Rainbows and Knowing

I'm just back from an interesting day trip to an outdoor exhibit of some artwork dealing with winter light. I was fortunate to have the site to myself and got to poke around and enjoy (and fix one kinetic piece with prisms that had been damaged). The art was all thought-provoking and some pieces were very well executed. But the signs that had been put up to "explain" them were irritating and detracted from the artistic value. I wish artists and curators would stop doing nonsense like this.

Some say that Donald Trump is a poor man's idea of what a rich man is like, or a stupid man's idea of what a smart man is like. Similarly, the pseudo-scientific bullshit (PSB) on the signs for these art displays looks like a technologically illiterate person's idea of what science and engineering is like. I'm guessing the artists want to try to claim some of the legitimacy of tech without bothering to do the hard work of actually knowing what they are talking about. Examples:

Random lines and angles leading nowhere

Ooh, torque me up

A pasted screenshot from Excel (you can even see the cursor in it), in which the oscillation period is blindly claimed to be precise down to 5 nanoseconds. Really, Scooter? I think maybe you've neglected bearing friction and wind resistance at that level. Alas, we never look more foolish than when we are trying to look clever. And pretension tends to trip over its own feet when it meets science. You can't fake science like this. And it wasn't even needed here! The actual artwork is perfectly capable of speaking on its own without these PSB trappings.

Caught in mid-swing

But criticizing ignorant technophile artists is too easy. One should try to practice what you preach and attend to the successes too. So here's an example of art that has done some small amount of real engineering, and could claim some equally small amount of tech legitimacy. The distant gear is being actively turned by an electric motor. This is stepped down by the long gear train. The final gear (closest) is embedded in a block of concrete. At the resulting gear ratio, the concrete block should flip over once every 13 billion years (the approximate age of the universe). Beautiful. I love this piece. It's not pretending and pretension. It's knowing your shit.

Art Ganson's wonderful art

 Here's another one. The iron pipe was buried for years, then excavated and placed on supports deep in a forest. If you whack it with a nearby branch it rings out a deep and clear note into the forest. That's because the supports are carefully placed at the nodal points of the first fundamental mode of open-tube resonance. The sign for this art piece could well have a diagram of the pipe resonance and talk about Helmholtz resonance. Maybe even the formula for the relevant Bessel function (that would look way cooler than a paste-up from Excel). But it tastefully refrains from such things. No PSB needed.

Voice of the Earth

And it's the same thing for Zen practice. You can't simply adopt the trappings and jargon and expect that it is going to bring you enlightenment. It isn't simply a matter of putting in your hours on the zafu. Even leaving home and shaving the "ignorance grass" is just pretension on its own. You have to actually do the work of examining how the mind works and how suffering arises. No amount of PSB is substitute for the real thing. You don't get to claim the legitimacy without doing the careful investigation. You have to actually look at the world, and see what is actually happening. A teacher can help, if you are willing to learn. But you have to do the learning yourself. That starts with keeping your eyes open to see the world as it actually is.

Many people seem to be going through the world with their eyes closed, operating on autopilot. They see only what they expect to see, and not what is actually there (which may be quite different this time). As a simple demonstration, I sometimes ask people about rainbows. We've all seen lots of rainbows before, right? Probably hundreds and hundreds of times. Well, it appears we've all looked, but not many have seen. Here are some the simple diagnostic questions for you to test yourself (with gratitude to Walter Lewin for sharing them with the world):

• What colour is on the outside edge of the bow, the red or the violet? Is it always that way, or does it depend on circumstances?
• Is there any difference in the sky above or below the bow itself?
• How big is the bow? Do they come in different sizes? If so, what makes them bigger or smaller?
• Where do they appear in the sky? Everywhere? When do they appear? Any time of day?
• How many rainbows are in the sky at the same time? Is it always that number?

Since we've all looked at so many rainbows, it ought to be trivial to get the correct answers to these questions, right? Do you want the answers? Okay, if you need to check: red is always on the outside, the sky under the bow is bright white, bows are all the same size of fourty-two degrees wide, they appear opposite the sun and so never appear in the southern sky (for those of us living north of the equator anyway) and when the sun is low to the horizon (as in afternoon rains), and there are always two rainbows sharing the same centre point - the secondary one is a little further out (about the width of your fist held at arm's length) - it is fainter (and the red is now on the inside), but if you know to look for it you will see it. If you struggled at all with these simple tests, maybe that is an indicator that your eyes are not fully open and you've been relying too much on autopilot. Who knows what jewels of the world you've already missed. First step to awakening is to open your eyes.

For keeners only, there is also a third bow, but it is located behind you when you are looking at the main rainbow. And if you turn around to see it, the sun is usually blinding you too much to make it out. But it's there. I have only seen it once.

The rare tertiary bow (Kyrgyzstan)

There is so much Zen teaching in rainbows. You and I are walking on the beach together. The sun shines on the crashing waves, creating rainbows. I point one out to you - "look over there!" But you say that's not where the rainbow is, it's over there (pointing to a slightly different place). Which one of us is right? Are they the same rainbow or different? Am I the only one who can see my rainbow? The special one? After the wave passes, where does my rainbow go? Did the rainbow really exist in the world?

A lot of pointless questions. If you want to understand the teaching of the rainbow, then open your eyes to it

Basta

Lately  I have been seeing an increase in "Zen"-branded products and services. I think it's just marketers trying to cash-in on the rise of secular Buddhism among well-off Westerners and some perceived "exotic" or mystical aura of Zen (which really couldn't be further from the truth, as Zen is the most pragmatic and down-to-earth thing out there). This has got me thinking about the marketing trade and some morally suspect aspects of it.

Obey

Don't let your kids major in Marketing

That's an odd recommendation coming from someone like me who works in a B-school. And, to be fair, it's not all of marketing that is suspect. The main problem seems to be with "Promotion" (i.e., advertising). And that's just one of the "4Ps of Marketing" (the others are Product, Price, and Placement).

In the daily environment we are surrounded by so much constant promotional advertising that it's hard to imagine a world without it.

Obey! First-world country

Art instead? Third-world country

And most of it seems to have one purpose: to make you feel dissatisfied. So unhappy that you are willing to open your wallet to make the malaise go away. Most advertising carries a message (either explicit or implicit) that you are currently inadequate or lacking (or you are in danger of becoming so very soon), and that this pain can only be remedied by buying our product. Or, in the terms of a recovering philosopher, the fetishism of commodities and the investment of inanimate objects with transcendent value beyond their utility, by randomly correlating the product with sexual desire and decadence, creating new insecurities the product might alleviate, associating the product with social status or celebrity, or with popular social movements. None of which is rational.

So the Promotion side of marketing is basically creating desires and fears - making people sufficiently unhappy that they will be willing to part with their money to buy some useless crap that promises to take the pain away (make your appearance marginally acceptable, make you less unpopular, give you a brief chemical high, distract you temporarily from the many dissatisfactions of samsara). Imagine, earning your living by giving people even more sources of unhappiness than they already have! And in many cases, doing so by misleading or deceiving others. Doesn't sound like Right Livelihood to me. Maybe it's not as obviously so as the kinds of extreme examples usually held out: thief, mercenary soldier, heroin dealer, telemarketer. But if you fill your days by creating ads for women's magazines that basically say "if you don't buy our $55 face cream, men will not find you sexually attractive and other women will hold you in contempt", you should not expect to find much peace inside you when you finish your day's work.

Really, aren't there already enough real wants and desires, with simple and profound pleasures to be had when they are filled? Do we really need to create more artificially?

There once was a man being chased by a hungry tiger. Running for his life, he came to the top of a tall cliff, so he started to climb down for safety, using a vine growing from a crack in the cliff face. But halfway down he discovered there was another hungry tiger waiting for him below, looking up and snarling at him. Then a mouse came out of the crack and started gnawing at the vine he was clinging to. He looked up in despair. He looked down. He looked at the mouse, already partway through the vine. And just then he noticed little wild strawberries growing from a tiny ledge on the cliff face. He managed to pick one and pop it into his mouth. Ah, taste how sweet the red juice is. How the tiny seeds crunch between your teeth!

Batteries not included

Between the tigers of Birth and Death there are such simple joys to be had. Who would make it their life's work to gnaw away at the vine of another?

The other 3Ps

Sometimes there is a product for sale that is a reasonable necessity of a good life, and where promoting it creates no harm for others. There are nice vegetables available at the campus farmer's market. But you won't know about it unless someone tells you. But clearly that is not the usual case in marketing promotion. Just look around yourself now - how many unnecessary products/services are being pushed at you, and are they being pushed by trying to make you somehow feel inadequate as you currently are?

But that's just Promotion that has so many pitfalls, and such a poor track record. There are three other Ps to the marketing discipline. Perhaps they are not so ethically fraught.

• Product - Some products do meet real needs of people, and are created without causing harm to others (the workers who create them, the consumers of them, or innocent third parties). I have no issue with the development and production of these products. And yet, not all products are so innocent.

  

  Some products just sell themselves!

• Price -"Cost-plus" pricing is charging enough for the product to cover the costs of the raw materials in making it, and to pay a decent wage to everyone involved in making it. Okay, fine (if all of the lifecycle costs are being covered, and not sneakily being passed onto the wider society in the form of pollution or health care many years later). "Value-added" pricing is charging as much as the customer is willing to pay, even if it is much more than the cost-plus price. The customer still fairly values the product more than that amount of cash, and willing trades to have it. Well, okay I guess (provided it was really a free choice, which is not such a simple issue as is sometimes glibly assumed). But, in unwise hands it can go much further than that.
  

  

  It would be wrong to punch Pharma Bro in the face
• Place - Ah, finally! An aspect of Marketing without ethical landmines. Just simply making a useful and fairly priced product conveniently available. What could be the harm in that? There is a  fundamental tenet of economic growth is that idle or underutilized resources should be put to a higher use. But they never quite address the question of what counts as "higher" or who gets to decide. Surely replacing a tract of empty land with a retail place to make product available would count as a higher use, right? What economic value is there to an empty lot?
  

  

  Coming soon: a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot

The Beauty of Imperfection

When you go looking for them, signs of subtle imperfection are all around. For this, I am very grateful.

I wouldn't recommend this search for people under the delusion of permanence, the idea that with enough effort and luck it would be possible (at least for a short time) to get everything just right, and then (and only then) to be able to be happy and relaxed. Such people are going to get frustrated and discouraged when they keep bumping up against imperfection. But people who are a little more aware of the Dharma understand that the imperfection is already perfect. The flaw lies not with the "imperfect" situation, but lies in our relationship to it - how we feel about it. To repeat myself: the imperfection is already perfect.

That's not meant to be some trite pop culture "Zen paradox". It's a simple observation of how things are when one has a more encompassing understanding of perfection. We are given a great practice opportunity to hold in awareness our desire and expectation of "perfection", and our inability to see the perfection that the world offers up every moment. Don't waste this! Everything is teaching, all the time.

Without any help from us, every snowflake falls in exactly the right place.

This recognition and appreciation of imperfection runs counter to Western aesthetic ideals informed by ancient Greeks like Pythagoras, and can feel defeatist when you are strongly attached to "perfection". But it is well-represented in other aesthetic traditions, such as Japanese wabi sabi.

Wabi. The beauty of thusness. The lone simplicity and quietude of the remote natural world. Freshness and understatement. The maker's mark. Imperfection of design and construction. The quirky input of path dependence. The uniqueness of the thing in itself. Suchness.

Sabi. The beauty of age and experience. Serenity in the face of wear and tear. Imperfection of usage and reliability. Growth and decline in the fullness of life. The quirky outcome of paths chosen. Wisdom embodied through practice.

Well-crafted and enjoyed by many, wood returns whence it came.

Musical Commas

For those who see what I'm pointing at, actively searching out "imperfection" can actually be a satisfying source of beauty and delight. And, since there's so much of it in the world, it becomes a rich and reliable source of happiness. Let me share an example from the world of music, which I find delightful. Maybe you will too.

Pythagoras was one of the first to take clear notice of the relationship between geometry and musical harmony. He was a great believer in the perfection of the world and in the ability to see this perfection by representing the world in geometric simplicity. The simplest example of geometry and music is the octave. If you stretch a string (always of a particular thickness, and at a particular tension) over a particular length and then pluck it, it will vibrate and produce a single note. If you then do the same but over a length exactly half of what you did before, the string will now produce a note exactly one octave higher. The simple ratio of 1:2 produces notes an octave apart. If you divide the string at different lengths (instead of the midpoint) you produce other different notes. If the ratios of lengths are carefully chosen to be ratios of small numbers, the notes produced will be in other pleasant musical intervals. For example, the ratio of 2:3 produces notes that are a perfect fifth apart (think of the opening notes of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star). The ratio of 3:4 produces an interval of a perfect fourth (the opening notes of Amazing Grace). And so on in beautifully consonant and harmonious intervals. So far, so good. Simple geometric ratios, pleasant sonorous harmonies. Close to perfection, yeah?

If you can produce a perfect fifth, you can then apply the same 2:3 trick to the new note to produce a third note that is a perfect fifth above that. For example, starting with C, 2:3 produces G. Then applying 2:3 to that G produces D. Continuing on like this eventually produces all 12 notes of the Western scale: C, G, D, A, E, B, F#, C#, G# (aka Ab), D# (aka Eb), Bb, F, C. The C that you finally reach will of course be seven octaves higher than the original C you started with. But it will be a C nonetheless (a piano keyboard is just long enough to try this yourself). You could alternatively take the original C and keep halving its length until you get up to the same octave. The two C notes should match, right?

Wrong. The C that you get by the cycle of fifths (repeating the 2:3 ratio twelve times) is a slightly higher note than the C you get by octaves (dividing the string in half seven times). The beautiful and mathematically elegant note produced by the Pythagorean method of perfect fifths is ever so slightly sharp and out of tune. Actually, it's not so "slightly". It's about a quarter of a semitone too high. Easily heard as dissonant even by non-musicians.

I suspect this difference (now called the "Pythagorean comma") drove poor Pythagoras a bit crazy. How could a perfectly just and beautiful universe behave so perversely? It's a grotesque discovery to anyone who is attached to the idea of perfection. It's as if we found out the moon does not go around the earth in a perfect circle (Narrator: It doesn't. It's not even a perfect ellipse). Argh.

And so we're forced to face this reality, to deal with things as they actually are, without attachment to ideals of what we think they should be like. Old school piano tuners (who work by ear, without an electronic tuner app on their iPhones), have therefore learned to deliberately mistune the fifths on a piano, making them all slightly flat so that if you go around the full circle of fifths you end up at a note that is in tune with where you started. How much deliberate flat mistuning do they introduce? A quarter of semitone by the twelth root of two (how's that for an ugly bit of math?) - which means they first tune each fifth (say C to G) perfectly, and then flatten the upper note until it creates a beat frequency of about one beat per second (see my earlier post "Sound is Weird" if you want to read about other weird beat-frequency stuff). The resulting tuned piano plays all intervals slightly flat and out of tune. But the out-of-tuneness is spread equally across all twelve notes of the scale (including the black keys). This "equal temperament" it sounds equally imperfect no matter what notes you play, and in whatever key.

You can perfectly tuna fish

(Aside for fellow guitarists out there: this is why tuning your guitar by matching harmonics on adjacent strings at fifth and seventh frets does not work. You're trying to tune perfect fourths with no beat frequency, which creates the Pythagorean comma problem. The farther you play from the middle of the neck, the more out of tune it will be.)

If you'd like to take a deeper dive on this stuff, look into the syntonic comma as well. It's the difference you get in a major third (e.g., C to E) by going around the cycle of fifths four times (C-G-D-A-E) versus going straight to it via a nice Pythagorean ratio of 4:5. Imperfection in art runs very deep.

Interesting tidbits, maybe. But the more important thing to hold in awareness is: how do you relate to this state of affairs? Is it the deep aesthetic problem that Pythagoras saw? Is it just a neutral and pragmatic issue to be deal with when tuning musical instruments? Or is it maybe actually a positive thing? Things are they way they are, and who are we to decide that's not exactly as they should be? All things are perfect in their imperfections. It's not the case that "perfection" is unobtainable or fleeting. But rather, it's that perfection is already present.

What you seek you already have (grasshopper). The damned guitar is never going to be in tune. So shut up and play it!

Do cracks and variations in colour add or subtract beauty?

That Pesky "Self"

Many people are familiar with the basic propositions of Buddhism, and often think that some of them are pretty self-evident. But today I want to share some thoughts on one that is frequently a bit troublesome. Certainly it is where I have had to put the most effort and exploration. Here's the general propositional territory:

• Impermanence - Nothing lasts forever, nothing stays unchanging for very long. The names and forms that we ascribe to things are just convenient conversational labels to refer to temporary arrangements of the universe. Wait long enough and the arrangement will shift - so that the named thing no longer exists. This is usually pretty easy for most people to immediately acknowledge as true (you have be pretty obtuse or unobservant to push back against this one in the face of the constant stream of examples the world keeps serving up).
• Non-duality - In the face of the impermanence of all "things", we're not on very firm ground trying to clearly delineate the boundaries between any two particular things (such as, in the canonical case, between "you" and "me"). The conceptual integrity of imperamenent and changeable things is fuzzy, and if you look closely, it is not such an easy thing to draw clear distinctions - whether in space, in time, or in causality effects. As I write this, I'm holding in my left hand a "spicy nacho" Dorito. Where exactly is the boundary between my finger and the "cheese" powder? At the molecular level, could we clearly ascribe any particular carbon atom to one side or the other (spatial boundary)? And a carbon atom that is clearly "chip" now, will soon be "spare tire" on my waist, and eventual be "ashes". Is it part of "me" or not (temporal boundary)? And we try to escape this fuzziness by switching to a stance where "me" is the thing that I have agency over, it just raises different problems - no man is an island, after all. Which most people eventually come to realize - good news for treating each other with humanity and compassion.
  
• Non-self - This is the hard one. WTF? Are you saying I don't exist? It sure feels like I do. Rene Descartes promised it to me (Aside: he showed "cogito ergo sum", to which any Zen master might respond "non cogito" - checkmate).

It's that third one that causes so much difficulty for many people (myself included). So, taking my own advice, I've been doing some investigations and running some experiments for the last couple of years.

Where am "I"?

When I say "I" who or what am I referring to? Never mind the definitions others have suggested. What do I mean? (And never mind the self-reference. I see what you did there). I can talk a fast line, and throw enough philosophical smoke to probably dodge the question. But that's not our goal here. We want to really know. And it turns out, I don't think I do know. Do you?

Ooh, "I" said it! "I" said it again!

So I did a little investigating of how it seems to be working in my own head. Here's the best I can describe what it looks like in my mind (YMMV). I wonder if other people work the same way?

First, there are raw sensations of the various sense organs. Eyes respond to incident photons. Ears respond to vibrations in the air. There's disagreement about how many senses human have (somewhere between 8 and 11, I think). Ears also respond to gravity, providing the sense of balance. There's also the "kinesthetic" sense that lets you know how your limbs are arranged without looking at them (go ahead, close your eyes and touch your nose). These various sensory capabilities are subject to the usual physical limitations on sensitivity (like the 17kHz noise generators being installed in UK plazas and  Tube stations to aggravate teenagers into not loitering but can barely be heard by old farts like me, or like our weak but real ability to see in the ultraviolet that was covered in an earlier post). As an example, my ears report to my brain that air vibrations are happening now.

These sensations then perceived by the brain - a process subject to lots and lots of perceptual biases (some discussed in previous posts). The brain figures out that the air vibrations mean that someone is speaking words to me.

Then the brain has to figure out the connotation of these words, to make sense of them, determine what they mean. This is a learned skill that involved lots of stored knowledge about language grammar and the meanings of individual words. This comes from memory built up by education, experience, and socialization as a child. Perhaps the connotation indicates words of abuse like "GTFO". My mind seems to keep a list of such words. And hey, someone is abusing me!

So, next there's an evaluation of this connoted meaning. Is the speech good or bad for me? Do I like it or not? The appearance of one of the stars of Zen investigation: the Discriminating Mind. So I decide that I don't like this abuse. It's a clear threat to my self-esteem, to my personal goal of protecting and promoting my ego in the eyes of others. I must have some list of "good" and "bad" things that I'm using to make this discrimination or categorization. More memory.

This implies that somewhere in my mind is a list of goals and objectives like this. In this example, I've discovered that I have a deep-seated goal to make everyone think I'm wonderful - to put forth into the world some perfect fiction or propped up puppet that they will fall for and will think is the real me. Where did such a goal come from? I can understand that evolutionary pressures would bake into all of us some basic goals for survival of the organism, and the drive to reproduce and pass on our genes. But that could still happen even if some people were able to see my flaws and weaknesses. The more I sit with this puzzle, the more it is appearing that this "ego" goal was something programmed into me in childhood by parents, teachers, and other role models. It's not innate. It's something I was given by people who loved me, because they had it inside themselves too. Part of my mind is a goal to promote the ego and therefore to not let people go around dissing me. This example speaking cannot be allow to stand unchallenged!

And so there finally appears some intentionality, some desire to make good things continue and make bad ones stop. Oh no. Desire is born. Craving and aversion. Clinging and hatred. Suffering and dissatisfaction. Dukkha. Alas, I want this bozo to shut up (add one more to the list of goals in my head). It's bad enough that he doesn't believe I'm wonderful. But somebody else might hear him too. And if not skillfully managed (as learned through zazen practice) this desire can all too easily lead to harmful actions - mental ones (thoughts and emotions) that harm me, or physical ones (speech or physical actions) that harm the bozo dude. Oops, too late. I've gotten angry and shouted back at him.

There it is. The map of what's going on inside my head, as explored from the inside. And now I'm trying to use this map to help with the quest I started on: what do I mean when I say "I"?

Is "I" the raw sensation of the world by sense organs? Is it  the perception in the brain? Is it the connotation, or the store of knowledge that fuels it? The discriminant  evaluation and the list of goals that fuels that? The intentions and sometimes actions that arise from there? None of this sounds right to me. I cannot find "I" anywhere in this reductionist mess.

Maybe "I" is therefore only a holistic phenomenon, an emergent epiphenomenon of the mind. Just a name we give for the whole process and all of its elements. It's a convenient conversational convention that points at this body and this mind and all the cool processes going on. But I don't see how it is referring to any separate thing. And especially not any enduring thing. This body is degrading all the time. The memory is adding and forgetting. Goals mutate and evolve. So, even if an "I" did temporarily exist, it's way too slippery to get fussed about. That's the provisional conclusion from this line of enquiry. So I started another, a more deliberate experimental design with manipulation of the independent variable.

What if "I" didn't exist?

I pushed myself into conducting this experiment after one particularly lucid zazen sitting, when I was ready to have a frank conversation with myself about all the ego protection I've been doing for so many years, and all the pain I've caused other people (and myself) pursuing this goal. I'll try to share the didactic exchange that went on between Kuwon and regular ole Dave.

Photo (c) William Putz

Kuwon:You don’t have an ego, so stop working so hard to protect it. It's causing harm to people you love.

Dave: Are you suggesting that, if someone attacks my ego (e.g., abuses me), I should just roll over and accept it, let it stand unchallenged?

K: Sure, why not?

D: Well, for one thing, it will cause them to think less of me. They won't believe I am as wonderful as I'd like them to think.

K: True enough. But do you really need them to think this? Probably they wouldn't think this anyway (since they see your flaws better than you do – no one can see your internal good intentions). And don't you think that being egoless might allow better actions on your part, which would actually raise their opinion of you?

D: But, for another thing, it will mean that they "win" and I "lose". They'll get ahead of me in this life race. Like that work colleague who hogs all the credit.

K: What race? There is no race. There is no final finish line at which you'll be scored. Think about it – what would be the basis of the scoring, and who could possibly know enough to accurately score it?

D: Well, okay. But they’ll end up happier because they got ahead relative to me.

K: Happiness is not zero sum; their gain does not come at your expense. What are you possibly losing by letting the ego attack roll past? And even if it were true that they moved ahead in happiness relative to you, is that really such a bad thing to have helped them with?

D: Anyway, if I were to really adopt this strategy of letting all ego attacks pass unchallenged, the world would take complete advantage of me. People would screw me over in order to get ahead in achieving their own goals. They'd prevent me from achieving mine. "A good offense is the best defense".

K: The goals that they could prevent, are these really the most important goals of yours? Don't you have more important goals in this short life, ones that are not dependent on the support or acquiescence of others?

D:  Now we're getting down to the brass tacks. Really, I’m scared that accepting egolessness will mean I fail to achieve material life goals, and that I’ll later regret this.

K: That’s understandable, but ill-founded. First off, your premise is false. You can still achieve material gains. In fact, with the clarity of awareness that comes from egolessness, you might actually be more successful in achieving goals (there would be less misdirected and wasted effort). Rolling over is not the same as passivity. It means not wasting time and energy on unimportant fights. Instead, redirect that time and energy to achieving something more important. Secondly, you know better than to get too caught up in these material goals. Life is short, and you are wasting too much of it on material gains. You’ve already had more than your fair share. And you’ve seen firsthand that they are essentially empty, and so deliberately got off the corporate treadmill. And anyway, even if you remain scared that still doesn’t change the truth of the matter. So you're scared – so what? You still don't have a real ego worth fighting over (it’s a delusion). Isn't it better to try to face up to the fact?

D: Woah, dude. That’s a lot to digest. Maybe some experiential data is needed at this point. I could experiment for a while, trying not defending and building up the ego so much, and then see what happens. Your thesis suggests I should see these results:

• More clarity and insight into what's going on around me (since it wouldn't be filtered or framed to make my ego look good)

• Wiser decisions about what to do next (since not driven by the need for ego protection)

• More time and energy available to spend on important goals

• A slight net gain in perception by others (even if you say this is irrelevant or even counterproductive).

 This experiment has been running for about a year and half now. And I'm starting to be persuaded. But old habits and conditioning die slowly. Right now it's more "fake it til you make it".

Wiser people than me have been down this same path. Maybe they are clearer?