Now, I’m exploring my most challenging and rewarding art of living experiment yet — raising my newborn daughter.  So for now, I won’t be adding new experiments.  But for those who are new to Life Beyond Logic or for those interested in revisiting past experiments, I have listed links to a few of my favorites below.

Thanks for all your insights and comments along the way!

Here are the art of living experiments that had the most lasting impact on me:

• Finding Enlightenment in an Airport Security Line
• Philosophy as a Training for Death
• Why PhDs Are Overrated and Everyone is a Philosopher
• How to Surf the Internet Without Losing Your Soul
• Thoreau’s Guide to Walking Philosophically
• One Daring Act a Day
• Don’t Think — Breathe
• Intuitive Choosing — Emerson’s Solution to Indecision
• The Case for Living in the Slow Lane
• The Practice of Dissolving Fear

You can also still download my free ebook (just click on the image below):

Play is like Liquid Drano for the soul.  When we stop being serious and stop trying so hard to figure things out, the residue on the pipe of creative intuition begins to soften.  Blockages release and creative expression flows more freely.

One of my favorite practices for opening up the flow of creative inspiration is what my wife calls “Yes, And…”  Here’s how it works:

• Step 1 – Choose an Issue – Come up with a question, idea, or creative task that you would like to explore.  You can do this alone or with a group of friends.  The key is to start with some sort of question or intention.  For instance, you might start with the question: “what should I write today?” or “how can I make enough money doing what I love?”

• Step 2 – “Yes, And…” – Now’s the time to start cleaning out the pipe.  Express either on paper or verbally every idea that comes up.  It doesn’t matter if it sounds stupid, insane, or weird.  At the end of each idea say “Yes, And…”  This is your invitation to keep going.  So you might say, “I could write about how philosophy can improve dishwashing efficiency.”  “Yes, And…I could write about what Socrates might think of the modern suburban experience.” “Yes, And…”  You get the picture.

• Step 3 – Look for Insights – Once you have expressed everything that comes to mind, see what’s left.  If you’re doing this with friends, ask them what ideas resonated.  If you’re doing it by yourself, think back or look at your notes.  Even better, look inside and ask: “what ideas felt like they came from a deeper place of inspiration?”

You might come up with your next great idea using this practice.  Or you might not.  The real goal is cleaning out the pipe of creative intuition.  The goal is to loosen up all the seriousness and efforting that blocks the flow of creative expression.

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I began exploring the idea that meetings might offer the perfect opportunity to test out Thoreau’s provocative view of the present moment.  Here’s how he puts it in Walden:

“Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.”

Thoreau poses a deep challenge.  If it’s true that “God himself culminates in the present moment,” then this must be just as true when walking through the woods as it is when sitting in a windowless conference room talking about mundane matters of company policy.

In fact, meetings would seem to offer the ultimate test of Thoreau’s idea.  It’s relatively easy to experience “something true and sublime” on a trek through the Himalayas, at an ashram in India, or while marveling at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  The more difficult task is to find this same experience of the “true and sublime” in the midst of an everyday office meeting.

So for this week’s experiment, I plan to test whether it is possible to turn workplace meetings into an opportunity for a divine experience of the present moment.

Here’s the practice:

1. Be Here

Here’s how I approach most meetings.  I walking in thinking to myself, “I don’t want to be here.”   This attitude makes the divine experience of the present moment all but impossible to attain.  It creates an inner state of resistance.  The “I don’t want to be here” state of being leaves me lost in thoughts about other times and places, wishing it were over.  It’s a state of saying “no” to life.

The move out of the “I don’t want to be here” state is simple.  Be here. Rather than living in opposition to the present moment, open to it.  By shifting from an inner “no” to a “yes”, the “true and sublime” qualities of what Thoreau calls the “now and here” become available.

2. Breathe

I’m beginning to think that the difference between the stressed-out chaos of the workplace and the perfect relaxation of a beach vacation reduces down to this:  the breath.  If your breath is constricted, short, or forced, your nervous system will reflect these in the form of racing thoughts, irritation, and anxiety.  If your breath is smooth, deep, and effortless, you will be on vacation – even if your body happens to be stuck in an office chair rather than a chaise lounge by the pool.

So finding the “true and sublime” in a workplace meeting requires a devotion to the breath.  It requires the moment-to-moment practice of using the breath to shift into the infinity of the present moment (for more on breathing, check out the Breath Experiment).

I have experimented with Finding Enlightenment in an Airport Security Line.  But finding the “true and sublime” in the midst of an everyday meeting might be my greatest challenge yet.

What do you think?   Do you have any tips or practices for turning mundane meetings into ecstatic moments of spiritual opening?

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Machiavelli then approached the second line.  Everyone in this line was dressed in noble attire.  They talked about politics with passion and intensity.  In this line, Machiavelli saw great philosophers like Plato and many of the great Roman political leaders.  “Why are you here?” Machiavelli asked them.  “We are condemned to hell,” they said.

When he awoke, Machiavelli told his friends and family that he realized he would much rather go to hell, where he could talk politics with the great men of history, than go to heaven.  Machiavelli’s motto was:  choose “heaven for the climate” but “hell for the company.”

The moral of this story is that the political life and the spiritual life cannot go together.  We must choose between the spiritual or the political path.  We can’t have both.  I love Machiavelli and I love this story, but I believe it is possible to engage in politics without losing our souls.

For this week’s experiment, let’s explore the possibility of merging the political and the spiritual.

Many things stand in the way of keeping your soul amidst the chaos of modern politics.  But fundamentalism poses the greatest threat.

If you’re on the left, you probably see fundamentalism in the words of Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, or Rush Limbaugh.   If you’re on the right, you see fundamentalism in President Obama’s latest jobs plan or the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC.

“I am tolerant and open minded,” we say to ourselves, “but they are a bunch of intolerant fundamentalists.”

These kinds of judgments are the currency of political conversations.   Listen closely and you will hear them at the dinner table, at bars, and around the water cooler.

These judgments arouse feelings of righteousness and moral superiority.  They give us the narcotic-like sensation of being right.

But on the level of the soul, they have corrosive effects.   They incite fear and outrage.  They turn friends into enemies.  Most importantly, they leave us so caught up in the moral shortcomings of others that we fail to see our own.

So this week I propose a radical practice.  I call it “finding your inner fundamentalist”:

Step 1 – Catch Your Judge – Next time you find yourself talking politics, notice when your judge arises.  Notice when you fall into the pattern of labeling others as “extreme,” “polarizing,” or “intolerant.”

Step 2 – Find Your Inner Fundamentalist – Once you catch your political judge, see what happens when you turn the tables.   If you see Rick Perry or Barack Obama as a radical fundamentalist, then ask yourself: “where am I a radical fundamentalist in my life?”   You might find your inner fundamentalist emerging in your opposition to the “other” party.  You might find it in your judgments about those with radically different religious, moral, or political views.

Step 3 – Open to Curiosity – When guided by habit, all of us slip into unconscious forms of fundamentalism.  So once you’ve found your inner fundamentalist, see if you can shift from judgment to curiosity.  Ask yourself:  “what could I learn from my political enemies?  How is the ‘other’ party or ‘other’ candidate actually serving me?”

In my experience, even the most ordinary practice of politics can have soul-crushing effects.  The mere mention of politics can lead even kind and compassionate people into red-faced fits of outrage.  If that is the nature of politics, then maybe Machiavelli is right, maybe we must all choose between engagement in politics and the care of our soul.  But maybe there’s another way.

What do you think?  Is it possible to talk about politics without losing your soul?

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The question: what does it mean to make a mistake?  We found a track of the great jazz pianist Thelonious Monk hitting a note that sounded like a clear “mistake.”  But as we listened more closely, we found that the “mistake” opened new creative possibilities.  This “wrong” note led Monk to a sequence of even more “wrong” notes that sounded so exquisitely “wrong” they became “right.”  We ended up writing an article about it called, “Plans, Takes, and Mis-Takes.”

It turned out that by letting things fall apart – by going with, rather than against, this “mistake” – Monk’s music got deeper and richer.

This week, I’m playing with the idea that just as there are no mistakes in jazz, there are no mistakes in life.

For me, this is a radical idea.  I spend much of my time avoiding mistakes.  I try to avoid screw-ups in the classroom, mistakes in my writing, and errors in my relationships and life.

All this mistake-free living can leave us clinging to perfection – gripping life like the reigns of an out of control horse.

What jazz musicians teach us, however, is that by letting things fall apart, life might just get deeper and even more beautiful.  As the famous jazz drummer E.W. Waignwright once told me, “A mistake is the most beautiful thing in the world, man.  It is the only way you can get to some place you have never been before.  I try to make as many as I can.  Making a mistake is the only way that you can grow.”

My first jazz piano teacher – a silver-haired jazz master named Keith MacDonald –agreed.  As he once told me, “Sometimes missing the note is more effective and appreciated than hitting the right note.  Playing careful is dull.  Playing with feeling is always better.  It is just more exciting to see someone on the edge – taking chances – with mistakes.”

So here’s the practice:

Step 1 – Spot Your Inner Perfectionist –  As you move through each day, notice when your inner perfectionist arises – that part of you that works so hard to live a mistake-free life.   Your body is a great indicator.  Notice when tension arises.  Does your neck tense up?  Do you get headaches?  Does your back hurt?  Physical tension tends to mirror an inner state of resistance.  It indicates that in work, in relationships, or in life, you’re trying to hold everything together, trying to avoid mistakes at all cost.

Step 2 – Let Things Fall Apart – I’ve summited Kilimanjaro and jumped out of a plane.  But for me, the spiritual and philosophical act of letting things fall apart is one hundred times more difficult.  Climbing tall mountains requires strength and courage.  Letting go of perfection and allowing mistakes to arise in work, relationships, and life requires a deeper courage.  It requires the ability to jump headfirst into what Cornel West calls “life’s abyss.”

This may sound like a masochistic, even dangerous, practice.  What if by letting go and opening to mistakes, you lose your job, your marriage, or your life?

What we learn from the great jazz musicians is that the opposite might be just as, if not more, true.  Monk’s “mistake” didn’t ruin his career.  It didn’t lead the audience that night to walk out of the club.  His “mistake” had the opposite effect.  It opened up a new and unexpected field of possibilities.

So as you go through the week, ask your self:  “Where am I clinging to perfection and avoiding mistakes?   Is it possible that by allowing mistakes, my life might grow deeper?”

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Karl Marx has one answer.  He didn’t care much for spiritual or personal growth (recall his famous line: “religion is the opiate of the masses”).   But the Marxist tradition offers a way of understanding the problem at the root of this pattern.  It arises from what many Marxists call “false consciousness.”

In Marxist theory, “false consciousness” has to do with a false perception of the reality of social or economic relations.   The worker who toils away at a factory all day thinking that it’s his duty or thinking that the capitalist system is the natural order of things suffers from “false consciousness.”  He lives in a state of ideological delusion – a state that conceals the true nature of his conditions.

You don’t need to agree with Marx to benefit from this philosophical tool:  the insight goes beyond capitalism.  The big idea is that without careful examination, our beliefs about who we are can easily slide into delusion.  Our ideology can mask reality.

Believing you have reached an elevated state of spiritual consciousness and enlightenment is particularly dangerous.   This ideology of spiritual enlightenment works like a set of blinders.  It conceals all those shadowy parts of ourselves that we like to keep in the periphery.

My guess is that this is what leads so many spiritual masters down the path of dishonesty and corruption.   They take on the ideology of enlightenment.  They begin believing that they exist in a higher spiritual order.  Soon, they lose sight of their imperfections and essential human shortcomings.

It would be great if spiritual false consciousness only affected a handful of corrupt leaders.  But on some level, all of us have the potential to slip into this trap.  The more we think we’ve achieved some sort of exalted religious state, the more we open ourselves to the delusions of false consciousness.

For this week’s experiment, let’s practice catching ourselves in moments of spiritual false consciousness.  See what happens when you let go of any idea that you are somehow more enlightened, spiritual, or philosophical than others.

Here’s the practice:

Step 1 – Catch Yourself Riding the Spiritual High Horse – As you go through the day notice anytime you slip into the delusion of spiritual enlightenment.  Sometimes this delusion will be self-directed.  It might arise in judgmental thoughts like, “Wow, I am way more spiritually realized than that guy.”  At other times it will be directed toward others.   You might see it in judgments like, “that spiritual teacher is so enlightened.”  These are indicators that you’re buying into the ideology of enlightenment – that the blinders of spiritual false consciousness have distorted your vision.

Step 2 – Get Present – If enlightenment or spiritual realization is anything at all, it certainly isn’t a concept or a thought.  It’s not a theory, a status, or anything that could be captured in words.  If it exists at all, it’s more likely to arise as a state of being.   It’s just the simple act of living deep and fully in the moment.  It’s a state that arises when mental and emotional blockages dissolve and we experience the pure awareness of being here now.   So the next time you catch yourself reveling in your or another’s enlightened status, go deeper.  Go beneath the words and concepts.  Go beyond the delusion of spiritual false consciousness.  See if you can experience the reality of this moment.

What do you think?  Do you ever get trapped in the delusion of spiritual false consciousness?

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If life moved at a sprint in Thoreau’s time, it now moves at light-speed.   In the age of Twitter, Facebook, and email, there’s never any need for a pause or delay.  Everything is instant, which is why a five-minute interruption in wi-fi service at Starbucks has the potential to inspire an espresso-fueled riot.

In our world, the idea of slowing down is about as crazy as trading in your car for a horse.  Sure, it might be fun for a day, as a kind of retro experiment.   But the ethos of our culture tells us that just as horses can’t ride in the slow lane of the freeway, productive people can’t slow down.

For this week’s experiment, let’s explore a radical alternative to the rapid pace of modern life.   Let’s see what happens when we slow down.

Given our cultural obsession with fast cars, fast food, and fast Internet, slowing down is no easy task.  It requires swimming up stream, against the current of modern life.   But slowing down holds three unexpected benefits.

1.  From Effort to Ease

Has this ever happened to you?  You’re late for work and need to get everything together as fast as you can.  You race through the kitchen to grab your lunch and then speed-walk out the door.  In these moments, time and space start to feel compressed.  It’s like you’re moving through molasses.  You strain and push to do what would otherwise be an effortless, even mindless, act.

By slowing down, time and space expand.  Tasks that require effort in a hurried state, become easy.   You become like the tortoise – slow at the outset but still going strong at the end of the day.

2. Getting Present

Imagine traveling to Paris to see the Louvre Museum.  It’s possible to see all of the thousands of paintings in less than an hour.  You could sprint through the corridors of the museum – elbowing your way through tour groups – to get a quick glance at every painting.

But there is a quality of presence missing from your actions.  In museums and in life, it’s only when we slow down that we appreciate the nuances of each moment.   When we slow down, we start noticing the feeling of the breeze, the smell of the air, and all that’s happening right now.

3. From Habit to Improvisation

There’s one final reason to slow down.   It can lead to creative inspiration.  The faster we move, the more we fall into habit and routine.   The body tenses, the mind churns, and we live on autopilot, moving from one preprogrammed act to the next.

Slowing down opens a space for creativity to emerge.   Problems that seem crippling at a fast pace start to dissolve.  Insights that once seemed unattainable start to surface.

There are, of course, moments when you still need to rush.  But as you move through the week, see if you can experiment with slowing your pace.  What happens when you intentionally shift your email writing, walking, dishwashing, and other daily tasks to a slower speed?

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It’s the same six-inch plank as before.  And yet what was once an effortless and simple act has turned into a seemingly impossible and terrifying feat.

We live in a culture that has turned our professional, athletic, and artistic acts into a similarly high-stakes tight rope walk.

Think about how we talk about success and failure.  We live according to mantras like: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” “second place is the first loser,” and “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.”

All of this has created a cultural phobia of failure.  Failing in your career or even in your weekend hobbies isn’t like walking across the plank suspended one foot above the ground.   You can’t just fall off and get back up.   Failure is a kind of death.  It’s the professional equivalent of an 80-story free fall onto Madison Avenue.

Here’s the problem.  By creating patterns of stress and resistance, this phobia of failure not only has toxic effects on the body and mind.  It also has a paradoxical effect:  it makes failure more, rather than less likely, to actually happen.  The more we resist, fight, and close to failure, the more we turn our imagined worst-case scenarios into reality.

This is why it’s easy to walk the plank at a height of one foot and almost impossible at 80 stories:  our resistance to falling makes it all the more likely that we will actually fall.

What’s the way out of this paradox?  The only way out is to go in.  This is the radical wisdom of Lao-tzu.  In Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao te Ching, he advises:

“If you want to shrink something,You must first allow it to expand. If you want to get rid of something, You must first allow it to flourish.”

So if you want to get rid of your fear of failure, you must allow it “to flourish.”  Rather than resisting it, open to failure.  Relax into the idea of even your most catastrophic career and personal failures.  Once you open to failure, its hold over you will begin to dissolve.

For this week’s experiment, let’s explore this radical move.  Rather than resisting, let’s see what happens when we open fully to failure.

The practice is simple.

Step 1 – Noticing Closure – Notice when you feel closed to failure.  Your thoughts are a great first indicator.  Notice each time you think thoughts like, “I can’t…,” “what would happen if…,” or “what would other people think if…”  Also pay attention to your breath and body for clues to when you are resisting failure.  Notice when you feel tension, when your posture collapses, and when your breath tightens.  These are all signs that you are resisting – that you are closed to failure.

Step 2 – Open – This is the key to the practice.  As soon as you feel resistance and closure, see if you can open to it.  Allow your body to relax, breathe deep into your belly, and welcome even the most horrifying forms of failure.

Opening to failure is different from seeking it out.  It doesn’t mean that you actively try to fail.  Opening to failure is an inner state.  It allows the cultural phobia of failure to loosen and opens the door for new and unimaginable forms of success to emerge.

What do you think?  What happens when you allow the phobia of failure “to expand” and “to flourish”?

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My rookie mistake?  I didn’t give them space.  Without the space to grow, my plants either died or under-produced.  I ended up with shriveled eggplants, dried up tomatoes, and squash that never grew beyond the size of a golf ball.

I have found that the same principle holds for the creative process.  Most of us habitually avoid space.  We jam our calendars full of events.  Even when we’re relaxing, we watch TV while simultaneously surfing the Internet or talking on the phone.

The pressures of the modern world combine with the endless stimulation of our digital tools to ensure that each moment is filled.  The moments of our day become like my plants: so scrunched together that they cannot grow and create.

Some of the latest discoveries in neuroscience confirm the creative potential of open space – of unplanned and uninterrupted time.  When we give ourselves space from constant stimulation and activity, the brain shifts to a “default state.”  In this state, our perception changes.   Time slows down, we daydream more, and, most important, we open ourselves to new and more creative ways of thinking.

So for this week’s experiment, let’s explore clearing space in the day for moments of creative expression to emerge.

This doesn’t mean that you should sit on your couch all day.  But you can use the following practice to give yourself space for creative ideas to emerge:

Step 1 – Set An Intention – Before you open yourself to the spaciousness of unstructured time, set an intention. It might be a question: “What wants to happen through me today?”  Or it might be a request: “I want to come up with a better way of thinking about X.”  This intention will help channel the creative power of the space toward a particular idea, question, or theme.

Step 2 – Make Space – You might set aside an hour, a half hour, or 15-minutes.   You might walk, lie down in the grass, or meditate.  It doesn’t matter what you do.  What matters is that you give yourself a space from the constant activity and stimulation of everyday life. 

Step 3 – Allow Creative Inspiration to Move – The goal is to stay open within the spaciousness – to let go of all that you think you know and open to deeper answers and unexpected insights to emerge.  Use this time to go beneath habitual patterns in your thinking.  Wait until you feel an opening in your thinking emerge.  It might come in the form of a new song, idea, insight, or a solution to a problem you’ve never been able to solve.  Once it hits, go all out.  Allow yourself to get lost in the creative act of expression.

I wrote most of my latest book, Life Beyond Logic, using this practice. On some days, I would spend hours lying on the floor in silence or with music.  I would simply wait for inspiration to hit.  On some days, almost nothing came through.  I just sat there waiting.  On others, I felt a flood of new ideas flow through me.

What do you think?  Is space the prerequisite to the flow of creative inspiration?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKsiRExe9to

Nate visits a local pet store to move deeper into the edge of his fear of snakes.    It turns out that there’s no better way to work on letting go of fear than having a six-foot snake wrapped around your neck.  A special thanks to For Pet’s Sake in Thousand Oaks for providing the snake.

At the level of theory, all of this sounds fantastic.  Why not shift from fear to love? Why not drop all our worries and live like an enlightened saint?  Why not approach each problem and situation with infinite courage?

Here’s the problem.  The actual experience of moving beyond fear isn’t a theoretical act.  It’s not like solving a math equation or cutting a philosophical distinction.   You can’t just say to yourself, “Wow…it turns out that all fear is just an illusion.  From now on, I’m going to let go of all fear and live like Jesus, Buddha, or Socrates.”

That’s like saying, “It turns out that playing the piano is just a matter of hitting the keys in various patterns.  From now on, I’m going to play like Rachmaninoff or Glenn Gould.”

To play Bach like Glenn Gould isn’t an intellectual act.  Even if you spent years studying his art and learning music theory, you still wouldn’t be able to do it.  Playing like Glenn Gould requires practice.  It requires a relentless dedication to practicing the nuances of pitch, technique, and touch on the piano.

Dissolving fear is no different.   Sure, a handful of beings report experiences of instant enlightenment – a moment where all fear drops away.  But for the rest of us, dissolving fear is like learning to play the piano.  It requires practice and a moment-to-moment dedication to unwinding patterns of tension and resistance in the mind and body.

So for this week’s experiment, let’s explore the practice of dissolving fear.

How do you practice dissolving fear?  I like to think of fear as the spiritual equivalent of a tight hamstring.  It’s an internal contraction that can only be opened by moving into it and stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone.

So the best way to begin dissolving fear is to develop what I like to call a “yoga of fear.”  Here’s the practice:

Step 1 – Identify a Fear – We each have an idiosyncratic collection of fears.  You might fear snakes, airplanes, public speaking, humiliation, or failure.  Choose the fear that you would most like to dissolve.

Step 2 – Find Your Edge – If you want to lengthen your hamstring, you have to stretch into it.  You have to move deep into the tension of the muscle without going so deep that it begins to tear.  In yoga, we call this finding your edge – that point between no stretch and too much stretch. Fear is no different.  To expand beyond fear, you first need to move into it.  See if you can find your edge.  See if you can find that place at the very outskirts of your comfort zone – that place just short of complete overwhelm.

Step 3 – Stay Present – When you hit your edge in a hamstring stretch, you need to breathe into it and stay present with the experience.  Likewise, when you go into your edge of fear, stay with the breath.  Our tendency is to turn away from fear.  When we feel fear, we stop breathing, we tense our muscles, and turn our awareness away from the experience.   To stay present with fear is to do the opposite.  Breathe fully into the experience from the depths of your belly and turn toward, rather than away from, the experience.

This yoga of fear is a practice.  Like playing the piano, it takes a lifetime to master fully.  But the more I practice this yoga of fear, the more I notice myself opening to new and more courageous acts.

I want to know what you think.  What is your experience of this yoga of fear?

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgF-Emmtd9s

If you’re like me, you get a song stuck in your head just about every day.  Yesterday it was “I Want it That Way” by the Backstreet Boys.   Today it’s “Just hear those sleigh bells ringlin’.”  That’s right, even though it’s mid-August, I have a Christmas song lodged in my brain.  In this short clip, Oliver Sacks, a leading figure on the neurology of music, explains why these “brainworms” arise.

Music represents the ultimate experience of life beyond logic.   Bands like The Beatles, U2, and The Miles Davis Quintet give us a window into the vast world of experience beyond words, concepts, and theories.

The ancients also understood the power of music to bypass the limited categories of the mind.  They saw music as shaping the soul. “Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other,” Plato remarked, “because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.”  Aristotle held a similar view: “We are altered in soul when we listen to such things” as music.

Both saw music as the ideal complement to physical exercise (last week’s experiment).  While exercise cultivates “savageness and hardness,” music creates its opposite.  It cultivates “softness and tameness.”

So if you look closely at Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Politics, you get some wild prescriptions for how to experience music philosophically.  Both, for instance, advocate listening to music with lyrics (logos).   Aristotle goes even deeper – outlining the various modes of music, Dorian, Phrygian, or Mixed Lydian, and their effects on the soul.

Modern neuroscience confirms Plato and Aristotle’s insight that music stirs the passions.  In Daniel Levitin’s fascinating book This is Your Brain on Music, he tells us that music’s impact on the brain goes far beyond the effects of language.  Music taps into some of the most primal brain regions like the cerebellum, while simultaneously activating “higher-order” regions in the frontal lobes and mesolimbic system that create “arousal, pleasure, and the transmission of opiods and the production of dopamine.”  Perhaps this is why Plato and Aristotle saw music as a direct line to the soul.

So for this week’s experiment, let’s explore the philosophical and soul transforming possibilities of music.  Let’s explore music as a vehicle to experiencing life beyond logic.

Aristotle offers an elaborate set of practices for doing this.  But they are almost impossible to replicate.  For one thing, few modern songs stick to a single mode (i.e. Dorian, Phrygian, or Mixed Lydian).  But the bigger problem is without years of training in music theory, most people have no idea what these words even mean.

So we have to come up with a new practice.  Here’s what I propose:

Step 1 – From Background to Foreground – In modern life, it’s difficult to go anywhere without hearing music.  Spend a day shopping and you’ll hear soft musac in grocery stores, driving techno in clothing stores, and adult contemporary at your local Starbucks.  But here’s the problem.  While ubiquitous, music is almost always in the background.  Rarely, if ever, does it take center stage in our awareness.   So the first step is to shift music from the background to the foreground – to really listen to one or two songs each day.

Step 2 – Conscious Oscillation – Music is a lot like life.  You can either lose yourself in the experience of it or take a step back and watch it unfold as a spectator.   Since both activities are important, I recommend oscillating between the two.  At times, let your self go totally into the music.  Let yourself experience music’s power to take you into dimensions of experience beyond the logical mind.  At other times, experiment with listening consciously.  Become an observer of your experience.  Notice what happens in the mind and body with each song.

Step 3 – The Energetics of Music – As you begin understanding how various types of music affect your mood, mind, and body, try basing your choice of music on the qualities you want to create in any moment.  Early in the day, when your energy needs a jump-start, you might crank hip-hop or hard rock.  Later in the day, when you’re in need of relaxation, you might listen to jazz or bossa nova.  The idea is to begin choosing music to match the energetic qualities you want to cultivate in any given moment.

What we know from both the ancients and from cutting-edge neuroscience is that music plays a unique role in shaping our experience.  The right song, played at the right time, can bring us to tears, inspire courage, and even make us fall in love.

I want to know what you think.  Does music take you beyond logic?  Do you have any practices for using its unique power to transform your life?

There’s one key force motivating all those daily trips to the gym or the yoga studio.  It’s the goal of body sculpting – of using exercise to tone abs, build up pecs, and firm up glutes.

If you don’t believe me, just check out some of the names used to describe today’s fitness classes.  You can take hard-core body sculpting classes like: “Hammercore,” “Rockbody Bootcamp,” and the mildly inappropriate “Tight End Zone.”  Then there are the gender-specific classes like: “Stiletto Camp,” “Bikini Boot Camp,” and “The Skinny Jeans Workout.”  For a more complete list, check out Social Workout.

But here’s the problem.  Exercise isn’t just about body sculpting.  It’s not just about rockin’ abs and bikini bodies for summer.  Exercise can also be a philosophical act.

This might sound strange but if we look back to Plato and Aristotle, exercise was a key part of philosophical training.  Before Plato, most philosophers viewed exercise as a purely physical act.  They viewed exercise as training for the body.  Music was seen as the primary practice for training for the mind.

Plato shifted the paradigm.  He saw exercise – or “gymnastics” as he called it – as an activity that went beyond sculpting bodies.  He and Aristotle viewed exercise as playing a key part in training the mind.

It’s not just the ancients who saw the philosophical power of exercise.  In the 19^th century, both Nietzsche and Thoreau talked extensively about walking as a tool for enlivening the mind.

Thoreau said “I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day…sauntering through the woods.”  Nietzsche put it even more boldly, “Only thoughts that come through walking,” he said, “have any value.”

To both men, exercise worked like a cognitive reboot for the mind and spirit.   It opened the mind to new and more imaginative ways of thinking.  It created a space for the best philosophy to emerge.

For this week’s experiment, let’s explore exercise as a philosophical act.  Rather than simply using it to tone, tighten, and strengthen, let’s use it to expand our thinking into new and uncharted terrain.

To exercise philosophically, you can use this simple three-step practice:

Step1 – Plant the Seed

Before you exercise this week, spend a few minutes planting the seeds of an idea or problem you want clarity on.  It could be a work or personal issue.  Use your drive to the gym or your time stretching to draw your attention to the current contours of the problem.

Step 2 – Work it Out

Do whatever it is that you love to do for exercise.  It might be yoga, walking, or “Body Bar Spontaneous Combustion” (believe it or not – that’s a real class name).   Go fully into your workout.  Get your breath moving, heart pumping, and sweat dripping.

Step 3 – Do Your Philosophy

At the end of your workout, or even during it, revisit the issue.  There’s a chance that when you revisit it, nothing has changed.  But I find that most workouts create an inner shift.  The cognitive reboot of exercise opens my mind.   Problems dissolve into possibilities.  And random thoughts turn into imaginative insights.

What do you think?  Do you agree with Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Thoreau?  Can we extend the benefits of exercise beyond the physical?

Can we use yoga or kickboxing aerobics to create a Socratic-mind in addition to a beach-ready-body?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz9_RlHE4w8

Nate and his actual father-in-law Jim demonstrate the four forms of drama from the Drama-Free Office.  The dilemma — who mows the lawn?

It’s not just philosophers who fall into drama.  Spend a week in any academic department, business, law firm, or organization and, beneath he surface of water-cooler small talk, you’ll find all kinds of drama.  And lots of it.

You’ll find gossip in the break room, turf wars, power struggles, and good old-fashioned cynicism.

The worst thing about all this drama is that it wastes time, energy, and money.  The anger, worry, and resentment of workplace drama stifles creativity and innovation.

My wife Kaley Warner Klemp and father-in-law Jim Warner have spent years helping organizations get out of drama.  Last week, they released a new book called The Drama-Free Office.  It’s a book about why we so easily slip into drama and how we can overcome it.

So for this week’s experiment, I propose a radical challenge:  can you go for an entire week without contributing to any form of workplace drama?

In the Drama-Free Office, Kaley and Jim give us a powerful tool for catching ourselves in moments of drama:  a list of the four most common “drama-types.”   As you read this list, think about your drama tendencies.   And as you go through this week, see if you can catch yourself anytime you see yourself slipping into drama.

1. The Cynic

Outwardly, a Cynic, claims she would love to “have it all work out,” but inwardly, she doubts that it will.  Even though she may not have the answer, she’s certain that everyone else’s ideas are wrong, and her job is to point this out.  Others are shortsighted, selfish, and ignorant, and she feels she’s “right” to draw attention to their flaws.  She also sees the shortcomings of potential solutions.  By pointing out all the ways current ideas fall short, maybe then they’ll “get it” and actually fix the problem. The Cynic doesn’t really want control, but she has disdain for whoever has it.

2. The Controller

A Controller wants work to be done efficiently and thoroughly.  He knows he has the best solutions and wants it done his way: the “right” way. Give him the ball, and he’ll score.  But he has to have the ball.  He finds others to blame for problems, since the problems wouldn’t exist if he had all the power.  Focused solely on his own concerns and grounded in a deep sense of entitlement, he is often oblivious to the needs of others.  Compelled to be the best, the Controller obsesses about winning.  He believes that others are constantly seeking the same, so he must overpower them to prevail.  Life is tough and only the strong survive.

3. The Complainer

Complainers believe that life is too hard and that everything is happening to them.  When trouble arises, they look for a bad guy to take the fall, because nothing can possibly be their fault.  A Complainer would love to have a happy ending to every problem but believes she’s powerless to alter the situation.  She is at the effect of other people and situations;  they have all the control.  Because she’s at the mercy of other people, the Complainer feels she is “right” in her suffering and deserves to be taken care of.

4. The Caretaker

Like most of us, a Caretaker wants to help others, feel appreciated, and live in a stable, calm environment. Unlike many of us, though, he becomes obsessed with these desires and will go to great lengths to satisfy them, including sacrificing himself. Caretakers believe the right thing to do is get along, provide for others, and keep the peace. Typically, Caretakers are highly productive associates in environments that require—and reward—long hours, no whining, and head-down work. Problems arise, however, when they take on more than they can do.

What’s your drama tendency?  Do you tend to be a hard-nosed controller or a caretaker who works tirelessly to keep the peace and satisfy others?  Or are you a mix of these types?

To find out more about your drama tendency, you can take a free online assessment by clicking here.  Knowing you drama type isn’t just valuable for office interactions.  It can help you avoid drama in whatever area of life it tends to arise.

Use these drama types this week to help catch yourself before you go into drama.  And if you’re interested in learning more about how to overcome workplace drama, check out Jim and Kaley’s book The Drama-Free Office. Or, you can find them on facebook and ask them about a situation you’d like to shift.

I’m curious to hear from you.  How does drama show up in your office?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDdoJA09TS0

In preparation for a week of eating philosophically, I took my camera with me to the grocery store.  The goal: to buy only foods with ingredients I could actually pronounce.  It turned out to be quite an adventure.   Along the way, I ran into a couple that runs a website called SayNotoMSG.com.  Enjoy!

Throughout most of the world, people struggle to find food.   But in the developed world, food just seems to appear.  It shows up, almost magically, in grocery stores, fast food joints, and restaurants.

Food comes to us so easily that we tend to lose consciousness around it.   We get lost in habits that leave us eating in a trance-like state.  Some of us over eat.  We just can’t stop mid way through a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream.     Some of us under eat.  We starve ourselves for beach season or get so busy that we forget about food altogether.

I’ve noticed that unconscious eating comes in two styles.  The first is hedonistic eating.   This style is all about finding short-term pleasure through food.  In fact, I’m engaged in a bit of hedonistic eating as I write this post.  I’m sitting at an airport bar in Detroit, waiting for my half-pound cheese burger and French Fries to arrive.

I don’t need the burger.  It’s probably not all that good for me.  But my flight just got canceled and, with a four hour layover looming, I’ve given myself a free pass for a bit of hedonistic eating.

Another style is pragmatic eating.   This is what happens when food becomes the bodily equivalent of gasoline.  In this style, food becomes little more than fuel to keep the body and mind running.     When I’m running out the door late for a meeting, this is my default eating style.  I grab whatever I can get my hands on.   There’s no conscious pleasure.  It’s just a way to fuel the body for the day ahead.

In this week’s experiment, let’s explore a third way: eating philosophically.  The goal is to see what happens when we bring conscious attention to what we eat and how we eat it.

What does it mean to eat philosophically?

The key move is to bring consciousness to eating.  To eat philosophically is to break out of the trance of habit and routine that most of us fall into around food.

Here are a few key principles of philosophical eating to play with throughout the week:

1.The Simplicity Principle

One of Thoreau’s most provocative ideas is to “simplify, simplify.”  Most people talk about simplicity in the realm of things but what about the idea of minimalist eating?  Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food gives us a perfect first start.  He shows just how complicated food has become over the last fifty years.  Food used to look like – well – food.  Now, our foods are so heavily processed that you need a PhD in nutrition to read the ingredients of an average product.  According to Pollen, all this complexity in the form of additives and processing appears to also play a role in rising rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and obesity.   So here’s the key idea for this week: “Simplify” by only eating food. Pollen offers two ways to do this:

• “Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”  In other words, if it didn’t exist fifty years ago, don’t eat it.

• “Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn.”   For more on this, I highly recommend Pollen’s book.

2. The Awareness Principle

Eating philosophically isn’t just about what you eat but how you eat it.   Habit and routine leave us rushing through meals.  Eating becomes like background music at a restaurant – it’s there and it’s happening, but we don’t pay much attention to it.  To bring awareness to the act of eating, experiment with two practices:

• Gratitude – Most spiritual and religious traditions begin the meal with an expression of gratitude.  Even if you have no interest in religion, the simple expression of one thing you are grateful for each time you eat can have profound effects.

• Presence – In the Eastern tradition there’s an old expression, “energy flows where awareness goes.”  As you eat this week, see if you can do just that.  See if you can energize the process of digestion by bringing your awareness to each bite.  Focus your attention on the taste and texture of the foods you eat.

I’ll be living these principles for the next week and checking in on Thursday with my experiences.  But I’m also curious to hear from you.  What is your experience with eating philosophically?

If you haven’t already, be sure to follow Life Beyond Logic on Twitter@LifeBeyondLogic and join the Life Beyond Logic Facebook Page to continue the conversation and get the latest updates.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4bnbs6gwb8

World renowned yoga instructor Erich Schiffmann joins us to talk about the art of choosing on the basis of intuition instead of habit.

Then there are big choices.  What should you do with your life?  Who should you marry?  Where should you work and live?

You might get hung up for a few minutes on a restaurant order.  But you can spend weeks, years, or even lifetimes agonizing over these bigger choices.

Emerson has a radical solution to the problem of indecision.  It doesn’t involve a complicated cost-benefit analysis.  Emerson’s solution is far more mystical and simple:  stop trying to figure it out and listen to your deepest intuition.

For this week’s experiment, let’s explore this radical practice of intuitive choosing.

We usually ignore intuition.  We usually focus on what others want or what we think we want.

Choosing what others want is often a noble strategy.   It’s clearly good to help others in need.  But it also has its dangers.  The problem is that you often don’t know what others want.   For instance, you might think your friend in debt wants a loan.  But they might not – in fact, they might resent your offer.  Since we don’t have full information about the needs and wants of others, these decisions can often go awry.

A second strategy is to base decisions on what we think we want.  You have more information about your own needs and wants.  But there’s still much you don’t know.   Say you’re thinking about ending your current relationship.  It’s possible that this move would lead you to an amazing new partner – a soul mate – who complements you in every way.  But it might not.  You might end up lonely and bitter, wishing you had never left.

Enter Emerson’s intuitive choosing method.  He sees the mind as too fallible – too limited – to be trusted with these decisions.  Logic alone can leave you clueless about what others want and often even what you want.  “Life,” says Emerson, “is a series of surprises.”

The alternative is to look beneath logic and reason – to look for the deep wisdom of intuition.   “Trust the instinct to the end,” says Emerson, “though you can render no reason…By trusting…it shall ripen into truth, and you shall know why you believe.”

How can you practice intuitive choosing?  This week, Erich Schiffmann returns to share his insight on this practice.  For now, you can begin experimenting with the following steps:

• Start Simple – It’s probably not the best idea to start with big life-changing decisions.  Before you quit your job or move to Hawaii, experiment with trivial decisions like what to wear, what to eat, or how to get to work.

• Listen – We generally think our way through decisions.  But see what happens when you listen for the wisdom of intuition.  When you go to the store, for example, you might ask: what cereal do I really want?  Then listen for an intuitive answer.   It might come in the form of a sensation, a feeling, or some other deeper form of knowing.

• Check It Out With the Mind – The typical objection to this kind of mystical decision-making is that it could lead to insane choices.  Think of the biblical story of Abraham, who hears the intuitive voice of God calling him to kill his son Isaac on a mountain top.  There’s an easy way out of this worry.  Use your mind as a check on intuition.  If your intuition tells you to eat nothing but donuts for the next year, your mind can exercise its veto power.

Please join us for my interview about intuitive choosing with the world-renowned yoga instructor Erich Schiffmann on Thursday. In the meantime, I’m curious:  what decisions have you made using this method?

I have found it relatively easy to set aside the time to watch the sunset.   It’s also been easy to feel into that space of the infinite during these moments.

The greater challenge has been internal.  I’ve noticed an inner critic that arises as I’m sitting before the sun “doing nothing.”   In a world where work and productivity dictate the flow of most days, this act feels radical.  With nothing to do, I almost have the sense that I’m doing something wrong.  ”Surely, there is some email I need to write, some chore I need to do, or some project that needs my attention.”

Thoreau also felt limited by this modern aversion to unproductive acts.  As he puts it in “Life Without Principle,”

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Watching the sunset is no different.  If you spend the evening sitting idly as the sun goes down, it’s easy to feel like you’re “doing nothing,” like you’ve wasted the evening away and produced nothing.

The finite world creates barriers to Thoreau’s sunset experience in external ways (through time constraints and obligations).  But it also creates these internal barriers.  These barriers don’t come from the outside.  They arise in the mind.  They emerge in the thought that there’s something wrong when your actions have no clear “value-add.”

So for the rest of the week, I plan to work on letting go of these inner constraints.  The goal is to release the story that there’s something wrong with “doing nothing.”

Have you encountered these inner barrier to experiencing the infinite?

How can such a simple sight transform us?

Thoreau’s answer:  sunsets break us out of the finite world and into the infinite. It’s not the sight of the sun or the horizon that makes them special.  It’s that through this act “we relate ourselves to a universal fact.”

The deeper insight here is that we live in two overlapping worlds.   We spend the bulk of our time in the world of the finite. This is the world where you and I are separate beings with separate problems and patterns.   It’s the world where the size of your bank account matters, where you need to impress others, and where it’s important to think about things like paying bills and keeping your job.

I woke up this morning in the world of the finite.  I arose to worries about finishing my book, preparing for classes in the fall, and finances.   “How am I going to balance my research, book editing, blog writing, and teaching?” I found myself thinking.

These worried thoughts left me in the predominate state of the finite world – stress.   My mind darted from thoughts about one potential problem to the next.  My body felt tight and constricted.   In response, I found myself moving quickly, as though living in fast-forward mode would somehow diminish the burden.

Then, in a rash and counter-productive move, I left my computer and walked outside.  I looked up at the sky.   Suddenly, everything slowed down.

Big clouds hung low over the horizon.   I watched their slow motion movements – the way white clumps of cloud crept over the blue backdrop.

In less than five minutes, I had entered the world of the infinite.  This is the world described by philosophers, saints, gurus, and mystics.   Plato saw this world in the “forms” – those ideas that transcend the world of “appearances.”  Saint Augustine saw it in the “Heavenly City” – the spiritual state of perfect peace.   The yogis saw it in “leela” – the divine play of consciousness that transcends the “maya” or illusions of our everyday experience.

It doesn’t really matter whether you are spiritual, religious, or atheist.  You probably have some connection to the infinite.  Whether you call it God, consciousness, or truth is not all that important.   What matters is that you experience the sense of liberation that occurs when you shift from the finite to the infinite.

For this week’s experiment, let’s explore Thoreau’s practice for finding the infinite:  his idea that “to see the sun rise or go down every day…would preserve us sane forever.”

Here’s the practice:

• Make the Time – The most difficult part of this practice is the simple act of scheduling time to see the sunset.   Without setting aside time, the sun rises and sets in the absence of our awareness.  So look up the time of the time of sunrise or sunset in your area (The US Navy Observatory has a free site for this) and block off 15 minutes to experience a sunrise or sunset each day.

• Find the Infinite – Allow your self to experience what Thoreau calls the “universal fact.”   You might breathe into the experience.  You might just sit there.  You might meditate on a point on the horizon.  It doesn’t matter what you do.  What matters is that you open yourself to a taste of the infinite.

I’ll be posting photos and video of my experience.  Please upload your photos of the sunrise and sunset from wherever you happen to be on the Life Beyond Logic Facebook Page.

What’s your experience of the infinite?

As with all of the art of living experiments, it’s relatively easy to understand them.  It’s far more difficult to live them.  You might read this blog in one moment and say to yourself, “That’s a really interesting idea.”  And then in the next, be back to your habitual ways of thinking and acting.  That’s certainly been my experience.

To deepen your lived experience of death, I recommend a powerful meditation that the Indian Philosopher Osho talks about in The Book of Secrets.   Osho points out that our experience of birth and death corresponds to our experience of the breath.

When you are born, he says, you cannot exhale because there is no air in your chest.  The infant’s first breath must be an inhale.  Likewise, when you die, you cannot inhale.  As he says, “the last act will be an exhalation.”

This leads him to the following practice for becoming more comfortable with death:

“Try this experiment.  The whole day, whenever you remember, exhale deeply and don’t inhale.  Allow the body to inhale; you simply exhale deeply.  And you will feel a deep peace, death is silence…This emphasis on exhalation will help you very much to do this experiment, because you will be ready to die…Exhale deeply and you will have a taste of it.  It is beautiful.”

I’ll be exploring this practice and look forward to hearing how it goes for you. Does Osho’s technique of emphasizing the exhales shift your relationship to death?

“Hello”

“Is this Nate?”

“Yeah”

“This is Dr. Vaidya.  I’m calling about your MRI results.”

“OK.”  I had been experiencing some mild dizziness and my doctor decided to run some tests to be safe.

“Listen, the radiologist report shows that there’s an abnormality in your brain stem.  They are thinking it is either a glioma or an AVM.” (You can check out what he’s talking about in the above picture.  Notice the small black dot in the middle of my brain)

“Glioma or AVM?   I have no idea what that means.”

“Well,” he said, “a glioma is a brain tumor – a cancerous growth that starts in the brain or spinal cord.  An AVM is an abnormal collection of blood vessels that could begin bleeding at any moment and cause serious problems with brain functioning.”

“Can’t they remove these things pretty easily?”  I asked.

“Well, the brain stem is an extremely delicate area of the brain.  It’s located at the very center – beneath many layers of brain tissue – so it’s actually quite difficult to get there surgically.  They could operate but the risk of complications is pretty high.”

I hung up the phone and felt my heart race.  “This is it,” I thought.  “I’m dying.  This is how I’m going out.  A brain tumor!”  I saw an image of my wife.  I could feel how devastated she would be.  I thought about my parents.  I thought about all the things I wished I had done.  I wondered why I was sitting at my desk grading papers if I was about to die.

They needed two weeks to do a few more scans and get a more accurate diagnosis.  And so I waited – facing what felt like an inevitable death.

But then something unexpected happened.  The idea of dying at any moment shifted from terrifying to liberating.  It shattered my previous perception of time.  I now felt a sense of urgency.  I felt my mind shift away from nagging thoughts about future classes, articles, and obligations to the raw experience of each hike, each meal, and each night sleeping next to my wife.

The thought of dying ripped away the blinders of obligation, entitlement, and expectation.  Worries about tenure and teaching evaluations felt like a joke.

Before this experience, I lived with the assumption of a long life. This assumption gave me an excuse for delaying the things I really wanted.  “I would love to start a blog and write a book on living philosophy,” I used to think to myself, “but I should probably wait until next year.”  But I could now see – that there might not be a next year.

After two weeks of MRIs and CAT scans.  After two weeks of waiting by the phone, I went to my neurosurgeon’s office.  He pulled out the scans and slid them onto the light-box display on the wall.  It turned out I was fine.  The “tumor” was just a harmless abnormality I was born with.

You don’t need to go through all this drama to experience the liberation of facing death.  As the French Philosopher Michel de Montaigne recommends, “We should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go.”

What Montaigne recommends is not just a thought experiment.  It’s a moment-to-moment way of being.

We assume an infinite time horizon.  We delay telling our loved ones how much we care about them.  We delay living our deepest purpose.  All because we think there will be time.

But there may not be time.  You might not be here next year.  You might not be here tomorrow.

This week’s experiment is both simple and near impossible.  See if you can live each moment “booted and spurred, and ready to go” – open to death at any moment.

One way to practice this is by taking an honest inventory of your life.  If there were no next year, what would you do?  What adventures would you take?  Who would you spend time with?  What work projects would you do?  For guidance on this, I recommend Steven Levine’s brilliant book A Year to Live.

The second way to practice this is through simple awareness. Remind yourself each morning – “this day might be my last.”  This doesn’t mean that you gamble away all your money.  The crucial word here is might.  It means arranging your life such that you could welcome death at any moment.

I’m curious to know what you think.  How would your life change if you lived the way Socrates and Montaigne recommend – with an openness to death at any moment?