What gets measured gets managed.

Peter Drucker

When you’re weight lifting, the weight of your barbells gives you a good idea of your progress. And, what’s more, the very system of measurement gives you a way to improve: start with a weight you can lift and gradually increase it. In fact, this is how any kind of measurable gets improved. Measure where you are regularly and try to increase it.

There are many things that cannot be measured but are still important. When I do Tai Chi, I am developing an inner sense of relaxation, calm, and connected movement. I cannot possibly measure it, though I do have a sense of how much I’m doing it. I suppose that is why it is called an art, and not a feat of engineering.

The same goes with Yoga. When I am doing yoga, there is no way to count how well I am doing. I am trying to hold myself in poses that are beyond my present ability. It is the quality of the trying that is important; I am striving for perfection. This, too, cannot be measured.

The measurable and the unmeasurable are both important. I prefer things like yoga and tai chi because they turn my awareness inward and develop my senses as much as they develop my body. To neglect the unmeasurable is to forget the beauty of artistry and the intelligence of the intuition. Yet to neglect the measurable leaves the entire endeavor to subjective interpretation.

That is why I think that measurement is best left only to track. What do I mean by this? Let’s say you wanted to be able to bench press 200 pounds. You could create a schedule of reps and sets to work up to 200 pounds. But this is putting the cart before the horse. The measurement system has become a training regimen. Now you must live up to a measurement.

Instead, you could use your intuition–your internal sense–to guide your training. You would measure regularly and track your progress. When you graph your progress, you might study the slope of your progress over time, and you would use that information to enhance your intuition. This would use the best of both systems. Intuition backed by measurement.

But this still leaves the realm of the unmeasureable. Can measurement be used to enhance Tai Chi skill? Perhaps some day someone will invent a push-hands machine that could give you a rating on different scales. But until then, we must be contented without numbers. Can we, however, track progress in such skills?

I think it might be possible. For one thing, we can keep subjective notes. Rereading these, besides reminding us of the internal discoveries we made, can also–in an entirely subjective way–show us the slopes of our progress over time. Other devices, such as video and photos, can help as well. I am reminded of a yoga blog where the author kept track of his jumpback and jumpthrough progress with videos. The blog itself is a nice record of his development through time. And he has edited together videos that quite clearly show his progress. It works very well in that it brings a new and relatively objective prespective.

Motion capture is used by well-to-do athletes to bring numerical objectivity to what used to be considered purely subjective motion. We’ve all seen the iconic images of the stick man and his golf swing. Motion capture has measured the magic of the golf swing. And their swings have improved.

Measurement just brings more information to your senses. I used to believe that only things that could be measured were important. I later changed my mind and thought that those things that cannot be measured are more important. I suppose now, though, I’ve come to accept that intuition and internal senses are most important but that measurement can provide valuable objective information to help develop your intuition and to keep it honest.

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So where was I? Why couldn’t I post to the blog? Why didn’t I catch that my server was down?

I was in a remote village in Nepal teaching English. I didn’t have electricity or running water. I was there for three weeks. Now I’m back in Kathmandu, the capital city. I’ll write a bit about my experience and what I’ve learned in future posts. In the meantime, I have many pictures online that you can look at.

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Freedom is self-creation. We exist to create ourselves in the image of the world. Creating yourself changes the universe. There are only small changes, microscopic choices you make all the time. Each choice is an opportunity to define yourself and the universe.

This is not The Secret bullshit. I’m not saying that you can control the universe with your thoughts. What I am saying is that each decision has repercussions that affect you and your future decisions and hence have ripple effects throughout your life and into the greater universe.

You are indeed part of the universe, which is so easy to forget. You exist as a momentary blip in the cosmos. A blip that can, to some degree, control itself and self-program. If you don’t self-program, you will be cast about by the winds of chance. If you do self-program, who knows what will happen?

Self-programming is a muscle that you must learn to use. We in the West have not developed it as well as other cultures. It is a shame, because it is highly enjoyable and fulfilling. It is necessary in a post-survival society such as we live in. We must learn to spend our time in ways that do not consume massive quantities of resources.

What better way could you think of to spend your life than to continuously reinvent yourself?

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I think a lot of the angst and troubles people have, all of the cruft we build up in our minds, are due to a lack of self-programming. We are totally aware of our shortcomings and must commit lots of our conscious mental capacity to try to fill the gap. Sometimes it works, but more often we fail and are too aware of it. We then try to compensate in some other, usually dumb way.

But what if, instead of consciously controlling ourselves, as soon as we find a shortcoming, we immediately recruit our unconscious mind to come up with a solution and embed that solution into our unconscious thinking. Our shortcoming would immediately slip from our conscious mind since we no longer had to control ourselves on that level. Our unconscious would do the trick.

Of course, we would feel more at ease. We wouldn’t be so tense trying to override our own impulses with conscious control. We wouldn’t have loops of inner monologue running to remind us of who we are and how to behave. We could just “let go” and let our unconscious minds operate at full efficiency. And our conscious minds could focus on what’s important: a beautiful appreciation of the complexity, elegance, and awesomeness of our experience.

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I was walking around ancient Athens the other day. I happened to be at the Temple of Olympian Zeus. From there I saw a clear view of the Acropolis and the Parthenon. It got me thinking about what it would be like to believe in Plato’s idealism. What would it mean to believe in ideal forms that are more important than the real world?

To me, the real world is vastly richer and more significant than the idealized version. Perhaps this means that I don’t really understand what an ideal form is. And as much as a philosopher necessarily reflects the attitudes of his time and place, there must be a great deal of idealist thinking in ancient Greek culture. And for a culture to have created monuments to beauty that have lasted for thousands of years–monuments that are still beautiful to us today–perhaps this is deserving of my study.

When I think of ideals, I think of cubes and spheres. Perfect forms that cannot exist in reality. The problem with these shapes is that they are uninteresting. They are flat and lifeless. I see much more beauty in the rough, irregular bark of a tree than I do in a perfect circle. To me, seeing beauty is about removing the expectations of perfection and seeing things as they really are. There must be something that I am misunderstanding about idealism.

In Ancient Greece, man held a particular place because he could bring about the virtues of a material to a greater extent than nature could without him. A Greek statue shows an idealized version of a person. It is not that their flaws are omitted. No, their flaws are present, but even the flaws are idealized. An artist can make the irregular beautiful and find a place for ugliness.

Again, let’s look at the example of the tree. I was looking at one surrounding the temple. It was gnarly and rough and misshapen. My first impression was that this tree was far from ideal. Its branches are not strong. Its trunk is not straight. It leans too much and probably will fall under its own weight. At it is ugly. Yet I know that if I sat there long enough and relaxed away that judgment, I would observe more and more about that tree. I might observe that the tree leans so that its leaves might get more sun. And that the texture of the bark lets animals climb up. And how supple the branches are so that they sway in the wind. After studying that tree, and getting to know more about the reality of the tree, it would become more beautiful. In effect, the ideal tree gets in the way of the beauty of the real tree. And the real tree’s beauty is unique and truer than the beauty of the ideal.

This seems to me to jar with the Greek notion of beauty. But perhaps not. If I were to ask an ancient Greek sculptor to sculpt this tree, what would he do? Would he change the shape? Would he change the texture? I’m not a scholar of Greek art, so I can’t say for sure. But what I imagine is that the tree would seem even more like itself, only more beautiful. The artist, if he were good, would have made the tree’s beauty immediately apparent. Instead of having to look at the tree for two hours to see the beauty, the sculpture would beam with beauty at first glance. The same lean, the same texture, the same weakness would now be apparently beautiful with no reflection necessary.

This kind of beauty is analogous to subjects in school. A subject may be difficult to apprehend. It takes work and patience to uncover the treasures of knowledge and insight that await within. But a good teacher, or a well-written book can make that knowledge more apparent.

I don’t know if this analogy is correct. I am not enough of a philosopher to say. Suffice it to say that ancient Greek art is beautiful. Ancient Athens was beautiful. And hikes around the city inspire philosophical reveries such as this one.

View my album of my trek around Athens

Athens

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I am prone to being sensitive. I feel very strongly. It is difficult for me to ignore emotions projected by others. And therefore difficult to know what is my original feeling. I tend to want to help people, to give them what they want.

We should not spend so much time trying to divine other people’s intentions or desires. Those are for them to figure out. We should look at if their actions are suitable to our purposes and whether they merit any response at all.

Mostly, other people’s actions should be ignored–that is: you see the action, determine it is unimportant, and let it go.

Other people’s emotions should mostly be ignored. Emotions are fickle things and most people wind up apologizing for them anyway. “I’m sorry I got angry.” “I’m sorry I got upset.” Don’t give yourself over to them. They are for them to deal with and will pass. Often they pass while you are still trying to deal with them.

People get angry at me a lot. I tend to think differently, observe things others don’t, and do things in ways that others don’t understand. If I stopped doing something intelligent every time some guy starts yelling at me because he doesn’t get what I’m doing, I wouldn’t be very intelligent, would I?

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All-in-one shower + toilet in Egypt

Life is rarely what you expect it to be. And you will always have expectations, as long as you are alive. The clash between expectations and reality can really harsh your mellow. Is there any solution?

I daresay that there is. It comes from yoga and Buddhism, which has studied the inner workings of the human mind for many generations. The idea is quite simple: meditate.

Meditation allows you to accept what comes. It allows you the inner awareness to know when you are upset and why. It lets you let go of a thought. It gives you the power to refocus on what is important to you.

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There’s a type of vipassana meditation where you note what your attention is on. If you’re seeing images, you say “images”. If you’re talking to yourself, you say “hearing”, etc.

When we are out and about in the world, we usually don’t know what modalities (senses) our thoughts take. We might get an idea that we want a cookie, but we are not very aware that first we saw an image of a cookie, then we felt the emotion we would feel if we ate one, then we say to ourselves “I want a cookie.” All of that happens unconsciously.

Noting meditation brings the modality into our conscious awareness. With each thought that you wrest into the foreground of your mind, little by little, you are gaining understanding into the functions of your own mind. For instance, with enough repetition, you might realize that the cookie pattern is common: for lots of treats, you first see it, then feel it, then say it.

Awareness loosens up habits, so that thought pattern will eventually be loosened down to nothing. It will also give you a clue into how you can reprogram yourself. But that is another topic.

Bottom line: meditation teaches you how your mind works. And a mind that understands itself works better. I don’t know why that should be so, but it is.

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In our culture, honesty is the norm. Lying is the aberration.

But lying is probably more natural. Lying is the Venus Fly Trap that emits a smell like rotting meat. Lying is the tiger’s stripes that hide him in the jungle. Lying is the flower whose sexual parts look like a bee.

In this universe, lying is the norm. Messages only occasionally correspond to anything we would call Truth. This is the way of nature, a law of the universe, and one would be foolish to forget this.

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Most people are constantly afraid of being wrong. I have been accused of being afraid of being wrong a lot–usually during an argument. I used to get upset by it–obviously, if I am defending my position so vehemently, I am not afraid of holding my position, regardless of whether it is right or wrong. It is the people who choose the easy, popular position who are afraid to even listen to my argument–they might be wrong.

But an insightful friend gave me a better explanation that made me realize what “afraid of being wrong” really meant. She said that it was just a cliché label that people have learned to put on a particular situation. That situation is when someone is defending their position–defense being a sign of fear–and the others think they are wrong–because it’s not their expected position. To tie the fear and wrongness together, they say “afraid to be wrong”.

Now, when someone says that I’m afraid to be wrong, I feel sorry for them. I try to politely excuse myself from the conversation. And I make a mental note not to have discussions with them any more.

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