ACCESSING OUR BELIEFS THROUGH MINDFUL READING
We have left the land and embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us- indeed we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity... Oh, the poor bird that felt free now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom- and there is no longer any “land.” - Nietzsche
Each man’s life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that- one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best he can. Each man carries the vestiges of his birth- the slime and eggshells of his primeval past-… to the end of his days... Each represents a gamble on the part of nature in creation of the human. We all share the same origin, our mothers; all of us come in at the same door. But each of us- experiments of the depths- strives toward his own destiny. We can understand one another; but each is able to interpret himself alone. – Herman Hesse
I am proposing a different way of reading, a different method of what to do with the information that our eyes scan and our minds perceive when we read. This method is interested in the reader, and hopes to articulate a way of reading that might lead the reader on a new journey of self-exploration. The objective is to use the practice of reading as a mirror in which our Self might examine our “self.” This is the philosophical Self—the Agent, the Knower, the Ultimate Locus of personal identity, God—examining the shabby patchwork of beliefs and understandings we have crafted from scraps of culture and experience that we identify as “self.”
We don’t often think of reading as something that has different ways of doing. At first glance, it’s just words on a printed page that we scan from left to right. Not much to it. And yet, if we think about it, we know that there are different ways of reading. What a 5 year old does with his mind while he reads is very different from what a 16 year old does, which is very different from what a 45 year old does. Reading a steamy novel while on vacation at the beach is different from reading the job manual your new boss just set in front of you, which is different from reading a breakup letter left for you on the kitchen table. Reading serves different purposes at different times or situations in our lives.
I am talking now mostly of the mental processes involved in reading. To quote my mentor, Santiago Colás, who has the same goal, “I want to share a way of reading; a way of approaching and engaging literature that feeds and is in turn fed by a way of living, a way of approaching and engaging life” (Book of Joys). Colás sees reading as holding the potential to lead to joy by reinventing the practice through reconfiguring its components. He underscores “the capacity to take up the raw materials of the reading process (text and reader and world, affect and intellect, complexity and uncertainty) and find, though [sic] open-ended experimentation, enjoyable ways to rearrange those materials.” My method of reading builds on this idea of reconfiguration Colás describes, as well as on the philosophy of reader-response criticism of the 1960s and 1970s, to a certain extent. I am suggesting an ethical pedagogy of the practice of reading by focusing on the reader’s relationship to the text. This method or way of reading is intended to subtly shift the reader’s mental focus from the characters or the author to the construction of self. Thus, reading becomes a self-centered exercise, one in which we think about how we think. Books become passports to worlds that exist inside of us. We are able to get to know ourselves, slowly, through adopting a completely different approach to reading.
This implies, perhaps asserts, that there is a “way of living” that might be preferable to another. I will own an ethical standpoint in this work, connected as it is to promoting unity through a better, broader understanding of difference and freedom. I will also cop to a pragmatic belief that if the meaning of a given proposition is found within the practical consequences of accepting it, then we might start at the end, envisioning what we would like the end result to be, and then figuring out what we would have to believe in order to achieve that end result. In Pragmatism, William James writes:
The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many? – fated or free? –material or spiritual?—here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic model in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences (28).
I think that the pragmatic method is a useful one for examining our own thought processes. I have employed this method myself to examine which beliefs support my vision of the world and which do not. I have also used the pragmatic model to examine many of our cultural beliefs—the meta-narratives that presently have currency. Some of the characteristics that I find negative and problematic in American culture are: the materialism and the narrow view of success that it inspires; the unmediated and often excessive consumption; the misconception and misrepresentation of love; the narcissistic individualism; the unhealthy relationship to the body; the dichotomous, linear, univocal thinking. These will be explored at length in this text. I am not prescribing blanket happiness, but I am issuing a blanket invitation to self exploration, so that we might know intimately what stands between us and happiness, if happiness happens to be our objective.
Theory and practice are not separate spheres; rather, theories are tools and maps for the practice of finding our way in the world. As John Dewey attests, there is no question of theory versus practice. Instead, there is a question of intelligent (or conscious) practice versus stupid (or uninformed) practice. In recent times I have undertaken the project of trying to produce scholarship that has resonance and relevance beyond the academic, into the personal and the lived. William James writes, “Our beliefs are really rules for action… to develope [sic] a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct for us is its sole significance” (28-29). My academic project has been to think about what type of conduct I would like to see produced- in the academy, in the United States, in the world, in myself- and what thoughts and ways of thinking might bring about this conduct. If, as James asserts, “all realities influence our practice, and that influence is their meaning for us” (29), I am interested in how realities are constructed and given meaning in light of a given practice.
I call this type of reading mindful because it offers an effective counter-balance to blind subscription to master narratives. Mindful thinking emphasizes the organic or functional relation between parts and the whole. Rather than scrutinizing an object under a microscope, we see it with a wider lens as a part of something bigger. With this lens we are able to see that even our seeing becomes a part of what is seen. Thus, an individual endeavor to understand and master the self has reverberations into our families, our societies, and ultimately the entire world. We cannot change society without changing ourselves.
I see the mindful phenomenon evidenced in the increased popularity of sustainable and ecologically sound living, the augmented awareness of the role of stress and nutrition in health, and even arguably the pull toward community that fuels social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter as indicating that a re-education of sorts has already been taking place. Dissatisfied with the meaninglessness, lovelessness and hopelessness that Cornel West calls nihilism in his book Race Matters, many Americans have sought a restructuring of their beliefs, values, and practices, and they have used mindful means to foster this re-education. Spiritual, self-help, and New Age books frequently become best-sellers, indicating that there is a market out there of people thirsty for a new understanding of themselves, the world, and God. I am interested to see how mindful thinking can be incorporated into academic learning. Of course, I can't set a moral agenda for the nation, nor do I intend to. I am not advocating the enforcement of certain or specific values. I do not see myself as endorsing swapping one fiction for another fiction. Instead, I encourage each of us to cultivate an awareness of one's own values and to bring mindful attention to where they come from, and what they enable and disable for us.
Identity and the Self
The premise of this work is that oppression is not (only) a complex interweaving of insurmountable institutional policies and practices, it is also a condition of mind. If we are able to decolonize our own minds, as everyone from Ngugi Wa Thiongo to Franz Fanon has implored us to do, then we can begin to navigate the landscape before us on our own terms. In Rock My Soul, bell hooks writes, “Used politically in a relationship to governments, the term decolonize means to allow to become self-governing or independent. In a personal sense decolonizing the mind means letting go of patterns of thought and behavior that prevent us from being self-determining” (69). To do this requires us as individuals to look within and examine our beliefs, and ultimately to abandon those beliefs that are limiting. This is a difficult but very worthwhile practice, in my opinion. To some this may sound like mind control. But I would argue that while we cannot control circumstances, we can exercise control over our reactions to them. We need not be at the mercy of our emotions. Through examining the numerous factors that contribute to our beliefs, such as culture, race, family, gender—to name but a few—I think we are able to observe our own beliefs with less attachment and more objectivity.
In this work, I evoke concepts of identity and self. Identity is an umbrella term used throughout the social sciences and humanities to describe an individual’s comprehension of herself as a discrete, separate entity. I think of identity as primarily threefold, consisting of a personal identity (or the idiosyncratic things that make a person unique), a social or cultural identity (or the collection of group memberships that may or may not define the individual), and a psychological identity (or a person’s mental model of him or herself, comprised of self image, self esteem, and individuation). My work draws on the interconnections and fluidity of all three of these ways of looking at one’s identities, acknowledging the multiply-determined ways we identify with the world around us. Identity is not a fixed thing, but rather floating, adaptable, and contingent. Identity is not just what we know; it is also how we know. If we call on intuitive powers, rational thought, gut reaction, dreams, if we are able to express ourselves through drawing, through dance, through words, through song, this is also a part of who we are and how we identify. From within our identity, from inside our world view and our complex network of identifications, we function. Our identity serves as the motherboard of our mental computer, the set of processing systems that tell us what to do with the information coming in.
If identity is the series of identifications that mediate how we know, the self is perhaps who or what we are striving to know. I see the self as being a multi-layered entity, and though I will try to give names to different elements of the self that I explore, one must bear in mind that these are fluid and contingent categories that are in no way hard, fast or definitive. Jiddu Krishnamurti writes his mindful version of the self:
You know what I mean by the self? By that I mean the idea, the memory, the conclusion, the experience, the various forms of nameable and unnamable intentions, the conscious endeavor to be or not to be, the accumulated memory of the unconscious, the racial, the group, the individual, the clan, and the whole of it all, whether it is projected outwardly in action, or projected spiritually as virtue; the striving after all this is the self (126).
When I unravel Krishnamurti’s complex bundle, I see the self as having some identifiable key components. There is, for example, the Self with a capital “S.” This is the spiritual, philosophical Self within us that observes. Rather than the one acting, it is the one observing the acting. It is linked, for some, to a concept of the divine, where this Self might be seen as our God Self, our innermost consciousness that is linked with all other consciousness. With the notion of the Self as God, where “I am” is God, our very existence indicates our godliness. For others, a better image might be that the Self is your primordial, foundational, or true self.
There is another self as well, the “self” with quotation marks and a lowercase “s.” This might be seen as synonymous with the ego. It is a gross accumulation of positive and negative beliefs about ourselves, from “My Auntie always told me I had a nice smile” to “I have my father’s temper” to “Women can’t be president” to “We are all born in sin” to “I’m a failure” to “Nice girls don’t give it up” to “Being poor is shameful.” Furthermore, it is the hidden beliefs that we do not even realize we have. It is what we think everybody else sees when they look at us. Our “self” is constructed around and within these various conscious and unconscious beliefs. Some of these beliefs come from our immediate society, from our parents, friends, or members of our race, social class, gender, or sexual community. Others are taught by our religions, schools, or by the media. Others are ideas that figure into our national identity, the ways in which we position ourselves globally and grow to embody on a personal level many of the things we tell ourselves about our nation. Still others function on a preconscious level and may be erroneous conclusions that we drew on our own based on the dynamics of our family.
Krishnamurti says that this identification process is the essence of the self (22). These messages are tossed to us by friends and family, pushed on us in school and in hierarchical social interaction, vomited on us by corporate advertising telling us what is and is not possible, and for whom. Our “self” is formed in relationship to these imposed beliefs. These beliefs end up creating the very limiting framework from within which most of us operate, similar to Marilyn Frye’s birdcage in her seminal feminist essay, “Oppression.” She writes:
Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere... It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon. It is now possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression can be hard to see and recognize: one can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great care and some good will without seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without seeing or being able to understand that one is looking at a cage and that there are people there who are caged, whose motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives are shaped and reduced (176).
This is what happens to us all. All of us began life as children, bursting with beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind is the state of wonderment and awe that comes from experiencing things for the first time (or as if for the first time, but more on this in my post, “Beginning with Beginner’s Mind”). Within beginner’s mind is the joy of an unmediated interaction in and with the present moment, the dizzying stimulation of something genuinely new. We begin life thinking that anything is possible, full of beginner’s mind, full of joy, but day by day, instance by instance, circumstance by circumstance, we are taught and re-taught limiting beliefs about who we are and what it means to be who we are. Wire by wire, the birdcage is constructed. There are mysteries and magic everywhere for a child, but these slowly disappear as we grow up. As we grow out of our natural beginner’s mind, we begin to think we know “how things are,” we know “how it is,” we know “how it goes.” We become “the ones who know,” who have figured it out. Wire of experience by wire of information, we construct our world view, our understanding of how the world works, and our identity within that world, who we perceive ourselves to be in relation to that world. From money to relationships to war to our own bodies, we decide upon a personal meaning for everything in our universe, based on our experiences and what information we have at the time. We make meaning. Our powerful drive to understand and make sense of the universe is the reason we abandon the awesome magic of beginner’s mind.
There is a third self I would like to define: the self, lowercase, no quotation marks. I see this self as both the Self and the “self,” everything that falls under the heading of “who I am.”
The relationship between these selves is well articulated in Conversations With God by Neale Donald Walsh. In response to the question “Who am I?” God responds:
Whomever you choose to be. Whatever aspect of Divinity you wish to be—that’s Who You Are. That can change at any given moment. Indeed, it often does, from moment to moment. Yet if you want your life to settle down, to stop bringing you such a wide variety of experiences, there’s a way to do that. Simply stop changing your mind so often about Who You Are, and Who You Choose to Be (21).
John Dewey once wrote that “What man does and how he acts, is determined not by organic structure and physical heredity alone but by the influence of cultural heredity, embedded in traditions, institutions, customs and the purposes and beliefs they both carry and inspire. Even the neuro-muscular structures of individuals are modified through the influence of the cultural environment on the activities performed” (30). Our life goals are influenced by our view of who we are, what we are like, the way we would like to be (or would like to avoid being), as well as our perceptions of what is feasible. These perceptions impact more than just our goals, however. As psychiatrist and psychotherapist Dr. Richard Gillett explains in Change Your Mind, Change Your World, “Our beliefs about ourselves and the world alter our perception, our memory, our hope, our energy, our health, our mood, our actions, our relationships, and eventually even our outward circumstances.” (13) Thus, the self as a construct has far-reaching implications for behavior, self-esteem, motivation, and emotions as well as for interpersonal relationships, society, and culture.
When we look at the world around us, we often see and process information that confirms our beliefs while rejecting or ignoring information that contradicts them (Gillett 53). It is hard to admit that our subjectivity is mired in the muck of our culture/s, our family/ies, and our own preconscious inventions. It is difficult to acknowledge that what we thought was objective thought is actually quite subjective. At times it is hard to even see that we participate by observing. As Gloria Karpinski explains in When Two Worlds Touch, “Since the 1920s when Werner Heisenberg developed the uncertainty principle, science has been showing us that there is no such thing as purely objective analysis. Our observation of a thing is part of its reality—and our own” (25). Gillett points to physical and mental limitations to explain the futility of thinking in terms of “reality” or “truth.” He writes, “There is no such thing as seeing the world ‘realistically,’ because our very sense organs and brain mechanisms are highly selective in the extent and quality of information they handle” (27). Furthermore, as Gillett explains, “The way we see the world is based on our senses, our language, our innate prejudices, and our personal history” (27). But there is freedom in acknowledging that our truth is not the Truth, but rather it is simply one truth, and it can be a temporary one if it is not serving us. We might accept Antonio Benitez Rojo’s assertion that, “There cannot be any single truth, but instead there are many practical and momentary ones, truths without beginnings or ends, local truths, displaced truths, provisional and peremptory truths of a pragmatic nature” (151).
We cannot see the truth because we cannot handle the truth, quite literally. The so-called “truth” of “what is” contains too much information for us to rationally process.
Gillett gives some valid sensory examples:
We can see wavelengths of light only between about 400 and 700 millionths of a millimeter. This is a tiny proportion within the vast band of electromagnetic waves, of X-ray, gamma-ray, ultraviolet, visible light, infra-red, microwave, and radio wave. In other words, most electromagnetic information simply passes us by…. Our hearing, too, is limited by the capacity of our ears, which hear only wavelengths between 20 and 20,000 cycles per second, and have limited sensitivity and discrimination…. These examples illustrate the relativity of our senses… Since much of what we believe tends to be based on trusting our senses, it reminds us to understand that our senses, for all their magic, are limited and highly selective encoders of information (28-9).
The capabilities of our senses place limits on what we can know of the information present at any given moment.
Gillett also points to the distortions of language as a reason that we cannot grasp truth. “The divisions and generalizations of one language create a different picture of reality from the divisions and generalizations of another.” (Gillett 29) He uses another interesting example:
Richard Bandler and John Grinder tell of a Native American language in northern California called Maidu, which divides the basic color spectrum into three colors. In Maidu there is a name for red, a name for green-blue, and a name for what we would call orange-brown-yellow. In English the rainbow is usually seen as divided into seven colors. So in English a yellow object and a brown object will be seen as different, while in Maidu they are the same color. In physiological reality, the human being is capable of 7,500,000 discriminations of color between different wavelengths of light. So where we draw our lines between colors is arbitrary (29).
Language simply becomes a coded frame, a filing system for the millions of bits of information hurled at us. It is very difficult to see and understand beyond the limits of one’s language.
Gillett makes another distinction about language—that there might be many words for slight varieties of a thing in a culture where that thing is seen as important.
Eskimos have many different words for different kinds of snow; in Sanskrit, the language of ancient India, there are over fifty words for “consciousness”; while in Luganda (one of the languages of Uganda spoken by the tribe of Baganda) there are over forty different words for a banana. To them a matoke is completely a different thing from a gonja, while to Americans, they are both just bananas (29).
Gillett points out that ultimately language functions as a handicap. “No matter which language you speak, the divisions are matters of convention which determine how we organize our thoughts and how we classify the world” (29-30). Language functions as an important lens that mediates our experience of the world around us.
Julio Cortázar’s observation was really quite astute, that:
Everything is fiction, that is to say a fable… Our possible truth must be an invention, that is to say scripture, literature, agriculture, pisciculture, all the tures of the world. Values, tures, sainthood, a ture, love, pure ture, beauty, a ture of tures (384).
Upon examination, we notice that what we consider reality is really quite subjective, an invention. How we choose to understand information determines what that information can and will mean. Knowledge is, after all, an invention according to Nietzsche, as Foucault says, “behind which there is something quite distinct from it: an interplay of instincts, impulses, desires, fear, will to appropriation” (14). Thus, the framing itself becomes part of the experience of the thing and, as such, the knowing of it. It is a fiction we choose, and as such we are free to choose differently.
Reading
I contend that, for the most part, we read like we live our lives. We make generalizations and then we filter our experiences so that they confirm the generalizations. Gillett says, “A generalization about life is like a fixed compartment or a square box. If life does not fit the box, we distort it until it does” (31). While many generalizations from experience are good and instructive, some generalizations may become extreme and actually limit the believer. Gillett gives an example of this, showing how a useful generalization might become limiting if it is taken to extremes:
If a boy’s father beat him whenever he spoke out as a child, the generalization that the father is dangerous and that it is probably therefore unwise to speak out in front of him would probably be useful. It is already a generalization because the father is almost certainly not dangerous in all situations. Nevertheless it is a reasonable protective assumption. If however the generalization becomes more extreme, for instance: “Men are dangerous and it is unwise to speak out in front of men in general,” then the boy would begin to distort reality and to limit his choices. When the generalization becomes more extreme still, for example, “People are dangerous and I will never speak out in front of anybody again,” then he lives with an oppressive illusion and his choices are crippled. It may affect every relationship with every man for the rest of his life. Quite automatically he will assume that men are threatening whether they are or not. He will misinterpret benign expressions as hostile. He will even find a negative motive for a kind action: “He only gave me that because he wants to control me.” In short, he cannot see reality because it is distorted by his belief (34-5).
Similarly, when we read, we become readers who “know how to read.” After the beginner’s mind wanes and wears thin, we read generalizations into the text that correspond to our beliefs, and then we push the text to fit this contrivance. We come to both life and texts with satchels of generalizations and stereotypes hanging from us. There are the ones that come from our given culture and country (or cultures and countries), from our school and education, from our class, from and about gender, about body image, wealth, power, about aging and death, just to name a few. We use this information to confirm or justify our relationship to the text, which is often something that we decided long before we ever opened the front cover. We participate while we swear up and down that we are merely observing.
How to Read a Book, the 1970s revised version of the 1940 bestseller, explains in plain language exactly what the title says. Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren explain in detail the different levels of reading that exist (which they define as Elementary, Inspectional, Analytical, and Syntopical), and offer practical information on different ways to read. The book explains the activity and the art of reading—how to “come to terms with an author” by understanding their use of terminology, how to determine an author’s message, how to criticize a book “fairly,” how to agree or disagree. How to Read a Book might be seen as a book explaining what to do with the information in a book, how to relate to a text, and even how to manipulate the text according to your own needs. They outline a few concrete ways to configure the elements involved in reading. I think that Adler and Van Doren’s exploration of what one should do when one reads offers a compelling springboard from which to launch my own suggestions of what might be done when one reads.
Reading as an adult is not often an exercise in discovery. It frequently becomes little more than a way to affirm what we already “know” of the world. We choose our genre of choice—news journalism, juicy romance, detective thriller, celebrity tabloid, comic book, instruction manual, academic journal—and we approach the text with a pretty good idea of what to expect, and what not to expect, from it. We do not anticipate finding spiritual nourishment, for example, in Cosmopolitan magazine, and we do not imagine finding a new hairstyle, for example, writ into the stories of the bible. We anticipate new information from reading, but we generally expect for literatures to stay true to genre. These expectations create the circumstances where we are hardly ever disappointed, perhaps because we ourselves are disabling other possibilities.
Adler and Van Doren illustrate this phenomenon, seeing it as reading to gain information rather than understanding.
There is the book; and here is your mind. As you go through the pages, either you understand perfectly everything the author has to say or you do not. If you do, you may have gained information, but you could not have increased your understanding. If the book is completely intelligible to you from start to finish, then the author and you are as two minds in the same mold. The symbols on the page merely express the common understanding you had before you met (7).
The majority of reading that most of folks do in everyday life is this one, reading to gain information. This type of reading “is at once thoroughly intelligible to us” (9). We are not fumbling in the language, or struggling with meaning. They explain, “Such things may increase our store of information, but they cannot improve our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started. Otherwise, we would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity that comes from getting in over our depth” (9).
Adler and Van Doren make a distinction between reading from which one gains information and reading from which one gains understanding.
Let us take our second alternative. You do not understand the book perfectly. Let us even assume—what unhappily is not always true—that you know enough to know that you do not understand at all. You know the book has more to say than you understand and hence that it contains something that can increase your understanding (7).
The authors reveal that what they are calling “understanding” is really an analytical frame or paradigm, something that might “throw a new and perhaps more revealing light on all the facts he [the reader] knows” (9). In this second sense of reading, reading to gain understanding or to possibly reframe our existing understanding, the book has “more to say” than the reader can comprehend. Adler and Van Doren point to an inequality between the author and the reader as a prerequisite of such reading.
Here the thing to be read is initially better or higher than the reader. The writer is communicating something that can increase the reader’s understanding. Such communication between unequals must be possible, or else one person could never learn from another, either through speech or writing. Here by “learning” is meant understanding more, not remembering more information that has the same degree of intelligibility as other information you already possess (9).
In the academy reading frequently functions similarly, falling into the same two camps but with different percentages attached to them. There is reading that is done for information and reading that is done for understanding, and at times a mixture of the two. While we don’t necessarily attribute it to “inequality,” we can at least acknowledge that texts often have “more to say” than we are able to hear. Many of these are “hard” theory texts that we read together in graduate seminars. Others are literary texts that elude our analytical nets like clever butterflies. Most—perhaps all—are texts that we are translating across some sort of divide—linguistic, cultural, national, temporal, spatial.
Adler and Van Doren ask a valid question- what to do with these texts you can’t understand?
What do you do then? You can take the book to someone else who, you think, can read better than you, and have him explain the parts that trouble you. (“He” may be a living person or another book—a commentary or textbook) (7).
This is a fairly common practice in the academy. We decipher in class together. We often defer to interpretations and readings by others of “difficult” texts. At times we even use the work of others to help us understand what we ourselves think of a text.
Instead of enlisting the help of others, Adler and Van Doren suggest “doing the job of reading that the book requires” (8). This is accomplished in only one manner.
Without external help of any sort, you go to work on the book. With nothing but the power of your own mind, you operate on the symbols before you in such a way that you gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to one of understanding more. Such elevation, accomplished by the mind working on a book, is highly skilled reading, the kind of reading that a book which challenges your understanding deserves (8, their emphasis).
I am particularly intrigued by this second type of reading that they suggest. In it there is just the reader and the text working with and on each other. This suggests becoming an active and mindful participator with the book. In a sense, the reader becomes the co-creator of the text. We are invited by the text to cast off our usual way of thinking about things, in order to meet the book wherever it is. Rather than casting our net of generalizations over the book, we let it fly free. And as the text soars about the landscape, we are free to choose who we are in relationship to the soaring text, what we are going to do about it, or with it, if anything. I am interested in what we can do in these readings Adler and Van Doren recommend. How can we read in such a way that reading enables us to get to know ourselves? What would have to change about reading itself in order to create these different readings? Can we attempt to rearrange the elements of reading, as Colás suggests, to activate new possibilities?
I believe that reading in a different way will produce different readings, ones that do not necessarily reinforce stereotypes and reiterate damaging social meta-narratives, ones that might invite us to challenge and question our limiting views of ourselves and the world. Thus, reading becomes an exercise in freedom and an invitation to power. There is a way in which we can read texts “to live” as Colás asserts in his work. There is a way in which we can read texts not to dissect them or manipulate them to prove a point, but rather to learn tools for life. These tools can range from the practical to the esoteric, from the mundane to the spiritual.
These readings also engender new ways of knowing, moving the notion of “knowing” out of our heads and into our bodies, growing there to embody the understanding that Adler and Van Doren describe. I call these alternative ways of knowing “feminine” or “Yin,” because they call on more subtle and indirect understandings that are very different from what we often consider “knowing” or “knowledge.” Far from an essentialist reiteration of cultural stereotype, I draw from the Eastern concept of “the feminine” as a necessary energetic force bound to and interdependent with its male counterpart. Gloria Karpinski is an author who is very much in touch with forms of Yin knowing. She will describe a vision she had while meditating, or even intentionally “take” a subject into meditation and report on her findings. She trusts herself as a vessel of knowledge. One of the big myths of Western culture is that knowledge comes from outside the body; her work confounds that idea and encourages others to do so as well.
I define Yin knowledge as knowledge or information that comes from the inside out, whereas masculine or Yang knowledge goes from the outside in. Thus, Yin knowledge would be found in intuition, dreams, experiential knowing, embodiment, and various other forms or directives that come from within the individual. Yin knowledge can also come out of the individual in different forms, such as poetry, myth, art, and symbols. Yin knowledge, for me, encapsulates the many alternative ways of knowing that fall—like the black swirl in the yin/yang symbol—into darkness and outside of normative ways of knowing. Yang knowledge, by contrast, includes what we are told, what we read, and various other directives that come from outside of the individual. Gloria Karpinski defines Yang knowledge in Barefoot on Holy Ground as “specificity, knowledge, hierarchy, dominance, and possession, extremes that led to separations from each other and the earth” (43). The construction of “knowing” in the academy is more often than not Yang—rational, linear, dichotomous thought—and it is privileged and maintained through more widespread and/or more deeply engrained cultural frames. These frames are upheld through interpersonal relationship to and communication of an ideology that seems to breed a climate of fear. More subtle experiential or extra-linguistic ways of knowing are given little currency because they can’t be accurately transmitted from within this framework, and the corporate/academic culture makes it feel risky to try to work beyond the existing frames.
Both masculine and feminine knowledge are ever-present in balanced amounts in everything, though we might not always perceive that fact. Karpinski explains the specifics of the relationship between Yin and Yang. She writes that “The Taoists describe the movements within wholeness as yin (feminine) and yang (masculine). The one is always in process of becoming the other. We are not one or the other; rather we are both. Yin and yang are movements of energies, not identities” (53). Margo Anand confirms this, “Each of us has an Inner Man that is associated with dynamic, active energy; with setting and achieving goals; and with getting things done. This is what the Taoists call the Yang aspect of our nature—the engaged, noncontemplative self. And each of us also has an Inner Woman, a natural capacity for letting things happen, for going with the flow of life without setting goals, for relaxing and being playful. This is what the Taoists call the Yin aspect of our nature—the contemplative, intuitive, communing self.” If we want to read mindfulally, we must approach wholeness by reading in a way that incorporates the feminine as well as the masculine. Karpinski reminds us that “This [is] but an outer dramatization of the collective inner drama, a drama that is neither male or female but human” (43).
Part of the difficulty we have been having with introducing feminine paradigms into the academy is that we have been attempting to use masculinist frames and masculinist lenses to perceive feminine knowledge. We strive to capture multiplicity, simultaneity, and interdependence within a system of linear and dichotomous classifications. This is similar to seeing an iridescent-blue-and-black butterfly pinned to cork in a display case. If we think that we can “know” the butterfly by observing it in the case, we are missing out on most of its story. We have no idea of its starts as a caterpillar, of the goings-on inside the cocoon. We don’t know what it’s like to see a butterfly in an open field. We don’t even know that it flies (though we might assume so based on wing-size and other assessments). Feminine ways of knowing, by contrast, are engendered primarily through experience.
Certain practices help to cultivate Yin knowledge. Two of these elements are beginner’s mind and mindfulness meditation, which draw the attention inward and widen the lens so that we might see mindfulally. The way of reading I am advocating—and practicing—in this book takes the usual elements of reading and combines with them the practice of mindfulness meditation and the practice of creative expression, which often puts us in touch with our beginner’s mind. By cultivating different practices, we can know things in a different way. Practice in this case becomes a revolutionary tool because it is reiterative and re-inscriptive. One key to personal and global change is cultivating a regularly recurring practice that corresponds to and confirms what one wants to see existing in the future, whether that thing be world peace or a new car. This is a literal spin on Gandhi’s words, “Be the change that you want to see in the world.” I am not proposing that we abandon other ways of reading entirely. Rather, I am advocating some people sometimes trying something different, ostensibly, reading such that the text is a mirror that reflects ourselves back to ourselves, reading as a journey of self-exploration.
One of the reasons I am advocating for a different method of reading is because I believe that reading books gives us an opportunity safely and intimately examine our beliefs. Books can take us all around the world, deep into different cultures, often seen through the eyes of someone possessing a completely different belief system. They can also take us into the deeper inner workings of lives of people we see as “like us.” The most interesting thing that we encounter when we read is not the “other,” but ourselves. Through our judgments, likes, dislikes, thoughts and emotions—all of which often come out during reading—we are able to get a firmer grasp on what it is that we believe. Like the meditation cushion, reading can create a safe haven in which our thoughts and actions cannot harm another, but can be explored. I truly believe that the combination of reading and meditation might engender some very different understandings of the self.
The Issue of Beliefs
As I said earlier, it is important that we examine our own beliefs as individuals. Rather than pointing outside ourselves at what is wrong, we can begin to make peace inside ourselves through the type of non-judgmental observation I described in the chapter on beginner’s mind. We can begin to see how our culture and our own individual beliefs are connected. As Krishnamurti remarks, “What we must realize is that we are not only conditioned by environment, but that we are the environment—we are not something apart from it. Our thoughts and responses are conditioned by values which society, of which we are a part, has imposed on us (56-7). Gloria Karpinski puts it thus in Barefoot on Holy Ground: Twelve Lessons In Spiritual Craftsmanship: “Our whole consciousness, expressed through the body, emotions, and mind, is in constant process with our many environments—the immediate ones, the remembered ones, and the ones we fantasize” (84). The repercussions of this are significant, for what we can be and do is limited (more often than not) by our beliefs and their corresponding actions. Karpinski writes in Where Two Worlds Touch: Spiritual Rites of Passage, “Whatever you believe is true—for you. We do not act outside our perception of reality. Whatever shape and structure our belief system takes on any subject is our “form.” Our forms allow us to express ourselves within the parameters of whatever we perceive ourselves to be. Good, bad, possible, impossible—these concepts are meaningful to us to the degree that we believe them” (73). By examining our beliefs, we can see more clearly the ways in which we are complicit with our culture’s morés and practices. We can get to know the ways in which we have been seduced or coerced into participation and compliance with societal norms. We are then better able to pragmatically choose for ourselves if these endorsed beliefs and practices our actually serving us. Intimately understanding our beliefs takes away their power over us, freeing up space in which we can choose our beliefs with awareness. In this section I try to illuminate how beliefs function so that we might have more insight into them.
Richard Gillett quips that “It is more work to maintain a belief than a car” (53). We don’t notice the work that we are doing, however, because it is mostly automatic and unconscious. Gillett breaks down the things that we do in order to “keep our precious beliefs intact.” He describes how we make life choices that both reflect and confirm our beliefs about ourselves and our beliefs about others. He contends, “To some extent we choose situations and people that fit our perceptions” (53). He gives two examples, “A woman who believes that change is dangerous will choose secure relationships and a secure working situation so that she does not have to test out change. A man who believes he is stupid will choose manual work or repetitive mental work requiring little creativity or initiative—in this way he never develops his mind and is able to retain his belief” (53). These people he describes never test the validity of their beliefs. Instead, they choose actions and situations that are based upon their beliefs and help maintain them.
For example, I’m sure we all know (or perhaps are) someone who is always the victim in every story told. Even in stories where the person seems to come out triumphant, s/he insists that s/he was somehow victimized. Energy medicine pioneer and author Caroline Myss has this to say about the origins of victimhood:
Being a Victim is a common fear. The Victim archetype may manifest the first time you don’t get what you want or need; are abused by a parent, playmate, sibling, or teacher; or are accused of or punished for something you didn’t do. You may suppress your outrage at the injustice if the victimizer is bigger and more powerful than you. But at a certain point you discover a perverse advantage to being the victim (116).
This advantage is the reason that the victim often clings to and insists upon that identity. S/he goes to great lengths to maintain the role, filtering out experiences and situations that contradict his/her belief in his/her victimhood. S/he might remember the same situation differently than others who were present. S/he takes the truth and manipulates it to support his/her beliefs. Much of this is done unconsciously, or on a continuum of awareness. Steven Covey writes about this in Principle-Centered Leadership, a follow-up book to his wildly popular Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He places victimhood at the low end of a spectrum measuring effectiveness, with self-awareness at the high end. He sees victimhood as a lack of self-awareness. He writes:
At the upper end of the continuum toward increasing effectiveness is self-awareness: “I know my tendencies, I know the scripts or programs that are in me, but I am not those scripts. I can rewrite my scripts.” You are aware that you are the creative force in your life. You are not the victim of conditions or conditioning. You can choose your response to any situation, to any person. Between what happens to you and your response is a degree of freedom. And the more you exercise that freedom, the larger it will become. As you work in your circle of influence and exercise that freedom, gradually you will stop being a “hot reactor” (meaning there’s little separation between stimulus and response) and start being a cool, responsible chooser—no matter what your genetic makeup, no matter how you were raised, no matter what your childhood experiences were or what the environment is. In your freedom to choose your response lies the power to achieve growth and happiness (42).
Viewing victimhood in this way acknowledges that while there may be real or imagined limitations existing in the world, we cannot know for sure how much the world is actually oppressing us until we stop oppressing ourselves. For surely we can name at least a few people who have come from circumstances far worse (in our judgment) than our own and have somehow soared far higher than we ever imagined possible for ourselves. We can attribute it to genius or luck, if that serves us. But it is also possible to see these people as able to transcend and transgress the limits enforced by others in order to realize the potential within themselves by simply refusing to believe what the world tells them about themselves.
This type of belief maintenance is done not just with victims but with a variety of identity roles. We look around for evidence that supports our beliefs, and look right past any information that doesn’t, or even contradicts them. We see, by and large, what we want to see. Thus does a belief become a self-fulfilling prophecy. While the phrase “self-fulfilling prophecy” smacks of some sort of hocus-pocus, Gillett explains that it is simply the way in which our pre-existing thought causes us to treat others as if our thought were already true. He contends that it is actually our thoughts and actions that call forth in the other the very behavior or quality we were guarding ourselves against.
The self-fulfilling prophecy of the man who believes “women are manipulative” goes something like this: “Women are manipulative, therefore I won’t trust her.” Because she feels treated with suspicion, she keeps her distance from him. Intimacy therefore disappears and they are left with a relationship of emotional dishonesty and mental manipulation. The part she takes in that process proves that “women are manipulative.” Of course, people are hardly ever aware of the mechanism behind the self fulfilling prophecy. Events happen that seem to vindicate the belief-- the man does really act like a brute and the woman does really manipulate, and both are unaware of the strings they pulled to create or manifest that reality in the other (52).
Although we do not notice our own role in bringing our self-fulfilling prophesies to fruition, Gillett argues that we “mold, select from, exaggerate, or distort the past to make it support our current belief. The process is so automatic, however, that we do not even realize our own bias” (55).
We also rationalize contradictory evidence when it does arise. “Rationalization,” Gillett explains, “Is the last ditch attempt, when all else has failed, to make the aberrant world fit the confines of a belief system” (59). We use the imagined future to support our stance, often giving reasons why “it’ll never work” or “it’ll never happen.” We use our imaginations against ourselves to manufacture an undesirable or impossible outcome. We often assume our reality will remain the same into perpetuity. The imagined result, Gillett maintains, directly impacts what we believe is possible in the present. If I believe “I am never going to get out of debt,” I will not bother to attempt to try by changing my spending habits. If I believe “I am never going to lose weight,” I will feel like it doesn’t really matter if I eat this donut now. This keeps us from changing, keeps us stuck in the same cycles.
Our beliefs also impact the future by filtering the past. Ekhart Tolle, a prominent spiritual teacher explains how the past functions to limit beliefs in the present. He refers to the egoic mind, or the mind wrapped up in “self”-consciousness. He writes:
The egoic mind is completely conditioned by the past. Its conditioning is twofold: It consists of content and structure. In the case of a child who cries in deep suffering because his toy has been taken away, the toy represents content. It is interchangeable with any other content, any other toy or object. The content you identify with is conditioned by your environment, your upbringing, and surrounding culture. Whether the child is rich or poor, whether the toy is a piece of wood shaped like an animal or a sophisticated electronic gadget makes no difference as far as the suffering caused by its loss is concerned. The reason why such acute suffering occurs is concealed in the word ‘my,’ and it is structural (34).
Tolle explains an important force at play in all of these manipulations, “One of the most basic mind structures through which the ego comes into existence is identification. The word ‘identification’ is derived from the Latin word idem, meaning ‘same’ and facere, which means ‘to make.’ So when I identify with something, I ‘make it the same.’ The same as what? The same as I. I endow it with a sense of self, and so it becomes part of my ‘identity’” (35). This identification is ultimately what causes our suffering when we are painfully reminded that we are not the thing we have convinced ourselves that we are. Whatever the identification, whether with a material thing like a car or a house, or with a title or occupation, or with a role such as mother or doctor, or an emotional state like grief or depression, or with one’s race or gender, religion or sexual preference—it is ultimately a construction of our mind, as Tolle asserts, in which we make the thing the same as us. The deep identification with a label or role causes the person to consistently interpret whatever content s/he is given such that it fits into the pre-determined structure that is in keeping with his beliefs about himself. We become in our mind these things that are really little more than practices that we have chosen.
Tolle explains, "What kind of things you identify with will vary from person to person according to age, gender, income, social class, fashion, the surrounding culture, and so on. What you identify with is all to do with content; whereas, the unconscious compulsion to identify is structural” (36). This idea of content as separate and apart from structure is a useful one. It shows the mechanisms at work so that a victim, for example, can maintain the structure of his victimhood while changing the content to suit the occasion. So closely identified is the victim with his victimhood that he often does not see the structure, only the content, which in his mind justifies or vindicates his thoughts or actions. It is by examining the structure—the way in which the victim seeks out situations in which he will be victimized, manipulates the elements in the situation to render himself the victim, or only notices situations that confirm his victimhood—that the victim can stop looking at the content and start looking at himself. Victimhood is a locus of power. There is tremendous power in articulating what is not possible, what I can't do, what is not available to me. Many of the prisons in life are self constructed, based upon our firm reliance on limiting beliefs.
The Advantages of Limiting Beliefs
There are many advantages to maintaining limiting beliefs. One advantage is what Gillett calls “the ego advantage.” This refers to the way that “with great dexterity of mind, any belief, however narrow, can be converted into a personal superiority” (44). Gillett contends that we are able to take our weaknesses and turn them—in our own minds—into strengths. He discusses how we are able to see ourselves as superior to others based on a structure that perceives a quality in them as a flaw or disagreeable or negative, then views the very same quality in ourselves as positive. We do this by sugar-coating the trait linguistically and making it in line with our beliefs about what is worthwhile or positive, recasting what we have shunned in another as a prized trait in ourselves. Gillett provides some wonderfully clear examples:
Take the situation of the man who has difficulty in crying or being tender: It is usually much easier for him to think to himself “I’m a man”; “I’m not weak”; “I’m strong”; “I can take it,” than it is for him to admit his own difficulty with, or even disapproval of, tenderness. It is easier to say: “I know what’s best for me” than to admit you are frightened of change because you have an old belief that change is dangerous. It is easier to consider “I am above money” or “money is dirty” than to face the possibility that you cannot successfully sell goods because you do not really believe you are good enough. Quite often underlying beliefs are lightly hidden beneath a sugar-coating of ego, which makes the belief palatable (44).
Thus, our inability to keep a job is seen in ourselves as “free spiritedness,” our unwillingness to commit to a relationship is attributed to our positive quality of “being picky” or “not settling.” We find ways to spin our misdeeds into virtues in our own minds. We then judge others who do not share our limited belief. As Gillett describes, “The man who has difficulty being tender calls the man who weeps ‘soft.’ The woman who is frightened of change calls the person who changes freely ‘inconsistent’ or ‘untrustworthy.’ The man who cannot sell his product thinks of the successful salesperson as a ‘money-grabber’” (45). As he explains, “The worst liabilities can become marvelous assets” (45).
Another advantage to limiting beliefs that Gillett points out is the illusion of safety that accompanies them. Gillett explains, “As long as we stay within the confines of our belief systems, we are afforded a feeling of security. There is no need for the anxiety of uncertainty because any new input will be rejected before it is effective, or else distorted to fit the parameters of our beliefs” (47). Gillett contends that we reject new information, not allowing it to permeate our consciousness, or we force it into accordance with our pre-set beliefs. Gillett asserts that this is true even when the beliefs create dangerous situations for the believer:
For example, women who believe “men are violent” or “I deserve to be mistreated by a man” tend to choose violent men over and over again. Although they are genuinely fearful and do not like pain or humiliation, the “old situation” provides a paradoxical sense of security. The familiarity of a repeated situation, created by a belief, somehow feels like home. We know the score. We know the rules of the game. Spiritual teachers say that it’s necessary to repeat situations until we master what we need to learn. There is certainly a curious attraction to repeat experiences that fit with a limited belief, and this continues until we learn to change the belief (47).
The predictability of the outcome makes the situations feel comfortable and familiar. We know the outcome before we even get to the end, mainly because we are helping create it. When it arrives, we think “I knew this would happen!” Whether “this” is getting rejected by a friend, cheating on a new girlfriend, being bested by a sibling, or feeling abandoned by a parent, our limiting beliefs help bring it to fruition. Gillett explains the mechanisms of such prediction:
Above and beyond all the ways that we maintain our beliefs previously described, we do one very important and insidious thing: we manufacture feelings that support our beliefs. While we often rely on our feelings and often take them as “truth,” Gillet argues that “Many feelings are no more than emotional representations of the restrictions of the mind” (61). In the example of racial prejudice, “A person has to have the prejudice—the misinterpretation—before he or she can feel the hate. Feelings are easily manufactured from attitudes” (61). We often use our feelings to validate our beliefs, ignoring the ways in which they inform one another.
While we may (or may) not be able to control the events that occur in our lives, it is inarguable that we can control our responses and reactions to them. What might be the moment to throw in the towel for most is the moment for a few others to try harder with renewed conviction. What might be life ending for some is life-beginning for a few others. It all depends on our own perspective of the events of our lives, our positive or negative judgments of those events, and who we see ourselves to be in relationship to those events. One guy gets into a car accident, loses his legs, and becomes a depressed, reclusive alcoholic; another guy gets into a car accident, loses his legs, and ends up winning the Special Olympics for downhill skiing a few years later. Our choices depend on our perspective.
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