed to go into science. An intuitive type, I had always been a bit spacey. I had assiduously avoided serious science, and especially laboratory science, feeling it alien to the likes of me. Learning to cook in the years just after college under Julia’s tutelage gave me confidence in my ability to weigh and measure. She did much more; she helped ground me in the world of sensation and also introduced me to the pursuit of excellence.

Though nominally I was teaching, my real job---and joy---was cooking. In the beginning my love affair with Julia and fine food took place in a tiny closet of a kitchen with no counter space what-so-ever and only a 2 x 2.5 foot table. Nonetheless I followed almost every step of her recipes as if they were sacred texts that held the secret to life. In some sense to me that's just what they were--- and I suspect I was not the only one. Julia opened this country up to the joys of the palate and much more.

I wonder did Julia serve as a stepping stone into science for anyone else---or am I the only one? As a youngster I knew science was supposed to be about observing the natural world, but little I saw jibed with what scientists supposedly said--- like apples and feathers falling at the same rate. At another level the control and precision that experiments required was not associated with women for me. Women didn't control the environment, men did. I don't think a male Julia Child, clarity, nonchalance, breathiness and all, would have had the same influence on me. Because Julia was a woman, she gave me permission; once I had begun to master French Cooking, the possibility of mastering other things became real to me as well.

My skill with cooking eventually went beyond just following Julia’s instructions. As I mentioned in my last post "Intuition and Brussels Sprouts," sometimes when I put myself in a special non–thinking but completely attentive state while adjusting the seasoning of the dish, I would know just when it was enough. Cooking tends to involve great deal of implicit learning, unconscious information processing, and expertise. However the connection between cooking and intuition is even deeper.

Years ago, when a friend and I were traveling together throughout Western US and Canada, she taught me to choose restaurants by their signs. It turned out to be a pretty good rule of thumb--- a restaurant with an appealing sign generally had correspondingly good food. Over the years, I have thought a lot about what this special something is that goes beyond good design.

Sometimes even a very simple restaurant sign or simple cooking rises to the level of art. Like all art, it depends on a combination of knowledge, skill, and creativity that ‘cook’ together below awareness---in short on intuition. Yet I feel that artistic quality is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain a sign that draws you into a restaurant or the good food that so often goes with it. Sometimes a sign that bespeaks good food to me can by no stretch of the imagination be called art.

I suspect some even more basic intuitive alchemy connects the sign an owner of a restaurant chooses to hang to invite people in and the food they prepare. Both share an inherent movement or dynamism that appeals and sometimes even fascinates. We feel enriched by looking at them or tasting them—and perhaps especially when the dynamism is ‘oh so subtle.’ (It might come from a just barely perceptible rhythm to the lettering or composition.) The sign forms an appealing as well as self-sustaining, or continuing, pattern in space--- and the food an appealing and self-sustaining pattern of tastes. These patterns resonate with something etched in the human spirit. To the extent we linger with them, they connect us more deeply to ourselves and also at the same time connect us to something larger than ourselves.

On Julia's website at the Smithsonian below a picture of her in the kitchen in France where she first started to cook is a quote from her “The whole thing was an opening up of the soul and spirit for me." Food is the most direct way we take in the external world and make it part of ourselves. Much of the time we eat without awareness. We are just following our biological imperative to survive. But when we do it with consciousness, this transmutation of world into self can also become a bridge between the sensual and spiritual. To begin with, as the tradition of saying grace highlights, we appreciate the bounty of the earth.

When the food is really delicious---to the extent we savor it--- we are also led into different and more rarefied realms of appreciation and even joy. The cook who pats herself on the back for making a wonderful new dish, in addition to appreciating her own skills, is celebrating---even when she doesn't know it---the slightly enlarged world of nuanced experience her own intuition has opened for herself and guests. (Of course, this opening might instead depend on the intuition of others codified in a recipe, combined with her skill.) When she makes and serves an old favorite, she revisits that special place again.

If you want to get heightened sense of the way food can carry one beyond oneself to new places, you might try a radical experiment---eating a wonderful meal in the company of friends in complete silence. It is hardly anti-social! Rather to the extent one remains present, it leads to an intensified experience of both food and friends. “It is the nectar.” as a friend who I convinced to lunch in silence on the veranda of a lovely restaurant in Italy during a busy conference said. Alas, Julia opened the possibility of experiencing this nectar for so many of us.

Had I dedicated my thesis to Julia back then, my appreciation of her influence on my life would have been incomplete. I was still years away from my current interest in exploring and resonating the experience and science of intuition. But what is a mere twenty seven years when completeness is at stake? Here is the original dedication, and below what I would now add:

This dissertation is dedicated to Bruce Isenman. He wanted to be a scientist, and I believe nothing would have stopped him had he lived.

This study is also dedicated to Julia Child. By teaching me to weigh and measure with the best of them, she gave me the confidence I needed to become a scientist. I now know that she also helped chart my course beyond to resonate more subtle yet no less real realms of knowledge and experience with scientific understanding.

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OTHER RESTAURANT SIGNS I THINK INTERESTING
(A Work In Progress)

I have not eaten at all these restaurants whose signs I think bespeak good food or find interesting for one reason or another. It is no doubt a better test of the rule when the food is unknown. (I apologize for the quality of some of the pictures. I am using Picasa for the first time, and the quality of the uploads seem inconsistent. Any insight appreciated.)

I am not sure about what these signs reveal, but I am certainly intrigued by them. The restaurant has been there since my college years and back then had excellent subs. It recently closed.

This one has changed hands at least once and probably more---so it might be a legacy issue as well.

The signs in the foodcourt of the Porter Exchange in the old Sears Building in Cambridge seem to be all by the same artist. They are very attractive but to my mind verging on slick. I think signs by an artist hired by a corporation for a foodcourt are less telling. Most of the food is quite good at the Porter Exchange, if I remember correctly, and hardly slick!

INTUITION AND BRUSSELS SPROUTS---WHAT!!?

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Tue, 01 May 2007 14:33:00 +0000

My first intensive schooling in intuition came when I learned to cross streets, my second when I learned to drive a car, and my third when I learned to cook (see "Running in Herds, Traffic, and Intuition").The cooking part began a year or two after I graduated from college with a going away dinner for some friends who were leaving Cambridge---and a three day stew. I bought Julia Child’s first cookbook, what became the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and chose the most labor intensive dish I could find.

Julia became my cooking teacher. Her clear and wonderful, if labor intensive, recipes produced food I was delighted to serve and eat. Because she provided such a strong base, she created what I will call a feeling for the palate--- or alternatively, for the recipe.

Her last direction was frequently to correct seasoning. Often it seemed that if I held the salt (or spice) shaker over the dish and went into a mentally blank but extremely attentive place, I would know exactly how much to put in. It certainly doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, I have this clear crisp feeling of being on beam—almost as if I am communing with the dish.

Over the years I have consulted Julia less and less. A recent special project made me go back to her once again. I ate a wonderful pasta dish in a restaurant several years ago, which, among other things, contained a few brussels sprouts. Cut in two, they had been browned in such a way that they became all crispy on their cut end. The contrast of textures and tastes was divine.

Eventually, I decided I wanted to try to make them for myself. I have cooked brussels sprouts only very occasionally---boiling them the ten minutes that the recipe I used suggested---in a pan just large enough to accommodate them. The results were OK, but less than wonderful; the sprouts tended to end up a dull green.

The key, Julia said, was a huge pot of boiling water, a short cooking time---about 6 minutes---and taking them out at their greenest. When I tried it, they turned bright green in no time at all---maybe two minutes. I hesitated a moment and then took them out.

I went on to the second step—cutting them in half and trying to brown them in butter. They hardly browned at all. However my curiosity was piqued. I thought intuition might tell me how brown the butter had to be---instead of my conditioned reactions of all kinds, combined with my thinking mind. Over a period of months I cooked many batches of brussels sprouts—each time trying a different way to brown them. Indeed intuition did have the role in this project, and somewhat like I anticipated, but I got in which part wrong.

I began to notice something interesting about the initially cooking step---the sprouts stayed bright green for a while---maybe as long as a minute and a half. Nonetheless something in me knew when they were at their brightest green and would be at their most delicious. This means a tiny bit crunchy inside, with a wonderful mustard or perhaps horseradish-like flavor.

I would watch them attentively and all of a sudden I would just know it was time to take them out. It certainly had nothing to do with thinking. In fact when I let myself think, I was less alert to this other kind of knowing and less likely to respond appropriately.

When I was a postdoc---way before I began to study intuition---I had my first experience of “knowing more than I know.” Often before I went home for the evening, I would have to add a liquid sample to a thick slurry of beads in a column and wait until it very slowly flowed in. Often it would get stuck.

One evening I knew that the sample was flowing even though I realized that the change in the fluid level in the column above the slurry of beads was imperceptible to my conscious mind. Astounded, I checked several more times and came to the same conclusion. This knowing had an extremely grounded, even physical feeling to it, though I could not identify its source.

I sensed it was not extraordinary knowing, but something every bit as interesting. Apparently our ability to detect visual change below awareness is greater than our ability to detect visual change at a conscious level. Since then I have become familiar with an ever growing body of work that confirms that indeed the unconscious can register and integrate stimuli that do not make it to awareness---see, for example, this 2000 review article by Philip Merikle . The study of unconscious perception of all kinds is a hot area of investigation in cognitive science.

I suspect there is also a similar explanation for my ability to sense when the brussels sprouts will be at their most flavorful as well. Probably my unconscious is aware of gradations in bright green that my conscious mind cannot distinguish. It may also follow the rate of change of the color to capture when it is at its brightest.

Perhaps there is a similar type of physiological explanation for my sometimes ability to stand over the pot in an apparently blank but attentive way and know just how much salt to put in---and also to get a clear signal that it is so. Could the vapors above the pot contain essential clues?

Of course I cannot rule out that an even more obscure aspect of the human ability to know has a role in this situation---or indeed any of these situations. But at least with the first two, a reasonable sounding explanation based on the greater acuity of our unconscious perceptual abilities makes it unnecessary to go any further, at this point anyway.

Currently I am still working on the second step---browning the brussels sprouts. After trying everything I could think of---different degrees of brownness of the butter, different pans, oil instead of butter, dipping the ends in different flour mixtures---I realized that it was time to bite the bullet. I had to attempt to dry the brussels sprouts after the initial cooking---an absurd-sounding notion I had been hoping to avoid. After a lot of thinking, I decided the best I could do was to put the newly cut cooked brussels sprouts on paper towels for a while.

This time they browned beautifully. After sitting a bit, they were scrumptious. The tangy, moist, fresh, mustardy sprouts contrasted in a profound way with the rich, deep, dark, taste of the burnt ends.

But alas they are still not really crispy. I guess I will have to go through everything I already tried before---this time with the paper towel drained sprouts. It is hardly a burden, but a labor of culinary and gustatory love.

Betraying Spinoza

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 04:15:00 +0000

The 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza counseled that we strip ourselves of our attachment to our personal identity and instead use reason to take our place as citizens of the cosmos. Contemporary philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein betrays Spinoza in her book Betraying Spinoza by considering how the environment he grew up in influenced his philosophical views. She also betrays Spinoza by telling something about the unusual circumstances in which she first encountered him.

I will also betray Spinoza. To begin with, my knowledge of his work is secondhand. Yet it has affected me profoundly.

The loss of individual identity, of subjectivity, advocated by Spinoza leads to what Goldstein calls radical objectivity. This objectivity is different from what, rightly or wrongly, is today taken to be the objectivity of science. Spinoza’s worldview is framed by reason, yet there is a strong ecstatic, or blissful, impulse it. (In fact the word ecstasy originally meant to stand outside oneself.) Goldstein sometimes pegs his views as ecstatic rationalism.

Baruch Spinoza grew up in a community of Portuguese Jews who had escaped from the inquisition and moved to Amsterdam where they were free to practice Judaism. A brilliant yeshiva student, who also read widely, he came to reject the rigidity of traditional practice and doctrine, and especially the notion of the Jews as the chosen people. His ideas eventually led to his excommunication. Goldstein traces how the spiritualized rationalism of Talmudic debate (a way of “meshing with the Devine” by studying his laws) and the Kabbalistic, or Jewish mystical tradition (strongly influenced by the Greeks) joined together with the recent suffering of the Jews at the hand of the inquisition to influence his philosophy. She says:

I have long thought that the distinctly platonic tone of Spinoza's philosophy, which consist not so much in his actual picture of reality but in the ecstatic impulse that radiates it, and that sharply distinguishes his rationalism from both Descartes' and Leibniz’s came to him by way of the kabbalistic influences which were vividly alive in his Portuguese community. And Spinoza's system will offer us, as we shall see, its own solutions to the two mysteries that the most central to kabbalistic speculations; the ontological mystery of why the world exists at all, and the ethical mystery of suffering; why does suffering---and of such mind-numbing magnitude---exist in this world, if God is both all good and all-powerful? (p. 91)

Although Spinoza suggests the key to avoiding suffering is to enlarge one's frame of reference to include all of creation, his views are grounded in bodily experience and in subjectivity. He wrote, “The endeavour, wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question.” ( The Ethics , Part III. VII, quoted in Goldstein p. 161) We come into being in a body and are committed to the well-being of this body in a way we are committed to nothing else. We cannot help it.

This basic yet nonetheless curious fact is at the core of most experience. It is what Spinoza calls conatus. Our emotions, bestowed on us by evolution to assure that we survive, make it so. Antonio Damasio, an emotion researcher, in his book Looking for Spinoza, points out that Spinoza anticipated much of current thinking in cognitive science. Damasio, for example, has amassed a great deal of neuroanatomical and clinical evidence that places the body and its emotions at the very core of the experience of self. Goldstein writes:

One cares about oneself simply because one is one’s self. A person is committed, immediately and unthinkingly, to the survival and flourishing of a single thing in the universe that she is. There is no reason, external to one's own identity with that thing--- one self --- that one should be so single-mindedly, unswayingly committed to it. What explains this commitment is nothing over and above the bare fact that one is who one is. (p.160)

When we are happy, this body and the experience of self that come with it seems to expand. When we are unhappy it seems to contract into itself. Our biological mandate, which we cannot refuse, is to try to expand this self as much as possible. Yet our emotions are shaped, or conditioned, by our background and also triggered by external circumstances. They are thus doubly contingent on things we cannot control. Spinoza argues that the only way to assure success in our commitment to ourselves is to greatly enlarge our point of view. We suffer less to the extent that we can distance ourselves from our own emotions. Goldstein says:

That problematic and precious “I” is, for Spinoza a symptom of a passivity, the acceptance of the contingently given, that weakens our capacities, drains and us, impedes our driving force to persist in our own being, to flourish in the world. Paradoxically the only way to flourish in one’s being is to cease being only that being.(p. 69)

Our very essence, our conatus, will lead us, if only we will think it all through, to a vision of reality that, since it is the truth, is in our interest to attain, and will affect such a difference in our sense of ourselves that we will have trouble even returning to the pre-philosophical attachment to ourselves.(p.162)

I had an illuminating experience while reading Goldstein’s book. Just as I was getting ready to go to the airport for my flight home from a trip, I checked my email and received some unanticipated bad news. A deeply unpleasant incident occurred on the way to the airport as well, in part because I was completely occupied processing my thoughts and feelings.

I arrived at the airport in a state of psychic shock. After stewing in my feelings for a while more, I felt drawn to reading Goldstein’s book; I read straight through to Boston. When I arrived home, my emotional pain had not gone away: it was a deep ache in my chest. Yet I was now able to accept these unpleasant events and the internal discomfort they caused without judgment. This seemed to free my mind from its tendency to process seemingly endlessly deeply upsetting events.

Spinoza’s pragmatic if challenging solution to the question of human suffering meets another strand of his philosophy. His basic assumption is one of holism. He begins The Ethics with the following definition,“By that which is self-caused, I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent." (The Ethics, Part I, I, in Goldstein p.71) The universe causes itself. It is therefore deterministic, even if we with limited minds can not understand it. The universe defines logic, or as Goldstein says, it is logic self-aware.

But this reality is not the material world generally perceived by the senses. Sense experience is the lowest step on Spinoza’s hieracrchy of cognition; he calls it imagination. Rather reality is the web of rational necessary connections that underlie the cosmos. By forsaking personal identity, and using our reason, we can partake of this web of necessary connections of which we are, at least in our essence, inherently a part. Though this logic is something we can only fully experience with intuition, our reason prepares us and guides us to this knowledge of God with Nature---deus sive natura.

I had another experience that helped illuminate the power of Spinoza’s work. One morning after spending about an hour with my notes from Goldstein's book in preparation for writing this article, I went outside to go to my car. The shimmering light and my hour with Spinoza seemingly came together to allow me a taste of something extraordinary, which might have some relationship to the ecstacy associated with nature for Spinoza. This feeling came neither from the sensory details themselves, nor how they fit together. Rather it came from something intangible behind all this. Whatever it was seemed dazzlingly intelligent (though whether it was was rational, and thus conceptual, or non-conceptual, I do not know). In any case, the world appeared both material and immaterial, and I found myself soaring to the rhythm of the pulse between the two.

For the next several hours, whenever I turned from my work I could reconnect to this ecstatic feeling. (Even now when I extend my field of vision to its limits, I can recapture a faint echo of the feeling.) But later in the afternoon I came down hard.

A friend’s manipulation about something unimportant and my acquiescence in order to minimize the situation and avoid a showdown left me internally fuming. My effort to talk myself down and to distract worked only to an extent. It did not really get inside to the source of my intense reaction, and I could not completely put this reaction aside. Alas, even though I had tried not to betray Spinoza and myself, I ended up betraying us both.

I plan to read Spinoza’s books, even though their sparseness and rigor makes them daunting. I would like to get a more of a feeling for this web of necessary connections Spinoza calls reason and also how reason and intuition come together for him. Even more importantly, I hope his methodology---his bare bones rationality---in conjunction with his message, will help me become more immune to the seductive and tenacious pull of negative emotions (even when it is round about).

Although I tend not to think this way, I am aware that there may be a bonus. Actually my preference is for super-grounded experiences of altered consciousness rather than ecstatic ones. But hey, if it ever gets to be a real issue, maybe I can work something out.

Rebecca Goldstein, Betryaing Spinoza: The Renegade Jew who Gave Us Modernity (New York: Schocken Books, 2006).

Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003).

ME, MALCOLM GLADWELL, AND A BLINK OF THE EYE

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 21:56:00 +0000

Time to get back to the Gladwell Affair. He seems to have appropriated my previously published metaphor for intuition ‘a blink of the eye’ in Blink, and the book turned into a best seller. Check out Things Are Not As They Seem

I first published the metaphor along with the unusual experience in which it came to me in 1997 in a journal article in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine titled “Towards an Understanding of Intuition and its Importance in Scientific Endeavor." (See link to paper at end; the metaphor etc. is on page 4.) The metaphor may sound obvious, but like most powerful metaphors, this is only true once you have heard it. It is also at the core of a book I have written over a period of ten years that explores the science and experience of intuition.

Here are the facts. Early in 2002, at the suggestion of a former colleague, I wrote to Tina Bennett a literary agent in New York and asked her to represent my book on intuition. In my letter I included the citation to the paper I had published on the topic---to show I was qualified to write the book. She turned me down.

In early 2005, Malcolm Gladwell her client published Blink and did not cite my paper. The title is a clear reference to the metaphor, however this is legitimate in terms of copyright law since titles are open game. He crosses the line when he uses the metaphor as a synonym for intuition in the introduction (page 17) and said " ...there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of analysis." The line is frequently quoted.

After Blink came out, I wrote to Gladwell, Tina Bennett, the agent, and Michael Pietsch, the head of Little Brown, the publisher of the book, asking them to cite my first use of the metaphor. They declined; a lawyer informed me that both Gladwell and the agent claimed they had not seen my paper.

It would be more comfortable for me in several ways if I could believe that my work was not the source of this metaphor, which had an important part in making Gladwell book a bestseller. But, alas, this comfort was not to be.

Early on, when I was in the midst of trying to convince myself my work was not their source for the metaphor, I had one of the most unusual spiritual intuitions I have ever had. Time slowed down, and soft, other-worldly inner light illuminated the stunning message that they had indeed taken the metaphor from my work.

I find the ordinary or clearly biologically-based aspects of intuition much more arresting than its potential extraordinary aspects at this point in my life. But because of the completely unbidden, even “contrary” nature of this experience---along with its strong spiritual surround, it intrigues me. (The connection between intuition and spirituality does interest me strongly.) Most of the time, I believe what it reported is true. At the very least, I cannot just ignore its uncomfortable message.

I have decided not to sue for copyright violation---at least for the time being. Eventually should I decide to do so, I sense there is a very interesting case to be made. For anyone who might be holding their breath, rest assured it does not depend on extraordinary knowing, but rather on the copyright law and the nature of metaphor. In fact whether or not Gladwell initially saw the paper is immaterial to the copyright issue. I informed of them my prior use of the metaphor, and they declined to cite it.

My unwitting connection with Malcolm Gladwell has made my book on intuition, which is a difficult book to publish, even more so. I sense publishers are uncomfortable with the fact that I actually first published this metaphor, which has cemented Gladwell’s role as the king of the publishing world. Alas this emperor---who claims he wants "to make a better world"---may be only scantily clad.

My book is inherently difficult to publish because it includes both scientific material about intuition and intuitions about intuition. (These intuitions, like my blink of the eye experience, are very powerful and rather extraordinary in their own way, but they do not require extraordinary intuition to account for them.) I was surprised and delighted to find these two different approaches bootstrapping on each other to reveal so much more about intuition than I would have ever imagined possible. Over time, the book turned into a bridge between our two ways of knowing.

What some might see as a risky partnership in which vast culture differences spell failure, I know to be an alchemical marriage in which both sides are transformed. Sometimes having to hang out with material that is alien to one's ordinary way of thinking and seems unclear has much bigger impact than information effortlessly absorbed. This kind of hard won impact is what is needed for the transformation I am hoping to have a part in bringing about. I am also convinced that there is a large audience for the book. Most people who have more than a passing acquaintance with this material have been deeply affected by it. We are all at some level longing for the sense of wholeness that this joining promotes.

I wish that this difficult experience had not happened. But it has had a silver lining. It has forced me to retink what is really important in living. Certainly I want a sense of completion for my long project, recognition for my work, and to share what I have found with others. But I have learned that many apparently lesser things are perhaps even more important to me---most especially the simple joy of being.

When Blink first came out, I asked myself half jokingly, “ If I had to choose between enlightenment and getting my book published, which would it be?” Had I responded from the place where I usually lived then, I would have answered that getting my book published was more important.

I am in no danger of getting enlightened any time soon, but something has started to switch. I sense that certain essential oils with spiritual overtones are concentrating and growing stronger in me---as sometimes happens to herbs grown in poor soil. My wish is more and more for wisdom in my efforts to serve. I sometimes still worry about the book getting published, but for the most part I know that it will happen when the time in right

My 1997 paper on intuition has not been readily available on the web. I have decided to make it so and eventually some of my other work on intuition. Anyone tempted to use my work without attribution--or any other work--beware of the risk! Alas this risk is so easy to overlook in the rush to get ahead---and ahead---and even further ahead. Though intangible, I suspect it is substantial---at least for those who care about an open relationship with their soul.

Of Temples and Grasses: A Visit to the Yucatan Peninsula

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:26:00 +0000

I’m just back from a conference in Mexico held on what is called the Mexican Riviera on the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. After the conference I spent a number of days on the Yucatan Peninsula visiting Mayan ruins. In part I felt I SHOULD, but something else seemed to be calling me as well. I first went to Merida, a former Mayan city that was destroyed by the conquistadors and is now a city with a strong colonial influence. Only the cities that the Mayans had already abandoned were NOT destroyed.

The first day I took a tour to Uxmal and then to Kabah --two Mayan ruins about an hour away. I approached them as a tourist, conscientiously trying to take in as much information as I could. The picture shows the main temple at Uxmal. The Mayans were inveterate temple builders, often building temple over temple on the very same site, as they did here. They painted them bright red.

The next day I had planned to take a tour to see some caves and three lesser Mayan sites. I wondered whether it was really worth it. After all I was going to go to Chetzen Itza and then Tulum and could instead use the day to explore Merida. Wouldn't the law of diminishing returns begin to set in? Nonetheless I decided to go ahead with the plan I had so carefully worked out.

The bed and breakfast I was staying at had an arrangement with a tour company. I signed up with them, rather than with another company that had an apparently similar tour about 15 percent cheaper. It was easier and I wanted to help out the inn keeper.

I had great trouble understanding the tour guide who picked me up. Eventually I realized that he was announcing that lunch was not included as I (and apparently many others) just assumed. It seems to be the custom there and it was included in the other tour.

No lunch and all day with a tour guide I didn't understand (and another couple who did not speak English). I said I didn't want to go and asked for my money back. The driver kept crossing himself and spitting into his hands. We were a ways from the hotel by this time, so he drove me to the downtown office of the tour company. First they said I should go back to the hotel, they would call, and the hotel would give me my money back. When I asked them to put that in writing they said they would pay for my lunch, if I would go on the tour. Somewhat to my own surprise, I agreed.

The Loltun caves, the first stop, have been used since prehistoric times. The Mayan’s hid from the conquistadors in them. Extending at least 6 km, they have many broad caverns and massive stalagmites. (To see them required hiring a special guide---who used a laser pointer.) I realized for them alone the day was worth it.

The minor sites were-well minor sights---at least for someone without much insight into the intricacies of different Mayan styles. (Actually, I have now come to appreciate the unique style of these ruins.) They were largely free of other tourists. I tried to believe what my guide was saying but some of its strained credulity. By no stretch of the imagination could I see elephant trunks in the many odd shaped protuberances punctuating the façade of one of the buildings. Soon I stopped listening.

Instead I tuned into the peacefulness of the day and the calmness of the grass in front of the long temple. Eventually I glanced at where the grass met the corner of the wall of the Temple. I experienced the coolness and impartiality of the stones and the strength, permanence, and angularity of the wall. I realized that Mayan architecture served at least in part as a bulwark against the natural word--- against the softness and fecundity of nature, on the one hand, and against human dependence on it and powerlessness in the face of it whims, on the other. The wall had a presence---one that spoke back to the passing of time and our limited lifespan and said something forceful and lasting.

I recognized this "standing up to nature” as the masculine project. I do not identify with it personally, yet I do feel very appreciative of it. On the way out of the site, the guide called our attention to a carved pillar of a Mayan warrior off to the side of the path. He said that it was unusual for carved columns NOT to have hieroglyphics, but the Mayans wanted to have warriors on their columns because they were interested in “imposing constraints.” I suspect that carved pictures long predated carved hieroglyphics. Nonetheless with those two words, ‘imposing constraints,’ my guide--- full of the unexpected---had captured my new insight about Mayan architecture as well as the masculine project in a nutshell.

My experience at Chechen Itza helped deepen at the same time that it opened up my insight about the Mayans. I saw the main temple for the first time during the evening Sound and Light show. It had a presence and power that spoke back to nature in a somewhat different way.

In its perfection it captured not only the human spirit, but something other worldly as well. I found it awesome in the real senses of the word. The next day, even amid the crowds and the heat, from time to time I was able to give myself over to its power and authority. Then it spoke to me not only as a beautiful artifact, but as something charged with human spirit, even as it surpassed the human spirit. This was much more than just the masculine project—though I cannot say what it might be.

My guide the next day---a very thoughtful and sensitive man--said that the power of Mayan culture came from the fact that women were educated just like men and were considered equals. Given the hierarchical nature of ancient Mayan culture, I have my doubts that this is true (or true throughout the many centuries the Mayan culture flourished.) Jean Molesky-Poz, one of the woman I got to know at the conference, is an expert on contemporary Mayan spirituality, with a focus on women. She described a gentle culture in which people were very in touch with each other with the Earth and with Spirit. I am going to buy her book, which in part looks at the continuity between contemporary and ancient Mayan spirituality, to see if it might provide some hints of what “this more” is I experienced at Chetchen Itza

As I waited for my bus in the parking lot to take me to Tulum, the Mayan city by the sea, I tried an experiment. Could I give myself over to other buildings in this way and would they speak to me as well? I tried ‘to listen’ to the buildings that housed the ticket office and market around Chechen Itza but they seemed to have very little to say.

At Tulum, known more for its setting than it architecture, I appreciated the beauty of this site perched above the sea. But when I try to ‘listen’ all that really spoke to me in this special way was the long grass towards the far end of the extensive site waving rhythmically and sweetly in the breeze.

The last picture is from the Governor's Palace in Merida. After my tour to the minor sites, I told the tour guide (of imposing constraints fame) to drop me off at the contemporary art museum. He said that I should go see the murals on the second floor of the Governor's palace instead. I didn't, but the next morning, I rushed out to get a look before my bus to Chetchen Itza. I am so glad I did. The 26 murals by Fernando Castro Pacheco depict the history of the Mayans on the Yucatan Peninsula. This is the center picture of three that frame the well of the grand staircase. It represents the birth of Mayan man from an ear of maze, as described in the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Mayans.

Breaking Ground---A Little Lower Than the Angels

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 15:43:00 +0000

Being the first, I am coming to realize, is not always all it is cracked up to be. I was the first to come up with the metaphor a blink of the eye for unconscious cognition and intuition and published it in 1997---long before Malcolm Gladwell and Blink. I am proud of it, but it has been a mixed blessing. Another first is that I was the first girl to have a Bat Mitzvah at Temple Israel in Boston. It was also a mixed blessing, but in a different way. This post is about my Bat Mitzvah. If you want to know more about my experience around the blink of the eye metaphor for intuiton, check out my Oct 24 post, Things Are Not As They Seem.

Sometimes I say that my mother was the first Bat Mitzvah at Temple Israel, because it was her idea. She was a feminist before her time. The first girl after four boys, like her brothers, my mother became a lawyer. Yet she practiced only briefly; parts of her nature were not really suited to it. She struggled instead, as she put it, “to accept her role as a wife and mother."

I had very little to do with my Bat Mitzvah except to learn my Torah part. I don't remember learning it, I don't remember when the idea of me having a Bat Mitzvah first came up, and I don't remember how I responded to the idea. Obviously I didn't object seriously. But I wonder, did I say “Yes,” enthusiastically, or did I say, “It's okay with me, if you want me to.” Most of my experience around my Bat Mitzvah is shrouded with this kind of vagueness and haze.

My older brother’s Bar Mitzvah I remember well. I remember Paul studying his Bar Mitzvah part, I remember the monumental preparations---especially the wonderful engraved invitations---that consumed my mother. I remember the luncheon and the magician who did the entertaining. I also remember how happy I felt. It seemed a mitzvah, a blessing, for the whole family.

I also remember the extraordinary charm bracelet wonderful friends of my parents gave me. I still have it. It has a book that opens, a watering can with a bird on it, a bell, and a lock with my name engraved on it---and other charms as well. It was right up there in my mind with engraved invitations.

Even my misanthropic grandfather, my mother's father, who didn't attend family celebrations came to my brother’s bar mitzvah. That was quite a coup--- though he wouldn’t let anyone know he was coming for sure until the last minute. What I don't remember directly, I can pretty much reconstruct from the abundant pictures and movies taken of the event. As I write this, I feel choked up; Paul's Bar Mitzvah had that much meaning to me.

I suppose at some level I did not object to the idea of having a Bat Mitzvah because I too wanted to be the center of so much meaning. Yet the only things I remember when it first came up was the wonderful anticipation of the engraved invitation that would announce the event. Engraved invitations were so reified, so official, so beautiful to me. I was certain that they transform the messiness and changeability of self into a sleek and compelling, permanent public offering.

But back to the haze. Yes I wanted to be the center of so much meaning, and I certainly wanted whatever my brother had, but I did not feel it was really kosher. After all I was only a girl. My brother---the first child and a son--- deserved all this fuss because at the age of 13 he became a man in the eyes of the congregation , and like generations of men before him could be part of a minyon or called to read from the Torah. I had no model for Jewish women having an equal role in official religious practice. Without this how could I feel I deserved this ceremony of coming of age or find emotional or spiritual meaning in the experience. Without this it was---at least at the conscious level, a short-term celebrity grab--- although one eminently justifiable from an egalitarian point of view.

Apparently my mother, the prime mover behind my bat mitzvah, felt the same ambivalence. I know because SHE DIDN’T ORDER ENGRAVED INVITATIONS, she wrote them out by hand instead. She tried to tell me that it was much nicer, more personal--- but she didn't fool me.

No doubt another reason for my haze surrounding my Bat Mitzvah was it was also my first year at boarding school. Since my birthday is in October, so I had been at Howard's Seminary for Girls, about an hour away from our home, for only a month or two before the ceremony. Anticipating going away from home, must have taken up a lot of my emotional energy in the months before.

My Bat Mitzvah might have happened on Oct 13. (I am surprised that any date came to mind.) I came home for the weekend. I remember what I wore; it was my good outfit---a purple wool skirt with a matching purple sweater. It seemed sacrilegious not to be wearing a new outfit to one's Bat Mitzvah.

I don’t remember anything about the service. The party was in the reception hall at the temple. The only thing I recall are spotlights held by someone standing on a chair taking pictures, which bothered my eyes. I do not remember ever seeing any pictures, either stills or movies. I do not remember getting any gifts. Perhaps my mother had also written on the invitations-- no gifts.

For years I have felt secretly ashamed of what a non-event my Bat Mitzvah was for me. Only in thinking about writing this piece have I realized that the vagueness I felt was completely appropriate. Extending the coming of age ceremony to girls in 1956 reflected the same urges that eventually gave birth to the feminist movement 10 or so years later. No doubt my own deep-seated but inarticulate feminist and egalitarian feeling were a factor in me going along with my mother's more articulated feminist desire for me to have a Bat Mitzvah. But like my leaving home to go to boarding school, this leaving what was known and making the transition to something other was deeply conflictual. In the world that has made me, girls were lesser than men and did not have Bat Mitzvahs, and did not read from Torah, but in the world that made me also girls did not want to be the lesser than men. No wonder I felt vague.

There was one tangible and very important result of my Bat Mitzvah. Like Bat Mitzvah boys, I had to promise the temple that I would continue with religious school until confirmation in the 10th grade. For two years at Northfield School for Girls---where I went for high school---I attended religious school by mail. The second year the text was a book written by the head rabbi at the Temple Roland Gittelson, called Little Lower Than the Angels. It was about the place we humans have in the cosmos, a topic that resonated deeply with me and continues to do so today.

Saturday evening, when most of the girls would go to movies in the auditorium, those of us who stayed behind would gather in the living room, listen to classical music, and quietly do our own thing. I would read Little Lower Than the Angels and answer the questions in the worksheets sent to me monthly. The sense of peace and contentment was so complete that I experienced the others returning from the movies as an unwelcome and fatal intrusion; it broke the circle of Being until the next Saturday night. Along with my brothers Bar Mitzvah and reading the funnies on Sunday morning on the living room floor, while my dad read the Globe in his chair, these Saturday nights at Northfield stand out in my mind as the richest and most contented epxeriences of my young life.

Years later I indirectly wrote about my brother’s Bar Mitzvah for a book about growing up Jewish in America called, Daughters of Kings. I described the trip I took to Poland and to Auschwitz. Talking about my experience at the Museum at Auschwitz, after visiting the death camp,

Close to the end of the exhibition the photos gave way to canvases depicting contemporary Jewish life. I scanned quickly until my eyes came to rest on tableau of a bar mitzvah boy reading from the Torah, flanked on one side by his father and on the other by the rabbi. …I felt completely absorbed. In its treatment of the figure and the light the picture revealed to me a sense of the sustained upward impulse of Judaism into spirit. In it I recognize the basic religious urge that as the top the core of Jewish experience. The gentle streams of light filling the sanctuary above the figure evoked feelings of both profound yearning and fulfillment. The loving life gave both new and renewed meaning to the familiar images of Torah reading and religious coming of age; in that moment I realized how thoroughly Jewish I am.

I am still not an observant Jew, yet spirituality is an anchor of my life, and being Jewish another. Just perhaps had I grown up in an egalitarian tradition, I would have found a place for myself within traditional Jewish practice. At the unconscious level I am almost sure that having a bat mitzvah did hold spiritual meaning for me. In any case I take great comfort in the fact that being one of the pioneers of Bat Mitzvah has helped make room for Jewish girls to receive the holiness signified in the Jewish ceremony of coming to age, I felt so clearly that day at Auschwitz.

I suspect that successful traditions generally begin in vagueness. They are for the most part the result of an intending that comes from someplace much deeper and impersonal than the conscious mind. They are precognitive and their implicit goal is to change the context within which we experience. The conscious mind goes along, perhaps making up convincing sounding reasons that turn out to be correct, or perhaps just not knowing why. Yet with time, as these traditions influence the world they create a context of meaning that makes them fit at all levels of experience--- emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and historical.

_______________________

After I posted this, I became haunted by the following passage Rosie Rosenzweig had written about her mother at her daughter's Bat Mitvzah. Born in 1900, her mother grew up in Grodno Poland; she immigrated before WWII to Canada to join Rosie's father, who had left several years earlier. The passage is from a longer piece called "Mourning Becames a Bat Mitzvah." The piece is one of Rosie's contributions to Sweeping Up the Heart: The Wisdom of Our Grieving, an anthology about loss and grieving a number of us from at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center are putting together.

Her First Touch at 82
by Rosie Rosenzweig

True to the old world Jewish Mother stereotype portrayed in Fiddler on the Roof, my mother was in perpetual dialogue with God addressing him as Rebeyne Shel Olam (Teacher of the Universe) with an occasional Oiy Got (Oh God!) I remember at my own daughter’s bat mitzvah when my mother was honored with an aliyah (“a going up”) to the Torah; when the parchment scroll holding the first five books of the Hebrew Bible was unrolled, she became transfixed in awe. In Grodno this would have been a forbidden act – for a woman to plant a kiss on the fringes of a prayer shawl, and to then take those fringes and touch the opened scroll itself.

At 82 and partially blind, this experience seemed to render her in a state of momentary ecstasy.

I wrote a small sentimental poem, which was read years later when a newly written Torah scroll was inaugurated into the curtained ark after being carried under a bridal canopy. (At an earlier date, I was first given the same honor; I actually looked up at the ceiling to see if some flash would strike me down. Patriarchal Jewish chauvinism and years of being sent back from the men’s side of the synagogue in my youth had taken its toll.)

Can I touch it? She asked,
In blind devotion,
Groping the air above the scroll.
Can I really touch it?

And before the rabbi turned his head,
She lightly tapped her mouth
And then the parchment pure.

Can I do it once again?
And she knew it more this time.
I heard a learning from her mouth to me.
No lightning struck,
Nor clouds did part.

Only for a moment,
This memory opened up my sky.
My mother, my teacher,
May this blessing
Be more than a memory.

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listening less anger

Blink and For the Time Being: A Tale of Two Books

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 20:57:00 +0000

In my initial post back in October, Things Are Not As They Seem, I wrote how glad I was to hear an NPR commentator resist the urge to say in ‘a blink of the eye’ and say ‘in a flash’ instead. Alas yesterday another NPR reporter, I am sad to say, did not resist the urge. Beside the fact that I first published the idiom as a metaphor for unconscious cognition and intuition in 1997, I dislike the trendiness of the phrase. But it seems like I’d better settle in for a much longer run for the distressingly facile use of this my adopted intuitive soul child. Apparently Blink is being made into a movie---or so the scuttlebutt on the web claims.

It is being made by the people who made Syriana. I didn't particularly like Syriana. I suspect it is a guy movie. (Too broad in sweep on the one hand and not enough heart on the other.) Its message seems to be 1) everything is interconnected---which is also its subtitle 2) the good guys if they don't get killed turn out to be in cahoots with the bad guys, because everyone who survives just wants power---or something like that. I apologize to the makers of the film (and to George Clooney) if I have missed the more important message--- such as American capitalism turns even the good guys into bad guys. But that is not what stuck in my mind.

What links Syriana and Blink, I guess, is that they both keep jumping between a number of stories. Yet Syriana builds to something--- even though I didn't particularly resonate with the film. Blink doesn't build to anything at the conceptual level, though Galdwell is a good story teller. Rather one is left with a jumble of self-contradictory themes. Admittedly unconscious cognition and intuition are tough subjects to deal with. (Perhaps no one knows this better than me.) Yet the job of an author is to find a thread through the jumble---or at the very least to acknowledge the dissonance the material creates. Gladwell takes the kitchen sink approach and blurs over all the essential distinctions.

Why then has Blink been such a tremendous success? I think it comes from 3 things in addition to Galdwell's skill as a story teller. The first is the sheer power of the metaphor ‘a blink of the eye’ for intuition. Yet the metaphor is not original to Gladwell and he does not develop it. Rather it seems like an afterthought used as packaging to market the book. Well sometimes the wrapping paper is more valuable than what is inside.

The second is the nature of popular culture. Being a popular culture guru means staying a millimeter ahead of the crowd--- capturing a trend a second or two before it explodes. Unconscious cognition and intuition have become hot topics of scientific investigation. But let's look more carefully at what is happening here. With respect to intuition, science is finally catching up with experience. Blink in popularizing this material says what everyone knows---if they've ever looked at their thought processes. I have to conclude that an awful lot of people have not. Only then could it come as a revelation that sometimes we don't use rigorous analysis, and furthermore what we use instead works just as well most of the time, and often even better. But Blink gets it wrong because it mistakes figure for ground. Analysis, if it comes at all, for the most part comes after intuition--- and this is especially so in our personal lives, as the work of Antonio Damasio makes clear.

The third reason Blink has been so sucessful is the most interesting to me. Reading Blink is a little like going to a cool cocktail party where everyone is a little high and full of themselves for being at such a cool party. One feels ---why yes--- Glad and Well. I was not a sympathetic reader of this book, as you might well imagine, yet about a third of the way through, even I felt Glad and Well (henceforth G+W). It's as if he encoded a little bit of an illicit substance into the prose. I don't know how he did this. Perhaps it is because as Jeffrey Rosen said in his critique, the book “…succumbs to the fallacy that people with good ideas must be good people. Everyone in the book who gets psychology right is not only or mainly a bright person, he is also a noble human being.”

As soon as the discriminating reader comes down from the G+W high they will recognize that very little interesting or coherent has been said. Rosen called Blink “a book for people who do not read books." I got two thirds the way through and then skipped to the end. I don't recommend Blink; I recommend a glass of wine instead. But if you have already read it and have some insight into the G+W thing, please let me know.

For the Time Being is a book by Annie Dillard I have written about several times ( Oct 24 and Dec 4 posts). After reading 40 or so pages when I first got it, I put it down. It is heavy duty---not aimed at making one feel either G+W. A year and a half later, I picked it up again where I had stopped. Reading a few pages at a time before I went to sleep, I found it to be one of the most compelling books I have encountered. Page after page was packed with insights and a quirkiness that penetrated to my core. Some nights I would only read over the few pages I had read the night before. I still keep it by my bedside. Sometimes I open it at random, and contemplate one of its passages. In one of my many favorites, Dillard says:

Mostly, God is out of the physical loop. Or the loop is a spinning hole in his side. Simone Weil takes a notion from Rabbi Isaac Luria to acknowledge that God's hands are tied. To create, God did not extend himself but withdrew himself; he humbled and obliterated himself, and left outside himself the domain of necessity in which he does not intervene. Even in the domain of souls, he intervenes only “under certain conditions.”

Does God stick his finger in, if only now and then? Does God budge, nudge, twist, help? Is heaven pliable? Or is …praying for things and events, for rain and healing--- delusional?

For the Time Being, like Blink, jumps back and forth between a number of interconnected “stories.” Yet unlike Blink, it builds to a crescendo that unifies all the content and brings the theme of interconnectedness home in an extraordinary meaningful and unexpected way. Though it didn't make me feel G+W in a cocktail party sense, it did something much more important. It left me feeling very small and very big (vS+vB) both at the same time. Dillard's book considers the most difficult questions of existence and then manages to reframe them in a very different sense high. One is also given an interesting mission---should one choose to accept it.

If the Syriana people are really interested in the theme of interconnection and in conveying some of its depths, I suggest they should make a movie out of For the Time Being instead of Blink. I admit it would take a lot of skill and also may require some rearranging. But imagine the cinemagraphic power of a movie that keeps switching between historically important archeological digs on the inhospitable steppes of China, Jerusalem, a maternity ward, and the ceramic soldiers in Xian. Also imagine Annie Dillard as narrator, and my favorite palentologist/theologian Teilhard de Chardin ( played by George Clooney of course) weaving in and out. That is Teilhard to the left. Finally imagine cameo appearances by Isaac Luria, Simone Wein, and many of the other deeply feeling and colorful theological thinkers of the ages.

In fact, you might even say that For the Time Being--- a story about existence--- is the real Blink. Perhaps this is part of what is beginning to bug me about the overuse of the phrase 'a blink of the eye.' Because it is so in, people feel cool and G+W when they say it. However the idiom used in its traditional sense has an undertone of sadness that is experienced largely at an unconscious level. Dillard’s book, in part by heading directly into this sadness and into the heartache of existence, comes out the other side. It brings the powerful (and grounded) sense of Being that comes from accepting what is.

Science vs. Religion: Bridging the Gap

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 17:25:00 +0000

The gym is not a place I associate with insight into the important spiritual or intellectual issues of our day. Nor for that matter is Time Magazine. I had just finished my workout on the elliptical machine and was on my way to the weight room when I glanced at the magazine table in the hall and in the corner of my eye caught the cover of Time. The cover article “God vs. Science” got my attention. Yet it was as much the spaciousness of the cover design that held my interest. In contrast to Time’s usual dark and busy cover, it was a large white field mostly empty except for an uncurled DNA double helix sauntering down its length to one side. The DNA bases turned into rosary beads and the "molecule" ended up holding a cross--- but I didn't see that until later. I grabbed the magazine and brought it with me to the weight room.

The body of the article turned out to be a debate between an evolutionary biologist and a Christian geneticist. Richard Dawkins , a well-known evolutionary biologist is virulently anti-religion: his recent book is called The God Delusion. The geneticist, Francis Collins, led the effort to decode the genome: his recent book is called The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. A while back I heard Dawkins debate a leading intelligent design proponent on NPR. I am very attached to the idea of evolution---to its power and elegance: my sympathies were certainly not with the fundamentalist. However I felt there was something lacking in the case that Dawkins made. Evolution and a sense of a deeper purpose or meaning to existence than that of the material world are not necessarily opposed to each other. I have trouble with the concept of God, but I do believe in the reality of something beyond the material world.

Francis Collins, the geneticist argued--- as do many scientists of faith--- that the fact that the six universal or cosmological constants work out to be just what they have to be to support life indicate that the universe was the handiwork of God. Most scientists agree that if even one constant had been a little off in one direction after the Big Bang--- for example if the gravitational constant had been off by one part in 100 million million --- the expansion of the universe would not have occurred in a way that would have eventually supported life. This is called the anthropic principle.

Dawkins countered in part that this assumes that the cosmological constants are fluid rather than fixed.

"People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable. Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill."

Certainly it is difficult to imagine the divine knob twiddling. Yet much more interesting to me is the other tact he and others use to argue against the difficult to account for coincidence implied by the universal constants working out just right to support life. If there were not just one, but a very large number of universes with different cosmological constants, then finding one where everything worked out right would not be so wondrous and would not necessitate an underlying intelligence.

"The other way is the multiverse way. That says that maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning."

In response Collins invokes Occam’s razor, saying that he finds the idea of a designer a simpler hypothesis than postulating a large number of alternative universes.

"This is an interesting choice. Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can't observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses. So Occam's razor--Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward--leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination."

This helps illustrate what is so often true. One person’s Occam's razor, or simpler explanation, is another person's Mount Everest--- or nearly impossible impasse. I have to say that I am with Collins on this one (though I would posit an intelligent force rather than a designer-- which is too” knob twiddling” for me). An intelligent force seems to be simpler to me than an almost infinite number of universes. Yet I'm not sure which I would think the simpler hypothesis if I didn't have sporadic experiences that support the existence of a deeper and more sophisticated force working in us and through us. My personal concept of spirituality is pretty much grounded in those brief moments in which I get hints of this larger consciousness in the cosmos.

Notice I said nearly impossible impasse above when remarking that one person's Occam's razor is another person's Mount Everest. Alas Dawkins, a scientist with a large theoretical reach---in spite of his strong antireligious bias --- does seem able to make an assent. He says,

"I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine…My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up…. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed."

Thus Dawkins is not necessarily arguing against mystery, but just for greater mystery that can be contained in God as a historical concept. A wise not so old man I met recently, when I told him about this debate, gave me a new sense of why Jews are not supposed to say the word God. Perhaps Annie Dillard , whose books have a strong spiritual thread (see Oct 26), captures this best---for our unholy and minimalist age--- when she writes, “I don't know beans about God.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Paul Tallant wrote me after reading my piece that he had some thoughts about science and religion. I encouraged him to put them in writing and submit them as a comment. The result was so comprehensive and moving to me and also so parallel to what I had written in certain ways --- I decided that it fit best right afterwards. Paul's views are not exactly the same as mine, but they come close in many areas.

No Essential Difference by Paul Tallant

Acknowledgment: I am grateful to Lois Isenman for her encouragement to write this note and for her gentle and thought-provoking comments and queries as I wrote it.

I was waiting in the doctor’s office and spied a copy of the 17 July 2006 Canadian issue of Time. The cover with a cowboy hat sporting a Presidential Seal and boots protruding beneath caught my attention initially, but my eyes rapidly shifted to one of the cover’s sub-captions; “Exclusive Einstein Letters.” I started reading Walter Isaacsons’s feature “The Intimate Life of A. Einstein,” however my name was called before I finished (a seemingly infrequent event in the patient-waiting rooms of Canadian medicine). After my appointment, the receptionist told me I could borrow the issue. I returned home with it and placed it on my night-time reading table. At bedtime, after reading Isaacson, I discovered David Van Biema’s article “Reconciling God and Science” in the “Religion” section of same issue of Time. Naturally I began reading Van Biema. I did not turn out the light until I had read his entire account of Francis Collins’s personal encounters with God and how Collins reconciles his work in science with his beliefs in the Divine---taken from Collin’s new book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

Serendipitously, Lois Isenman’s post, a doctor’s appointment, and a five-months old copy of Time provided me an opportunity to comment on a subject that, in various incarnations, has held my attention for years. I thank Lois for the opportunity to describe briefly the latest edition of my thoughts regarding God and science.

I believe in God. I believe in evolution. And I believe that those two beliefs are intrinsically harmonious. But this harmony is infrequently heard amid the crescendo of a commonly perceived dissonance between God and science. It is the perceived dissonance that likely led Van Biema to title his piece “Reconciling ---” and similarly for Lois to title her’s “--- Bridging –“

I grew up with beliefs far more conservative than those of Collins. Early-on I believed in a “young” Earth, and essentially accepted the Genesis story as an account of Divine science. But Collins does not take that tack and is quite clear in his view about the Genesis account. He says “I don’t think God intended Genesis to teach science.” I now agree with Collins.

Collins’s approach to spirituality was different than mine. Collins was hiking in the Pacific Cascades and encountered a frozen waterfall with the shape of three distinct streams. From those frozen forms Collins recognized the Trinity and surrendered to Jesus Christ. My hike was figurative. It seemed that on a thickly-clouded night I was deep in the Barrens of the Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland Canada, seeking to return to the only road that led back home to Witless Bay, a small ex-fishing community near St. John’s. I was lost. But out of the darkness appeared a woman who was studying to be a rabbi. She handed me a copy of Minyan, Ten Principles for Living a Life of Integrity by Rabbi M. Shapiro and said “read it.” I did.

Rabbi Shapiro’s account of the foundation of spirituality is strongly credible to me because he is a Jewish Rabbi who has moved spiritually beyond both his Orthodox upbringing and the Reform rabbinical training he received. In “Minyan –“ Shapiro gives a moving account of his experience as a rabbinic student. Shapiro says:

“I delivered a sermon on the necessary unity of God, woman, man and nature. Immediately after the service I was called into the office of the chairman of the philosophy department for a scholarly reprimand.”

“Referring to my position that God and creation are one, the chairman said; ‘You sir are a megalomaniac.’”

“”With all due respect, Rabbi,’ I said, you are wrong. If I understand the term correctly, a megalomaniac thinks he is God. I, on the other hand, know I am God.’”

“What I meant to convey and doubt very much that I did, was my deep conviction that God is not something or someone living somewhere in or out of time and space. To me God is the One who manifests as all things in time an space. God is not something you pray to, but rather the greater reality to which you awake.” (Italics mine.)

Rabbi Shapiro’s approach to spirituality is in a sense similar to Collins avowing a belief in God and concurrently possessing acknowledged stature in molecular genetics. Shapiro moved beyond the traditions of his cloth and Collins embraced a spiritual belief not common among his scientific peers. I take the essence of Shapiro’s thesis to be that God dwells within each of us, is indescribable, is Love, and is accessible through the exercise of our own free will.

The lady with the book provided the way for me to figuratively return to the road and civilization. I believe in God and further believe that God dwells within me, and within every human being. I spent years wondering about the nature of God, feeling almost a compulsion to discover the nature of God. Lois comments about the deeper meaning of the Jewish concept of God being indescribable and un-nameable. That now is my view of God, perhaps not in the strict Jewish sense, but I recognize that neither I nor any other human can possibly define God, other than to deny God’s existence – and that is a thread-bare definition. I am now content to believe that as part of God being God, the Divine dwells within each of us. And I leave the huge remainder to God alone.

Francis Collins, when viewing the frozen waterfall, surrendered to Jesus Christ. After absorbing more of Minyan -- and the works of other thoughtful writers (for example see Williamson , Welwood , Walsch) I surrendered to God Within, to Love Within. In the broad theme of the Divine, I believe there is no essential difference between Collins’s experience and mine (and that of zillions of other spiritually inclined people)--- what difference there is lies in human viewpoints. I believe further that there exists a perspective that presents these seemingly different views of God as a single Wholeness.

The notion of “no essential difference” applies also to my belief about a “gap” between science and religion, or the need to “reconcile” God and science. Within the broad theme of the Divine, I believe that there is no difference, no gap, and no need for reconciliation. I believe that nature is an explicit revelation of God and that science is the tool available to us humans to learn of the “testable” part of the Divine.

Lois quotes Richard Dawkins as saying, "I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine…” She also quotes Annie Dillard as saying, “I don't know beans about God.” Van Biema describes an exchange between Collins and a Ph.D. candidate at a meeting of Harvey Fellows in Alexandria Virginia. The student asked Collins if he felt that evolution applied to everything else but humans. Collins responded that such a position would get you into real trouble. Collins also said “the human genome contains nonfunctional elements in the precise spot where they can be found on chromosomes of lower animals.” Then Collins asked a question and provided his own answer. “If God was creating humans afresh, why would He insert a pseudo-gene that has lost its ability to do anything in the same place that it appears in a chimp? “ Collins continued “Barring evolution, you are forced to the conclusion that God was trying to mislead us and test our faith and I have trouble with that kind of conjecture.”

Physicists have long recognized the extreme sensitivity of the nature of our Universe to the value of fundamental physical constants. From the Big Bang on, very slight changes in one or more of these constants would have resulted in a dramatically different Universe than what we observe today. And as Lois describes, argument and controversy in the context of God swirls about the origin of the value of these constants.

In graduate school one of the most important things I learned about representing physical phenomena is to use a coordinate system that is intrinsically appropriate to the process itself. For example, if a process inherently has spherical geometry, don’t describe it or cast it in Cartesian coordinates; you’ll only create a symbolic mess for yourself. On a more abstract level, a coordinate system is simply a formality through which details of phenomena can be visualized. It is a perspective through which to view the behavior of a process or system.

Personally, I take the approach of choosing the appropriate “coordinate system”, the appropriate perspective to solving the issue of God and science. If you do not believe in God, then you have the “trivial” solution; there is only science and no need to look further. But if with me you admit the existence of God, then I believe we require a figurative “coordinate system,” a yet undiscovered and undefined perspective, a point-of-view, that will allow the “problem” of God and science to be resolved with efficacy and integrity.

This perspective must deal with both the spiritual and the physical. The spiritual requires faith, the physical intrinsically does not; it is “testable.” With Annie Dillard, I don’t know “beans about God.” But I believe that God exists and I believe with Rabbi Shapiro that the Divine dwells within me and within each of us humans. I further believe with Collins that DNA is a “language of God,” that evolution exists and that it has been and continues to be active in our world. I also believe with Richard Dawkins that “—there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine –.” I further believe that a perspective exists that contains an elegant and non-trivial solution to the issue of God and science. And finally, when viewed via this perspective, I believe we will discover that the solution contains no essential difference between God and science.

The Furnace and the Stove: Another Fable (with a strong personal note)

noreply@blogger.com (Lois Isenman) — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 17:47:00 +0000

My older brother came to visit for a few days the weekend after I changed the old converted coal furnace for a spanking new boiler (Reason vs. Intuition). After about 20 minutes, I commented jokingly on my restraint at not yet having asked him to come see the new furnace. Immediately he marched downstairs to the cellar--- with me following. “It certainly is different,” he remarked, as he checked out clean-lined red heatsource that replaced the indomitable old snowman that had held court in the nether region of this our family home for eighty years.

Later over dinner he noticed that I had also replaced the old stove in the kitchen. (It was 5 years ago, when the third of four burners on the 60’s era electric stove became unusable. The new furnace apparently primed him to see the handsome, not quite new stove.) Half joking, and buoyed by good wine, I opined that replacing the stove was like getting rid of mother and the furnace, dad. We the children were finally in charge, I thought. It's way past time and all for the good.

Sometimes in spiritual circles it is said that you choose your parents. Besides the biological absurdity of this, it never made sense to me because I was clear that I never would have chosen the parents I got. They were good people; intelligent, funny, with excellent values---but nonetheless challenging parents.

My father was a patriarch with a scientific bent, who did not easily allow emotion or other people's needs.

“Dad, I have a question.”
“The answer is no, now what is your question?”

My mother was emotional and, as might be expected, increasingly needy over time. The strongly receptive part of her nature was constantly at war with the equally strong independent side. A truth teller, she was very often right. Yet even when she was right, in context she was frequently wrong. The house was too often a complex battle scene between my mother and father, or my mother and my mother, or my mother and everyone else.

A few days after my brother's visit, my aunt and I--- based on a plan we made months before--- went to the cemetery where my parents as well as her mother are buried. I had been to the family gravesite two or three times before and had found it a vaguely peaceful experience. The man in a yarmulke and jacket at the tasteful but frigid administration center pulled out a magnifying glass to find the site on his mimeographed plan of the cemetery. “Oh boy,” I thought, “this is going to be tough to find.” My concern grew when he realized that the first mark he had made on the map was incorrect and had to go through the procedure again.

Carefully following all the roadside indicators, we went round and round in circles between the carefully landscaped Mount of Olives and Mount Tabor. (I suspect a map of the Holy Land would have been more helpful than the mimeographed plan I had in hand.) “Perhaps they had recycled old the plot and sold it to someone else,” crossed my mind. After about 45 minutes---with the help of some reluctant maintenance men, we found the spot. I bristle at this kind of poor administrating, and I had to work actively to calm myself.

When I finally sat down on the small bench, my parents’ presences immediately filled my mind. I felt transported into a place of wordless communication and connection with them both. Most remarkable of all to me was how well my being fit with theirs. I never remember having ever experienced such clear consciousness and deep emotional connection before. We were separate --- it was a precondition for this delightful exchange--- but we were at the same time inexorably joined. This joining was harmonious, yet complex and dynamic--- like a wonderful rich trio sonata. It was an experience of complete spiritual communion . I don't know whether we choose our parents, but if we do, I now understand why I would have chosen mine. I also understand the rightness of their choice of each other.

I also don't know if the presences I felt were actual presences from the beyond, or my internalized sense of my parents. Because it's a simpler hypothesis and because I have no experiential evidence to the contrary, if pressed, I would definitely say the latter. But the answer to this question doesn't matter to me at all. Even if they were internalized presences--- it was a real encounter with internalized presences. This in the end might be more even more important. Replacing these weighty relics of my mother and father's material existence ---the furnace and the stove--- --- rather than excising parents, seems to have freed me to experience their spirits more deeply.

Like their material doppelgangers, they each gave a different kind of fire. My father's fire, the fire of the furnace, warmed and sustain life. It forged truth of the practical and worldly kind. My mother's fire, the fire of the stove, was of the psyche---it transformed the world so it could be absorbed. Its truth was the truth of essences---seeing through the surface of things to their intangible core.

I certainly would change many things, if I could do it again with executive control. But I see that---besides being formed by the very rich consciousness of these two beings --- I have inherited from each a priceless gift. From my father, I have inherited my analytic, scientific mind that strives for clarity. From my mother, I have inherited unusual receptivity and an interest in the powerful yet subtle reality of what we cannot see. Their vital fires are both part of me.

About 10 years ago, after a number of working as years as a scientist, I began studying intuition. There is lots of dissonance where I now sit right in the middle of the bridge between the furnace and the stove---the science and the experience of intuition. On one side is cutting edge science of the mind and on the other, subtle experience---including spiritual experience. My work has inherited the complaints of each side of the divide for the other side. A number of the scientists find it too experiential or anecdotal, and a number of the experience people are resistant to the analytic material.

I believe these often warring sources of transforming heat, the furnace and the stove, must learn to speak each other's language and to understand each other's truths. I am glad to be one of the crucibles in which this alchemical marriage is now occurring. The wonderful heat of this joining is such that, even with all the dissonance, there is no place else I would rather be.