Twilight Zones

 I recall watching a TV program when I was growing up called "The Twilight Zone". The premise behind this program is that people who otherwise live "normal" existences are suddenly thrown for a loop--they find themselves caught in inexplicable dilemmas that cannot be explained, either by themselves or the authorities in their world. It's as though the "laws" of space and time (and society as a whole) were twisted or warped, and the person is caught in a wormhole where those familiar rules no longer apply.
   What pushes this show to a paranoia is that it puts the viewer in the position of one who knows and feels that something is wrong, yet somehow lacks the shared language with others to voice what is different. Like characters in Kafka novels, there is a sense of something being off, but no way to set it right, because there are no rules of engagement with others that bind people to shared solutions. In thriller movies like King Kong or even slasher films, there is at least a notion of a shared enemy that everyone agrees to escape from or fight. In Twilight Zone, no such common cause can be identified, and the main characters often feel isolated, thinking they are the only ones who share their previously familiar values.
  Sometimes, I feel like the view of samsara is very much more like "Twilight Zone" than anything else. We often find ourselves caught in situations that can only be understood if we go into past lives that we have long since forgotten. Even then, there is no beginning cause whatsoever, and whatever I do to frame the solution of a problem is itself influenced by my conditioning. In this situation, I might find that the prevailing explanations don't fit my ideas or understanding, and the choice is either to acquiesce with socially accepted discourses on what's true or not true, or I might say that the current explanations don't suit or address the conditioned arising. Many people are told to choose the former, because it's easier to accept whatever ideologies are given to us and try our hardest to stay within their confines. It's only when a person's suffering is excrutiating or especially bothersome that they will think to push the boundaries into the latter. This is where all explanations start to lose their meaning, and one starts to see their problems as entry points to deeper existential riddles.

Cool Empathy

 Empathy is often portrayed in popular psychology as a warm and fuzzy sort of feeling. We want to put ourselves in the shoes of someone else so we try to project onto them traits that we find desirable, such as love or sympathy. But I have found that real empathy can be cool and detached as well. It doesn't need to set up or presume a specific atmosphere, and it can even be used to teach reading and literature. Empathy does not need to be immersive or total, in the sense of trying to completely immerse ourselves in another experience like a method actor. Instead, empathy might be considered trying out different ideas or situations that another person might be experiencing, based on what they communicate to us.
  I sometimes feel that the task of empathy can be too daunting: how can we ever tell whether we have fully captured another person's experiences? In fact, this is neither possible nor especially desirable, in my opinion. Furthermore, such an experience doesn't necessarily entail a connecting experience with another person. I think that empathy needs to be approached with caution and humility, in the sense that what we think about someone else can only be a mental construction based on a mixture of one's personal experiences,education and the observations of another person. We don't have special access to another person's mind, and nor is this necessary for people to get along or live harmoniously.
    Though we cannot know another person, we can have fun exploring the lived experiences of others. I think it's important not to try to take another person's experiences as one's own or claim knowledge that is only partial or fragmentary. This kind of empathy is grounded in a sense that understanding is impermanent and partial. And this is okay, because all of experience is a constant unfolding.

I Thou Spirit

In his book, The Religion of Tomorrow, Ken Wilber writes about different pronouns denoting spirit, which he refers to as "1 2 3 spirit". First person spirit relates to the identification of one's mind or interior as ultimate spirit. Second person spirit relates to spirit as a "you", or an enduring conversation with an other, whether it's God or the Buddha, or another practitioner. Third person spirit sees spirit as something out there, that has no direct connection with us, such as Aristotle and Plontius's ideas about the Prime Mover of things, or Spinoza's idea of conatus.
    I find that the "Second Person" spirituality is perhaps the least definable--and, for this reason, sometimes the most problematic. This is because trying to picture spirit as an ongoing dialogue between two or more persons is sometimes conveying the idea that spirit is never completed, and cannot ever be defined or contained. Wilber suggests that conversation with the other is the way that qualities such as "compassion, love, gratitude, forgiveness, and so on" (p.173) can be expressed.
   Thinking about spirit as an ongoing, incomplete conversation that never ends, can sometimes help a person let go of a certain pride that might come from believing that they have found spirit or have achieved it in some way. Speaking personally, I have found that it's only when I admit my lack of control, or exhaust the feeling of being "in control", that spirit is allowed to seep into my insides and lift me up. Part of it is because spirit always falls behind or out of range of words, so we only realize spirit when we run out of consoling words. But part of it also is that spirit can't happen if we feel already complete and full. When we are "full", we have ossified ourselves, and are not able to let anything in, which is why failure is often the prelude to many spiritual moments. When spirit is allowed to get into the broken cracks of a tarnished surface, one can then realize that the brokenness is part of a process, and there is no harm in ever having to break for lack of any other way to proceed forward.

Wilber, K. (2017). The Religion of Tomorrow Boulder: Shambhala.

Conditions for A Grateful Reading

 I have several books (library and otherwise) currently stacked on various shelves (bookshelves or otherwise), and waiting for me to read them. Sometimes, I am sidetracked by a whole lot of things, so I might not get to them as quickly as I would wish. On the other hand, this reading is essential to my research and theoretical formulations. And I am thinking: what kinds of reading allow me to be curious about the topics that the authors are conveying in the book? What aspects of reading fill me with joy, if not gratitude?  Conversely, what aspects of reading, particularly in academia, cause me to lose curiosity, if not outright shut down from being curious or grateful?
   All of this ties in with the topic of assessment, because I believe that learners and students assess as much as teachers do. While teachers ultimately assess the value of a students' writing, students also need to assess the sources they are researching to determine relevance to their research topics. However, too narrow a focus on "relevance" can lead to a kind of repetition of the same material and ideas as in existing scholarship in a certain area. To be original and creative, scholars need to be willing to dip into subject areas that are sometimes tangential to their current topic. This is because the cross-fertilization of different theories across different fields is a fruitful way to invigorate scholarship and prevent the student from thinking too narrowly about their given topic and field.
   So, I think this comes to my main point, and that is the reader needs to be willing to suspend disbelief in a topic's relevance to their topic. That is, a student needs to go beyond what they think they will find in a given subject to embrace what could be found; to even step outside the familiar to see something new. This requires a certain ability to enjoy and appreciate something as though it were specifically designed for that person's life in that moment. When a person is open to reading in this way, serendipity tends to happen. This, for instance, happens to me when I read the I Ching: I often connect the hexagrams I am reading to my life experience, or something that seems similar to it in some way.
  What I think this requires goes beyond a traditional idea of reading as an act of opening a book that was written years ago by another person. To read a book is to open to one's present situation, using the words of the book as a way of assessing that present, felt and lived experience. A book speaks to me and reaches out to me where I am now, but it is up to me to trust that it will do so, just as every book has always done so since the very beginning. When thought of this way, no reading is accidental, and reading can plant seeds for future thought or inspiration. Given this, there is no reading that is ever a true waste of time.
   Could some of this thinking about revising the function of reader key into what my thesis is about? Well, writing this should give me reasons to feel grateful later (perhaps).

The Pains of Being a Receiver

  I mentioned in an earlier post about assessment, that simply reading a student's writing with the expectation of receiving a gift is actually challenging a view that teachers should administer assessment rather than enjoy student writing. It is I,the teacher, who gives you, the student, a grade or an assessment, thus turning your work into something that can be coherently compared to something else. This, after all, is what the term "grade" comes from; it refers to a quality that can be scaled, compared, or categorized into specific functions or levels. Because the teacher gives a grade, the role of the teacher assumes a crucial agency, which students often lack. It's rare to find students completely in charge of their own grading. Even in those special cases, it's usually a teacher who becomes the final arbiter of whether the student's judgment or grading scheme is justified or not.
   What are the pains, then, of being a receiver of gifts? I think this goes back to a cultural notion of receiving a gift as a form of having a debt to someone else, which often seems unwanted. But it also seems to incapacitate the person who considers him or herself to be the "giver" in a teacher-student relationship. If I allow myself to admit that I am privileged to read my students' work (that is, even gifted to do so), then I am reversing the attitude that a student should thank me for giving them a grade and properly judging their work as "good" or not. Instead, I look to the student as providing me with an experience that is fundamentally not reduced to a grade, or a teacher-student transaction. In doing so, I surrender some of my "authority".
    Of course, we do (often inevitably) judge the gifts we receive---for example, we decide that our gift-giver was a bit too "cheap" or hasty in the way they prepared the gift. In that sense, receiving gifts and being thankful for them does not preclude my abilities to assess the quality of the gift itself. But seeing myself as a recipient of a gift from another takes away (to a certain extent) my capacity to judge the gift/giver in the way that I would judge my own purchases. In effect, I am told: this person did something 'gratis', and certainly didn't need to go to this length to do so. Seeing that this gift is not based on a previous debt, it must surely be seen as a gift, or at least as something coming from another person's sincere heart and intention.
   By shifting away from an idea of exchange, something must surely happen to the identity of the teacher as an assessor. This is my ongoing "huatou"--a contemplation for future postings.
   

Time Blurred

The sense of time is quite strange. I sometimes have difficulties figuring out how or why time seems to go "more quickly" on some days than others, when one is doing the exact same thing at work, from one day to the next. I believe that today felt like the shortest day of my life. Now why and how does it happen that time slips away so quickly?
    I have found that whenever I really let myself be drawn into the present experience, I am not even thinking about time. But there is no trick to this: I don't try be in the present, but rather I just let things fall in whatever arrangement they want to be, seeing myself more as a participant or a fellow "time traveller" than as the clock-master. When I think in this way, there is no time, because there is no longer the illusion that there is an I moving from point A to point B in time. Without that sense of linearity, time doesn't seem to exist at all, and I find myself oddly enough not even being aware that hours passed while I was doing something.
  It has only been recently when working at home that I have experienced these kinds of moments. And I have come to the sense that these moments are training in the awareness that time itself is not so real, because it is not a something reaching forward to an end result. This is a kind of felt sense of things going on and not having a real finish.

Enjoyment and Assessment: Opposites?

When teachers assess student writing, they might think of it as putting on a reflective, critical hat: one must assign a grade, which requires a logical mindset. What happens when one instructs teachers not simply to evaluate in a logical way, but to enjoy the students' writing through their emotions? So far, I have the stumbling block of seeing "reason" and "emotion" as somehow separate components in the assessment process.
  It's very much similar to the distinction between "passive" and "active" reading.  Books can be both a source of reflection and a kind of passive escape from thinking altogether. I have sometimes heard the expression "being carried away by a book" to describe the latter. It is as though succumbing to the pleasures of reading something without any critical acumen or interpretive framework were a kind of primitive, inadequate source of reading that needs to be supplanted in favor of a mature way of reading. I am also reminded of Plato's warning that art "corrupts" character, especially art that does not have a specific message that supports moral life.
   Bringing enjoyment or pleasure into assessing student work is not easy, because assessment itself is built around critical frameworks that support certain ways of reasoning about writing and art. Without those logical structures in place (and legitimated), there is a danger that the process of grading itself can lose its coherence. I remember a high school English teacher once remarking on how impossible he felt to grade creative writing, although he never hesitated to assign tough grading standards on essays. This teacher felt reluctant to evaluate creativity in the same way that intellectual thinking could be evaluated.
   What is it about creativity or "creative" writing that makes it immune to the deeper criticism of an essay or academic paper? Again, I would have to say that teachers have different impressions about the functions of these writing types. Whereas it's considered legitimate to enforce strict standards on discursive writing, narrative writing might get a looser evaluative mode. It's as though a kind of caution steps in that wants to preserve the sacredness of creativity and our responses to it, by holding a space away from a critical lens.