Five Featured Reviews:
1. Milan Kundera's 
Testaments Betrayed
To interpreters of the works of Rabelais, Kafka, Stravinsky, Hemingway, Nietzsche, and others, Kundera offers the
following words of chastisement from Stravinsky, "But you're not in your own house, my dear fellow" (This phrase is also
the title of the last chapter.) As a meta-critic of music and literature Kundera blows away the fog of confusion so that the
reader may see how the well-meaning epigones, lost in the fog of cultural expectations, have strayed from the path laid out
in the works of the original composers and authors.
In A Sentence Kundera presents three different translations of a Kafka sentence, followed by the original German, and
finally an exact translation by Kundera. The foibles of translators are laid bare on Kundera's dissecting table. One must
read translations with a fresh eye for literary foolishness after this chapter.
In Works and Spiders he quotes Nietzsche, "an act put on by system-makers: in their desire to fill in their system and
round off the horizon that encloses it, they must try to present their weak points in the same style as their strong points."
This filling in of the system, Kundera refers to as "a collaboration between an eagle and hundreds of heroic spiders
spinning webs to cover all the crannies." This reminds of the Levee Board system in place which led to the Federal Flood in New Orleans in 2005, often called Hurricane Katrina ( a minor event compared to the widespread flood from a failed levee system).
In The Unloved Child of the Family Kundera says "Thus in the big family that is a small country, the artist is bound in
multiple ways, by multiple cords." Someone from a small country such as Greece or Italy would be called a traitor for
disparaging his homeland's character, but someone from a large country would be mostly ignored for the same offense.
In Paths in the Fog Kundera reminds us that man proceeds in the present always in a fog, unsure of what the next moment
may bring. He says, "But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path," thus reminding us
that when we judge the actions of others we should re-create their fog as a part of our creative act of imagination. If "all
history is the history of thought" as R. G. Collingwood said, then the future history of thought, the evolution of
consciousness from that time, must be a necessary part of the fog that accompanies us in our meditations on that time. This
is the fog that Kundera lifts for us momentarily in this book, thereby betraying for all to see the many "Testaments
Betrayed."
2. Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way
Got writer's block? Take one of these and call me in the morning after you've finished the
twelve week course that Cameron and Bryan have laid out for you in this book. I will then ask you,
"How many days did you do your morning pages the past week?" If the answer comes back less than
seven, I will suggest a cloistered order because the life of writer is not for you. I will place you in the
same category as the wanna-be Miss Abs of 1996 in the Dilbert cartoon who said, "I bought the
exercise machine you suggested, but I'm still lazy."
This book is not for lazy people. Instead it is for industrious people who have poisonous friends who have thrown wet blankets
on their every artistic endeavor, be it painting, sculpture, writing, or whatever. The authors put you on
the exercycle of morning pages (free writing) for ten minutes every morning and urge you to use your
newly developed will-power and discipline to take yourself on an artist date every week. Here is the
plan in all its simplicity: 1) write freely, without editing or stopping for three pages every morning to
clear the garbage from your psyche, and 2) spend time alone with yourself studying life and art once a
week. These are the two fine themes around which this fine book has been woven by Julia Cameron
and her friend Mark Bryan.
Since giving someone a suggestion (like "Buy yourself an exercise machine") is usually not
enough to turn them into an athlete, Julie and Mark have given their course to many people in seminars
and developed this book from it. If you've bought self-help books before, read them, tried some of their
suggestions, and then forgotten about the whole thing, save your money. This book won't work for you
either.
If you are serious about freeing your artist within, buy this book, and use it as a workbook. Do
all or most of the exercises at the end of each chapter. Do your morning pages and artists dates. Soon
the latent artist within will pay you a surprise visit now and then.
I read this book straight through during a weekend trip to Houston I loved the quotations
sprinkled in the margins. I had discovered morning pages or free writing years ago from Peter Elbow
(Writing Without Teachers) and I had been taking myself on artists dates for years, but The Artist's Way
re-invigorated my resolve and I began my morning pages again. My book A Reader's Journal was the
direct result of my first attempt at morning pages some ten years ago. While writing full-time for the
past year, I'd dropped them until this book reminded of their importance.
This book is loaded with ideas and suggestions. Here's an example. The authors are talking
about the swimming of Eva Babitz a novelist and swimmer:
That rhythmic, repetitive action transfers the locus of the brain's energies from
the logic to the artist hemisphere. It is there that inspiration bubbles up
untrammeled by the constraints of logic.
This is the process I call "collating time" it is the process of weeding a garden, sewing
stitches on a quilt, of shelling peas, of loading shotgun shells, of shucking corn, of peeling shrimp, of
doing something as mundane as collating pages from a printer if one does the operation carefully
with full intention, inspiration will bubble up, freeing the artist within.
3. Rudolf Steiner's The Arts and their Mission
In the Introduction, Virginia Moore says, "Clearly Rudolf Steiner belongs to an age-old
stream flowing sometimes above ground, sometimes below, but never, since the beginning, dry."
Never one to be bound to "the aridity of matter-bound thinking"[VM] Steiner is rather the
marathon swimmer who swims the length and breadth of this ageless stream, stopping at points
along the way to describe the scenery, enticing us to explore the stream ourselves.
At one early stop he shows to us some men who instinctively remember the experiences of
their fathers and grandfathers. At another place in the stream we meet men who experience ideas
flowing into their minds as water flows into our bodies a bounty from the large mass of the
earth. (The concept of ideas and thoughts arising within our minds would have to wait for a
paradigm hop of consciousness farther down the stream.)
At another resting place we observe
spirits of the recently deceased finding their way upwards by following the architectural lines of
pyramids and spires. At another we see a man whose trunk and limbs in one life transform into his
head in the next life. In the stream, we observe everywhere colorful soul-spirits and follow them
into their earthly incarnations as they garment themselves in the splendid colors of their being in
the spirit world.
From our tutelary sessions in the stream with Steiner, we ken the spiritual essence
of the various arts: how the entrance of the soul-spirit into the world creates costuming, how the
focus on the present time freezes a human body into sculpture, how the exit of soul-spirits from the
material world creates the need for architecture, how the soul-events in paintings occur in two-dimensions with color as the third perspective, how the lower earth gods (e. g., Dionysus)
appeared as actors on the dramatic stage before man did, how the upper gods (e. g., the Muses)
infused man with poetry and song. As we drift in the stream, we hear from the banks, Homer
pleading to the gods that their will be done, not his, as he opens the Iliad: "Sing, oh Muse, the
wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus." And, lastly, we pause in the stream of today, "when man is in
the process of becoming free, daimonic man, that is, man under the influence of tutelary spirits is
an anachronism." [RS, italics mine] Looking back over our trip in the stream, we realize that we
have seen man evolve in consciousness, from Homer, who required the tutelary advice of his
Muse, to Modern Man, who shuns parental injunctions in favor of the complete freedom that only
autonomy can bring.
"Once upon a time," or as we may now say it: Many paradigm hops ago, "the daimonic led
to tragedy."[RS] Today, in complete autonomy, we can say, "There are no innocent victims"[BM]
that each one, partly in consciousness, partly out of consciousness, has complete control over the
events of one's life.
Finally we pause in the stream to consider Goethe's triad, "Wisdom, Semblance, and
Power." Wisdom, Steiner sees as "formless knowledge," Power as virtue, or "the power to carry
out worthwhile things effectively," and Semblance, as art, "the beautiful." I see Goethe's triad as a
four-part process that mirrors Don Robinson's Habit Formation steps: 1. Unconscious
Incompetence (Power, will, virtue), 2. Conscious Incompetence (Action Semblance performance
arts), 3. Conscious Competence (Word Semblance literary arts), and 4. Unconscious
Competence (Wisdom, formless knowledge). In the progression through each of these four steps
humankind makes a paradigm hop and consciousness evolves. The stream is actually a cascade of
falls, each one marking a jump in the evolution of consciousness for the salmon-like human race
heading for its spawning grounds upstream.
4. James Michener's The Novel A Novel
"The Novel is a work of fiction. The characters in it have been invented by the author, and
any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental. The story is also fictitious."
Going to such lengths to ensure the reader that the book is fiction causes one to wonder if
Michener "protesteth too much" and if much of the content of the book actually happened to him.
On page seventy-five the fictitious Yoder tells us that the endpapers were done by the artist, Jean-Paul Tremblay. On the flip of the title page, credit is given to Jean Paul Tremblay. Such
propinquity in one area makes one wonder about the rest of the book.
Readers are cautioned not to miss the CONTENTS page or they may wonder in Chapter
Two how Yoder could have been a tomboy. The first chapter deals with The Writer, and the rest
deal with The Editor, The Critic, and The Reader.
The Writer, Lukas Yoder has just finished his eighth book in his Grenzler series. We
follow him through the well-practices motions he goes through after the completion of his novel.
As he visits his friend who checks his book for Pennsylvania Dutch authenticity, we enjoy a fresh-baked German rice pudding with him.
When he visits his editor, Ms. Marmelle in New York, we
sit in on the conferences about the subsidiary rights and international rights of his earlier books.
When he returns home, we look over his shoulder in his workshop as he converts old hex signs
hacked from collapsing barns into finished art works.
The Editor, Ms. Marmelle, tells us how she came to be an editor, starting as a go-fer in the
secretarial pool, then being assigned to Mount Dreck, the over the transom submissions pile. Her
biggest difficulty in that job was holding to the one in nine hundred goal. She was severely
reprimanded and told to hold her recommendations to the editors to a maximum of three in nine
hundred. One of her submittals was Yoder's first novel and she was assigned to be the editor for
its publication.
The Critic, Karl Streibert, we also follow as he grows into a full professor of English at
Yoder's alma mater, Mecklenberg College, a tale complete with a raffish summer affair in Athens.
Streibert loves great writing and detests Yoder's plodding style. In spite of that, Ms. Marmelle
becomes his editor. Streibert grows several writing proteges, the two most prominent being Jenny
Sorkin and Timothy Tull.
The Reader, Jane Garland, turns out to be the grandmother of Timothy Tull in the fourth
and last chapter, during which a murder occurs and is solved in short order by the writer Yoder and
his Dutch friend.
Each chapter shows the book process from a different angle and reflects light in the hidden
recesses of the other chapters, till in the final chapter all the action is brought together by murder.
Michener tells a masterful tale about a writer and his milieu, which we must suspect closely
parallels Michener's own.
5. Dudley Lynch and Paul L. Kordis's Strategy of the Dolphin
Ablaze with self-indulgent and self-congratulatory fluff this masterpiece of hyperbole hardly
ever finishes a sentence or a complete thought. E.g., "The strategy of the carp. And the strategy of the
shark." or later "It's the road less traveled, but if you begin, in the discovery sense, you are already there."
This is future shock in mega-doses, "open wide" they say (in effect), "we have you pegged and here is
your curriculum vitae for future success. You only have to jump into the pool and dophinize your shark
and carp brain to swim circles around others to succeed in creating a flow that overwhelms you with
abundance everywhere: of money, love, friends, success, and, of course, money! By the way, here's our
address to send us money at Brain Technologies Corporation."
I read this book through in one session (about 2 hours) since there was little material that was
new to me and because the hyper-onceover the book gives the subjects encourages that kind of express
train mentality.
Read this book if you are a carp or a shark and have fallen so far behind in your field that you
cannot catch up in one simple lifetime. It will at least give you an explanation of why. Or at best plot a
blueprint for a springboard to a revolutionary way of thinking/being that will make your former
shark/carp/pseudo-enlightened-carp thinking irrelevant to your future self.
Dolphins: save your money and skim it at amazon.com or a library.
And for my Good Readers, heres the new reviews and articles for this month. The ARJ2 ones are new additions to the top of A Readers Journal, Volume 2, Chronological List, and the ART ones to A Readers Treasury. NOTE: these Blurbs are condensations of the Full Reviews sans footnotes and many quoted passages.
1.) ARJ2:
Guidance in Esoteric Training, GA#245 by Rudolf Steiner
This book marks the 195th book by Rudolf Steiner that I have read and reviewed. My goal is to read,
study, and report on my study in all of the books by him available in English translation. How I first
began reading Rudolf Steiner's works is written up in several places such as Rudolf Steiner Comes Into
my Life by Friedrich Rittlemeyer. It was a process that began with small books of his lectures which I
found on the bottom shelf of Golden Leaves Bookstore operated by Donna France in Metairie,
Louisiana in 1977. I was seeking books on metaphysics and she had the widest collections of books I
knew about. Each time someone did a course on some author, Donna would buy extra books for the
course, and put the leftover ones up for sale in her book store. Over the next 10 years, I had bought
about 10 books and read one or two and wrote short reviews of them, but I still didn't know why I
kept buying these books by an obscure Austrian mystic and philosopher. When the Internet became
operational about 1995, what seems like a century ago, the first question I asked was, "Who is Rudolf
Steiner?" and the second question was, "What books of his should I read first?" Soon I was reading his
basic books and the more I learned about these basics of Occult Science, Theosophy, and the
Philosophy of Freedom, the more I realized that he was revealing the key information I was seeking
to help me understand the two big enigmas of life.
What enigmas? Someone, perhaps it was I, once wrote that "life is like a puzzle with an enigma on
both ends." Those are the two enigmas I sought answers to: what happens before life and what happens
after life, meaning life in a body on Earth. With those answers came an avalanche of information about
how the human being and the cosmos in which we find ourselves developed together, and how what we
do in our lifetime can have dramatic effects on the future generations of this world. This understanding
came to me long before I read this next passage in the Foreword to the Second Edition of this book by
Virginia Sease.
[page 1, Foreword] Since the year 1972 when this book was first available in
English, the demand for esoteric training has increased to an overwhelming
degree. Just at the time of the first printing, a whole generation of younger
people world-wide had begun to experience that the mechanistic, utilitarian,
materialistic attitude and relationship to life no longer could provide a basis for
their own entrance into twentieth-century civilization. They began to search in a
far more intensive sometimes even frantic way for means towards
self-discovery than had been the case for their parents or grandparents, who
were absorbed and burdened through war and the immense technological
challenges which accompany war and its aftermath. Now, in retrospect, at the
end of the century it is apparent that the last third of this century bears witness
to countless human beings who know with inner certainty that their own
development in the skills of modern life, in social relationships and in spiritual
dimensions is not limited in effect to them only but simultaneously affects the
earth, the universe and humanity in general. Thus they have become earnest
seekers imbued with the will to find various means for self-development.
My reading of subsidiary or derivative works of Rudolf Steiner I have limited to those authors who
wrote about his life such as Rittelmeyer (above) and those who have expanded on some particular
aspect of his works, such as Edward Reaugh Smith in his Burning Bush etal series of books. With a few
exceptions I have stayed away from those writers trying to popularize Steiner, because their broad
brush and interpretive approach would distract me from my focus on what Steiner wrote directly. Each
book I read of Steiner's introduces me to new and mind-boggling concepts this remains true after
195 books!
Naturally there are repetitions of themes from time to time in Steiner's lectures, but each I
re-read a familiar theme, it is a new me reading it, and Steiner handles the material from a new
perspective to fit the particular audience in the lecture hall. Rudolf Steiner explains about how he
creates the various points of view.
[page 2, 3, Foreword, from Munich, August, 1913] "I try to present spiritual
facts again and again from fresh points of view, in spite of my having described
them fro other points of view in other works. Such accounts are complementary
to each other, like photographs of a person or an event taken from various
points. In every such description, made from a certain standpoint, there is an
opportunity for communicating knowledge which is not attainable from the other
points of view."
The topic of Occult Science had nothing to do with Black Magic, but was a way of understanding
the spiritual underpinnings of the physical world, especially the two enigmas of life before birth and after
death. Theosophy was not a religion but rather a way of understanding all religions (Page 7), and thus a
true theosophy is a spiritual science itself, which is why Steiner abandoned the term theosophy early in
his teaching, changing it to the more descriptive term, anthroposophy, which breaks down into
anthropos the full human being of body, soul, and spirit -- and sophy a knowledge of. In the first
lecture of this book, he likens theosophy to mathematics.
[page 7] A man can understand mathematics through his own spiritual faculties
and comprehend the laws of space without having to refer to any such early
text. But if he has really absorbed the truths of geometry, he will value all the
more highly the original texts through which these laws were first presented. So
it is with theosophy. Its sources are not in ancient documents, nor do they rest
upon tradition; they lie in the reality of the spiritual worlds. It is there that they
must be found and grasped by the development of man's own spiritual powers,
just as he grasps mathematics by endeavoring to develop the faculties of his
intellect.
Just as we require organs to perceive the physical world, so do we require organs to perceive the
spiritual world. The difference is our sensory organs were operated on by the forces of Sun and sound
and thus came fully developed and ready to use during this epoch in human evolution, whereas our
spiritual organs are in a quiescent condition and must be exercised to bring them into operation.
[page 7, 8] Our intellect, by means of which we are enabled to comprehend the
laws of the world of sense, is supported by an organ, the brain. Similarly, in
order to grasp the laws of spiritual worlds, we need appropriate organs.
How have our physical organs developed? Because forces from outside
have worked upon them: the forces of the sun, the forces of sound. Thus did
eyes and ears come into being out of neutral, sluggish organs into which, at
first, the sense-world could not penetrate, and which opened only by degrees. If
our spiritual organs are worked upon by the right forces, they too will open.
In ancient times, we possessed spiritual sight. One can confirm this by reading the earliest writings
of humankind, in which reports of gods, spirits, and elemental beings of many kinds were described.
These writings, such as Beowulf, Gilgamesh, the Iliad and Odyssey, were written versions of oral
traditions going back centuries before writing. Likely the oral tradition was made possible by spiritual
viewing of the events of these epics and did not require a written document nor rote memorization as
scholars suppose today. Instead, with the loss of spiritual sight, writing was necessitated! Writing
replaced the direct perception, which explains these amazing statements about the invention of writing
by Plato who lived in the early centuries after its invention.
For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to
use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing,
produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will
discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an
elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the
appearance of truth, not truth, for they will read many things without instruction
and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part
ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear
wise.
One cannot read these immortal words of Plato without being reminded of the politicians and news
anchors on television who are reading from their teleprompters and giving the appearance of being
wise.
What happened to our spiritual sight? It had to be sacrificed in order for our "I" to be awakened.
As our human body gradually gained solidity, the spiritual sight became replaced by sensory
perceptions of the physical light reflected from the surface of objects. Man's ability for spiritual sight
was gradually relegated to his night consciousness as his day consciousness and physical sight took
over.
[page 8, 9] But the forces working upon him were no longer plastic, weaving
forces akin to the nature of his own being; they were forces that fed upon him,
destroyed him, in order to awaken the 'I'-consciousness. Only in the night,
when he sank down into the rhythmic spiritual world homogeneous with him, did
he acquire new strength and become able once more to feed forces into his
physical and etheric bodies. Out of this conflict of impressions, out of the
deadening of the astral organs formerly working unconsciously in man, the life
of the individual 'I', the 'I' -consciousness, arose. Out of life death, out of
death life. The ring of the serpent was complete. And now from the wakened
'I' -consciousness there had to arise forces that would kindle life again in the
defunct vestiges of earlier astral organs, shaping and moulding them.
To modern humans, who are accustomed to instant solutions to everything, the thought surely
arises, "Why did we have to wait so long for our spiritual sight to arise once more?" The answer is
similar to what Plato said, "We would not have freedom, but would only appear to have freedom."
There is no shortcut on the road to freedom. An education in freedom requires the development of the
Will, whose initiation must come freely from within the individual; it cannot be imposed from without.
[page 9] The great Initiates could have made the task easier, for themselves
and for man, if they had worked upon his astral body during the night, when it is
free, in such a way as to impress the astral organs into it from outside. But such
an act would have operated in man's dream-consciousness; it would have
trespassed on his sphere of freedom. The highest principle in man, the will,
would never have unfolded.
But on one day, a salient day in the history of the Earth, rightly understood, one great Spirit united
in the body of a man shed His life's blood into Earth which thenceforth took on a golden glow as seen
from outer space. What He did was to bring the Initiation Mysteries into the light of day and make them
available to every human being as His legacy. John 12, 14: "the Word became flesh and dwelt among
us, full of grace and truth" and "to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to
become children of God".
[page 10] Then initiation came forth from the darkness enshrouding the
Mysteries into the clearest light of day. In a great and mighty Personality, the
Bearer of the highest unifying Principle, of the Word-of Him who is the
expression and manifestation of the hidden Father, and who taking on human
form became the Son of Man and thereby the Representative of all Mankind,
the bond uniting all 'I' s in Christos, the Life-Spirit, the Eternal Unifier, the
initiation of mankind as a whole was accomplished as historical fact and at the
same time as symbol, on the plane of feeling. So potent was this Event that in
every individual who modeled his life on it its power could continue to work
right into the physical, expressing itself even in the appearance of the stigmata
and in the most piercing pains. Feelings were shaken to their innermost depths.
An intensity of emotion, the like of which has never surged through the world
before or since, arose in mighty waves. In the initiation on the Cross of Divine
Love, the sacrifice of the 'I' for All had taken place. The blood, the physical
expression of the 'I', had flowed in love for mankind, and the effect was such
that thousands pressed forward to this initiation, to this Death, letting their
blood flow in love and devotion for mankind. That blood untold was poured out
in this way has never been sufficiently emphasized; the thought no longer
enters the consciousness of people, not even in theosophical circles. Yet the
waves of ardor which in this streaming blood flowed down, and then ascended,
have fulfilled their task. They have become the wellsprings of powerful
impulses. They have made mankind ripe for the initiation of the will.
And this is the legacy of Christ.
This the legacy we have received from what Steiner calls the Mystery of Golgotha, the Deed which
we commonly refer to as the death of Christ Jesus on the Cross.
The remainder of this book consists of General Requirements, Exercises, Mantras, and
Explanations for students developing their organs of spiritual sight, most of these were given around the
period of 1905 to 1907.
Steiner gives six goals which every aspirant for occult development strives to achieve. Each of
these activities should be focused on for a complete month before proceeding to the next activity.
1. Cultivation of absolutely clear thinking. [page 13]
During a period of 5 minutes a day, one must become the ruler of one's own thought independent
of one's outer circumstances, occupation, social network, and various circadian activities. One must
empty all these thoughts and focus on one single thought at the center of one's soul.
2. Begin a New Daily Action [page 14]
Pick some activity that in the ordinary course of life you have not performed. Then make it a duty
to perform this action every day. As time goes on, add other activities.
3. Development of equanimity towards fluctuations of Joy and Sorrow. [page 15]
Replace height of jubilation and depths of despair by an equable mood. "Care is taken that no
pleasure shall carry us away, no sorrow plunge us into the depths, no experience lead to immoderate
anger or vexation, no expectation give rise to anxiety or fear, no situation disconcert us, and so on. . . .
Once every day, at least, this inner tranquillity should be called up before the soul and then the exercise
of pouring it out from the heart should proceed."
4. Positive Attitude which Always Looks for the Best in Everything [page 16]
"It consists in seeking always for the good, the praiseworthy, the beautiful and the like, in all
beings, all experiences, all things. This quality is best characterized by a Persian legend concerning
Christ Jesus. One day, as He was walking with His disciples, they saw a dead dog lying by the
roadside in a state of decomposition. All the disciples turned away from the disgusting sight; Christ
Jesus alone did not move but looked thoughtfully at the corpse and said, "What beautiful teeth the
animal has!"
5. Confronting all Experiences with Complete Open-Mindedness [page 17]
To accomplish this, one must be willing to drop all the in-grained maps in one's mind, and be wiling
for each new experience to operate completely out of those maps. One avoids ever saying such things
as, "I knew that" or "I know how that will be" or "Isn't that always the case." These are merely
examples of the pervasive way one can encounter reality out of one's own expectations and
suppositions about the way the world is. "At every moment [the esoteric student] must be ready to
encounter and accept absolutely new experiences." And this is regardless of what he deems as natural
law or what is possible. One must become ready for anything to happen.
6. Repeat All Five Activities Systematically and in Regular Alternation [page 18]
"In the sixth month, endeavors should be made to repeat all the five exercises again, systematically
and in regular alternation. In this way a beautiful equilibrium of soul will gradually develop. It will be
noticed, especially, that previous dissatisfactions with certain phenomena and beings in the world
completely disappear. A mood reconciling all experiences takes possession of the soul, a mood that is
by no means one of indifference but, on the contrary, enables one for the first time to work in the world
for its genuine progress and improvement. One comes to a tranquil understanding of things that were
formerly quite closed to the soul."
Through the attention one gives to these exercises, one becomes an agent for good, which means
advancing the evolution of humanity. The alternative is to continue with everyday morality, doing good
in order that others will think of one as good, which is a path easily filled with evil, and evil hinders the
evolution of humanity towards the good.
[page 19] . . . two things must be stressed. First, the six exercises described
paralyze the harmful influence other occult exercises can have, so that only
what is beneficial remains. Secondly, these exercises alone ensure that efforts
in meditation and concentration will have a positive result. The esotericist must
not rest content with fulfilling, however conscientiously, the demands of
conventional morality, for that kind of morality can be extremely egotistical, if
a man says: I will be good in order that I may be thought good. The esotericist
does not do what is good because he wants to be thought good, but because
little by little he recognizes that the good alone brings evolution forward, and
that evil, stupidity and ugliness place hindrances along its path.
In an Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP) Conference at Berkeley about 1979, I sat
next to a young woman who began talking about words and how if you reversed a word, you found a
word with its opposite meaning. It was she who first brought to my attention that EVIL is LIVE written
backwards. One can see in the above paragraph that EVIL hinders Evolution, while to LIVE according
to the six exercises above brings Evolution forward. Thinking on these matters, I wrote the following
poem, "No I Tu Love."
No I Tu Love
What would life be like
If we had no I tu love?
Could we live if we had no evil?
If we had no I tu love?
Madam, I'm Adam is a palindrome,
Which reads and means the same
From back to front to back.
What shall we call a word, a phrase
Which reveals its outer meaning
Front to Back
And reveals its inner meaning
Back to Front?
"Take evolution . . . Please," Henny Youngman might have said,
If he wished to monkey with the human race
As Charlie Darwin did.
"Please pass me a banana" no monkey has ever spoken that line,
Having no concept of I, or me, or Thou.
No how.
What Charlie did was turn the idea of humanity
into a game of chance, naturally,
with selection happenstance,
Treating I am God
As antiquated Dogma, I think,
Reminding us what would life be like
If we had no I tu love.
Steiner adds three additional rules to the general requirements for one on the esoteric path. These
rules are laid down to allow one to avoid the confusion which might otherwise lead one into calamity as
one advances on the path. The first rule is: "No idea which has not first been examined shall be
allowed to enter my consciousness." This examination should lead to an independence and strength
of soul which will reveal itself as follows:
[page 21] The strength of one's own soul will then shed light upon all one's
thoughts and conduct; one's consciousness will grow correspondingly broader
and one will be able, above all, to form the habit of allowing the spiritual laws
which reveal themselves in the soul to express themselves, thus emancipating
oneself from a blind obedience to the surrounding world.
The second rules states: "My soul should be vividly aware of the obligation to increase
constantly the sum of my concepts and ideas." One should constantly increase one's conceptual life
and expand one's expectations or one might encounter higher experiences on the esoteric path without
realizing it.
[page 22] Nothing is worse for the esoteric pupil than staying fixed with a
certain number of concepts and trying to understand everything by means of
them. It is infinitely important to be constantly appropriating one new idea after
another. If this should not happen, the pupil would be ill-prepared to meet any
sense-free perceptions he might develop, and would be overpowered by them
either to his disadvantage or at least to his dissatisfaction. To his
dissatisfaction, because under, such circumstances he could well be having
higher experiences already without even noticing it. There are many pupils for
whom this is the case, who do not recognize higher experiences because of
incorrect expectations due to a paucity of concepts. Many people are not in the
least indolent in their outward lives, but are nevertheless quite reluctant to
enrich their conceptual life with new ways of understanding.
The third rule states: I will only gain knowledge about those things to which I am not attached
in sympathy or antipathy. Here the importance of developing equanimity in all things, so that one does
not zoom from the depths of despair to the heights of exultant from one moment to the next, but
maintains a steady demeanor whether things are going good or bad. One must remove all wishes or
have these inner wishes lead to self-deception.
[page 2, 23] An old initiate repeatedly drove home this point to his pupils by
saying: 'You will only learn something about the soul's immortality when you
are as equable about the possibility of its annihilation after death as about the
possibility of eternal life. As long as you wish to live eternally you can learn
nothing about life after death.' It is the same with all truths. As long as the
human being still harbors the slightest wish that things might be one way or
another, the pure bright light of truth will not shine for him. Whoever, for
example, retains even the most hidden wish that his good qualities might
outweigh his bad will not be able to achieve real self-knowledge, for this wish
will pull the wool over his inner eyes and deceive him.
The fourth rule is easier to state than to achieve: I am obliged to overcome my reservations
towards what seems 'abstract'. If one discounts abstract ideas, saying they are not real, one will have
great difficulty developing sense-free concepts. The perfect triangle cannot exist as a chalk marking on
a blackboard, but only in the mind of the person making or viewing the triangle. Our centuries of
experience of finding an abstract mathematical concept which later proves to be useful in the sensory
world has happened many times and should prove to us the reality of abstract ideas. At the same time,
one can only understand truth in the higher worlds if one frees oneself from the sensory-based concepts
so prevalent in our time.
[page 23] As long as an esoteric pupil clings on to ideas whose substance is
derived from the sense-world, he cannot attain to any truth about higher worlds.
He must strive to develop sense-free concepts. This is the hardest rule of all
four, particularly in the circumstances of our day and age. Materialistic
thinking has to a large extent deprived human beings of the capacity to think in
sense-free concepts. One must do one of two things: either strive to think
concepts that are never perfectly, but only approximately, present in sensory
reality for example, the concept of a circle. A perfect circle can be nowhere
found, but only conceived of; such a conceived circle is the underlying law out
of which all circular formations arise. Alternatively, one can think of a high
moral ideal; this also cannot be wholly realized by any human being, but it is
nevertheless the foundation or law underlying many human deeds. No one can
make any progress in their esoteric development if they do not recognize the
fundamental importance for life of such so-called abstractions, and enrich their
soul with the relevant concepts.
In the lecture "Main Exercise" the pupil is required to abstain from breathing while immersing
oneself in one of the following images, in successive exercises: IT THINKS, SHE FEELS, and HE
WILLS. The reasons for these exercises are tied up with the evolution of the Cosmos which proceeded
from Old Saturn, to Old Sun, to Old Moon conditions during which the human being evolved in parallel
with the Cosmos. Thus each condition led the human being through another stage of transformation until
we arrived at the current Earth stage of evolution, during which these three earlier conditions returned at
a higher level.
[page 42] Thus the Saturn, Sun and Moon conditions were recapitulated during
the Earth-evolution, and in such a way that the Saturn repetition corresponds to
the creative work of the 'He wills' on the outer sheath of the human being. The
Sun recapitulation corresponds to the creative work of the 'She feels' on the
arms and hands, and the Moon recapitulation to the creative work of the 'It
thinks' on the organs of speech. The idea of the human body as a mere product
of the sense-world is abandoned, and the esotericist finds his way to vision of
those higher worlds whence come the forces that work creatively upon man. So,
too, the bare concepts which have been acquired of such matters as Saturn, Sun
and Moon become actual perceptions and experiences. And so indeed it must
be if the way is to be found more and more from the exoteric to the esoteric.
How are these three images related to the higher world?
[page 42 IT THINKS ] 'It' is the Word of Power for the Cosmic Thinking, that
is, for those Beings in the higher world to whom creative thinking belongs in
just the same measure as sense-perception belongs to the human beings below
them.
[page 42, 43 SHE FEELS ] 'She' is the Word of Power for the Cosmic Soul
which originates the Feeling that streams out from it, whereas human feeling
streams in, being stimulated from outside. This Feeling of the World Soul is the
Creative Cosmic Love, which brings all things into existence.
[page 43 HE WILLS ] 'He' is the Word of Power for the Cosmic Will, the
Cosmic Spirit whose will acts from out of Himself, whereas the human will is
brought into action through the outer world. This 'He' is the creative,
archetypal Power of the World.
If we go back to the Great Epoch (Fourth Root Race) preceding the our current Atlantean Epoch
(Fifth Root Race), we are in the Lemurian Epoch during which human beings were prepared to enter
their first physical incarnation as hard Man or Adam-Man. The preparation was performed etheric
streams which first closed Man off from his environment by a boundary layer we call skin, then Man
began to stand upright, along with the upright posture came operational breathing apparatuses we call
lungs and their associated larynx which together made speech possible, and finally Man primitive feeling
of self was replaced by a clear consciousness of self, an I am.
[page 95, 96] At that time an important event took place in the process of
human evolution man developed a skin and thereby shut himself off from the
rest of the world as an independent being. Until then he had not been separate
from his environment; the streaming currents of the whole world penetrated
into him. Now he shut himself off behind his skin. The process of separation
from the environment was brought about by a particular ether-stream.
After a certain time there was a further significant event. Man assumed
the upright posture, thereby giving a definite direction to his whole striving and
development. Before that time the position of his body was like that of the
animal today. Only now could he develop his forelimbs into arms and hands as
they now are, i.e. fit for work in the real sense. Only now did he begin to work
as an independent being; only now was it possible for him to develop individual
karma. No animal can do this. Only a being who walks and stands upright
creates individual karma. A second, definite ether-stream brought about this
transformation.
A third ether-stream resulted in a third important transformation. Only
when man had assumed an upright posture could lungs develop in the form to
be found only in man, and in connection with them the larynx formed itself out
of delicate etheric substances. The gradual development of human speech was
now possible.
Through a fourth ether-stream the organ lying between the eyebrows at
the root of the nose was formed, and thereby man awoke for the first time to
self-consciousness to consciousness of self. Before then he had only a
feeling of self.
Everyone has seen Leonardo da Vinci great drawing of Man with his arms and legs spread out.
What few understand is the spiritual realities which underlie this drawing. Consider the drawing's arms
spread horizontally and the legs spread out. If you draw a line from the tip of the head to the Man's
right foot, then a line to the left hand, then to the right hand, then to the left foot and finally back to the
tip of the head, you will have drawn a pentacle or five-pointed star, also called a pentagram. There is a
stream of ether which flows into the human body taking this exact path.
[page 97] Streams of ether are always circulating out of the cosmos through the
human body. One such stream enters through the head, passes from there into
the right foot, then into the left hand, then into the right hand, then into the left
foot, and from there back to the head. If we think of a man standing in the
position just described, with outstretched arms, then the streaming has the form
of a pentagram.
These streams of ether must come into the body from the head. If one were to take the pentagram
and invert, one will see a drawing which one finds often associated with Black Magic, often seen drawn
upon the head of man with goat-like horns and features. The inverted pentagram goes from the chin to
the each horn and ear in succession. This association of the inverted pentagram with evil reveals the
negative effects that would enter Man if the etheric forces entered from his feet.
[page 97] It would be bad for man if the stream did not enter into him through
the head but through the feet. All evil influences enter the human body through
the feet. The black magicians make use of this.
This may sound far-fetched and one might wonder how this could be proven to be true, but I
encountered exactly such a case of evil spirits entering and leaving through a man's foot. A long time
friend of the family, call him Hank, was on his death bed when a priest was called to administer Last
Rites, the Sacrament of Christian Healing as it is called today. Some background on Hank: after his
wife of many years died, he continued to live in the small family home and met a gal at a nearby bar
who moved in with him. Soon she invited her boy friend to join her in the house and relatives received
reports that they were stealing from Hank and even beating him up.
Eventually the relatives moved
Hank to a nursing home in a nearby state where he never really seemed to get better. He was abusive
to everyone around him, never had a nice word to say, and was a mere shadow of the loving father and
friend he used to be when his wife had been alive. Hank utterly refused to have the Last Rites
performed on him, but his daughter insisted that the priest perform them and attendants were called in
to hold Hank down. He screamed as the Rites were performed and after the Holy Sacrament was
over, he quieted down and went to sleep. From reports of the violent scene, it sounded to me like an
exorcism, and that impression might have remained a hunch, but for what happened the next morning
after the Rites. His daughter had been changing his garments and bed linen for several weeks, and when
she came to do so the next morning, she noticed a prominent burnt spot on the sole of he left foot which
she was positive was not there the previous morning! She was also convinced that an evil spirit that
possessed her father had left during the Rites the night before. Even this physical evidence could be
called into question by skeptics, but for the dramatic changes in Hank's personality which appeared
immediately the next morning and lasted until his death a couple of weeks later.
Hank was polite and caring to everyone who came to see him, often talking for a long time about
favorite times he had with visitors. He got to spend the last few weeks of his life reminiscing with his
friends and relatives, all thanks to the insistence of his daughter that the Last Rites be administered. No
one could doubt that Hank had been possessed by evil spirits and that these had left during the sacred
ceremony performed by the Catholic priest on that fateful night.
Hanks experiences certainly confirmed for me that evil spirits enter and leave from the feet of the
human being as Steiner indicates above. We are woven out of spirit and if we deny that as a reality, we
will be confronted with proof to the contrary at some time in our lives.
[page 97, 98] These streams circulate all the time in man and bring him into
connection with the entire cosmos.
The being of man is woven out of the spirit, we are born from out of the
spirit, we have descended into matter, and flow back again to the spirit. The
streams which were active in us during our descent into matter should now
become conscious to us. We go back along the same path by which we have
come, but consciously. There is no other true evolution. What we now kindle in
ourselves through these exercises will be developed by humanity at large only
in the Sixth Root Race. In spiritual science, a Root Race is called a Day of
Creation. We are at the point where the Sixth Day of Creation is being
prepared; we are in the dawn of the Sixth Day of Creation. The descent from
the spirit, the life in matter and the return to the spirit are presented in three
letters:
AUM . . .
The next lecture gives us six subsidiary exercises, some of which we have encountered before:
1. Control of one's thoughts
2. Initiative in one's actions.
3. Mastering joy and sorrow.
4. Positivity.
5. Lack of prejudice.
6. Equilibrium.
Let's look in detail at No. 5 and what lack of prejudice might mean.
[page 103] 5. Lack of prejudice. We should remain flexible, always capable of
taking in new information. If someone relates something to us which we think
sounds improbable, we must nevertheless always keep a tiny corner of our
heart open, in which we say: 'He could be right after all.' This does not need to
make us completely uncritical, for we can always examine and test such
statements. When we practice this, a feeling comes over us as if something was
streaming into us from outside. We draw this in through the eyes, ears and the
whole skin.
Are you really ready to say to someone, "I do believe you are right." even in the face of what you
believe to be evidence to the contrary? Few people would and yet this is exactly one of the things
Steiner is asking us to practice in these exercises. There is a wonderful Sufi story which illustrates this
deep spiritual reality. The story relates how Nasruddin was made judge for a day. He sat in his
prestigious robes and looked down on the courtroom as an accused man brought before him to be
judged. The Prosecutor told the court of the many crimes that the defendant was accused of
committing. As soon as he was finished his pleading for a conviction, Nasruddin looked at the
Prosecutor and said earnestly, "I do believe you are right!" The Bailiff quickly came over and whispered
into Nasruddin's ear, "Your Honor, the Defense had not been heard from." So Nasruddin called for the
Defense Attorney to come forward. The Defense plead his case for his client's innocence. He explained
what an exemplary life his client had lived, how he was somewhere else at the time of the crime, and
possessed an air-tight alibi. When he finished presenting the case for his client's innocence, Nasruddin
looked at the Defense Attorney and said, "I do believe you are right!" The Bailiff rushed over to
whisper in Nasruddin's ear, "But Judge, they can't both be right!" Nasruddin looked at the Bailiff and
said, "I do believe you are right!" Can you bring yourself to this level of lack of prejudice?
There is another important exercise that everyone can avail themselves of, whether on an esoteric
path of training or not, and that is the Rückschau, Back-Look of the day's activities each night before
going to sleep. This exercise is similar to the process one goes through upon entering the life between
death and a new birth called Kamaloca during which all the events of one's lifetime on Earth just ended
are reviewed in backward order.
[page 105] The evening review of the day is also important. It must be
undertaken backwards, from the end of the day to the beginning, since we
ought to accustom ourselves to the mode of perception of the astral plane.
During this review one should visualize everything as vividly as possible. To
begin with, of course, if one has 80 important experiences to review, one cannot
visualize each one of them vividly. One must then choose a considered
selection, until the whole day unfurls before one like a tableau. Once again, it is
the little insignificant occurrences which matter, for what awakens the powers
of the soul is the effort which one makes.
There can be no EVIL without the letter I in it, and there can be no evil in the world unless
performed by someone with an I an animal has no "I" and as such is incapable of evil. This analysis
leads me to think that perhaps why so many people love animals is because they are assured of the time
they spend with animals will be free from evil, but cannot be sure of the same amount time spent with
human beings. In the one prayer which Christ Jesus gave to us, the last line refers to our "I" thus: "And
deliver us from evil." The Our Father proceeds through the various bodies of the human being from the
physical (daily bread), to etheric (trespasses), to astral (temptation), to I (evil). Without evil, we have
harmony in the world, but let the I get involved and the possibility for dIsharmony (sic) appears
there's the I, the Ego again, and the possibility for evil.
[page 110] Whoever has supersensible hearing hears the universe resounding
in a mighty harmony; when he compares this with the tones reaching him from
individual human beings, he hears a discord greater in some cases, less in
others, but still a discord. It is your task to resolve and dissolve this discord
into harmony through your continued evolution. This discord has arisen through
the 'I'; yet it came about through the wisdom of the spiritual powers which rule
and guide the universe. If human beings had remained in harmony, they would
never have come to independence. Discord was introduced so that the human
being could freely regain harmony out of his own strength. For this reason it
was necessary that the 'I' -feeling, conscious of itself, should develop at the
cost of inner harmony.
How does this inner disharmony show itself in our time? In increasing fear and anxiety. One need
only turn on any news channel to bombarded with the latest disharmony inducing news items. For every
harmony-inducing item, about 37 disharmony-inducing items will be broadcast over the airwaves and
cyberspace. Our development of our "I" will culminate when we reach the Jupiter condition of
consciousness. This will allow humans for the first time to be an independent "I" and remain in harmony
with the universe. (Page 111)
What is evil? Steiner said on several occasions that "evil is a good out of its time". Can you think of
an example of a "good out of its time"? Forcing a plant to flower prematurely in a greenhouse is one.
What is the evil which attends such an endeavor?
[page 111] A flower which should bloom in August can be 'forced' in a hothouse
so that it flowers already in May. In August, the time of its proper flowering, no
further blossom can unfold; its strength is exhausted and it can no longer find
its right place within the conditions to which it belongs. In May, also, it will die
the moment it is taken out of the hothouse, since it does not belong in the
context of that season.
Okay, how does that apply to human beings like us, you ask. Consider what happens inside us
when we experience anxiety. Steiner stately clearly that anxiety is optional today, but the way of
overcoming will only come in the future. "It is the same with feelings of anxiety. They have no place
today, and will have one still less in the future." So what exactly is anxiety?
[page 111] What occurs when we feel anxious? The blood is driven back into
the center of the human being, into the heart, in order to form a firm central
point and make the human being strong in opposition to the outer world. It is
the inmost power of the 'I' which does this. This power of the 'I', which affects
the blood, must become ever stronger and more conscious; on Jupiter the
human being will then be able to direct the blood to his central point quite
consciously, so as to make himself strong. What is harmful and unnatural
today, however, is the feeling of fear which is connected with this flow of the
blood.
With the advent of the science of doyletics, removing anxiety and fear is a simple trace away. A
one-minute Speed Trace can quickly remove the throbbing doylic memory which when it arises, we call
it fear! Or the vague antsy feeling we call anxiety. A doylic memory trace is a quick and easy way to
"set your inner strength against this outer world that presses upon you." Similarly one can remove
anxiety "which is especially necessary for anyone who proceeds with an esoteric training." (Page 111,
112) What if one thinks, "I am not interested in esoteric training, so why bother to remove my anxiety
and fears?" Is that a valid objection? Perhaps for this lifetime, but eventually each of us will face the
onset of Jupiter-consciousness and its powerful accouterments.
[page 112] What would happen if the human being should still have feelings of
fear and anxiety at the onset of Jupiter-consciousness? The outer world at that
stage will be far, far more antagonistic and terrible for the human being than is
so today. Anyone who does not rid himself here of the habit of anxiety will there
fall into one dreadful terror after another.
If one learns to cope with terror and anxiety in this lifetime, one will be well-prepared for Jupiter-consciousness. We are currently in the reign of the Archangel Michael which will be succeeded by the
reign of Archangel Oriphiel around 2229 A. D. This next age will bring horrific challenges to humans
who have not already prepared themselves to cope with terror and anxiety. Ask yourself if you can
imagine the cybernetic machines we are already building today arising in the future to oppose the
evolution of humankind. Artificial Intelligence will never replace nor achieve human intelligence, but it
will sure give it a yeoman try. What is a robot or an android, but a computerized machine which tries
to assume life and then oppose its creator as Dr. Frankenstein's monster did in Mary Shelley's
prophetic horror story.
[page 112, italics added] This condition is already now preparing itself in the
outer world. That will show itself still clearer to the human being during the
terrible epoch which will come upon us during Oriphiel's rulership, which I
spoke to you about last time. When that time comes the human being will need
to have learnt to stand firm! Our contemporary culture is itself creating those
horrifying monsters which will threaten the human being on Jupiter. You need
only look at the huge machines which human technology is today constructing
so ingeniously. The human being is creating demons for himself which in the
future will rage against him. Everything that he builds today in the way of
technical appliances and machines will assume life in the future and oppose
him in terrible enmity. Everything that is created for mere utility, to satisfy
individual or collective egoism, will be the human being's enemy in the future.
We are today far too concerned with gaining useful advantage from what we do.
If we really wish to help advance evolution, we should not be concerned with the
usefulness of something but with whether it is beautiful and noble.
What can we begin to do about this situation today? Place our children in schools, such as Waldorf
Schools, in which children are exposed to beauty and artworks and create such works to surround
themselves with. Too long we have experimented with mechanical and material utility in our schools.
One can read the inspiration for Waldorf Schools fermenting in Steiner's mind a full decade before the
idea came to fruition at the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Factory in Stuttgart, Germany.
[page 113] Our actions should not be guided only by utility but by our pure
delight in what is beautiful. Everything created by the human being to satisfy
his artistic needs, in pure love of beauty, will also assume life in the future and
contribute to his higher evolution. It is terrible to see today how many
thousands of human beings are forced, from earliest childhood on, to engage
only in activities founded upon material utility; they are cut off all their lives
from everything that is beautiful and artistic. In the poorest primary school
there should hang the finest works of art; that would be an endless blessing for
human evolution. The human being is today building his future. One can gain an
idea of how things will be on Jupiter if one is clear that today there is no
absolute good or absolute evil. In every human being is mixed both good and
bad. Whoever is good must recognize that he only has a little more good than
bad in himself and is certainly not wholly good. But on Jupiter, good and bad
will no longer be combined. Human beings will divide into those who are wholly
good and those who are wholly bad. Everything beautiful and noble that we
cultivate today leads to a strengthening of the good on Jupiter; everything that
occurs as a result of egoism and utility leads to a strengthening of the bad.
Clearly we will have more complicated computerized machinery, including robots and androids in
coming decades and centuries, so what we can do about them? Take the Luddite approach and
destroy them with sledgehammers and computer hackers? Or find a way to create beauty and morality
with them? The time is now the choice is ours. We can not help but choosing by commission or
omission the mission is ours.
[page 115] Everything that serves only to advance the principle of utility will
one day come into its own as such awful powers. This process can be paralyzed
if we transform instruments of utility into those which, besides their usefulness,
above all also communicate beauty and godliness. It is very good for us to know
this. Otherwise such powers would one day tear the earth asunder. We can also
see how enormously important it is in education to surround the child with
artistic creations and impressions. Art frees one. Even the locomotive must one
day be transformed into a beautiful machine. Our feelings of fear and anxiety
nourish other evil beings. We must not allow ourselves to fall prey to such
thoughts. On Jupiter such beings will surround us in far greater numbers than
they do now. But there is no need for anyone to be alarmed who maintains a
clear aura, so that no flies can swarm around the dirt.
In an essay written in 1903, Rudolf Steiner offers his exegesis of the opening sentences of Light on
the Path by Mabel Collins, a Theosophist. Here are the sentences:
[page 131]
Before the eyes can see they must be incapable of tears.
Before the ear can hear it must have lost its sensitiveness.
Before the voice can speak in the presence of the Masters,
it must have lost the power to wound.
Before the soul can stand in the presence of the Masters,
its feet must be washed in the blood of the heart.
These words were not written for those who are steeped in "scientific truth." What is scientific
truth? It is being, i.e., what "has become" what already exists, what has being currently and as such
can be examined scientifically. Science makes maps of what exists, and these maps can represent all the
territory of what exists, but undaunted, scientists so believe in their maps that they call their maps
reality! This leap of faith by the very scientists who would scowl others' faith is glossed over and rarely
mentioned. But Steiner points out that there is something equally important as being and that is
becoming. Being is a finite truth which must be given life by a truth that is becoming.
[page 131] Every object in our surroundings is at once product (i.e. become,
manifested) and seed (unmanifested, becoming). And only when one thinks of
an object as both 'become' and 'becoming' does one realize that it is a member
of the one life, the life where time is not outside, but within it. Thus finite truth
is only something that has become; it must be called to life by a truth that is
becoming. The former one grasps, the latter one 'heeds'. All merely scientific
truth belongs to the former kind. Light on the Path has not been written for
those who seek only this kind of truth. It is written for those who seek the truth
which today is seed, in order tomorrow to be product, and who do not grasp the
'become' but heed the 'becoming'.
THE EYES: When one cries over a situation, it is always the situation of being. Turn one's focus
to becoming and notice how dramatically the situation can change. One begins to think of ways in
which one can help and the tears are pressed into service to water the seeds of change for the better.
[page 132] Anyone who still abhors the criminal in the customary sense, and
still idolizes the saint in that sense, has not rendered his eyes incapable of
tears. Consume all thy tears in the will to help. Do not weep over someone
stricken with poverty; get to know his situation and help him! Do not grumble
about what is bad; understand it and change it into good. Thy tears only dim the
pure clarity of the light.
THE EARS: Being sensitive means to allow our feelings to merge with and modify our perception
of sound. Steiner points out that more delicate sensations can only be perceived if our feelings do not
interfere with our hearing.
[page 133] Thy sensations are all the more delicate, the less sensitive thou art.
Sound becomes clear to the ear if its clarity is not disturbed by encountering
rapture or sympathetic feeling as it enters the ear. . . . Put it another way,
this means: let the heartbeats of the other resound in you, and do not disturb
them with the beating of your own heart. Open your ear and not your
nerve-endings. For these will tell you whether the tone is agreeable or not,
while your open ear will tell you the tone's true nature. When you go to
someone who is ill, let every fibre of his body speak to you, and deaden the
impression he makes on you. . . .
Bestow your words on dumb things so that they may speak through
you. For they are not a summons to your pleasure, these dumb things, but a
summons to your activity. It is not what they have become without you that is
there for you, but what they are to become through you.
THE VOICE: A phonograph needle rests in a groove laid down when the recording was made,
and the variations in that groove as the needle moves along re-creates the sound present when the
needle of the recording machine engraved the groove in the record. Our lower self is like the needle
of the recording machine in that it wishes to engrave itself upon the record of the world. But, as Steiner
says on page 133, "As long as it wants to do that, no Master will wish to hear its voice."
[page 134] As long as the sharp needles of the 'I will' project from man's words,
so long are his words the emissaries of his lower self. If these needles are
removed and the voice becomes soft and pliant, so that it lays itself round the
mysteries of all things as a veiling garment, then it weaves itself into
Spirit-raiment, and the Master's delicate tone takes it as vesture. With every
thought which in the true sense of the word a man dedicates to the inner truth of
things, he weaves a thread of the garment in which the Master who appears to
him may wrap himself.
THE FEET: Our feet must carry us to where there is work to be done, if we are to become an
emissary to the world, that is, "an organ through whom the depths of the world-riddle speaks". The
Master will not stand in our presence when we, in our lower self, are enjoying pleasant things, only
when our feet have taken us to where our work is to be done will the Master be present. (Page 134)
[page 134] He who remains in himself cannot find the Master; he who would
find him must let the strength of his soul his heart's blood flow into all he
does, into his active feet.
This book is full of guidance in esoteric training, but one would be ill-advised to expect that merely
doing the exercises suggested will be enough. This book is not like the Betty Crocker Cake Mix box
which proclaimed, "Be Creative!" and "Here's how to do it!" If one follows instructions, one can mix
the ingredients and bake, but one will have been compliant and not creative. One likewise cannot excel
in esoteric training by merely adding these exercises to their daily routine. One must strive to
incorporate every aspect of one's current life, one's being, into the becoming which will result as one
mixes the ingredients together and bakes over time.
[page 166, 167] It is possible so to regard the esoteric life that one looks on the
exercises which one receives as an adjunct to one's ordinary life. One would
find then, however, that the progress made was not very considerable. The aim
of the esoteric pupil should far rather consist in resolving to bring into
connection with his esoteric life all that meets him in everyday existence. In
this way he creates a center in himself from which he directs the whole conduct
of his life.
The words of the exercises only form the garment which we wear as an antenna, ever ready to
receive the beams from the spiritual world when our "thought is filled with the power of the Christ".
(Page 179)
Close the book now and let the blood of your heart wash the soles of your feet as they carry you
into the world where the needle of your lower self becomes dedicated only to reading being and not to
engraving becoming, where your ears will hear your voice with such sensitivity that your voice will flow
as a garment over those who hear it, warming their hearts and attracting the beams of the spiritual world
to them, where the tears in your eyes will dissolve and add brilliance to the rays which streams into
them. Let your current being serve as a launching pad into the becoming which is approaching you
even now.
Read the Full Review with its 9 Footnotes here:
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/guidance.htm
2.) ARJ2:
The Land of Painted Caves by Jean M. Auel
Six years after reading the fifth book in the Earth's Children Series, I had given up on hearing about
Jondalar and Ayla again. So, when I learned of a sixth novel, I quickly ordered the book before it was
released and began reading as soon as it arrived. Our two heroes were older now with a daughter,
Jonayla, who was just barely old enough to ride the smallest of their horses. The book opens with a
group approaching a friendly cave hanging above the plain, only to find their way blocked by a group of
Cave Lions. Ayla had the greatest respect for her totem animal whose claw marks on her leg were like
a badge of honor and an indelible reminder of the ferocious lion's attack on her as a child. What worried
Joharran, Jondalar's brother, most was that the lions were not worried by the approach of a group of
humans. The huge lions probably saw the humans as an afternoon snack. Which told Ayla that they had
not been around humans much or they would be concerned. She urged an attack to prevent the lions
from staying around, which might happen if they simply bypassed the lions. She prepared her spear
thrower.
[page 13] The cave lions became still and seemed tense as they watched the
approach of the strange herd that didn't behave like prey animals.
Then, suddenly, everything happened at once.
The big male lion roared, a staggering, deafening sound, especially from
such close range. He started toward them at a run. As he closed in, poised to
spring, Jondalar hurled his spear at him.
Ayla had been watching the female on his right. About the time that
Jondalar made his cast, the lioness bounded forward running, then vaulted to
pounce.
Ayla pulled back and took aim. She felt the back of the spear-thrower
with the spear mounted on it rise up almost without her knowing it as she hurled
her spear. It was so natural for her, it didn't feel like a deliberate move. She and
Jondalar had used the weapon during their entire year-long Journey back to the
Zelandonii and she was so skilled, it was second nature.
The lioness soared into her leap, but Ayla's spear met her more than
halfway. It found its mark from beneath the big cat, and lodged firmly in her
throat in a sudden fatal slash. Blood spurted out as the lioness collapsed to the
ground.
Soon the remaining Cave Lions were crawling away through the bush, some of them wounded. This
hunting adventure started off the long saga of Ayla and Jondalar on their visit to the region filled with
caves decorated by artists who lived long before them. Caves filled with images of rhinoceroses,
mammoths, cave bears, hyena, aurochs, and various creatures who roamed the region. These caves can
be visited today, as the author Jean Auel did in preparation for this book. One can expect that the caves
described in this book were actual caves visited by the author.
Someone told me recently that some author she was reading wrote about the daily things that women
did around the house. I was reading this book at the time, and thought, yes, that's what Jean Auel is
doing, only it's around a cave instead of a house. Riding on horses instead of cars, pulling a travois
instead of a trailer. She describes to the reader how Ayla cooks supper, makes tea, carries around her
provisions for making tea in a pouch she always has with her. Without metal containers, Ayla and her
contemporaries used water-tight leather bowls filled with water to cook in and make tea, etc. These
bowls had hot rocks placed into them to heat up the water, soup, or stew. The rocks were placed in the
campfire and were taken from the fire with wooden tongs and dropped into the liquid.
We are told how Ayla field-dresses large game such as aurochs and dries strips over a smoking fire
which she notes, not only preserves the meat, but makes it take on the taste of the smoke and wood.
Also, Auel describes something that is rarely mentioned in literature, certainly not in Jane Austen's novels:
how and when a woman goes to urinate or replaces her menstrual padding. How their daughter was
taught to pee as a baby when she was taken outside and held up away from the cave entrance. Auel
describes all the daily activities of a woman and the materials she for cooking, cleaning, padding, clothing,
riding, or hunting, using only materials that would have been available in the region of the land of the
painted caves what today we call France during the early Stone Age times of Ayla and Jondalar.
This book is like a written travelogue into the earliest human times of the Ice Ages.
In addition, Auel describes how annual meetings were held and who attended. How vacations would
be taken. How visits to old friends would happen, sometimes on a long trip. How baby-sitters were
engaged, e.g., when Jondalar and Ayla went on a trip to a nearby museum such as to one of the
magnificent painted caves.
The summer lodges were described with scrupulous detail, including how the inside walls of the
lodges were kept dry from overnight moisture.
[page 76] The ground cloth only went a short distance up the inside wall, but it
was enough to keep out drafts. Any moisture that condensed in the cool of the
evenings would form on the inside of the outer wall, leaving the inside of the
inner wall dry.
What constituted sex education for the young female virgins? A special ceremony called the Rites
of First Pleasures.
[page 85, 86] Ayla and Jondalar said their farewells and headed toward the
camps to which they had been directed. When they neared the camp of the Third
Cave, Ayla recognized the large zelandonia lodge with its ancillary lodges close
by. Right now, she thought, recalling the Summer Meeting of the year before,
the young women who were being prepared for their Rites of First Pleasures
were cloistered in one of the special dwellings, while appropriate men were being
selected for them. In the other lodge were the women who had decided to wear
the red fringe, to be donii-women this season. They had chosen to make
themselves available to the young men who were wearing puberty belts, to teach
them how to understand a woman's needs.
Pleasures were a Gift from the Mother, and the zelandonia considered
it a sacred duty to make sure the first experience of young adults was
appropriate and educational.
By her liberal and consistent use of the word "pleasures" to refer to sexual activities, Auel is able to
avoid using modern words for activities which certainly happened during Stone Age time. She does so
in a very delicate way so that even modern prepubescent youngsters might learn something about sex,
but no librarian would pull Auel's books from even her most Puritanical collections.
Have you ever met someone who was so shallow that you thought their brains were useless? After
reading this next passage, you might have to alter that opinion. Their brains would be useful for tanning
hides.
[page 208] Many of the internal organs of herbivorous animals like bison or
aurochs or any of the various deer, or mammoth or rhinoceros, were edible and
quite tasty the liver, the heart, the kidneys and some parts were usable.
The brains were almost always used for tanning the hides.
Auel states that the people of that region didn't have a concept of private property. That they didn't
consider that land could be owned. Yet, rightly understood, land cannot be owned, only the right to use
the land can be owned. In the definition of property as "all non-procreative derivatives of one's life" land
cannot be included because the land was there before the person acquired the rights to use it and will
be there after the person is gone or the rights have been sold. This is the most robust and useful definition
of property and I recommend to everyone. In her creative imagination of the Cave people, Jean Auel
formulated a version of such a definition of property.
[page 20, 21] "It is in the territory of the Fourth Cave of South Land Zelandonii,
and they consider it theirs to use and show," the First said. "They are also the
ones who would add any new paintings, usually. If Jonokol felt moved to paint
on the walls, they would probably welcome it, but it would be best if he made his
wishes known to them first. One of their own might have been feeling the need
to paint something in the same place. It's unlikely, but if that were true, it might
mean that the spirit world is reaching out to the zelandonia for some reason."
She went on to explain that it was always fitting to recognize the territory
that any Cave thought of as theirs. They didn't have a concept of private
property; the notion that land could be owned did not occur to anyone. The earth
was the embodiment of the Great Mother, given to Her children for all to use,
but the inhabitants of a region thought of their territory as their home. Other
people were free to travel anywhere, through any region, even distant ones, as
long as they used consideration and generally accepted courtesies.
Jean Auel does a great job describing the walls of the painted caves, undoubtedly recorded during
her visits to them. One can have the feeling of
walking through these caves without having to bend
down in low spaces, walk over slippery paths, re-light tallow candles to see in the dark, and without
having crane one's neck over to inspect the
ceilings. Ayla didn't know how to sing in the caves,
but she could whistle and it worked as well to ken
the size of each dark space they entered.
[page 30] "Why don't you use
your bird whistles to speak to
the Mother, Ayla," the First
said.
Ayla had heard the
woman humming, not loudly but
very melodically, and hadn't
expected to be asked. "If you
would like me to," she said,
and began a series of bird calls,
the ones she thought of as
softer evening sounds.
About four hundred feet
from the entrance, halfway in,
the cave narrowed and the
sounds resonated differently.
That was where the drawings
started. From this point on, the walls were covered with drawings of every kind.
The two walls of the winding subterranean passage were marked with almost
uncountable, often undecipherably superimposed and intermingled engravings.
Some were isolated and many that could be interpreted were very well made.
Adult women frequented the cave most often and, consequently, the more
accomplished, refined engravings were usually made by them.
Horses predominated, shown at rest and with lively movement, even
galloping. Bison were also very prevalent, but there were many other animals:
reindeer, mammoths, ibex, bears, cats, wild asses, deer, woolly rhinoceroses,
wolves, foxes, and at least one saiga antelope, hundreds of engravings in all.
Some were very unusual, like the mammoth with its trunk curled back; the head
of a lion that utilized a naturally embedded stone for the eye was strikingly
rendered; and a reindeer bending down to drink was outstanding for its beauty
and realism, as were the two reindeer facing each other. The walls were fragile
and didn't lend themselves well to painting, but were easy to mark and engrave,
even with fingers.
There were also many parts of human figures, including masks, hands,
and various silhouettes, but always distorted, never as clearly and beautifully
drawn as the animals, such as the disproportionately large limbs on the seated
figure, shown in profile. Many engravings were incomplete and buried in a
network of lines, various geometric symbols, tectiform signs, and undefined
marks and scribbles that could be interpreted many ways, sometimes depending
on how the light was held. The caves were originally formed by underground
rivers, and at the end of the gallery there was still a karstic area of active cave
formation.
When Ayla gets attacked, she and Jondalar subdue the four men led by Balderan, and take them
to the nearest cave shelter with them. Everyone recognized them as the perpetrators of multiple sexual
assaults, murders, and thefts in their own caves. The four were placed under arrest and the cave dwellers
met to discuss the fate of the four murderous thieves. A decision was made to kill them by poison and
Ayla reluctantly prepared the hemlock potion required, which could be disguised as part of the water
parsnip soup of the evening, but the four led another attack on Ayla and this time, the cave dwellers took
their own revenge on the four, leaving only one alive.
The last 200 pages of the 700 page novel were filled with excitement enough to keep pages flipping
until late into the night. Ayla remained behind from the Summer Meeting until after the Summer Solstice
(Summer Long Day) which marked the end of her year-long recording of the positions of the Sun and
the Moon on her chart, a necessary study for her as an acolyte of the First Zelandonii. When she finally
reaches the Summer Meeting already in progress, she stumbles upon Jondalar in a sexual liaison with his
former girl and in the place in the river which was special to Jondalar and Ayla. She was heart-broken
and for the first time since they first met in The Plains of Passage, she and Jondalar were separated and
their beautiful daughter Joyayla was confused as why her parents were not sleeping together.
Enjoy the long trips through the Painted Caves and get ready for the long passage through the
deepest psyches of Jondalar and Ayla which will end only the Mother knows where.
Read the Review at:
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/paintedc.htm
3.) ARJ2:
Reality Is Broken Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal
In the time before the Industrial Revolution brought division of labor, most all human activity was
autotelic, that is, activity which is self-motivated and self-rewarding, done for its own sake. As people
migrated to jobs with wages and salaries, suddenly their daily work was motivated by a paycheck and
the rewards of the money which could be spent on life's necessities. What little time remained for
autotelic activities was greatly reduced and thus became more valuable. With repetitive activities at work
becoming increasingly boring, we are led inexorably to the need for activities which provide intrinsic
rewards of positive emotions, increasing personal strengths, and improving social connections all of
which "we build by engaging intensely with the world around us" outside of work. (Page 45)
In my own career I had little time for games as I worked my way up the learning curve for one job
after another, each one drastically different from the other. When I homed in on a computer career
(which was a do-it-yourself job in the 1960s), each project was like a completely new job. I learned
how to program and debug the first real-time computers in 1966 and a couple of years later I was
debugging the scientific math package for a Fortran compiler, writing simulator a brand new 16-bit
minicomputer, then writing a complete data collection and reporting system for large process control
computers. I progressed to bootstrapping a PASCAL compiler which is written in PASCAL code, and
then into assembling, debugging, and writing code for large supervisory pipeline control systems. Each
challenge built on my previous challenges, and I continued up the learning curve. When I topped the
learning curve, things became increasingly boring and I was faced with long hours of work in repetitive
tasks which offered me little challenge. Luckily home computers and computer games showed up at
exactly the right time to relieve my boredom and send me on new paths of autotelic activities, gaming and
writing.
The point-and-shoot game of DOOM arrived at exactly the same time as an intranet was installed
in the plant where I worked. During our lunch break, three buddies and I would tackle the demons in
DOOM and each other. The score we kept was the number of frags we made. A frag was basically
a removal of the other player from the game, requiring him to start over somewhere else. And when a
player got removed, what was his first response? To sulk and mope? Nope, maybe a short cry or moan
which could be heard over his work cubicle, but then he jumped right back into the action to seek out
and frag the player who had just fragged him, or any other player who stumbled across his path. The
game could be played solo against the demons, but the human players were at another level of skill and
unpredictability! We all had immense fun for 30 minutes and then returned to work. For me, it was as
if I were 11 instead 51 years old I was back running around at night in my yard, climbing over fences,
laying in wait for, and catching one of my three brothers by surprise in our improvised games of Cops
and Robbers. At age twelve we were already expert game designers and testers. The fun games lasted,
the non-fun games were quickly forgotten, or they were modified until they became fun. A few props
like a cowboy pistol was all we needed, and a few hours of night-time. In the 1940s and early 1950s
we had no air-conditioning or TV and our parents sat on their front porches and talked with neighbors
for hours, which allowed us kids to play as much as we wanted. It was a game heaven for kids. We
knew autotelic activities because we were constantly seeking new ones, improving on old ones, and if
nothing else was available, inventing new ones on the spot. The thirty minute games of DOOM forty
years later during lunch at work got my heart pumping and adrenalin flowing just like those games of
Cops & Robbers when I was twelve years old. When I retired from that plant, my DOOM buddies
honored me with a DOOM MASTER plaque which they had created especially for me. That plaque has
a special place in the Dustbin of Time and in my Hall of Fame for cherished memories.
Isn't this supposed to be a review of a book, you may be thinking? Yes, and when I review a book,
I share the thoughts which the book conjures up in me, and I allow the book to become a focal point
for sharing my thoughts and memories, and they will undoubtedly conjure up some equivalent thoughts
in you, we both get ready for autotelic theme of this book to unfold.
What autotelic games did you participate in your early life? Here are mine to help you get started,
not all of them, but the ones I recall the best. I will omit the so-called kiddie games like Ring-Around-the-Rosie which well-intended teachers led us through. These were barely fun and definitely not
autotelic, but teacher-telic. Thankfully these teacher-telic games disappeared by the time I reached
High School. Graduation night, for example, was a night to practice having the kind of freedom I would
have from teacher-driven activities when I attended college just a couple of months later.
In elementary school at recess and after school we had waves of activity which spread across the
schoolyard. One day we would be playing marbles in the dirt under the perennially shady live oak trees,
and then suddenly everyone showed up with tops. We would wind the string about the top's base, pull
the string quickly away as we released the wooden top, and it would fall spinning to the ground. Games
evolved around trying to land your spinning top on othe top of another top. Then yo-yo's would appear
and we would practice our moves (called tricks) like walking-the-dog or baby-in-the-cradle, or around-the-world. Then pocket knives would appear and some version of Mumbly-Peg would arise. Some time
in February, kites would suddenly appear in the schoolyard after school was over. If Dad had some old
weather boards around, a quick pass of the pocket knife would create the spars for a kite, and some
tissue paper from Mom, together with some paste of flour and water and some kite string would create
all the fun of many days of kite-flying. Buying a kite was as unknown as buying crawfish during my pre-teen years. We had lots of both, but only through our own efforts. Dad knitted crawfish nets and we
saved guts from chickens my mom plucked and gutted to use as bait. For kites we also needed some
rags, which Mom always had plenty of. We tore the rags into strips, tied the ends together, and made
the long tails which stabilized our handmade kites in strong winds. We stuck our nose up at the lazy or
rich kids whose store-bought kites didn't have tails. Keeping our kites in the air and letting out big rolls
of No. 50 cotton thread to the end of the hand-made spool were our goals. We heard of people flying
with razor blades on the tail of their kites to bring down other kites, but we would never purposely do
anything to endanger our hand-made beauties. We never lost a kite that I can recall, so careful were we
with our flying techniques. My brother Paul and I once endeavored to build a box kite. It long and
tedious work and when we flew it the first time, it crashed and broke into pieces. Back to the three-stick
hexagonal kite design which we had mastered already.
One autotelic activity I enjoyed was building balsa stick and tissue paper models of airplanes. It was
a joy to take a 10 cent box of balsa sticks and sheets, cut out the wing and fuselages formers from a
printed flat of balsa wood, pin the pieces to the layout sheet, glue it together with fast-drying cement, and
then cover it with tissue paper and decals to make an flying model of an airplane. In practice we rarely
flew these models because they invariably crashed and that part was no fun at all.
Comic books were readily available. We didn't have money to buy them, but our Uncle Frank
bought and read a lot of them, so when we visited our Grandma's house, we'd go immediately to the
closet where he would place his already read comic books, and we'd spend the day under the pecan
trees reading copies of Henry, Lulu, Nancy, Heckle & Jeckle, Batman, Superman, Plastic Man,
Captain Marvel, Blackhawks, and a seemingly endless stream of other comic books. Friends would
loan us their comic books, we would read them and return them. Many of my early moral judgments
were formed by comic books. People may look down on comic books, but lacking a library of classical
literature, I was reading comic books, the 5’ Superman may not have been a classic, but it's worth a
fortune today for anyone lucky enough to have saved one. What kid who was derided by adults for
reading comic books would have ever decided to actually save one? My parents never said anything
negative about them, they were delighted when I was delighted. They only scolded my brothers and me
if we did anything to break something around the house or dared to do anything the least bit illegal. There
was a kid across the street who had been to Reform School and they made it clear that where we were
headed if we did anything bad. In addition to morality, they gave me the most precious gift any parent
can give to a child, freedom. It is becoming an increasingly rare commodity among kids today,
unfortunately.
I recall vividly the day that signaled the end of my childhood. It was a warm summer day
somewhere in the middle of Avenue E when a couple of my thirteen-year-old peers showed me the
inside of the first Mad comic book. It seemed like they whispered as they spoke, as if they didn't want
any parents to know what they had in their hands. Naturally I wanted to see it and read it, and suddenly
a vast expanse of terra incognito opened up for me: for the first time in my life, I was reading satire!
The world would never be the same for me again! I doubt that I ever read Lulu or Henry again after that
day, childish comic books fell away from my life and I began reading Mad comics, and buying my first
comic books in the process. My world exploded with new possibilities and meaning with each Mad
comic book I read. They were an excellent training course for another magazine which would make its
appearance in a couple of years, Playboy.
Back to my earlier years, at the age of eleven or twelve got my first BB gun, a Red Ryder model
with a telescope on the top of it. I soon discovered the arc of the spring-propelled BB's made the use
of a telescope ridiculous, and I removed it. With my rifle, I could shoot, with careful aim and estimation
of that deep arc of the BB's flight, small birds such as sparrows, goldfinches, and even some bigger
cardinals and Blue Jays. It was as hard as lobbing a dime into a plate as the Penny Arcade, so I enjoyed
long hours of stalking and fun for ever bird I shot. One or two birds killed in a long afternoon was
deemed a great success. No human, old or young, ever got their eyes put out, as my BB gun was too
precious to me to chance losing it. My dad shot birds, ducks, rabbit, and deer with his shotgun and I
figured this was my basic training in learning to do the same when I grew up.
As I grew in my mid-teens, I discovered card games which I played with my friends. Seven-and-a-Half was a Blackjack type game we played for money, nickels and dimes. Knuckles was a game we
played when there were no adults around because it involved payment, not in money, but in pain. If you
lost a game of Knuckles, you were hit on your knuckles by the other players for as many times as
number of cards you were left with. With my cousins, it was a mild tap, but with the tough guys of
Westwego, these were hard slams that could leave my knuckles red for an hour or so afterward. I didn't
like the pain, but the motivation so high to win, that my adrenalin was flowing at every point during the
game.
Skipping forward past college and raising four children, I arrived at the very first computer games.
About 1966 a primitive version of Blackjack appeared which one could play on a Teletype terminal.
Then about 1972, interactive CRT displays made Pong possible (video simulation of Ping Pong), and
a few years later, I had a chance to play a Lunar Lander program on a monochromatic CRT which used
vector graphics to draw the lunar surface and my job was to set the Lunar Lander safely on the Moon's
surface by varying the pitch and yaw and the retro-rocket thrust. A game player could have the Apollo
11 experience on a computer! Next stop was the 1980s with Wolfenstein, the first point-and-shoot game
which rose to popularity. So far as I know, Wolfenstein innovated the idea of Boss Levels, which if you
succeeded in fragging the bad guys and reached the top level, a Super-Bad Guy was waiting for you and
this top level often took as long to solve as all the lower levels. From the flat single-level world of
Wolfenstein, DOOM meant a huge quantum leap into a reality in which you could jump over objects,
climb up stairs, etc, while exploring the rooms and open spaces looking for bad creatures to frag. When
DOOM morphed into QUAKE, suddenly there were artificial goals added, which reminded me of the
teacher-telic activities of my youth which I disliked so much, and I quickly tired of video games after that
evolution.
During the 1980s Video Game Rooms flourished all around the country, and I spent many a quarter
on my favorite video games. PAC MAN was not my favorite, too teacher-telic like, probably. The ones
involving space travel and Star Wars like shooting were my favorite. I recall the thrill of the first time I
sped through the hurdles to let off a shot which destroyed the Death Star! Soon home computers
reached and topped the level of the arcade games, and a new decade of computer games appeared on
home computers like DOOM and QUAKE in the 1990s.
When I retired from the plant where I worked for 14 years, it was with the goal of spending the rest
of my time writing and once I set out on that autotelic goal, I left behind the video game playing for good.
The work I began was more interesting to me because I was deciding on the activity, it was rewarding,
it was the most fun thing I had done in my life, and there was little time or inclination to play video games.
My grandkids loved some of the new video games, however, and I received "Call to Duty - World at
War" one Christmas and soon had a PS-3 Play-Station on which to play it. My PC was my full-time
typewriter and data base and I could not let it be used to play games on, so the PS-3 allowed me to
check some of the newer point-and-shoot games. One incredible event happened to me a couple of
years after I completed the World at War game. In the last episode of the game, I had to fight my way
through barricades, barbed wire fences, and machine gun nests to reach the entrance to the Reichstag,
and then battle troops inside the huge auditorium until I reached the top and could hoist a victory flag.
On a Baltic Sea cruise later, I took a day trip to Berlin and when I walked up to the huge green lawn in
front of the Reichstag, I could see the barricades, the barbed-wire fences, and the machine gun nests,
and look up at the real building towering over me. I felt no need to stand in a long line to enter the
building because I had already spent hours of time exploring every inch of the building inside a video
game.
Today, my monthly Good Mountain Press Digest, which will feature this review in its June, 2011
issue, is my autotelic activity. In each month's issue, I compile my writings during the month, my
photographs (another autotelic activity I love), my cartoons (2 a month), emails from my Good Readers,
and my Personal Notes on our activities for the preceding month. Someone asked me how long did it
take me to create a Digest, and I answered simply, "A month". All of my activities of a month feed
entries to the Digest. For example, my wife and I typically watch a movie on any night we don't have
an outside activity, on good nights, we enjoy a Double Feature with popcorn during intermission. I make
quick notes on each movie after it's over and from that, pen a short blurb about the movie. Currently
there are 2257 movies we have watched. I keep a relationship data base to keep track of movies we've
seen before. In fact, each separate item in the Digest that repeats requires an entry in a data base list to
ensure that I do not repeat certain items, such Recipes, Cajun Stories, Cartoons, Quotations, Poems,
etc. This requires almost daily updating and adding items to the Digest, so the writing of a single Digest
can be said to take a month.
I mention all things because on page 3, McGonigal asks a good question.
[page 3] Gamers want to know: Where, in the real world, is that gamer sense of
being fully alive, focused, and engaged in every moment? Where is the gamer
feeling of power, heroic purpose, and community? Where are the bursts of
exhilarating and creative game accomplishment? Where is the heart-expanding
thrill of success and team victory? While gamers may experience these
pleasures occasionally in their real lives, they experience them almost
constantly when they're playing their favorite games.
Where is it? You must create it for yourself. Lacking the ability, the knowledge, the time to do that,
games are a convenient substitute, but game activity should always point towards a time when the real
game of life itself begins, namely, when the gamer creates that kind stimulation and satisfaction in their
everyday existence. At that point, the gamer will find little time for games. As the Sufi saying goes, "The
existence of counterfeit gold tells us that real gold exists." Until that time arrives for a gamer, it will seem
that "Reality, compared to games, is broken."
The author states a goal, a personal mission, to see a "game developer win a Nobel Prize in the next
twenty-five years." (Page 10) She makes no mention of John Nash who received a Nobel Prize in 1994
for his game theory work as a Princeton graduate student. Yes, I know that is not the kind of games she
was talking about, but game theory existed for a long time as thought experiments before the digital
computers came along to provide simulations of the thought experiments. Another innovator in the field
of game theory, Robert Axelrod, used computer simulations of the Prisoner's Dilemma and showed the
robustness of cooperation in the face of defection. His work, when fully developed and understood,
may well deserve a Nobel Peace Prize, in my opinion, because it can lead to peaceful cooperation with
in every aspect of human existence.
This next passage by the author seems to be equally true if the word "game" were to be replaced
by the word "sport". A sports coach could be saying those words to the team's players. Perhaps it is
her intent to get video games moved up to the level of importance accorded to football, baseball,
hockey, or other sports in our society. Such sports can also be seen to build virtual experience on the
sports fields which will prove useful in later life.
[page 12] If you are a gamer, it's time to get over any regret you might feel
about spending so much time playing games. You have not been wasting your
time. You have been building up a wealth of virtual experience that, as the first
half of this book will show you, can teach you about your true self: what you core
strengths are, what really motivates you, and what makes you happiest. As
you'll see, you have also developed world-changing ways of thinking, organizing
and acting. And, as this book reveals, there are already plenty of opportunities
for you to start using them for real-world good.
Near the end of this book, McGonigal lists all the things she claims that reality is, compared to
games. Paradoxically, after giving details in each of the preceding chapters about why this is so, this list
appears in the final chapter whose title is "Reality Is Better".
[page 348] Reality is too easy. Reality is depressing. It's unproductive, and
hopeless. It's disconnected, and trivial. It's hard to get into. It's pointless,
unrewarding, lonely, and isolating. It's hard to swallow. It's unsustainable. It's
unambitious. It's disorganized and divided. It's stuck in the present.
If you feel this way about reality, or if you are stuck in some unproductive job which depresses you,
the exit from which seems hopeless, the aim of which seems pointless, and if you also feel unrewarded,
lonely, and isolated, well, the author has a solution for you: Games. If this describes you, then this book
will be a revelation to you. And it's only about games, something you probably disdained as trivial and
worthles, up until now, computer games in particular. This book can literally kick-start your life, allow
you rev it up at will.
If, like me, you grew up in a target-rich environment for games of all kinds (as I listed above), then
you will have already discovered that video games, computerized reality games, can be a wonderful past
time.
McGonigal's four defining traits of a game were known to me by the age of five as my three
brothers and I began making up games to play. One, the game had a goal. For "Cowboys & Indians"
it might have been as simple as "Shoot the other guy first". Two, rules. Given that our guns didn't shoot
any bullets or pellets, our rules were about what constituted a shot to remove the other guy from the
game. Three: feedback system. How did we know the game was over? All the Indians were shot
perhaps. And fourth: voluntary participation. The one aspect of our kid games, which none of the
parent- or teacher-telic games possessed: each game was voluntary! If you had a cap pistol, e.g., and
wanted to play "Cowboys & Indians", you could play. No one forced you to join. The game went on
to fill all the time available so long as everyone was having fun. Any suggestions for new goals or rules
were quickly evaluated by trying them out. If they added to the fun, they were kept. The ultimate goal
was fun, and everyone had a vote. If someone disagreed with a new rule, they could voluntarily drop out,
and the game went on without them. There were no unhappy players in our childhood games. By
definition if there was one unhappy player who tried to force his rule on us, it became a fight, but rarely
led to fisticuffs, more like a brief recess from the fun, an animated discussion on how to get back to the
fun as quickly as possible. If recalcitrant Joey didn't agree, he could leave. If girls wanted to play, and
had a pistol, they could and did. Our Aunt Carolyn, only three years older than I, would always had a
set of cowboy pistols and joined us in playing.
Computer games that became wildly popular have traits similar to our childhood games. No one
kept score in our shoot 'em up games. The goal was to have fun and the game continued as long as we
were having fun. In the early computer game Tetris, which played under some different name, the fun
was not so much in the scoring, but in the playing, due to its exquisite feedback system:
[page 24] As you successfully lock in Tetris puzzle pieces, you get three kinds
of feedback: visual you can see row after row of pieces disappearing with a
satisfying poof; quantitative a prominently displayed score constantly ticks
upward; and qualitative you experience a steady increase in how challenging
the game feels.
As you got better the game became more challenging. It was like riding a horse who kept going
faster and you strove to keep seated as you rode it faster and faster. The next game I knew to captivate
people was the Free Cell Solitaire game which appeared in the early Windows operating systems as
a free game. It was like Solitaire card games, but with four cells where you could park cards which
prevented you from making Solitaire. Those four free cells opened up moves which allowed you to
complete the Solitaire on every game. A list of the dozen or so very difficult games appeared and I
completed them first.
There was one solution, which was proven likely impossible by computer-testing, whose
number was 11982 or something close to that. The computer had tried over 65,000 solutions and failed,
and I tried several thousand before I convinced myself further attempts were fruitless. Many people
began at number 1 and went up one game at a time into the 10,000s, skipping over the insoluble one.
When the game was increased from 32,000 to 1,000,000, I began systematically coming down from
the top. I was still using as a past-time when I became a writer, but as my activity on my Digest picked
up to near full-time fun, I set myself Free Cell free.
I got a bit of a laugh just now as I tried to place my cursor over the text on page 26 of the Reality
Is Broken book in order to swipe it, copy it, and paste below. Of course, it would be nice if that
worked, but I prefer reading actual hard bound books, and that requires an extra step of typing or OCR
scanning to input text. This time, I'm choosing the typing, which is possible for me because of that typing
class in Hahnville High School where I learned to type at 60 wpm. The author is talking about the type
of games on computers which I intensely disliked, such as Quake, which I played, but eventually gave
up on because of the time I had to spend looking for that dumb clipboard on the desk, for example.
BORING ! ! !
[page 26] If you poke around the room enough, you might think to pick up a
clipboard lying on the desk. This movement triggers an artificial intelligence
system to wake up and start speaking to you. The AI informs you that you are
about to undertake a series of laboratory tests. The AI does not tell you what
are being tested on. Again, it's up to you, the player, to figure it out.
I avoid games with such obstacles to fun. I was content with games in which I discovered the rules
in the process of playing, and that led me to point-and-shoot games. When Call to Duty: World at War
came to me as a Christmas present from my grandson, I enjoyed being able to choose my weapons and
learn the rules as I went along on a team of Americans capturing Pelilu island in the Pacific or a team of
Russians counter-attacking Germany. The first time I got to control an army tank was a thrill. What few
hints I needed were flashed on the screen as I drove the tanks looking for targets to shoot, mostly enemy
soldiers on the ground or inside other tanks, who, like in my childhood "Cowboy & Indians" games, shot
back at me. It was me or them and them got as much back as they put out on me! There was some time
looking around for the right weapon, and one had to learn how replenish ammo and grenades by walking
or running over the dead enemy, but there were no long handbooks to read. I liked the one Call to Duty
game which began with a training session with various weapons. The parts I disliked were the cul-de-sacs in games where there seemed to be no targets left to eliminate and no way to get on to the next level
or episodes. These seemed to be bugs, and the other resort was to start the current level completely
over.
But for the most part, I was happy re-living WWII for the first time, a war that was over before
my cognitive memory ever set in at five years old. I was firing weapons I only held for a short time when
I was in the Army ROTC at LSU for my freshman and sophomore years, the M-1 Garand and the
Carbine rifle. Never was called on to fire them at real people, just on the target range. I dropped out of
ROTC when it became voluntary for my Junior and Senior years and I was spared the ignominious fate
of becoming Second-Lieutenant cannon-fodder in Vietnam later. Call to Duty was hard work, but
constant fun, fighting in the field of War without getting your boots muddy, sleeping on rocks, or eating
K-rations. I was simultaneously a Private with boots on the ground and a General who decided whether
I would fight this next battle or not. I was happy. Call to Duty, unlike WWII or Vietnam was voluntary.
[page 28] Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for
ourselves, and it turns out that almost nothing makes us happier than good, hard
work.
We don't normally think of games as hard work. After all, we play
games, and we've been taught to think of playas the very opposite of work. But
nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, as Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading
psychologist of play, once said, "The opposite of play isn't work. It's
depression."
When we're depressed, according to the clinical definition, we suffer
from two things: a pessimistic sense of inadequacy and a despondent lack of
activity. If we were to reverse these two traits, we'd get something like this: an
optimistic sense of our own capabilities and an invigorating rush of activity.
There's no clinical psychological term that describes this positive condition. But
it's a perfect description of the emotional state of gameplay. A game is an
opportunity to focus our energy, with relentless optimism, at something we're
good at (or getting better at) and enjoy. In other words, gameplay is the direct
emotional opposite of depression.
When we're playing a good game when we're tackling unnecessary
obstacles we are actively moving ourselves toward the positive end of the
emotional spectrum. We are intensely engaged, and this puts us in precisely the
right frame of mind and physical condition to generate all kinds of positive
emotions and experiences. All of the neurological and physiological systems that
underlie happiness our attention systems, our reward center, our motivation
systems, our emotion and memory centers are fully activated by gameplay.
This extreme emotional activation is the primary reason why today's
most successful computer and video games are so addictive and mood-boosting.
When we're in a concentrated state of optimistic engagement, it suddenly
becomes biologically more possible for us to think positive thoughts, to make
social connections, and to build personal strengths. We are actively conditioning
our minds and bodies to be happier.
In my real life today, hard work is what I choose to do every day because I consider it valuable
to the world and fun to myself. But I worked the other way for the first 55 years of life, mostly doing
work assigned to me by others. Often it was hard work that I loved doing, but a lot of time it was
unsatisfying work which I had to do until I could figure out how to move to the next level, which in reality,
is the next project or a new company. That is why I moved from job to job every few years when
I reached the top of the learning curve at one job, I jumped to another job with a new learning curve and
new challenges. But we live in a time in human evolution where, at the age of 27 humans do not mature
further automatically. Someone once said that, "Nowadays an 18-year-old is barely qualified to flip
hamburgers and 9 years later is running the world." The result of this evolution shows up in so many
retirements at the age of 55 and the difficulty of out-of-work 40-somethings finding a new job. Also,
consider this: the judge in a robe is probably only as mature as any 27-seven-year-old adult, no matter
how austere the gray hairs may make the aged magistrate appear.
The influx of inexperienced youth in companies, new college graduates in engineering and marketing
especially, also shows up in needless new varieties of everything. Every week when I shop for groceries
at the local supermarket, I see some new product designed by some new graduate in market
management. A new set of variations of Rotel, e.g., shows up on the shelf where only one existed the
week before and suddenly I have to read labels to try to locate the original can of tomatoes and chili
peppers. Fifteen new varieties of Newman's Own salad dressing appear, and I only want the original.
Sometimes there are no bottles of the original on the shelf! These new graduates have to do something,
so they make change for the sake of justifying their jobs, and cause ripples through the entire consumer
product chain, which are often more confusing than useful. By the time the errors of these new graduates
are discovered, they have moved to a new job elsewhere, and those errors have become status quo for
the new set of graduates just coming in. A new engineer replaces a metal part with plastic and the failure
mode only shows up years after the engineer is working elsewhere. I mention these new graduates
because they are the ones given minor modification work to do which is often unfulfilling and boring. No
wonder they are more interested in games than in their employer-telic work.
[page 28, 29] If only hard work in the real world had the same effect. In our real
lives, hard work is too often something we do because we have to do it-to make
a living, to get ahead, to meet someone else's expectations, or simply because
someone else gave us a job to do. We resent that kind of work. It stresses us
out. It takes time away from our friends and family. It comes with too much
criticism. We're afraid of failing. We often don't get to see the direct impact of
our efforts, so we rarely feel satisfied.
That's what happens to the new graduates. Now look at the other end of the spectrum, to the 45
to 55 year olds. They have reached the top of their learning curve and are not given challenging jobs, but
grunt work to pass the time to retirement and pensions.
[Page 29] Or, worse, our real-world work isn't hard enough. We're bored out of
our minds. We feel completely underutilized. We feel unappreciated. We are
wasting our lives.
At all ages, what we really want is work to do which is novel, exciting, and uses all of our skills,
stretching us constantly until the day we die. That kind of work often appears in our favorite games more
than in our everyday lives, thus the attraction of these games. Until one creates the right kind of work for
oneself, fun will always seem more fun than work.
[page 31] High-stakes work, busywork, mental work, physical work, discovery
work, teamwork, and creative work with all this hard work going on in our
favorite game, I'm reminded of something the playwright Noël Coward once
said: "Work is more fun than fun."
When Del and I are at home, we have a Screening Room with five large TV screens to view movies
and other topical events. When we go to our mountain cabin with its limited TV selections, we usually
take along a Scrabble game with us. One of the gotcha's in Scrabble, the Challenge of a word laid by
another player always seemed distasteful to me. Finally I suggested an alternative: allow players to look
up the word ahead of time, before they lay it down. Then if someone else asks what the word means,
the player can simply tell them. It had another salubrious effect: Del had admitted to me once that she
never looked up words in a dictionary. Suddenly upon implementation of this rule, she began spending
several hours in almost continuous thumbing of a dictionary looking for a word which fit her letters and
positions on the board. One simple modification to Scrabble rules, and a tedious task previously avoided
became a productive activity to win a Scrabble game. This new rule requires us to bring two large
dictionaries with us on trips now, because each of us are looking up words most of the time. We also
had to remove the dumb time-limit for making a word. Without a time limit, the other player may take
15 minutes to form one word, so we may turn on the TV and watch a re-run of a series of old James
Bond movies to past the time while the other player is earnestly searching for the one right word. We
also allow for repetitive usages of the Blank Tiles and of the Double and Triple Word scores. These
changes lead to long satisfying, high-scoring games, with lots of fiero moments. What is fiero? It might
be a thrill for you to find out. Stick around to read the next passage.
[page 33] Scientists have recently documented that fiero is one of the most
powerful neurochemical highs we can experience. It involves three different
structures of the reward circuitry of the brain, including the mesocorticocolimbic
center, which is the most typically associated with reward and addiction. Fiero
is a rush unlike any other rush, and the more challenging the obstacle we
overcome the more intense the fiero.
With multi-person interactive games, people are creating bonds with other people of like interests
all over the globe, from World of Warcraft guilds to nascent Rock bands.
[page 76] It may have once been true that computer games encouraged us to
interact more with machines than with each other. But if you still think of
gamers as loners, then you're not playing games.
My wife, Del, and I play a lot Chore games which we designed for ourselves over the course of 35
years together. I mentioned earlier that I did the grocery shopping. Del bought the groceries until the last
of her four kids moved out to college, and then continued that practice until I retired at 55 to work as
a writer out of our home. I had been doing most of the cooking for the two of us on the weekends before
and soon, working at home everyday, I began cooking for Del each night when she came home tired
from a long day selling and managing Healthcare plans, often working 80 hours a week, at the office and
at home.
By taking over the grocery shopping, I made things easier for her, and it allowed me to buy
exactly the things I wanted to cook for the coming week. After fifteen years of this, it is still working, and,
even though Del is home much more since she retired, she seldom accompanies me to the grocery. Over
the years we found fun ways to take care of the other repetitive chores around the house and Chapter
7's "Chore Wars" section inspired me to share these.
One of the least fun aspects of sharing living quarters with someone is walking into the kitchen first
thing in the morning to find pots, pans, and dinnerware scattered all over the place, yelling, "Who left this
mess?" only to hear back, "Not me!". So we decided to make Not Me the good guy. We began to that
cleanup, one or the other of us, at night when the other one had already gone to sleep. The next morning,
the kitchen would be spic and span and the other would ask who did this? The one who did it would
smile and say, "I guess it was the Midnite Elves." Here is a poem I wrote about 1990 to explain the
process.
The midnite elves were on the shelves
and counters of the kitchen
They made them sparkle in the dark
and even loaded dishes in
The dishwasher to start it running
well into the winter's evening.
LO! upon the morning's early light
everywhere the eyes could see
The house was right a lovely sight
and who'd take the credit? Not Me.
The midnite elves enjoyed themselves
and didn't look for credit
They tended to their task without being asked
and would only answer, "Not Me did it."
From that humble beginning, we created the Honey Bunny and the Coffeemate Fairy. We drink
a lot of coffee and we use Coffeemate Creamer and Honey. The small convenient dispensers we use
every day need to be refilled about once a week or so. When one of us comes to make coffee and sees
the honey refilled, for example, we'll say, "I see the Honey Bunny has been here!" Note how much more
fun this is to say instead of the marriage-killing equivalent, "You used up all the honey without refilling
it!" Another two chores turned into fun. Sometimes the Honey Bunny and Coffeemate Fairy made visits
at the same time.
From the wonderful "Rose Is Rose" comic strip in our Times-Picayune daily newspaper, we
discovered the "Garbage Moment" from Jimbo, who loves to go outside under the stars and look up at
them after he takes out the garbage. No one has to remind him to do so or denigrate him for not doing
so, he volunteers in the game of "Garbage Moment" and enjoys his time under the starlit sky. Later, we
added the Newspaper Moment as our morning equivalent game. I usually go outside to retrieve the
newspaper, and I always enjoy listening to the roosters crowing across the bayou on the other side of
the bamboo thicket. We have a couple of quiet games we play, one is called Koala Bear. Do you recall
when Qantas Airlines had the TV commercials with cute little cuddly bear saying the tag line, "I hate
Qantas"? In our version of the game, if one of us is upset, the other comes over gives a gentle hug and
says, do you hate Qantas, which is a signal for the sad one to place one's head on the shoulder of the
other and say quietly and poignantly, "I hate Qantas." The other one is Waterfall. In this one, we get in
the shower, hug as closely together as possible so that the water is dammed up to our shoulders, then
we suddenly separate and feel as though we had suddenly stepped under a waterfall. We have lots of
these moments of fun, whose primary requisite for playing is that both people have a lively child still living
inside of them. One day Del was copy-editing my work and wanted to change a quote from the author
Christopher Fry. I told her, "You're editing Christopher Fry and the man doesn't even know you." She
replied, using her child voice, "Yeth, but if he did, he'd wuv me." It's never to late be a kid!
Sometimes things occasionally happen which are not fun, and one of us is doing something to make
the current situation unbearable, so the other one invokes the Pissing in the Soup game, which means to
accuse the spoil sport of "Pissing in the Soup." What does that mean? Well, it's the name-equivalent
activity in life to pissing in the soup: "It may create more soup, but it doesn't necessarily improve the
flavor!" Most of the negative interactions married couples get into which end in divorce could be
reckoned to pissing in the soup. By calling attention to the negative activity, one of a couple is able to
break up the unpleasant game of Pissing in the Soup and get on with the fun of being together again.
Sometime one of us does something so wonderful that when the other asks "How can I to repay
you?" the answer comes back, "Put it in the Book." The Book is an imaginary book in which we log
these special treats and treatments. It is creative accounting in the best sense of the word.
McGonigal's Chore Wars is a modified version of World of Warcraft where all the online quests
correspond with real-world cleaning tasks and you play it with your spouses or room-mates.
[page 120] It's meant to help you track how much housework people are doing
and to inspire everyone to do more housework, more cheerfully, than they
would do otherwise.
A Fix is McGonigal's answer to repairing some way in which she sees that "reality is broken." Fix
#7 is titled "Wholehearted Participation" and its theme is stated this way, "Compared with games, reality
is hard to get into. Games motivate us to participate more fully in whatever we're doing." I couldn't help
but reframe the penultimate sentence this way, "Contrasted to idiocy, reality is harder to get into."
Under Fix #7 is the statement "If we're forced to do something, or if we do it halfheartedly, we're
not really participating." Clearly someone who is doing something halfheartedly is doing so under some
imagined if not obvious compulsion. And compulsion is the sure-fire killer of spontaneity. Paul
Watzlawick describes the "Be Spontaneous Paradox" as the situation when someone commands you
to do something which can only be done spontaneously. The result is a pale attempt to comply which
is always fails in its attempt. Point a camera at someone and say, Smile, and you'll get their best pretend
smile, but no spontaneous smile.
Good photographers evolve cute approaches to get around the BSP,
and the novel approaches are what create the smile, not a command to smile which would invariably fail!
Erections are spontaneous, so any woman saying, "Get it up!" is more likely to create impotence instead
of an erection. Sneezing is a spontaneous activity and the BSP timely applied can stop a sneezing
cascade. Simply wait until after the first sneeze and say, "Do that again!" This hiccup cure is also sure-fire: wait till a hiccup has just ended and flash a twenty dollar bill in front of a person, saying this is yours
if you'll give me another hiccup. Their attempt to consciously create a hiccup on command will make it
impossible for the spontaneous hiccup, which was waiting within, to show itself. For putting children to
sleep, it is like magic. Sleep tell the child to lay in its bed with their eyes wide open for as long as it wants.
Just keep quiet and stay in bed. Invariably, unless the child has been trained to pester its parents, it will
fall asleep within minutes. Tell them to "Go to sleep" and you may have an all-night insomniac on your
hands.
How can education be structured in the form of a game? It is surely the most compulsive form of
activity kids are subjected to: they must go every weekday until they are at least 16, they have to stay
in class, study courses pre-determined for them whether they like them or not.
[page 128] Increasingly, some education innovators are calling for a more
dramatic kind of game-based reform. Their ideal school doesn't use games to
teach students. Their ideal school is a game, from start to finish: every course,
every activity, every assignment, every moment of instruction and assessment
would be designed by borrowing key mechanics and participation strategies
from the most engaging multi-player games.
Three of my grandchildren went to a project school in Bloomington, Indiana, and I had occasion
to visit at their school and learn about how the school worked. Basically each pupil was allowed to
choose a project and while working on this voluntary project, they learned the necessary skills and
content to complete the project. In this way subject matter became something that the child needed to
learn to complete a project, not something a teacher wanted to cram into a child. The difference is
incredible. Participation was not voluntary, but how you chose to participate was, so the Project School
meets three of the four criteria for game design: One, it has a goal, namely the project. Two, it has rules
about choices of projects. Three: there is a feedback system from the teachers who judged how each
student's project challenged their current level of understanding. My grandson Walden had chosen a
project about Jet Fighters and wrote that I had worked for the Lockheed Aircraft Co, among other
things.
Whenever anyone gets hurt, I always look for the answer to two questions, one of which will be
clearly the operant reason for the illness or accident or inconvenience. The first question is: What
happened because of X that would not have happened under any other circumstance? The second
question is: What did not happen because of X that would have otherwise happened? When Jane
McGonigal hit her head hard on a cabinet door standing up in 2009, she developed a concussion and
the only good thing which happened to her in my mind is that when her husband tested her for a
concussion by asking her who the president was, she didn't know. It definitely was a concussion, but
all the tests showed that she would likely be free of the headaches, vertigo, and blurred vision in about
a month. But it required no reading, no writing, no working, and no running until she was symptom-free.
She even discovered that computer and video games were too much stimulation for her brain.
[page 133] Either I'm going to kill myself or I'm going to turn this into a game.
After the four most miserable weeks of my life, those seemed like the only two
options I had left.
Contemplating suicide under any circumstances, to use the vernacular, is a strategy to die for!
Luckily she chose the second option. But what about the two questions. These are best answered by
McGonigal, but from the information she gives, I would expect that the operant question would be the
second, namely, what did not happen, because her giving up computer and video games would not likely
have happened under any other circumstance. When the first month found her with symptoms remaining,
she was facing two or months of prolonged symptoms. This was serious.
[page 134] My doctor had told me that it was normal to feel anxious or
depressed after a concussion. But she also said that anxiety and depression
exacerbate concussion symptoms and make it much harder for the brain to heal
itself. The more depressed or anxious you get, the more concussed you feel and
the longer recovery takes.
A system of positive feedback (otherwise known as a vicious cycle) is set up, depression causes
symptoms which cause more depression. One way out of the vicious cycle which she did not have at her
disposal was a doyle trace. Feelings of depression are doylic memories usually from immediately before
birth where one is pushed into a tighter and tighter space with no end in sight. All those feelings are
stored in doylic memory because the normal memory (cognitive, cortex-based memory) does not begin
to work fully until after five years old.
A speed trace takes the current doylic states of depression and
uses them as sled to quickly speed down the hills of memory to the location in the limbic system where
the primitive doylic memory is stored, accesses it and create a cognitive memory (which the brain was
too immature to do at the time, but is now capable of doing). After the speed trace, the depressive
symptoms will be gone and the concussion symptoms while still present will quickly heal absent the
exacerbating depressive symptoms.
What Jane McGonigal did was use what she knew best how to do: create a game. The energy of
game creation will lift her spirits and help relieve the depressive symptoms. It was at this time that the first
question kicked in: she did something that she would not have done under any other circumstances, she
asked friends and family for help. And she created SuperBetter, a multiplayer interactive game.
[page 134] SuperBetter is a superhero-themed game that turns getting better
into multiplayer adventure. It's designed to help anyone recovering from an
injury or coping with a chronic condition to get better sooner with more fun,
and with less pain and misery, along the way.
She became the Concussion Slayer and the point of her mission was to start seeing herself as
powerful, not powerless. This instant reframe from powerless to powerful has been used for many
decades by the Senoi tribe of the Malaya peninsula in Asia. A friend of mine Jack L. Johnston studied
the Senoi's dreamwork processes and taught people in the States how to use them in their own dreams.
If a Senoi sub-teen boy might come to the daily morning dream session in the tribal hut and say, "A scary
tiger tried to eat me in my dream!" The people around the circle would start muttering, "Wow! A thing
of power! How lucky you are!" Then they would have the boy relive the dream and confront the tiger,
makes friends with it, and ask the tiger for a gift as a token of its esteem. Amazingly this process works
quickly to remove the fear and anxiety caused by a tiger and replace them with a feeling of power.
For her second mission, McGonigal had to recruit her allies, the equivalent of the tribal folk in the
hut. She then had to fight the bad guys which were the things which triggered her symptoms, the reading,
running, emails, etc. Consider how brave she was being, designing and implementing the SuperBetter
game while having only limited resources available to her. Soon she was identifying her power-ups, those
fun things she could do to feel better. Then came the superhero to-do list. Her easiest to-do was baking
cookies for people in her neighborhood. Eventually the game was over as she had recovered from all
of her concussion symptoms. But not before she had created a new game to help other people in similar
distress.
When McGonigal began talking about New Games, I remembered a Radical Therapy Conference
that I attended in 1979 in Ames, Iowa. I had read about New Games, but here was my chance to
participate in them.
I recall the fun of playing volleyball without keeping score! It was completely
voluntary and players could enter or leave the game at any time. We had the fun of making the current
shot and winning, but there was no score kept, except for the amount of fun we had.
McGonigal says that "there's no score at all for getting smarter once you're out of school for good."
But there are scores in the life of one's avatar in a computer game.
[page 146] "If I have one regret in life," I complained to the crowd at the Austin
Convention Center, "it's that my undead priest is smarter than I am."
Technically speaking, it's true: if you were to add up every A I've gotten in my
real life, from junior high through graduate school, the total still wouldn't come
close to my World of Warcraft character's intellect stat."
After many years of working assiduously at reading, studying and reviewing the works of Rudolf
Steiner, Dave Lyons introduced me this way to a group I was in front of to lecture about Steiner's
works. "Someone told me that if you have read at least 75 books on one subject, you have the
equivalent of a Ph. D. Bobby Matherne has studied over 150 books on Rudolf Steiner, which makes
him having a double Ph. D." I was amazed and flattered, but also glad to hear how Dave had found a
way to score my achievement in one key area of my adult, out-of-school life.
Perhaps my life of reading
and reviewing books is like the Tetris game, quickly rotating and placing each review to plop into place,
so that the stack keeps moving down with a satisfying click, and my score keeps getting higher, and
books flow in faster and faster each year.
The Chapter titled "Happiness Hacking" takes on the biggest Be Spontaneous Paradox of all,
Happiness! Go ahead, the self-help books say on the cover: "Be Happy and Here's How You Do
It". Sounds a lot like the famous Betty Crocker Cake Mix box which said, "Be Creative and Here's
How You Do It". Happiness activities, like creative activities, cannot be packaged in a book or a box,
it must stem from self-generated activity. Happiness activities, like multi-vitamins may be useful, but not
if they remain in the bottle unopened and unused, or simply forgotten about.
[page 184] What, exactly, are happiness activities? They're like the daily
multivitamins of positive psychology: they've been clinically tested and proven
to boost our well-being in small doses, and they're designed to fit easily into our
everyday lives.
There are dozens of different happiness activities in the
scientific literature to choose from in addition to the three listed above, ranging
from expressing our gratitude to someone daily to making a list of "bright-side"
benefits whenever we experience a negative life event. And they all have one
thing in common: they are backed by multiple million-dollar-plus research
studies, which have conclusively demonstrated that virtually anybody who
adopts one as a regular habit will get happier.
Only problem is they don't work. Knowing what to do to be happier does not translate
automatically into doing. It takes work, and work is exactly what most unhappy people have been
trained to avoid except when it's forced on them.
Every morning right about this time, I leave my computer desk and drive to PJ's Coffeeshop a few
miles down the road. Working at home as a writer can turn easily into a drudge, and soon after I began
writing at home I found the need to take frequent breaks like I did at the plant, only problem was that
the plant had a break room where I could chat with people while sipping my coffee, and my home
doesn't have a break room with people there. PJ's has become my morning break room. There's David
who likes to talk about the latest Saints's game who fixes my coffee, Diane who is a regular who I
always say Hi to and sometimes sit down to chat with, Penny who sits outside at a table since she
smokes, Gary who worked at my plant is often there reading his newspaper and I can ask about plant
related activities as he is still in the business, and so on. The Jen Ratio at PJ's is very high. What is the
Jen Ratio? McGonigal explains how she created it from the Chinese word jen which means happiness.
[page 190] To measure the jen ratio of a space, you simply watch it very closely
for a fixed period of time say, one hour. You count up all the positive and
negative microinteractions between strangers, keeping track of two different
totals: how many times people smile or act kindly toward each other, and how
many times people act unfriendly, rude, or openly uninterested. All the positive
microinteractions such as big smiles, a hearty thank-you, a door being held
open, a concerned question get tallied on the left side of the ratio. All the
negative microinteractions a sarcastic comment, an eye roll, an unexcused
bump, someone cursing under their breath get tallied on the right side.
Having observed these kinds of microinteractions at PJ's Coffeeshop for many years, I rate the Jen
Ratio there very high. I rarely leave there without a happy feeling inside, and that makes it a great break
room for me in my current job. After reading about the Jen Ratio for the first time in this book, I
pondered all the various places I have spent time in and realized that I have stopped going to Negative
Jen places and I avoid contact with people who create Negative Jen in my presence. One of the fun
activities in New Orleans is just to walk the streets of the city. McGonigal writes on page 190, "But
strangers aren't always inclined to be friendly to each other." The opposite is true in this city. If a New
Orleanian sees a likely tourist stopped on a street looking puzzled, soon that tourist will have a wealth
of information provided by the stranger who will stop, ask if they can help, and then provide whatever
help the person needs.
There is no list of the friendliest cities in America, but I would put New Orleans
at the top of the list. It also has the highest Jen Ratio of any city I've ever been in on a year-round basis.
No need for "Happiness Hacking" (Chapter Ten) if you already live in New Orleans.
If you want to play Tombstone Hold 'Em, this is also a great city for that, because most of our
tombstones are elevated from the ground due to the high water table. The game is described on page
198, 199 and is based on the poker game "Texas Hold 'Em" but instead of playing cards, it uses
tombstones, dates of death, and number of names to create the suits and number on the cards. You
literally touch one tombstone and need other people to touch both you and another tombstone to get the
next card. This makes for a rollicking time in the cemetery by the time you get a winning straight or flush
together. It's one of the games created by McGonigal as part of Happiness Hacking. This is the first use
of cemeteries for fun I've encountered, since seeing the movie projected on the side of a mausoleum in
a Hollywood cemetery during the movie, "Valentine's Day".
One other Happiness Hack is the Top-Secret Dance-Off in which a player dances in disguise and
posts the video on the Internet to compete. "TSDO is an environment with an off-the-charts high jen
ratio." (Page 213)
In the Chapter "Engagement Economy" we learn about crowdsourcing, "coined by technology
journalist Jeff Howe in 2006, (it) is shorthand for outsourcing a job to the crowd." You invite people
over the Internet to cooperate in tackling a big project. Wikipedia, an on-line encyclopedia, was created
by more than 10 million people, unpaid and anonymous (mostly). The Guardian in England needed
massive help in sorting through Member of Parliaments' expenses to confirm suspicions of blatant misuse
of taxpayers's money. So they developed an online game, Investigate Your MP, after converting and
condensing 458,832 documents and placing them on-line. The game was to review each document for
revealing information about misuse. Within three days, 20,000 players had already analyzed more than
170,000 documents. (page 221). The data revealed such facts as this: on average, each MP expensed
twice the amount of salary received. Soon hundreds of MPs were ordered to repay about two million
dollars. (Page 225)
Wikipedia has good game community as defined by McGonigal. Here's how Wikipedians
describe it:
[page 230] Every unique location (article) in the game world encyclopedia) has
a tavern ("talk page," or discussion forum) where players have the opportunity
to interact with any other player in real time. Players often become friends with
other players, and some have even arranged to meet in real life.
In the waning years of the 20th Century, I spent a lot of time in a List called Steiner98 and over the
succeeding years I have met in person a half dozen of the members of the List who are located all over
the country, and it's always been a wonderful meeting, as of old friends not of new friends. As for the
Tavern in Wikipedia, I wonder if there is a doyletics Tavern. If anyone knows, please let me know, as
I would like to raise a quaff with the regulars. As the founder of the science of doyletics, I was not
allowed to create the entry for doyletics, but at some point, I will wish to see what it contains.
One of the things I do on the way to my break room at PJ's Coffeeshop, is listen to Teaching
Company lectures. My current lecturer is Grant L. Voth, who wrote in his Lecture 47 Notes for
Borges's Labyrinths the following about his famous story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." (On page 207
of Teaching Company's course, The History of World Literature.)
[ Grant L. Voth ] The story is about the gradual discovery of a society which
over the past three centuries has created first an imaginary land and then an
imaginary planet. One of its founding members was Bishop Berkeley, the
Idealist philosopher, so it turns out to be a most intriguing and interesting kind
of place. It is, of course, also logically consistent and coherent because it was
made by humans using the rules of human logic and language.
When word of this
imaginary planet gets out into the world, the world begins to adapt itself to Tlön;
even objects unique to this created world begin to show up in ours. The reason
for this is clear: Tlön is made up, but it is orderly, rational, and understandable
vis-a-vis our own reality, whose order and rules and meaning we never grasp.
As Oscar Wilde said half a century earlier, reality is merely process looking for
form. Art is form, and when someone creates something of formal perfection, we
try to adapt reality to it; thus, the world is becoming Tlön.
Wikipedia is like the imaginary land of Tlön: it started out as someone's imagination, and soon
people from all over the world were adding entries which brought it into the realm of reality in a big way.
One cannot look up an item without getting a link to Wikipedia today. The imaginary has become real
due to crowdsourcing of an on-line encyclopedia.
Earlier in this review (page 348 passage), I gave a list of "reality slams" or potshots that McGonigal
takes on reality in this book. To her credit, she takes back these slams in the final Chapter "Reality Is
Better".
[page 348, 349] Reality is all of these things. But in at least one crucially
important way, reality is also better: reality is our destiny.
We are hardwired to care about reality with every cell in our bodies
and every neuron in our brains. We are the result of five million years' worth of
genetic adaptations, each and every one designed to help us survive our natural
environment and thrive in our real, physical world.
That's why our single most urgent mission in life-the mission of every
human being on the planet is to engage with reality, as fully and as deeply as
we can, every waking moment of our lives.
That doesn't mean we can't play games. It simply means that we have
to stop thinking of games as only escapist entertainment.
Perhaps we should think of games the way the ancient Lydians did, she says. They invented dice
games and spent 18 years eating every other day and on intervening days, they played dice games.
Eventually they decided that experience was telling them that the land could support only half of the
population, so one-half the citizens of Lydia moved away to what is now Italy and settled in a fertile
region and became known as Estruscans. While they were playing games, the Lydians were also doing
crowdsourcing by involving the entire population in an experiment in survival which led to a solution to
the problem of starvation in Lydia.
Like the Lydians, games today help keep us alive, happy, and connected with others. Video game
players need no longer be looked down on as lonely losers wasting their life away in computers.
In the 1980s I heard a lot criticism of video games as the Game Rooms popped up all over the
country and kids were dropping quarters for thrills in all kinds of games. When the Desert Storm War
came, I predicted that American kids who had spent years shooting down spaceships in various video
games and, who were now flying fighter jets and manning army tanks, would have no trouble dispatching
Iraqi kids who grew up in the same time period learning to jockey a camel. History proved my hunch
was correct. The games we play today prepare us for the real world we will live in tomorrow, and
sometimes, like with Wikipedia and Desert Storm, the two will develop together, the real world of today
holding hands with the world of tomorrow in ways we cannot imagine, a future which will be quite
extraordinary.
Read the Full Review with its Five Footnotes at:
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/ribroken.htm
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