An Englishman in the New World

What dream of myself do I push away, thinking it’s too good to be true? This was the question posed by Brian Swimme, mathematical cosmologist and philosopher at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and keynote speaker at the co-active coaching summit in Napa this April. In co-active coaching this is known as a powerful question. Training in co-active coaching is summarised by it’s developer Henry Kimsey House as ‘context based, experientially driven transformational learning’. “What I have to offer is perspective”, Brian Swimme began. In effect 13.8 billon years of context. How did he bring the known universe into the ballroom of the Meritage Resort and connect it to a coaching question? Read on. 

My non-scientifically trained English mind remembers Swimme’s words thus. When Einstein developed his ideas about matter and energy he didn’t simply download them from his forebrain. He brought them forth from his viscera. It is no accident that what came out was a reflection of the structure of the universe; because we are all woven into the fabric of the cosmos. Einstein’s cerebral cortex did, however, come into play when he modified his equations so that they made sense to him. Which part of these equations didn’t make sense to one of the greatest and most courageous minds of the twentieth century? Well, when Edwin Hubble started looking really hard through his mighty telescope and proved that the universe is expanding he got on the phone to Einstein and said, ‘get your big old brain over here, there’s something you should know.’ And Einstein was forced to confront the fact that the changes he had made were actually chisel slips on Michael Angelo’s David. Or, as he put it, the biggest mistake of his career as a scientist. Thus, what dream of myself do I push away, thinking it’s too good to be true? Give it some thought, and then some more. It is a truly transformational question.

            Apparently such ideas are commonplace in California, but to this cold, small island resident they took the concept of mind-blowing out of the realm of cliché. Here’s another one, again as I remember it. The sun makes life possible. It sends out light which is transformed by chlorphyll and the process of photosynthesis into energy. We are all light, pretty much. The part of us that is not, that is matter, would take up less space than a grain of sand.  

The sun has matter to burn, lots of it. It burns the equivalent of 4,000 elephants every second to produce the light that makes life on earth possible, sacrifices 4,000 elephants worth of matter to make elephants, and rabbits, horses, daisies, cherry blossoms etc. And the amount of the sun’s light that actually reaches earth is one billionth of what is actually produced. And it doesn’t ask for payment. The sun is infinitely generous. Coaching point: think about that next time you find yourself fighting over scraps or playing at office politics.

As well as the summit, I went to California to learn some new coaching techiques at the Coaches Training Institute. Serendipitously it was training in perspective coaching. In between the workshop and the summit I drove down the central coast as far as San Simeon. I’ve seen Hearst Castle before, so instead I drove around the Paso Robles wine growing region and added to my stock of Pinot Noir. Apparently there was a late frost in 2011 and the quantity of the harvest was much diminished, but this had a positive effect on the quality. I learned this by chatting to the friendly round guy at Windward who was posted out front, but it was self-evident in the tasting. He also gave me an opportunity to challenge an assumption that some people make and which, me being a Pinot fan, has impacted me negatively; namely that Pinot Noir is a girl’s drink. I asked and of course he said it wasn’t, and how could it be if  I am a man and I love it this much? Coaching point: never waste an opportunity to challenge negative assumptions and once you make a gain to the positive, lock it in and don’t surrender the ground again without a fight.

Later that evening I drove 50 miles through the fog to the hot springs at Esalen, winding along the coast on route 1 with sheer drops on the seaward side. I was headed for the night baths, unclothed (if you like which many people did), communal, mixed, dark and set atop the rocks with the Pacific waves crashing below. Before I went I did some reading. The Esselen Indians used it as a place to heal from 6,000 years ago until comparatively recently. In the 1880s Thomas Slate ’homesteaded’ Easalen. My suspicious English mind immediately said “that’s American English for the British word ‘colonised’”, though I do know I’m in no position to take the moral high ground. Since the 1960’s Esalen has been home to practices such as meditation, humanistic psychology etc. which, for me, made knowledge of the ‘homesteading’ even harder to stomach. To cut a long story short it was gloriously relaxing, but the history stopped my thoughts from wandering where they may have gone to the pulse of the universe and ancient wisdom. Later, at the summit, I was complaining about this to a lady who was planning to go there soon for a retreat. I apologised for spoiling her anticipation and she said, “no problem I’ll just imagine I was an Indian in a past life and am coming home”. Powerful question: In what ways do you rain on your own parade?

No Eternal Reward will Forgive You for Wasting the Sunset

I first wrote this as a contribution to a friend's book idea which she titled 'Dear Daughter'. The idea was to compile a collection of advice people would give to their daughter, real or, in my case, imagined. What I wrote was:  "If you find yourself arguing with a religiously-minded person about creationism/intelligent design and evolution, stop and change tack. Here are some ideas about how to avoid getting dragged into a futile debate with someone who has already made up their mind on the issue:

1. Ask them why they assume that only one entity was responsible for the design of the earth and all the living things in it. Take a single thing that we know for sure has been intelligently designed e.g. a Ferrari. How many people down the centuries have been involved in the perfection of a modern day Ferrari? Don’t forget to include the invention of the wheel and its development into an alloy construction with tubeless low-profile tyres.

2. Ask them where the evidence is of God practising, since no intelligent person I’ve ever met got good at anything without practice.

3. Ask them to explain how assuming an almighty creator can help to evolve human society in a moral rather than merely material direction. If you get a sensible answer, please pass it on.

4. Ask them to explain how the creator might have been created.

5. Ask them why pronouns for God always have capital letters and why He created people, like me, who find it intensely annoying.

6. Ask them whether God is responsible for the development, by seemingly intelligent people, of carbon dating techniques.

7. Ask them if they accept that the idea of an intelligent designer is based on observations of intelligent design by humans. Then ask them if they think human society may one day evolve a new almighty designer who will this time leave written records and allow future humans to avoid wasting time on futile discussion of imponderables."

Since then I have had an experience that has changed my advice somewhat. I was sat on Cottesloe beach in Western Australia enjoying a beer and watching the sunset, as is my wont while on holiday. A man of God came up to me and demanded my opinion on this topic. I asked him most of the above questions and he just brushed them off, his technique when faced with something he couldn't possibly give a reasonable answer to being to chuck a non sequitur at me. His favourite brickbat was "the first thousand years in hell with soften you up". I realised later that such a conversation feels like being stoned (in the biblical sense). So here's the thing dear daughter: people who do not share basic assumptions can never really get beyond mudslinging when debating. Therefore there really is only one question to ask, Do you agree that scientific inquiry is a legitimate way to go about knowing who we are and how we and the world we live in came to be here and that, because of it, we know far more about the nature of things now than was known by (western) humans when all the major (western) religions were invented? If you are not satisfied with the answer you get, bid your evangeliser a polite good night and get back to watching the sunset. After all, however it came to be, it would be a crime against the creator to waste it. 

Have Your Cake and Eat it

You can't have your cake and eat it. That's what we are told, but why? In Japan, people love to take pictures of food. There is a saying in Japan that you taste food first with your eyes. This is what underlies the tremendous care and skill that goes into the presentation of Japanese food. When a cake arrives on the table it gets photographed, then eaten. In a sense this is having your cake and eating it. Obviously the phrase have your cake and eat it is not meant so literally. It usually implies the necessity of making a choice and giving up one thing in preference for another. If you want to go out with your friends tonight, you can't watch whatever on television. If you want a bicycle for your birthday, you can't have a train set. This apparently simple truth is complicated these days by recording technology and parents increasingly yielding to pressure from the consumer society to give children everything they want. It's actually hard to think of an example of some situation where it isn't possible, for some people at least, to have their cake and eat it. My pet peeve in this area is people who want to take something from you, time, money, attention etc in a way that is not really fair, but also want you to aid them in not feeling bad about doing it. Some people are highly skilled at this. And this links into the area of relationships. If you make a commitment, you are making a choice to either have the cake or eat it. You can't gain without sacrificing something. If you take the hedonist and enjoy the all night parties together, you have also to take the bags under the eyes and the tired moodiness in the daytime. If you take the interesting character you have also to take the troubled past that forged it. If you take the beauty, you have also to take the vanity and/or the constant competition. To try to have your cake and eat it in the sphere of romantic relationships means staying constantly on the move, enjoying some attractive feature and getting out before its less obviously attractive corollary becomes apparent. Again some people are very skilled at this, while others marry and have affairs. We are all subject to the temptation to have our cake and eat it, or at least to try. Let he or she who is without sin cast the first stone. My question is this: what do we lose when we have our cake and eat it? My own answer is that we lose our connection to reality: the nuanced pleasure of enjoying and being satisfied by something that is then gone forever except in memory; or the aesthetic delight tinged with frustration of having our visual sense stimulated by something we cannot enjoy the consumption of. These days we talk about reading books and watching films as consumption and advertisers would try to convince you that you can indeed have your cake and eat it. Something important is lost when we view the world that way. Give some thought to what we might mean in this day and age when we say you can't have your cake and eat it and you might just realize that it's as true today as it ever was.