Zen and the Art of Archery.

I read this book a long time ago and I have returned to it.

Zen and the Art of Archery is still, for its time, an excellent description of an occidental immersing himself into the cultural and philosophical depths of Asia. When Herrigel visited Japan, he was unique, for there were not too many occidentals who ventured to Japan,nor were there too many who had the open mind or courage to enter into Asian art forms with guileless curiosity. 

As a result, his account of his lessons with the master and his experience is about as pure as possible. But, he did still carry the Occidental ideas on learning, and training in an martial art. He was a skilled pistol shooter by his account so some of what his personal accounts were colored by that part of his makeup. His account though is relatively free of overt western arrogance and preconceived notions.

In the time that has elapsed between my first reading of this book and now, I have been changed by my own readings and prejudices. What Herrigel was trying to convey in this book, the modern writers call "flow", a term coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. A state of being that conforms somewhat to what people used to call being in the zone, or the unconscious state of being completely comfortable with ones surroundings and being at such a heightened state of enhanced performance that performance is simple and unencumbered by the burden of thought. Indeed, the mind is completely unmoored from one's being, some have compared this to be a state of unconscious consciousness.

Ed Slingerland wrote about this in his book Trying Not To Try, a personal favorite. His concept of "flow" comes from Chinese philosophy, and it is called "wu-wei". There is indeed some differences between Slingerland's Chinese philosophy of Confucianism and Daoism versus Herrigel's Zen Buddhism. The Chinese school is much more formalized and more structured, while the Japanese is more mystical and less structured. Regardless of the formalism in their philosophy, the ideas are almost identical, different sides of the same coin. 

The drawback for me is that Herrigel's account is showing its age, the accounts are somewhat naive and full of wonder at the vastly different turns of the mind that the master and other practitioners of archery practice versus his own Occidental mind. 

I suppose I may be termed jaded after my own readings but Herrigel's account still carries a certain level of wonder as I read through it for the second time. It is indeed an excellent account of an Occidental's foray into the, for its time, mystery and mythical state of the Asian mind. It is still very worthwhile to read this short book and it is still very worthy of its place in the references on learning.

Leaving Space For the Divine

I was listening to Radio 360 this past Saturday when I heard an exchange between Tavi Gevinson and Ben Wishaw. The discussion about acting and trying too hard in acting; Whishaw was making a point about trying too hard, being too disciplined and leaving little to chance. He quoted Jane Campion, quoting her as saying: “making space for the divine”. Gevinson also talked about reading the phrase: “Leaving room for the divine” from The Argonaut.

In the context of their conversation, they were talking about not being too regimented, that the idea of acting is an exercise in creation, reacting to and allowing the other performers to act and in being spontanepus; as Gevinson remarked: “You don’t want to end up acting like robots.” In other words, “leaving room for the divine means to leave room for the spontaneous, the moment of dealing with the unknown, whether the spontaneity is due to something mundane, i.e. the situation, or whether the spontaneity is due to impulse.

This got me thinking about the meaning of the particular phrase in other contexts and in a more general way.

“Leaving room for the divine” means two things: one involves how we act or react and the second is how we view our reality. In the former meaning, the sole word that comes to mind in spontaneity; while the second meaning, the world is random.

The first context, making space for the divine, means to allow the spontaneous to happen, by itself and in its own time, without undue pressure and rigorousness. This means to be in a state of wu-wei, a concept that the Chinese Daoists and Buddhists have cultivated: living in the moment and and Trying Not To Try as Ed Slingerland so eloquently describes in his book of the same name. http://eslingerland.arts.ubc.ca/tryingnottotry/.

It is a real conundrum, trying to not try, cultivating the spontaneous while not trying because trying to be spontaneous is not spontaneous.

In the second context, “leaving room for the divine” leads me to think in terms of the random, the unmodeled, the unpredictable and the unknown.

We, living in modern society as worker bees toiling in the technology and science infused ethos have been inculcated in the idea that humans are so knowledgeable of our world that our sphere influence are so vast that  our world is deterministic, that leaving nothing to chance is an attainable if not an already organic state of reality. We believe that there are so much already known that the possibility of the unknown and the random entering into our reality is not only undesirable but impossible.

Dr. W. Edward Deming, the total quality and Statistical Process Control (SPC) expert recognized our hubris and pointed this out in his book Out of the Crisis: “the most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable” in response to the American management’s hue and cry for management by results, pointing out that the most powerful numbers are those that we cannot possibly measure.

Yet, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb so forcefully pointed out in his Incerto series of books that not only is randomness a reality, it is inevitable. Moreover, the more we disregard randomness, the more we will inevitably suffer from our intentions to ignore the random. http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/INO/incerto

I find the link between spontaneity and the random very hopeful, inspirational, and invigorating.