CRAFTING RIDDLES

July 10th, 2019

Einstein once said “we cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.”

The cognitive move that he’s suggesting is termed lateral thinking.

If rational thinking is often visualized as a step by step process, each step giving rise to the next, in a sequential order like stepping stones, then lateral thinking would be the equivalent of taking a right turn and swimming off into unknown territory.  To echo Einstein, it is the ability to abandon the train of thought in which a problem is created in order to approach the matter from a radically different angle.

The word problem is appropriately a bit… problematic in this sense.  Problems can perpetuate, like a sort of static quo.  We think of problems like stubborn, hard-to-move realities, which do not lend well to the discovery of their solution.

We can ask: what is the first step in order to solve a problem?

This question actually represents – recursively – the first step to solving any given problem.

It is a micro problem, and what it reveals is the connection between problems and questions.

Problems can be reworded as questions, and often the solution to a problem is dependent on rephrasing the problem into the appropriate question.  We generally don’t give much thought to the art and practice of forming questions, but this is the underlying practice that creates a foundation of creativity in nearly all fields.

We are always only a single question away from thinking in a much better direction.

Riddles, present one of the juiciest examples of question forming.  The solution to many riddles often depends on some alternate lateral interpretation of some key piece of information.

Take for example this short riddle:

Say my name and I disappear.  Who am I?

Finding the answer depends on reinterpreting the subject of the riddle and realizing that the ‘name’ is not a person at all, but a thing.  We can reword the riddle and see that it’s perhaps easier to solve.

What ceases to exist while we are speaking?

The questions have the same answer, but they reframe the problem differently.  We can rephrase the question again and see if the solution becomes even more obvious:

What is present while we are not talking but suddenly doesn’t exist once we start talking and is therefore probably like the opposite of talking?

In this way, rephrasing problems as questions and then rephrasing those question can actually allow us to close in on an answer, so much so that the rephrased questions begin to describe the solution.

Solving problems, is in many ways dependent on the art of crafting riddles, or simply put, asking better questions.

A FRIEND FOREVER

July 9th, 2019

Loneliness can seem somewhat paradoxical when considered in one’s own company.  The sentiment seems to call into mind an idea of there always being two people in a person. Our simple ability to reflect on our own thoughts and emotions in real time generates enough of a remove to at least create a helpful illusion.

In the meditation practice of Metta, one is directed to think of another person with loving-kindness and wish them free of suffering and hope that they experience fulfillment and joy.  This practice is often then redirected to take one’s own self as the object of Metta.  To wish one’s self well as we might wish a good friend well.

For those who are often very hard on themselves, this can be a difficult task that can easily produce remorse.  This common tendency begs a larger question: why do we not seek to build a friendship with ourselves?

It’s not uncommon for a person to be self-sacrificing to a fault, giving to a point where they are incurring detriment.  One way to think about this a little more clearly is to imagine a person giving to a friend at the expense of another friend who is loved and cherished equally.  The situation makes no sense.  What we are best off to seek is the win-winwhere we can give at no detriment, because the person who is self-sacrificing to a fault ultimately harms those relationships in the long-term when the cost is more apparent.

More importantly, if we investigate the mind closely enough, it’s quite difficult to find the person we think we are.  If this seems confusing, we can contemplate this question:

Can you locate the source of your attention that allows you to read and understand this sentence?

Or rather,

can your attention pay attention to itself?

. . . not really. 

It’s a bit like trying to use a camera to take a picture of the very same camera without the use of a mirror.  It’s simply impossible to point the camera at itself.

We are, in a sense, constantly witnessing who we’ve turned out to be.  We witness thoughts arise, we do not predict them, for to try and predict a thought is to actually have it.

Reflecting on one’s own self in this way, the little separation can help foster a sense of good will, in the same way it’s easy to foster good will towards others.

At the very least, at the end of the day, you’re stuck with yourself.

or, we can look at it differently:

You will always have your own company.  In light of that, it’s probably best to make a good friend.

MONEY MOUTH

July 8th, 2019

Opinions, we dispense with freely.  We do so as though we are handing out good deeds, advice to be heeded, benefited from.  We often phrase these opinions in the manner of directives.  This is how people shouldlook at things, understand things, do things.

But like Priorities, what we say is often not in accord with what we do.

The verbal smorgasbord that we constantly issue is in many ways its own animal, and an emotional one at that, one not totally in step with the actions we take.

The old aphorism “actions speak louder than words”

is only true because words so often cease to say anything that amounts to substance.  Action, as a comparison, only seems more truthful or powerful because action is itself the manifestation of it’s own substance.

That being said, words can be just as substantial as actions.  It’s a rare and worthy person whose words have as much substance as their actions.  This has far more to do with a careful curation of one’s words than it has to do with being a person of tremendous and varied action.

There exists another aphorism that echoes the previous one about actions and words, but it hits at the heart of one’s ability or inability to be more careful with our words so that they might meet our actions more truly.

Put your money where your mouth is.

This is most often used when a person sings the praises of something they might buy or support financially.  It’s a directive that says don’t allow your actions, or lack of actions speak louder than your words. 

Or to phrase it another way:

Don’t let your actions betray the meaning or your words.  Live up to your language.

This is an incredibly difficult symmetry to create in one’s own person.

One way to think about it a little differently is to price it out with a thought experiment.

Imagine if every sentence spoken had a price tag associated with it.

Let’s say $10 per sentence for starters.

Anything uttered that we do take action on, we get our money back, no matter the outcome of our efforts.  Total failure is fine.

No effort whatsoever to live up to our word results in a total loss of money.

And conscious lies double the charge and the money is totally lost.

This sounds pretty ruthless, but just for a moment, imagine what the world would look like.

The first thought is that the world would turn into a quiet, near silent place overnight.

But how realistic is that?  The urge for self-expression far outweighs something as ridiculous as sentences that have a cost.

If anything, it’s easier to imagine a world that is suddenly far more thoughtful about what is said.

There is one macro-example that applies here that might at first seem an odd match to this discussion:

Nuclear Weapons.

Incredibly, These apocalyptic weapons have not been aggressively used since the conclusion of WWII.  While many like to concentrate on how close we perpetually are to some catastrophic event involving these weapons, the nearly 80 years that we’ve stacked up without using them is possibly a tribute to a rarely witnessed aspect of human nature, simply put:

when the cost is high enough, we behave. 

To invoke the example on a more individual level, we can imagine some horror movie villain attaching some sort of fatal shock collar to a person, the catch being it activates if they raise their voice to a loved one. 

If our lives depended on the equanimity and civility of our conversation, would we be so quick to anger and frustration? Faced with such high costs, chances are we’d change quick.  Just as the world has continually de-escalated the size and magnitude of violent wars since WWII.  This isn’t to say that wars have totally vanished, no, not at all.  But nothing even near the scale of a World War has existed.

Thing is, we already pay a higher price than any cash that might leak from our pockets when our words fail to match what we do.  It’s not as obvious, in-your-face, but subtler, steeper.  The cost is our very own self.  That sense of a self that we all carry through the world: it’s impossible to find behind our very own eyes, and yet we can see it exist through our actions, by the authenticity through which we endeavor to match the machinations of a mouth to the attempts of our ability.  The lazier and more careless we are with that endeavor, the more we cease to be a real part of the world.

To grasp a place in this world, we need only try to improve.  We need only be a little more thoughtful about our words each time, and we need only be a little more effortful with our actions in compliance with what we’ve heard ourselves say. 

Just a little more each time allows a trend to form and compound.  And slowly, we improve.

This episode references Episode 10: Priorities

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: CONSISTENCY

July 7th, 2019

Lucilius took a seat on a large boulder to look back on the progress he’d made, but a haze of grey erased his view.  Low clouds had rolled into the valley, covering the tremendous distance he’d walked over the past several days.  The ground, now rocky and gravel merely faded a few hundred feet below where Lucilius sat. 

He drank from a canteen and watched as the cloud rose higher, and higher.  The summit he was trekking towards was still another half a day away, and the rising cloud would make night fall quicker.  He capped his canteen and turned to continue on and find a good place to make camp.

The white mist rose up around him, making all the ground around him fade out towards nothing but white.  He kept his eyes to the ground just before him, watching his boots take step after step.  He paused to look around, seeing nothing, but knowing the way from the slope. He continued on, watching each step, one after another.  Time began to blur into a single moment, repeating, over and over.  With the cloud blocking his view, his whole sense of the situation narrowed, and he began to wonder if he was indeed trapped in a loop of some kind.  He kept on, noticing his breath in rhythm with the march of his step, and below the breath he began to sense the beat of his heart, all of it in a slow roll, repeating. Where many might find the trudge boring, Lucilius found himself falling into a sort of trance, meditating on the gift of a simple moment that seemed to repeat with no novelty.  Each time his mind wandered off to some distant worry or wonder, he quickly saw his boots again and the whole moment rolled him once more and again.

As the light of day began to fade, Lucilius finally decided to make camp.  Pleasantly tired from the long day, he decided to skip dinner and go straight to sleep, making a cocoon of his sleeping bag.

The next morning, when Lucilius awoke, he opened his tent to find that the clouds from the night before had vanished and he was surprised to find that he’d camped nearly on the summit.

He looked back down the mountain and down into the valley, amazed how all those blind steps had added up.

THE MIND'S PANIC ROOM

July 6th, 2019

A panic room is a concealed and secure room that exists within a house.  It is a way to safely hide when leaving the house is not possible.

Now, if we think of the mind in these terms, it’s easy to see that the mind is a house that we can never leave.  We are trapped in our own mind, along with all manner of terrible things we might imagine in order to torture ourselves.

But, as with something like meditation.  The effect is akin to building a panic room within the mind.  An ability to call into being a state of mindfulness creates the bizarre effect of being shielded from one’s own mind. 

As John Milton once famously wrote: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

Which is to say, when our thoughts and emotions turn of the worse, we are trapped in our own mind with that reality.  Like being trapped in a house with burglars, villains or monsters.

Take anger for instance.  The experience is overwhelming.  The anger arises and swells in the mind with an intoxication that is not dissimilar to being drunk.  But the act of becoming mindful during such a situation is like existing somehow outside of the mind in a way that allows a person to look around make a fairly calm observation and assessment of the situation, such as  “wow, there’s quite a bit of anger going on right now.” 

It’s like watching a robber wreck part of the house on a monitor from inside of a panic room.

Even more powerful is that ability to shield one’s self from the personal monsters that we ourselves create.  Imagine, for a moment being able to hide and calmly watch those monsters that we ourselves dream up?  Imagine if it were impossible for those monsters to harm you anymore.

This is the panic room of the mind that a practice like mindfulness can create.

With enough practice, equanimity can be applied to anything, even to the terrible things that might exist in our own minds, that we mistakenly think are integral to who and what we are.