“Mastering the art of not being touchy, of avoiding over-sensitivity, is important in the development of spiritual consciousness. An analysis of the psychology of touchiness shows that it is the result of misunderstanding, inferiority complex, and an ungoverned ego. Sensitiveness expresses itself in a lack of control over the nervous system. A thought of being offended runs through the mind and the nerves rebel against it. In reacting, some persons seethe inwardly with anger or hurt feelings and show no irritation outwardly. Others express their emotions in an obvious and instant reaction in the muscles of their eyes and face – and often in a sharp retort of their tongue as well. In either case, to be touchy is to make oneself miserable, and to create a negative vibration that also adversely affects others. To be able always to spread an aura of goodness and peace should be the motive of life. Even if there is good reason to be excited because of mistreatment, one who instead controls himself in such a situation is master of himself.

It is a common trait of human beings to be touchy. And when this irrational emotion comes, it blinds the eyes of wisdom. Even though the touchy person may be wrong, he perceives himself as thinking rightly, acting rightly, feeling rightly. It is when the scales of ignorance fall away from the inner sight that one is able to measure exactly the good points and weak points of oneself and others without the prejudice and intolerance of the emotional ego. One then worships only what is good, and remains transcendentally indifferent to what is psychologically unwholesome.

Many persons think that they should pity themselves when criticized, and that sensitiveness brings a little relief. But such people are like the opium addict; every time he takes the drug he becomes more steeped in the habit. Be as firm as steel against sensitiveness. Never be touchy or harbor self-pity.

An oversensitive person frequently suffers in vain; generally nobody has any idea that he has a grievance, much less what it is. So he feels further hurt in his self-created isolation. Nothing is accomplished by silently brooding over some perceived offense. It is best to remove by self-mastery the cause that produces such sensitiveness.”

Our conversation was interrupted because I had my scheduled meeting with Jacob Winkler. For our tenth session, we had agreed to discuss my 2013 New Years Resolution: to become more powerful.

I didn’t know exactly what I meant by that. But somehow it seemed appropriate as a culmination of my experiences from 2012. For personal and political reasons, I was concerned with misuse of power in the world and so duly conflicted about my own personal capacity for power. That inner conflict I think wound up doing more harm than good. So, this year I am going to try something different.

But whatever my personal motivations, asserting that this is my New Years Resolution feels provocative, even transgressive. I told my friends about it over New Years. They immediately assumed that what I meant was that I was going for a kind of super-villainous world domination. They wished me luck. I told them they were giving me too much credit. There’s only so much damage you can do as a PhD student.

While there was an element of that kind of craving behind my resolution, there was also the searching for something more. Partly this was due to my work with Jacob, who uses the word ‘power’ without the negative connotations I have grown familiar with. What did he mean by it? What was I missing, not seeking out that form of power?

I had brought it up briefly at the end of an earlier session. He had replied with this quotation from Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.’ We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

It was time to tackle the issue head on with Jacob. How can he be such an advocate of power, when so many of us see power as something antithetical to humility and compassion, virtues that Jacob would no doubt get behind.

Jacob said that he thought I could do the work of figuring this one out by myself. I told him I wouldn’t mind being subjected to the Socratic method. So asked me:

In what ways are supervillains and dictators powerful, and in what ways are they not?

Well, dictators can get what they want, in at least a narrow egoistic sense. They have instrumental power to achieve their goals.

It’s funny that this kind of political power that first comes to mind. Maybe it has to do with my academic background, and certain politically progressive or radical people that have had a lot of influence over me in life. There’s a certain view of society which I’ve become very familiar with that sees it as shaped by structural social power. Capitalism is seen as an economic system wherein capitalists hold power. Social privilege–white privilege or male privilege, for example–reinforces itself as systemic white supremacy or patriarchy. Lots of academics and activists thrive on critiquing current events from this perspective. I think there’s a lot of truth to it.

Jacob said that he appreciated the courage and to some extent the deliberate obnoxiousness of expressing desire to become more powerful in this context.

I told him that I felt like I didn’t have much choice any more. I’m a straight white man from an upper middle class background. For years I have been told that I need to own that privilege, hold myself accountable, and check myself against abuse of my own structurally endowed power. Sometimes it seems like there’s nothing someone in my demographic can do which isn’t “problematic”. So I used a lot of energy preoccupied with how to undermine that power. But these preoccupations wound up with me tripping over myself.

What good did it do, really? When I see myself and others tied up in these preoccupations, I see people undermining themselves. They are impotently well-intended.

So, without denying that it’s important to be conscious about power dynamics in society, and accepting that ethical life means taking asymmetries of power into account, I need to at least test what the alternative is like. What happens if I spend a year just accepting and living into the privilege that’s been afforded to me? Naysayers will say that’s a sure path to corruption. If that’s the case, I can stand as an example to others.

But who am I kidding? I’m not a saint. On the contrary, I’m fed up with holding myself back. Power sounds great. And the stuff that is supposed to come with it (wealth, influence, sex…)–why not just go for it? Why fight the destiny of my demographic?

Anything for science.

Jacob mentioned that the first popular book by Dr. David Hawkins, one of his strongest influences, is called Power vs. Force and addresses some of these issues directly. But instead of going into it, he asked me another question:

Who are your heroes? Who do you especially admire from history or literature?

It was a tough question. I have a jealous soul, and don’t admit many heroes.

But since he had come up in our last discussion and is someone I think about quite I bit, I said that I think of Socrates as heroic.

Are there others, or would you like to focus on Socrates? Jacob asked.

I told him I’d rather not focus on Socrates.

“Why?”

I told him I thought it would be unseemly, somehow.

“Is the unseemliness related to your undermining yourself?”

He had hit the nail on the head. Here was this figure from history that I admire greatly, and who I’m tempted to compare myself to. But that comparison seems hubristic to me. Who am I to compare myself to Socrates?

Jacob pushed right through it:

In what ways are you similar to Socrates?

Reluctantly, I told him: I think I’m willing to ask provocative questions because I think the truth is important. I think that people and society get better when they are led to discover faults in their thinking. I see myself as part of a dialectical philosophical tradition. That even working with Jacob as I am is motivated by an interest in and anticipation of how we would disagree. That there was something very appealing about living out the archetypal dialog between Socrates and the Priest. That I spend a good deal of my life seeking out people who act like they have the answers and try to test them. If they know something, I learn; if not, I like to think I teach.

Was Socrates powerful?

It was a good question. Yes and no. He was powerful in the sense that he was able to bring about the amazing effect of his legacy. But one might argue that this was only because he was part of a dialectical structure that was bigger than he was to begin with. He positioned himself as a catalyst for unfolding understanding, which he sacrificed quite a bit for.

But was he powerful in the instrumental sense we had discussed before? That’s not clear. Plato describes him as living a humble life.

To accomplish my New Years resolution, then, I could ask: how can I position myself to be the best conduit of larger structural unfolding? There is a sense in which that would make me powerful. But if we are just playing a role in a larger structure, can that power satisfy an egoistic appetite for power? Would it be my power?

Jacob asked:

When was Socrates at the height of his power–when he was a great teacher or when he died?

This question took me by surprise and I had to think about it.

I had to say that he was most valuable when he died. Socrates was sentenced to death for his provocations. But by accepting his death sentence, he became a martyr for the civic virtue and reason for which we still honor the Athenian polis today.

Since it was on my mind, I asked Jacob if he had heard of Aaron Swartz. He hadn’t, which was a stark reminder of how different our paths have been.

Aaron was a programmer and political activist who played a critical role in shaping…gosh, even writing this is hard. Not because of any personal connection to the man. I had none to speak of. But in just trying to explain who he was (and I had only a peripheral understanding of who he was before his death), I realize how much of what I identify with is froth in his wake.

Aaron was a programmer and political activist partially or fully responsible for the RSS standard (a ubiquitous method of syndicating content that facilitates all blogging, including this one), the Python library web.py (which I’ve used), Creative Commons licensing (which I dutifully use on everything I put out on the web out of a sense of justice), and the resistance to the Stop On-line Piracy Act (SOPA) (which is one of the most inspiring political events of my lifetime, for me). He committed suicide after being charged for what I think could safely be described as a hacktivist stunt of leaking a lot of papers from an MIT server. This last act was to support open access to academic research, an issue that is absolutely critical to my current life as a PhD student.

What I didn’t know until I read so many heartfelt obituaries is that Aaron was a point in the constellation of luminaries that I look to for direction and inspiration. In a modest way, my professional life has been about the unfolding of the potential of the Internet through open software and data, and the pursuit of social flourishing and economic fulfillment in that. It’s a movement. And who leads it? Among others, Lawrence Lessig, David Weinberger, danah boyd, David Segal, and this guy Aaron who I hadn’t heard a lot about but who I guess must have operated more behind the scenes than the others, being a techie. Underestimated but necessary?

If I were more thoughtful or had a more generous spirit, would I have thought to add Aaron to my list of heroes? Are those others that I’ve mentioned my heroes?

What I had been pondering since I heard the news, and which I had to bring up with Jacob, was this: was Aaron’s suicide a political act?

The consensus of the reports that I’ve read say that Aaron had struggled with depression. Implicitly, this and the pressure of his criminal charges–which were pushing him towards many years of jail time–drove him to suicide.

But someone as savvy as Aaron was–and he is widely acknowledged as a genius, as well as extraordinarily selfless in his political pursuits–would have known the political impact of martyrdom. Throughout history, its been martyrs who have elevated fringe causes to mythic stature. The symbolism of an innocent sacrificed life cuts through every worldly objection with inexorable moral force.

A part of me fears that it is tactless to bring up this aspect of Aaron’s suicide, but for some reason I feel it necessary to acknowledge it, if only buried so deep in a personal testimonial.

Jacob and I began to compare Aaron Swartz and Socrates. Jacob asked me: if Aaron had not committed suicide and had instead accepted the punishment for his deeds, would that make him more or less powerful?

It was an excellent question. Socrates martyred himself for Athens, because Athens sentenced him to death. His friends had given him the option to escape, but he had said that the same thing would happen anywhere–he’d be told either to shut up or be put to death. So, he took the hemlock.

In the legacy of that act, Thoreau wrote that fundamental to civil disobedience as a political act against unjust laws is accepting the punishment society inflicts. So maybe it would have been a more powerful political act for Aaron to have accepted his jail sentence. Then, at least, he would still be alive, which is one would have to assume a more powerful position than being dead. So, if it were a political act, perhaps it was miscalculated.

I suggested that perhaps prison in this country is a fate worse than death. Jacob retorted that if Socrates had been sentenced to torture, would that have changed his story significantly?

I replied that part of the point of Socrates’ act was that he was standing up for the integrity of Athens, his polis. I’m aware that I am extrapolating about Aaron beyond the bounds of decency at this point, but I can’t help but wonder. Hacktivists often have an anarchist streak, as the issues of Internet Freedom seem to transcend state boundaries. WikiLeaks is an extreme example of information freedom advocates seeing their cause as a humanitarian one beyond and even in direct confrontation with the limits of national governance. If one sees a government as unjust in light of principles of justice that apply to the totality of the information order, then maybe accenting ones disobedience with civility is a meaningless gesture.

At this point, the best way I can think of to honor a dead hero is to suggest that Aaron was in full command of his faculties at the time of his suicide. If he saw open access to research and Internet Freedom as a critical issue of global justice (I’m inclined to agree), and felt that the highest sacrifice was necessary to demonstrate the importance of that cause, and he went ahead and did it, I wouldn’t want the world to waste the opportunity by labeling his act as ragequitting. By all reports, Aaron was the rarest kind of noble, selfless character. Perhaps he sacrificed himself so that others wouldn’t have to.

To put it another way: if we think that there’s even a fragment of Aaron that died to show that open access to research was a cause worth dying for, as it may well be given how many lives might be saved by opening up research to poorer nations, then we would want to respect that by being inspired. However tragic the circumstances of his death.

Jacob at last coughed up his assessment of power. Dictators, he said, may have instrumental power but are not masters over themselves. Their needs are never truly satisfied. Socrates, on the other hand, had power that came from within: to bear the world, to bear suffering. He lived with dignity, not compromising what he believed in while resisting temptation, including the temptations of anger and negativity.

I asked Jacob who his heroes were. He mentioned Gandhi, Buddha, Jesus, Abraham, Martin Luther King Jr. “The great spiritual teachers.” (A number of whom were assassinated as a result of their work.) He said there were several rabbis who he thought were “transcendent.”

Jacob told me his personal dream was to become the kind of person who would be able live in a concentration camp during the Holocaust and still be a compassionate and loving consolation to others, and in so doing transform observing Nazi’s into peaceful men. In this imagined scenario, Jacob exposes to the Nazi soldier their own weakness: “I live in fear, but this person is so unafraid. So what am I?”

I felt I had to test him on this. Wasn’t there some trace of ego in wanting to be such a person? I asked if he had ever considered if he had a White Knight Complex.

“That’s one of my complexes!” he exclaimed, delighted. “No, I’ve never heard of it. But it sounds like the sort of thing I have! I’ll look it up!”

But your ego. Isn’t there some ego in wanting to be the one who converts the Nazis?

“So what? What’s the danger in that? That I won’t make it, or that I will?”

I tried all the critiques I could think of. Wouldn’t you be exploiting your position of power? Doesn’t that mean you imagine yourself as a savior, and should come down off your high horse? What if your perspective isn’t right, and you are forcing it on the Nazis?

It was Jacob’s turn to be skeptical. “You’re saying there’s something wrong with forcing my beliefs on the Nazis?”

I explained that I was trying to make an analogy. In my academic work I’ve been exposed to another “post-” discipline, post-colonialism, which critiques among other things the imposition of information technology on the Global South. Some people in discipline seem to fear that any movement of technical innovation from the rich West to what is problematically called “the developing world” will be a kind of imposition with an inherent “colonial impulse.” There is a legacy of imperialism to watch out for–a conquest rationalized as being good for conquered. “Civilizing” would be an operative, dangerous word.

Jacob pointed out that one way to think of this is a fear of the Shadow: the danger of thinking you’re doing good when you’re not. He suggested that a way to resolve that tension would be to develop ones power with the help of a mentor or community. A community can provide its members checks and balances, and an environment for supportive sharing.

But what prevents a community from insulating itself and become self-righteous? Seems like communities might have a lurking Shadow just as easily as individuals do.

Jacob’s answer, which I didn’t find entirely satisfactory, was that a community ought to be tuned into a higher source. And in the end, we have to trust that life is always self-correcting, even if it takes us more than one lifetime to correct ourselves. Jacob believes that there is ample evidence for reincarnation if you go out and look for it in people’s testimonials from near death experiences. He ran off a number of names of researchers: Brian Weiss, Eben Alexander, Ian Stevenson. If we fail in this life, maybe we learn from it and do better in another.

I don’t believe it. But maybe I just haven’t read the right stuff?

Earlier that day, Critch had been telling me that soon we will be able to upload our brains into simulations. He told me he was concerned that if people believe that there is a supernatural afterlife, then that might prevent us from making immortality a reality for us here and now.

Socrates also believed in the reincarnation of the soul. Learning, for Socrates, was a matter of remembering from past lives.

Maybe I’m the crazy one.

Jacob went into more detail about the background of his Guidance practice, which he attributes to The Oxford Group, a community of Christians experimenting with following the direct teachings of Jesus. Their Guidance practice evolved into something taken up by Alcoholic Anonymous, through which there’s evidence of its practical results on millions of people. The practice is more or less simply listening to ones own advice to oneself and following it. This has apparently had a transformative impact on many people’s lives.

(I should note that knowing that Guidance has been a successful strategy for people whose lives have really fallen apart gives me pause. I wonder if it might be too extreme a technique, or if exposure to it means that for some reason I should share the same kind of stigma as a dysfunctional alcoholic. Rationally, I know these concerns are silly.)

I asked Jacob why he thinks it works. He says that he believes that we’ve evolved or been designed (he’s noncommital on the point) to live much more in line with the divine that society teaches us. By relying on built-in assistance, we can live more serenely. Animals are not worried about the past or the future; humans too can learn to be less anxious, just doing what they need to do in the moment, including planning. (I’m not sure I follow the logic of this argument though it has plenty of intuitive appeal).

I asked: what about people in legitimately tough circumstances. What about their discomfort?

Jacob understood what I was getting at. He identified the line of thinking that blames people’s circumstances on their spiritual failings as a kind of spiritual trap.

Trying again to explain the success of Guidance, Jacob said: A lot of people as they develop get a sense for a need for meaning in their lives. Guidance opens you to “the source of meaning” (I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean). The content of Guidance (the words that come to one who practices it) are ones personal “connection to meaning”.

I asked him: What is meaning? Of the many voices that may speak when one opens oneself up to ones own mind, which ones are meaningful? And why would you identify any in particular as the source?

Jacob said that the most meaningful one was the lvoing, pure, unselfish, honest voice.

Ok, ok, I kept pushing: but why is THAT the most meaningful voice?

Jacob said that the people who take up the Guidance practice are those who were inspired by its affect on somebody else. My notes say he mentioned something about oxytocin, empathy, and compassion here.

I’m not the kind to give up an argument easily.

So, what about those that find meaning in the domination of others? I asked.

Jacob’s answer: If the source of meaning is transient, then you will suffer. If it is eternal, then it can continue to inspire you?

Aha! But what about the argument Nietzsche makes, for example in his last work The Will to Power. He claims that it is a depraved ideology that condemns life because it contains suffering. Rather, one should consider life holy enough to justify the monstrous amounts of suffering that come with it. Pain and discomfort are part of the package.

Jacob thought this was a reversal for me, that suddenly I was advocating indifference towards the suffering of others because, well, that’s life. I’m not sure what I think about that.

I tried another angle: I’ve been very influenced by Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity, a book on existentialist ethics that argues that the only consistent source of meaning for mortals is the project to liberate and empower others. I tried to live as best I could according to these ethics for several years, but would up burnt out and exhausted. I had to stop.

Jacob was pleased at this. “Oh, that’s what I’m trying to do with my life!” But, he pointed out, spiritual growth can be seen as a way of increasing ones capacity to do just that.

I was pretty satisfied with this. Existentialism, whether Nietzsche’s or de Beauvoir’s, is pretty intense. I can afford to chill out a bit.

Somehow, we changed the subject to how our working together had been going. I mentioned that since I had started doing weekly calls with Jacob, I had been doing more things to take care of myself or show care for other people or address my own disatisfcations.

He said “I just want to acknowledge that you’ve taken these actions of self-love and caring for the things and people you care about.” He asked what I thought of that.

I told him I thought it sounded formulaic, like part of a clinical program. Why bother acknowledging that stuff?

It was his turn to press me on something. He asked me why I felt strange being acknowledged for acting on self-love.

I told him that I was accustomed to doing things and moving on, and generally feel uncomfortable being congratulated. It seems immodest to practice self-love or to acknowledge it, or have it acknowledged. And I have suspicions about Jacob’s coaching; I feel like he would “acknowledge” anything, that it’s not genuine.

Do I feel the same way when other people acknowledge me? Jacob asked. Yes, often.

What would they have to do to let you know that they were genuinely happy for something about you?

It was a good question. I thought of a couple friends recently who have been doing and saying some really kind things to me lately in ways that seem almost out-of-the-blue. Certain very touching statements that weren’t called for at all, or statements of encouragement from somebody I haven’t been in touch with for a while. In these cases, I felt OK being acknowledged because I knew on some level that I had put special effort into the acknowledged actions or relationships.

Jacob wondered why I didn’t just accept the positive aspects of how people engaged with me more.

I told him that was an uncomfortable thought for me. I’m worried that if I just focus on the positive, I’ll start to think too highly of myself and become (more) arrogant.

Jacob said: I acknowledge that there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to be arrogant, and that that’s a sign that you aren’t.

Bah, I said. When you acknowledge that, it’s like you are pointing out that I’m going “Look at me, I’m so humble!”

Jacob suggested that this “responder” is demonstrating concern, care, and positive traits that many people don’t have.

We were caught in a loop. I didn’t look forward to writing any of this down in this blog post. It was part of its own problem.

We talked through this issue quite a bit, and Jacob assigned me homework: to do the Voice Dialog technique he had taught me the previous week to resolve these aspects of myself, the part that wants to be acknowledged and the part that wants to deny myself acknowledgement.

Ok. I scheduled a time to do the Voice Dialog.

Was there anything else I was concerned about? asked Jacob.

Yes. I told him what I’ve known for many weeks now: that all this spiritual guidance, all this intellectual stimulation, I was distracting myself from what I really needed to do, which was go to the dentist. I am afraid I can’t relax or just accept the positive parts of life because if I did, I would never go to the dentist.

What I really needed from a Spiritual Coach, I admitted, was somebody who would tell me to go to the dentist.

Ah.

Jacob told me to schedule an appointment with myself to make an appointment with a dentist. I scheduled it in right before the Voice Dialog.

On Tuesday, I voted, made a dentist appointment, and resolved my inner conflict between self esteem and humility (in the symbol combining stage, a gold medal and a wicker basket transformed into a bag of money). I feel great.

I have met Jacob before. He is childhood friends with Joel, one of my closest friends from college. Joel mentioned Jacob to me often, because we are both philosophically inclined. When I met Jacob the first time, he was studying in a yeshiva in Israel. He was visiting his home town in New Jersey.

That was in 2007. After a conversation with Joel and myself, he sent us the following email:

www.dovidgottlieb.com

see

living up to the truth

Over five years later, LinkedIn offered to send out contact invitations to everyone in Jacob’s contact list. I was intrigued by his choice of profession, checked out his website, and discovered his promotional deal. I inquired and passed the stage of free consultation. We’ve agreed: we’ll do a call weekly over three months, and for each meeting I will write a blog post tracking my spiritual progress. He envisions that this will result in a dramatic improvement to my well-being, a profound blooming of potential.

I harbor an intense ambivalence towards spirituality.

On the one hand, there is the tremendous emotional appeal to the belief in something greater than oneself, the belief that that greater thing cares about you personally, that one has access to its wisdom, that one can make inquiries and requests of it.

On the other hand, there is the possibility of all of that being delusional, and delusions lead to harm. Maybe belief in something greater leads people to neglect others who are not so great. Thinking that a God takes personal interest in you, or cares what you think, seems narcissistic. Talking to God seems schizophrenic.

Modern society as I’ve come to know it sees spirituality as complacency–an unjustified joy in a terrible world. It sees it as naivete–refusing to see what dangers may be coming around the corner. It’s reactionary, because spiritual institutions are responsible maintaining conservative norms. It’s a form of stupidity, because it means believing in things for no good reason.

This ambivalence has been a part of my most personal journaling for most of my thinking life. It is a source of shame for me, because I see spirituality as a temptation and a weakness. I am constantly sneaking towards it to get another glimpse at it, then backing away with new ways or reasons to challenge it. Sometimes it’s taken hold of me like a fever, and I’ve tried to shake it off with some kind of hardly veiled self-expression.

There’s a part of me that sees this new series of encounters with Jacob as another step in this process. In my life I’ve found that it is always worthwhile–whether for insight or entertainment or intellectual practice–to engage deeply with religious or spiritual people. These conversations have shaped me over time, but I try to balance them with philosophical reading and life experience. I have at times played the role of secular evangelist.

What may be different about this experience is that by the nature of our agreement, I need to write blog posts for Jacob. I have no more excuses for why I can’t be open to the world, and under my real name, about my inner struggles with this subject. I will have no choice but to defragment myself.

An example of how this is working: whenever I write something very personal and for the public, I have to confront a fear of my own narcissism or desire for attention. Who am I to write this thing? Often, I write what I imagine to be insufferably lofty or, as my sister once called me, abstruse stuff. However therapeutic the experience of writing may be for me, and motivating publishing writing is for me, I am wary that it is all a function of an exaggerated sense of self-importance.

Believing that I am writing these posts as a favor to Jacob relieves me of this concern, and lets me do something that I’ve wanted to do anyway, which is resolve my inner inconsistencies around spirituality.

My concerns about my own exaggerated sense of self-importance paled once I got a feedback email from Jacob, who, as we had discussed, had prayed for guidance on my behalf and written down the words that came to him. He writes:

Here is Guidance listened for with you in mind. You can read more about this process on my website. Basically I’m going to sit and just listen and receive whatever words come, as if God is speaking now to you and to me, through these words.

My son.
My beautiful child.
You are perfect.
And I love you.
This experience will rock your world.
If you let it.
Let it.
Let go.
Smile.
Laugh.
You will soften through this process.
Like a baby’s tummy.
You are so lovable.
And others will see this.
And see that they are so lovable as well.
This improves health, and life in all areas.
You will see.
See how God has a sense of humor.
This is not how Jacob usually writes guidance.
Every time is different, unique, personalized.
You are bringing something new into the world by working together.
Rejoice and give thanks.
I am here. I will see you at the finish line.
I am the race.
I am the shin-splints.
I am all.
Surrender to Me.
And laugh.

These are such lovely words. I find myself quite moved by them.

However, my critical faculties have kicked in. I would like to write more about the nature of prayer as it’s something I’ve wrestled with in my life, but I would like to point out from the get go all the “problematic” aspects of this Guidance.

• Jacob basically talked to himself for ten minutes and typed this out, believing himself to be the mouthpiece of God. Isn’t that hubris? Is it insane?
• I’m not perfect. I have several flaws. I can start enumerating them, but that would get depressing.
• Being encouraged to “let [this]” experience “rock my world” is an injunction to let my guard down, which is of course the first step to being brainwashed.
  • I want to mention here that I fully believe that if I do just let go and surrender to this experience, I will be persuaded by it and have a dramatic blooming in my well-being. Jacob is wonderfully compassionate and gives off an aura of egolessness. I believe I am the kind of person who is susceptible to spiritual conversion. I have, at other times in my life, been rather intensely religious in my own way. I know that I am in many ways free to determine the outcome of this spiritual journey (I am something of an existentialist). The question is what to do with that freedom.
• A baby’s tummy? Jacob has a small child so I guess this is a more salient metaphor for him.
• “See how God has a sense of humor.” This is my favorite line, because a common thread in my theistic life (mostly past with occasional lapses) is about the pranks being played on me by Higher Powers. I wonder if this is another joke, and if so who it’s being played on, Jacob or myself (or both). I am conscious that part of my intention of experiencing this “coaching” is mischievous (though another part is completely sincere). It would be an honor to serve God’s mischief, if there is a God.
• “Surrender to Me.” I want to admit that there is something very chilling to me about this line. I am deeply skeptical of any being that wants my unconditional surrender. I have made a good life for myself challenging anything that asks me to surrender. Before reconciling myself to something like this, I need to know exactly what I am surrendering to and what that surrender entails.

I have full confidence that some positive result will come of this encounter, for my own reasons. I believe very strongly that by encountering people who think differently from ourselves and working out our differences through dialog, we come to a greater common understanding of the world. I think my PhD research will be about this topic, in some way. Jacob has explained that he is interested in a universal spirituality, finding principles that are common to all religions and are consistent with a scientific understanding of the world. Our goals, I think, are deeply compatible.

I am looking forward to the synthesis of our views, whatever it turns out to be.

SOCRATES: Then begin again and answer: What is virtue, according to you and your friend?

MENON: Well now, my dear Socrates, you are just like what I always heard before I met you: always puzzled yourself and puzzling everybody else. And now you seem to me to be a regular wizard, you dose me with drugs and bewitch me with charms and spells, and drown me in puzzledom. I’ll tell you just what you are like, if you will forgive a little jest: your looks and the rest of you are exactly like a flatfish and you sting like this stingray–only go near and touch one of those fish and you go numb, and that is the sort of thing you seem to have done to me. Really and truly, my soul is numb and my mouth is numb, and what to answer you I do not know. Yet I have a thousand times made long speeches about virtue, before many a large audience, and good speeches, too, as I was convinced; but now I have not a word to say at all as to what it is. I must say you are wise not to sail away or travel abroad; for if you did this as a foreigner in a foreign city, you would probably be run in for a wizard.

SOCRATES: You are a young rogue, Menon, and you almost took me in.

MENON: How, Socrates?

SOCRATES: I know why you made that comparison of me.

MENON: Why, do you think?

SOCRATES: That I might make another of you¹. I know this–that all the famous beauties love being put into comparisons; it pays them, you see, for comparisons of the beautiful are beautiful, I think; but I will not do it with you in return. Well, if this stingray is numb itself as well as making others numb, I am like it; if not, I am not. For I am not clear-headed myself when I make others puzzled, but am as puzzled as puzzled can be, and thus I make others puzzled too. So now, what virtue is I do not know; but you knew, perhaps, before you touched me, although now you resemble one who does not know. All the same, I wish to investigate, with your help, that we may both try to find out what it is.

MENON: And how will you try to find out something, Socrates, when you have no notion at all what it is? Will you lay out before us a thing you don’t know, then try to find it? Or, if at best you meet it by chance, how will you know this is that which you did not know?

SOCRATES: I understand what you wish to say, Menon. You look on this as a piece of chop-logic, don’t you see, as if a man cannot try to find either what he knows or what he does not know. Of course he would never try to find what he knows, because he knows it, and in that case he needs no trying to find; or what he does not know, because he does not know what he will try to find.

MENON: Then you don’t think that is a good argument, Socrates?

SOCRATES: Not I.

¹ The editor’s footnote here is “A favourite game in society.”

Several people whose opinions I respect have stated rather firmly that they don’t see why anybody would pursue a PhD. Job prospects are terrible. Industry will always be ahead in technology. There’s the opportunity cost of lost pay and time spent climbing a more robust career hierarchy.

Nevertheless, PhD students around me, the happy ones at least, seem passionate about what they study. They believe themselves to have found a niche that needs, for personal or social reasons, further exploration or illumination. The opportunity for authenticity outweighs the cost of lost luxury.

So the deepest anxiety for me is one of irrelevance. I’ve been afforded the chance to live passionately and bet my life on creativity, intelligence, hard work. But what if it amounts to nothing? We are drowning in cultural excess. What good is one more meme launderer?

A return to first principles is in order: What is knowledge? What is learning? What is discovery? What is progress? What is innovation? Given three years to “research” something, what guidelines prevent it from being a waste of time for me and everyone who I distract along the way?

Paradoxically, these questions are among the most navel-gazing and abstruse.

But so are all questions of spiritual or existential import. A permanent return to them is reserved for a very select caste. A temporary return is a purification rite. By studying and meditating on the questions, one cleanses and clarifies the mind. The strongest tools are made from diamonds found close to the brain’s bedrock.

Then, before getting lost forever in those caves, one returns to the surface to work.

I’m proud of the work I did between college and the beginning of my graduate education. Did an indulgence in philosophical thought prior and during guide that work? Absolutely. My dedication to what we were working on, my “management style”, my approach to solving problems. I believe that my mistakes and failures were due to the limits or unraveling of my philosophical comprehension of what was going on around me. (Though it would be just as easy to say that “philosophical comprehension” is epiphenomenal to much more mundane realities. Perhaps I only see things so abstractly because of a mental defect. The confrontation with this possibility, too, is (again paradoxically) a reason for deepened inquiry.)

It could all be a terrible mistake. What gives me small confidence is that wise people have said that everything has its season. It’s easy to slip from that to the thought that now is the season for this, almost just because it is so. That is the kind of optimism I was on guard against when I lived in New York and have been adapting to since moving to Berkeley.

A middle ground: now is the season for this because I make it so. The meaning of lifting a hammer is not contained in itself but in the complete movement of which it is a part–the striking of the nail, the building of the house, the living of ones life or another’s life in that house. For the sake of all of that, one must sometimes lift the hammer away from the nail, the house, the life in the house.

Most likely, if you look for that solution, there is somebody working on that project already. We are in that kind of world. Just talking about a problem openly is likely to stir up energy aimed at solving it.

So maybe we can stop worrying so much. The solutions are out there. Often, it takes time for them to reach us. Like it takes time for the light from stars to reach us.

We can choose to dwell on those problems, our limitations, our finiteness. We can sit in that dismay. Or we can strive towards the dim lights, open our eyes. Try to be more creative and more receptive in how we engage with these positive aspects of life, and pass what we are able to gather on to others.

William James coined the term meliorism for the philosophy that we shouldn’t idle either in despair or hope, but that we can believe in progress and work to make things better. It’s true that it can be difficult to live without guarantees. But there is maybe a bliss in swimming upstream to the source, seeking the next highest level. Since there are so many people doing that, it is not a lonely thing to do at all. In fact, it should get more crowded the more people’s paths converge.

There are a lot of ways to think about that. You could sit and think about whether it would bother you if you were to suddenly die, just now. “I wouldn’t mind it much, because I would be dead” is a pragmatic answer.

So, Andres argues, perhaps its better to imagine the possibility that you might be maimed brutally. You could lose a leg. Or both legs. Or, I would add, you hands. Or parts of your brain. By “a truck you didn’t see coming” (Andres’ example).

The point is not so much the morbidity of the original thought but the snapping-into-focus that comes from its careful consideration. Well, if I could die tomorrow, what am I doing right now?

Oh Mother, please relieve my foolish pride
I’m choking in the river that’s my mirror
remind me that true virtues lie inside
simplicity the thing to make them clearer

Oh Sister, teach me to always be kind
and call me out for selfishness and envy
this fog of jealousy will make me blind
if bitterness of lonely heart don’t end me

And Brother, hold me to my every vow
(a man’s commands are naught if he’s a liar)
and when I’m fucking up please tell me how
while fending off my cowardice with fire

For if I’m very lucky then one day you’ll be my child
and I want so very badly to deserve you
if maniacs and bureaucrats are undoing the world
through dedicated acts we may preserve you

Big predators eat the weak of grazing herbivores. Scavengers chew those bones. Hiding rodents gather seeds until snatched by hawks. Worms blissfully migrate through the mulch; shrubs burst from their excrement.

Consider the ecosystem of which humanity is a part.

Some people build towers. Others farm and sell their produce to lawyers who battle over the definition of justice so that soldiers will act in such and such a way. All this is to ensure that the organism that is the state will have regular bowel movements and breathe easily and be fed despite its own complex environment: other states. States guarding their burrows with claws. States gathering into herds and packs. States hearing music played by prophets that make them rabid or docile. States who sell their their voices for food like minstrels.

There are men like ants who build hives to dig for iron. Men like spiders to weave webs to catch wanderers. Men like beavers to dam rivers. Men like proteins that spin strands of chemicals into new strands of chemicals. Chemicals made into laws or played as music in the courts of lions or passed to new enzymes to form the membrane of a spore. Spores that launch into the breeze, latch onto a dead tree, and grow from that richness of decay into a pale crust of life, inert until harvested and cooked in a broth by a historian or a pharmaceutical company or an oil rig.

When we conceive of ourselves apart from all of this, no wonder we are so often disappointed. We are blessed to be part of a wondrous Nature.

I have recently received joint approval from the UC-Berkeley Committee on the Protection of Human Subjects and the Graduate Division for our Nemesis relationship.

This is a relief. It’s been a restless fortnight since our last Thirsty Thursday encounter, when you scandalized me with your ideological confessions. Naively, I came to the School of Information expecting a research utopia. But lo! Snakes in Eden!

I refer of course to the three pillars on which you declared your research to rest: positivism, postmodernism, and statism.

• “Positivism is a philosophical approach, theory, or system based on the view that in the social, as well as in the natural sciences, sense experiences and their logical and mathematical treatment are the exclusive source of all worthwhile information.” [W] [SEP]
• “Postmodernism is a philosophical movement away from the viewpoint of modernism. More specifically it is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the problem of objective truth and inherent suspicion towards global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. It involves the belief that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs, as they are subject to change inherent to time and place.” [W] [SEP]
• “Statism is a term usually describing a political philosophy, whether of the right or the left, that emphasises the role of the state in politics or supports the use of the state to achieve economic, military or social goals.” [W]

Could there be a more dastardly trifecta? Positivism, long the secret handshake of the hard sciences, sneaks its way into the social sciences to allow it to shirk responsibility for social norms. It’s redeeming quality is its devotion to methodological rigor, which you undercut with postmodernism! What’s left are bare facts to be consumed by self-legitimizing cliques of academic speculation. Statism all but follows, for what is the postmodern state but the amalgamation of institutions that uphold the status quo? Bare facts with no critical teeth are but raw data to be consumed by engines of instrumental rationality, fodder for power. History churns at a standstill, with you, Maestro, victoriously expert.

It is brilliant. You have won.

But what has been lost along the way? Shouldn’t we, with the opportunities afforded to us by UC Berkeley School of Information, aspire to more?

First, should our work not engage the passions? Should it not transcend “just the facts, ma’am” toward human potency? For this, our inquiry requires components forbidden by positivism. It must cross the Rubicon between the false dichotomy of facts and values. It must recite narratives and, when challenged, respond with legitimizing metanarrative. It must engage critically with itself until it achieves consciousness. We must go beyond the mere exposition of the facts of sensation (data) and its methodological corollary, the totalization of the library sciences through hegemonic abstraction.

Second, we should aspire to truth. Though this aspiration should go without saying in an enterprise of knowledge-production, as linked as ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ are, it nevertheless meets with resistance. Operationally, what is at stake is the territorial waters within our archipelago of academic disciplines. Is it a neutral, placid trading zone, or is it a battlefield? In the first case, interdisciplinary work is merely eccentric, at best a form of seasteading wherein a few libertarians can smugly bear arms on a big boat. The alternative is that interdisciplinary work is cross-disciplinary invasion. With survival at stake, there is common ground for consensus and truth-discovery. The iSchool, situated as it is at the nexus of disciplinary information flows, is well suited for such discourse. We should strive for synthesis, not schizophrenia.

The first point is directed toward our individual research. The second toward our research community. The third aims at the world at large: our research should be radical, if not anarchist. The political reality of our time is the failure of the state and the use of information technology in its transformation. As a school, we ought to embrace the agenda of technical disruption of the state.

As these are issues of critical importance for the intellectual identity of the iSchool, I have no choice but to throw down the gauntlet. Maestro, I challenge you to a duel.

Or, rather, a series of debates, one on each of these topics. Time and place decided by eD. Judged by a self-selected panel of faculty and fellow students. Format to be determined.

I await your response.

Nemesisticly yours,

Sebastian Benthall, PhD (student)

Jetsam is part of a ship, its equipment, or its cargo that is purposefully cast overboard or jettisoned to lighten the load in time of distress and that sinks or is washed ashore.

I am moving across the country from New York City to Berkeley, California in August. So I need to throw things away.

I have a lot of pads of paper with notes on them. Some of them are from creative brainstorms. Others are attempts to think through and sort out my life, which has been stressful and confusing in the past couple of years.

I’m loathe to throw these away, since they seemed so important at the time and they are some of the truest record of who I was and am. Maybe some other time in a similar place in life I can look back on them and learn from my own past? Or maybe some descendant will one day scrape through digital archives and be curious about the anxieties of an early 21st century American?

Who am I kidding? These anxieties are some of the best documented and best preserved in history. I suppose there is always something to be said for adding to the available data on the subject.

Besides, I have already decided on this course of action. The preceding is a rationalization to cope with the myriad doubts that accompany such an act of…what sort of act is it? It is a way to cheat death, the little death that is permanent loss of a piece of oneself. Just as we can live on past death in the hearts of those that love and remember us, we are at a stage of society where we can live on past our death and indeed preserve our own youth in vast distributed memory banks.

Whether there is any permanence to such an extension of life remains to be seen. Perhaps our information that survives us will lurk in ghostly irrelevance. Maybe it will remain real through its minute influence on the vast digital/technological system to which we surrender more and more of the chores of life. Decomposed into topsoil for the new generation of ideas. Or maybe an apocalypse will cause a Judgment Day when only the worthy information is preserved or when nothing is preserved at all.

I’ve outpaced myself. What I originally set out to do has been sabotaged by my over-thinking of it. What remains is stubbornness, irony, absurdity, inquiry, and a small measure of craftiness.

From the notes:

I am losing people. Why? Because I am locked into a pattern.

What I need is a disciplined lack of regularity (noise).

Narrative is a High Level Data Structure

was the first thing I read this morning. It was a text message that Ethan Jucovy had sent the night before.

“Or…is data a high level narrative structure?” I responded, pleased with myself for having found something to say on the topic at 7:14 am. I was preoccupied with the question for most of the early morning before I left my apartment to go to work.

So you can imagine my joy when I bumped into Ethan on the Park Place platform of the Franklin Avenue Shuttle.

We discussed the matter. In short order it was clear that Ethan’s original comment had depth deserving of a more careful response than my cheeky one a few hours earlier.

To sum up, his contention was this: he had used to believe that narratives were primarily a way of packaging a single idea, or what he sometimes calls “conceptual atoms”. But he has recently thought that they may be data structures, like stacks and queues.

Data structures are designed to optimize certain kinds of data input and access. So what kind of operations are narratives optimized for? Ethan had struggled with these questions and hypothesized that the narrative structure might be defined by a geometric braiding of ideas.

At this point I should have admitted that I didn’t fully understand what he meant by braiding. But I was already suspicious of the contention that narratives could be defined in such geometric terms.

We debated the topic for the duration of the subway ride. At one point, we were interrupted by a panhandler who announced:

I am homeless veteran. I came home with post-traumatic stress disorder. I have been waiting on the results of a specialized treatment. I don’t know why its taken this long, but it has. I am out of money and haven’t eaten in two days. If any of you could spare an apple, a bottle of water, a quarter, a dime, a penny, I would deeply appreciate it. I hope you will find that charity or love of our country in our hearts, and blessed you all.

I asked Ethan what he thought the constituent ideas of that narrative were, and how they were arranged. He hesitated, then said that the difficulty in extracting the entangled constituent ideas from such a story was precisely why he had proposed the braid structure. The most compelling Art, he claimed, expressed just one idea–the idea of the work of art itself. So a good narrative was, in this way, like good music.

We arrived at my stop on Canal Street. I asked him to hold the thought.

Later, we would continue the discussion on IRC:

<sbenthall> ejucovy: so, what I was going to say before being so rudely interrupted by arriving at my stop was that I was concerned that that description of what makes a narrative compelling wouldn’t generalize culturally

He agreed and said he had the same reservations, and began to refine the definitions of his terms. But as we discussed them, they showed themselves to be increasingly entangled. This was frustrating because it took the discussion away from the motivation behind our interest in narratives, which, between the two of us, were threefold:

• Interest in the potential for technology to capture and communicate the processes implicit in the creation of various forms of human expression
• The conviction that the establishment of narrative is essential for building political movements (or more generally, essential for broadcasting actionable ideas)
• Curiosity about the role of narrative in knowledge legitimization

Ethan pointed out that the discussion was getting lost and that we needed to regroup. He asked how we should proceed. I hemmed and hawed, saying that it depended on what we were trying to accomplish in the first place. But eventually I came around to the conclusion that we should begin to accumulate examples of narratives in order to provide a data set against we could test any proposed definition of narrative. I with the follow examples:

But I surprised myself when I proposed as an example the following sequence of words in quotation marks:

“There once was a small boy named Peru who was fond of foreign languages. He had learned about five or six before he was hit by a bus. His gravestone read, ‘He never learned Spanish.”

And suddenly my way of looking at the problem changed radically.

What does the narrator in the preceding narrative mean when he concludes cryptically that his “way of looking at the problem changed radically”?

Luckily, I am that narrator and can explain everything.

If one wants to go about identifying the necessary structure of a narrative, then the best place to start is with concrete examples and look for parsimonious hypotheses that accommodate them. This is the methodology that linguistic syntacticians use to derived models of formal syntax. In retrospect it seems like a no-brainer to consider narrative to be a linguistic phenomenon and treat it as such.

I am sure that just such a sociolinguistic analysis has been done already. But rather than looking those up (because what fun would that be?), we can already draw substantive conclusions from the narrative provided in the first half of this post.

First, and most obviously, the narrative structure integrates well with other data structure. The above narrative has, nested within it, several other narratives as well as more formal structures such as the list structure and the tabular structure.

Moreover, the narrative structure nests easily into non-narrative forms, such as this expository post on the nature of narrative structure.

This method is especially informative when applied to extreme cases, such as the minimal narrative. For example, the following:

I met a girl yesterday. I got her number.

Can this be further decomposed into narratives? Does “I met a girl yesterday” suffice? Or is some introducing and easing of import or tension necessary for mere statements of fact to combine into narratives?

We can also use this method to find counterexamples that break the structure of narratives (and the structures within which they are embedded) to test their limits. Because Peru’s grave was secretly empty; he had been stolen from the hospital and raised in Argentina, where he learned Spanish after all.

To conclude, I’d like to provide another example that demonstrates another interesting feature of narrative structure: the possibility of a sequel.

I rambled on in IRC about possible examples on narratives until it was clear that I had killed the conversation. All for the best, perhaps, because there was work to do. By the time I came home and consumed my burrito from Taqueria De Los Muertos, I was thoroughly distracted by more urgent matters.

But shortly after dinner I found myself pacing, unable to stop puzzling over the conversation of the day.

I invited Ethan to go on a walk with me, but he did not answer. Perhaps he knew my intentions and had grown bored of the subject. Or perhaps he knew, precognitively, that it was about to rain.

Plodding through the drizzle down Eastern Parkway, I began to plot this very post as a structural knot for him to untie, should he accept my methodological proposal.

So ends the story of my day.