Jeremiah 7:11

Has this house, which bears my Name, become a den of robbers to you? But I have been watching! declares the Lord.

Matthew 21:13

“It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’”

Mark 11:17

And as he taught them, he said, “Is it not written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’”

Luke 19:46

“It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be a house of prayer’; but you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’”

Never run from pain.

Pain can sense fear, and will attack ...

Car!

There is a one word Canadian joke.

"Car!"

This should bring to mind a ball hockey game being interrupted by the fact that a car wants to drive down the street on which the ball hockey game is being played.

I have just realized that I have only once in my life seen this situation in action, in real life.  I must have been at least fifty years old before I saw it.  We were living in a townhouse complex, and new neighbours moved in with a pair of hockey-mad twins, who set up said ball hockey games with some of their school friends and some other children from the complex.  Not on the street, of course, but on the driveway of the complex.

It's that "of course" that has hit me.

I have a subscription to The Atlantic Monthly magazine, and I have just read an article, which has just been published, online.  I don't even know if it'll make it into the print version of the magazine.  I hope it does.  It'll be behind a paywall, but I hope you all look for it, and point it out to friends.  It's important.  The title of the article is "What Adults Lost When Kids Stopped Playing in the Streets."  To assist you, here is the URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/07/play-streets-children-adults/679258/

I've just realized, reading the article, that I have never seen children playing in the streets.  Oh, yes, I've seen it in movies and TV shows, but the times that I have seen it in real life are vanishingly rare.

Of course, you will say, this is natural.  I grew up in "the Big City."  My home, growing up, was on a street with six lanes of high speed traffic.  *Nobody* would play on that street.

But off that street were back streets.  And we didn't play on *those.*  We all *knew* that streets were for cars.  Not for us.

And later on I lived in a small town.  Not just *a* small town: *the* small town.  Kitimat, the famous planned community.  The streets were designed to have few major arteries, with the bulk of the streets as winding back roads, *made* for ensuring that cars didn't barrel down them at high speeds.  If *any* place had streets safe for kids to play on them, it was there.

The kids didn't play on the streets in Kitimat, either.  I know.  I was the only pedestrian there, too.  I walked two miles to school, each day (yes, mostly in the snow, no, it wasn't uphill both ways).  OK, I was *teaching,* not going to school, but I still got to see, up close, what anyone was doing on the streets.

Driving.

Not playing.

And, later on, I taught on six continents.  I have taught all over the world.  And I've never seen any place where the kids play on the streets any more.

And now I live in a small town, again.  With beautiful wide streets.  And I'm the only pedestrian in town here, too.  So I know that the kids don't play on the streets here, either.

Yes, cars are useful things.  But, as somebody said about fire, it's a great servant, but a terrible master.  We have rearranged our lives, and our childrens' lives, to make the roads safe for cars.  Not the other way around.

Think about that.

MGG - 5.34 - HWYD - teaching styles

I have a fairly simple teaching style.  I know as much about the subject as I can, and I try to figure out what the most important information is to deliver.  In the case of the CISSP seminar, I knew, from my own analysis of the exam when I wrote it, that the fundamental principles in the field of information security are the most important items to know.  Yes, it's good if you know a bunch of technical details, because there will be questions on technical details, to determine whether you know about the technology at all.  But the really crucial things to know are the principles of security.  So, I have analyzed the enormous amount of material that can be covered in the seminar, and concentrate on stressing these principles.  I know an awful lot about security, and have learned even more from facilitating the seminars, so I always have much more material then can be delivered.

But others have different teaching styles.  One of the instructors had an extremely interesting style, which it took me a while to analyze.  As I taught with him, multiple times, I realized that each time he taught he presented the material in a slightly different way, even though he presented the same actual material, every time.  Eventually I realized that he was working with cycles of the volume of his voice, the emotional intensity that he was using to deliver the material, and the speed that he was talking at.  Because the number of stages in each of these three cycles was different, he would cycle through differences in volume, tone, and speed in an almost inexhaustible variety.  None of this had any relation to what he was actually talking about: as I said, the information was always the same.  But, because of the variety of volume, timing, and intensity, he always got very good reviews as an instructor, because he kept the candidates entertained by the variety of the ways that he was presenting.

One of the other instructors was very big into mastery teaching.  Mastery teaching is a style that emphasizes that I am the teacher, I am the one who knows, and you are the ignorant peasants to whom I am forced to deliver this information.  In order to do this, whenever he was asked a question he would snap back an immediate answer.  He never once indicated that he didn't know, or would do some research and get back to the questioner with an answer later.  Unfortunately, his mastery of the subject was not as solid as his mastery of the students.  He would immediately answer a question, whether he actually knew the answer, or not.  And very frequently, it was not.  When I taught with him, I had to be extremely careful, when he had given an egregiously erroneous answer to some questioner.  I would try to imply that I was simply restating what he had just said, in a different way, and then present the actual facts of the situation.

I, of course, reviewed the textbooks that were produced for the CISSP seminars.  There was one particular book by one Shon Harris, that was very popular.  The first edition of her book that I reviewed was an interesting experience.  Because I had reviewed so much of the other security literature, I was able to identify individual sentences, sometimes paragraphs, and sometimes whole pages that she had cribbed from other works.  However, as the academic joke has it, if you steal from one person, it is theft.  If you steal from two people, it is plagiarism.  If you steal from three people, it is research.  Subsequently, Shon did try and expand her work, and to explain things in her own words.  Unfortunately, as with the one particular co-instructor, Shon was quite willing to explain things that she did not, in fact, understand.  Her books were readable, and, for the most part, they were valuable study guides.  But it got to the point where I would tell seminar groups that I refused to answer any question that started out, "Shon Harris says ..."

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/07/mgg-533-hwyd-cissp-and-narcolepsy.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/08/mgg-535-hwyd-you-do-you.html

Imaginary friends

Well, my imaginary friends don't believe in *you*, either ...

The Bear

In the winter, on Mount Arrowsmith, when the snow covers most of the mountain, around noonish, the shadows on the mountain (from ridges on the west face) cast a shadow like the profile of a young bear.

In the summer, the shadow "face" is definitely not as clear (with no snow background to make it more defined), and the profile may also change slightly, due to the lack of snow accumulation on the ridge.

Leading to the local expression that "the bear is back," as an indication that winter is here.

The winter profile is a central feature of one of the pictures hanging in Stamps Cafe, at the Best Western Barclay.

Psalm 13:1

How long will you forget me, Lord?  Forever?  How long will you hide your face from me?

LLM AI Bios

Did you know that large language models are described in the Bible?  And not just in the New Testament.  Isaiah 28:10 literally translates as, "For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; a little here, a little there."  But, in the original Hebrew, it reads more like, "Tzav la-tzav, tzav la-tzav, kav la-kav, kav la-kav z‘eir sham, z‘eir sham."  In other words, what it is really saying is, "He keeps telling us blah blah blah blah blah."

Both literally and idiomatically this is a *really* great description of large language models.

The bloom seems to be coming off the AI rose.  Yes, corporations are still investing millions, and even billions, of dollars in artificial intelligence, mostly in companies that are pursuing the "Large Language Model" chimera.  Initially, I thought that the large language models were a cute trick, and might possibly have some uses.  As time went on, we found about out about "hallucinations," disinformation, "jailbreaking," and a whole bunch of other problems with a large language models.  What we *didn't* find was any activity or process where the large language models were really useful.

Businesses said we can use these large language models to automate mundane tasks.  But, really, how mundane does the task have to get before we entrust it to a large language model?  And if the task gets that mundane, is it really a task that we need to do?  I am reminded of Peter Drucker's famous quote that there is nothing so useless as doing, efficiently, that which should not be done at all.

So, for quite a while, my take on the large language models has been that they are a solution in search of a problem.

Given the money being thrown at them, that search seems to have become more desperate.

I have been doing presentations, to various groups, on artificial intelligence and the different types of approaches to the field that preceded the large language models, and would seem to be considerably different in approach.  As well as the various risks, both in not pursuing artificial intelligence, and of pursuing artificial intelligence too avidly.  Recently I was given a date for a presentation to a group that I knew would want a bio.

I hate writing bios.

I hate *listening* to bios, for that matter.  They always seem to be full of stock phrases and puff pieces, and rather short on actual facts or reasons that I should listen to this particular person, who is doing this presentation not out of any particular interest in or insight into the topic, but as a means of reaching for the next rung on the ladder of fame and success.

I hate doing them, on myself.  So, I thought it would be amusing to have ChatGPT write a bio of me.  ChatGPT is, after all, the tool that pretty much everybody thinks about when they think about the large language models.  In order to see how much the technology has improved over the past few months, I decided to also submit the same request to Claude, the tool from Anthropic.  (Claude is supposed to have better "guard rails" against jailbreaking, than does ChatGPT.)  And, today, Meta announced Llama 3.1, so I included Meta AI.

Well, It was somewhat amusing. 

But it has also become part of my presentation.  The bios that all three systems produced point out, in large measure, the problems associated with the large language models of artificial intelligence.

Rob Slade was born, variously, in 1948, 1952, and "the 1950's."  That last is accurate, but rather imprecise.  I had not known that there was so much controversy over the date of my birth (although I *was* very young, at the time), especially since it is not exactly a secret.  So, some of the material is purely in error.  I have absolutely no idea where they got 1952 and 1948 from.  I also wonder why all three systems decided that it is important to give the year of my birth, but none mentions where I was born, or lived most of my life, or, indeed, where I live now.  (Claude *did* manage to figure out that I am Canadian.)  Again, there is no particular secret about this.

I gave them a three hundred word limit, and, somewhat to my surprise, given the weird and wonderful errors that LLMs seem to be capable of making, all three did come in "under budget," at 246, 268, and 279 words.  All three systems wasted an awful lot of their word count on what could primarily be called promotional or sales material.  I had noted that this is a tendency in the large language models.  This isn't terribly surprising, given that most of the material that they would have been able to abstract from the Internet, would have been primarily sales, marketing, or other promotional material.  I don't know whether this speaks to the tendency, on the part of the large language models, to hallucinate.

It is nice to know that I am renowned, with a career spanning several decades, have made significant contributions to the field of cybersecurity, authoring numerous books and papers, with a solid foundation for my expertise, I'm influential and my publications have served as essential resources for both novices and seasoned professionals, I give engaging presentations, and my ability to demystify complex security concepts make me a sought-after speaker and educator, with a career marked by significant achievements and a commitment to advancing the field of information security, my work has been instrumental in shaping the understanding of digital threats and has left an indelible mark on the information security landscape.  My legacy serves as a testament to the importance of dedication, expertise, and innovation in the ever-evolving landscape of information security.  You will note that none of these claims are really verifiable, and so they are also basically unchallengeable.  On the other hand, my contributions have been recognized with several awards.  (Well, I *did* get a mug from IBM, at an event ...)

I am also known as "The Father of Viruses."  Oh, gee, thanks, Meta.

ChatGPT found three of my books, Claude two, and Meta one.  Nobody found all five.  There are other Robert Slades on the Internet.  Over thirty years ago we had the "Robert Slade Internet Club, with a membership of about a dozen.  There is a Robert Slade who publishes on Greek pottery and inscriptions, another who publishes on fishing lures, another who teaches mathematics, and another who is a DJ for events and parties.  In order to give AI the best chance, I specified that I wanted a biography of the Robert Slade who was an information security expert.  To their credit, none of the models came up with specific references to the publications of these other Robert Slades.

However, I have been credited with degrees from a number of universities which I did not attend, so their backgrounds may be the explanation.  (Meta found one right university, but the wrong degree.)  But that doesn't explain my "memberships" in a number of tech associations to which I don't, and have never, belonged, and the failure to list the *one* organization to which I did, for some time.  (Apparently I also participated in numerous committees and working groups aimed at improving global cybersecurity standards and practices.  Unfortunately, not true.)

Claude says that I developed an early interest in computers and technology during my university years, which is pretty much false.  Although I did explore one computer system, and taught myself programming, at the time I felt that computers were pretty much useless except for crunching data, and, even at that, they were a lot of trouble.  Both Claude and Meta insist that I started with mainframes: again, pretty much completely false.  (Meta insists that I started with computers at age twelve: I was almost thirty before I really got interested.)  Claude managed to figure out that it was my reviews of antivirus software that first got me any attention.  (Overall, I'd say Claude definitely gets top marks for accuracy.  But being the best of a bad lot is not exactly a stunning accolade.)

Yes, it has been somewhat amusing to have the LLMs write my bio.  But that's because I hate writing bios anyways.  If this bio were, in fact, important to me--if it were some type of resume--I would not be able to accept the errors that have been made.  Granted, it has automated the task of generating marketing and promotional fluff; with claims that are both unverifiable, but unchallengeable.  But do we want to produce this kind of material, for any reason?  Is this not the slippery slope to the post-truth world in which we live, where major figures are able to lie, blatantly, provably, without regard or interest in whether or not people are going to be able to say that is a complete and utter lie?  I have, in another piece, commented that the large language models could not be better at producing disinformation than if they had been designed that way.

Have they?

(I also asked Meta AI to do a headshot of me from the available images of me.  The result:

)

Isaiah 28:10

For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; a little here, a little there.

Tzav la-tzav, tzav la-tzav, kav la-kav, kav la-kav z‘eir sham, z‘eir sham

Profundity? From a *Hallmark* movie?

Okay, the way you're looking at me right now, that's why it wasn't hard for me to leave my friends in [...]: because they had all already left *me.*  They couldn't imagine what happened to *me*, happening to them.  And every time they saw me, they did.  So they just ... they all faded away ...

 - "Field Day"

Ecclesiastes 9:9

Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun—all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun.

MGG - 5.33 - HWYD - CISSP and narcolepsy

About the time that I started going to the Agora meetings, I also started facilitating the CISSP review seminars for (ISC)^2, the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium.  Hence the need for the TN-1 visas.  (Initially, most of the seminars I did were in the States.)

In those dim and distant carefree days, we were sent out as pairs of instructors.  Sometimes it would be a matter of teaching for an hour on, an hour off, or sometimes we would divvy up the domains that we taught, but, in any case, it allowed you to have a bit of a break from what is, after all, a really, seriously intense seminar to be dealing with.  You are faced with a group of perhaps thirty candidates for the certification exam.  All of them have at least five years work experience, simply in order to get into the seminar.  Sometimes you will be faced with a class that has a half a dozen very senior people, all of whom have fifteen to twenty years experience, in particular and specific subfields of security.  You have to be able to stand up and deliver forty hours of material, and answer all kinds of questions, and not look like an idiot.  Having a second instructor allows for a bit of a break from this very intense occupation, and also allows for a second opinion if you can't immediately think of anything to answer a question that has been asked.  It's a good way to learn security, certainly.  The class is always asking questions that you, yourself, have never asked, and the research that you have to do in order to answer these questions gets you into a lot more areas and fields of security than anything that you will ever work on in your job.  As far as I was concerned, it was the best teaching job ever.  You always knew that everyone had the basic prerequisites, which is never something you can count on in any other type of commercial training.

Anyway, as I say, they sent us out in pairs.  One of the other instructors that I was paired up with, fairly frequently when I first started instructing, had narcolepsy.  I didn't know this when I started teaching with him, and was quite offended when he started out the morning, taught for a couple of hours, and, when I took over, went and sat in the back of the room and immediately fell asleep.  He did explain, later.

But it did have a bearing on one of the subsequent seminars that we taught together.  In this particular seminar, one of the candidates worked for a company that, as the seminar started, had just had a disaster in the field of information security.  So, this guy was sitting in the seminar all day, trying to retain as much as he could of what we were covering, and then racing back, through heavy Atlanta traffic, to his workplace, which was all the way across town, putting in six or eight hours trying to deal with the disaster, and then driving home and catching two or three hours sleep, before he had to rush back to the seminar the next morning.  By about Wednesday, his body figured that he had had enough.  He was seated at the rear of the classroom, on the right.  My co-instructor was seated at the back of the classroom, on the left.  And at some point they both fell asleep.  And started to snore.  In stereo.

The entire seminar group burst out laughing.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/07/mgg-532-hwyd-smuggling.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/07/mgg-534-hwyd-teaching-styles.html

Review of "From Strength to Strength," by Arthur C. Brooks

I didn't learn anything in particular from this book.  I don't have the "striver's curse," and I'm not on the "hedonic treadmill" of which Brooks speaks.  I learned quite a while ago that success, while it relies on preparation, learning, discipline, and work, is also, and primarily, about random chance.  And you are unlikely to make it as a big success in life if you don't make it early.  So, I figured I wasn't going to make it, and why bother trying to play the success game, if I wasn't going to win?

But I highly recommend that pretty much everybody read it.  Those who are under the striver's curse, or on the hedonic treadmill, should be encouraged to get off.  Those who are wondering how to get off can gain some insight from the principles suggested in the book, although enlightenment and wisdom is not one-size-fits-all, so this isn't exactly a step-by-step process to enlightenment.  But it is quite valuable advice.

It is also comforting to know that what I seem to be doing, in terms of how my life is progressing, even if accidentally, seems to be correct.  No, I'm not happy.  I'm not even content.  But then, depressives don't get to be happy.  It's a dirty life, but somebody has to live it.  Apparently.  (No, I don't know why.)

Psalm 84:7

They go from strength to strength, till each appears before God in Zion.

Rest

In one of the grief groups, as a kind of throw-away parting suggestion, one of the leaders/counsellors suggested that we figure out what we could do for "rest."  And, a few nights thereafter, while I was lying awake, in bed, so it should have been about as restful as you could get, I realized that I *couldn't* rest.  I had nobody to look out for me.  Nobody.  I was alone.  I have to watch everything.  All the time.  I'm the only one who will.  If I get a pimple on the inside of my thigh, I have to deal with it, even though I can't even *see* it.  I have diabetes, and extremely hard callouses on my heels.  They crack, deeply enough that they can even bleed.  So I have to use moisturizing cream on my callouses (which I *deeply* resent having to do: I *hate* having anything greasy or sticky on my skin, and always have), and file them, every single day, to keep them down (and *even so* one has still cracked, on the bottom of my heel, and I have to be paying attention to trying to keep it from becoming infected even though I can't even see *it*).  And I have to keep up with all of these stupid, *stupid*, *STUPID* details of my *COMPLETELY POINTLESS* existence.  And I don't know which one of *ALL* of these stupid details will, if I miss it, make my life ever worse.  And I am exhausted.  And there is *NO* reward for staying alive, when you are a depressive.  So I wish I were dead.  God also promises us rest.  After we are dead.  I'll take the pie in the sky by and by when we die.  Right now, please.

Psalm 10:1

God, are you avoiding me?  Where are you when I need you?

Review of Purdy's

Although we have always loved their chocolates, ordering, online, from Purdy's is an absolute nightmare.  Their website is a bit opaque, in terms of finding items, but ordering, particularly as a gift, and particularly shipping to multiple addresses, is an exercise in frustration.  Which functions are available where is completely unclear.  If you are shipping to multiple addresses, you are pretty much forced to create an account with Purdy's, even if you don't want to.  Even then, trying to specify what you want to ship where you can get completely lost.

Placing the order is also very confusing.  Trying to ship as a gift, the system wouldn't let me place an order, and kept rejecting my credit cards.  (Yes, I had to try multiple cards to see if they didn't accept certain types.  Their error messages are supremely unhelpful.)  In the end I did manage to figure out what I had done wrong, but only by accident, and trial and error.  *Several* trials.

In addition, having (semi-)successfully placed one order with one card, the system then refused to accept another order with the same credit card.  In the end, I had to use different cards to ship different gifts.  (And, in all the confusion, apparently missed whatever opportunity there might have been to send a message with the gift.)

(Actually, I'm not entirely sure that I *have* placed the orders.  Having paid for them by credit card[s], I have now received *invoices* for the orders!  What on earth goes on, Purdy's?)

Having sent a first version of this complaint to Purdy's, I did get a response, of sorts.  It was marginally more than the usual, "We are sorry your experience was not up to our standards," but not by much.  And, in fact, a lot of the information seemed to be in conflict.  I had received a message confirming that the items had shipped.  But then I was told that the items *hadn't* shipped, so an ommission could be corrected.  Then the confirmation of delivery came *four days* before the items actually arrived.  Messages sent with the gifts probably *were* included, but the message cards are so small that they were likely lost in unpacking.

Psalm 119:70

Their heart is as gross, callous, unfeeling, and "unalive" as is fat or grease ...

o/' "Sunrise, sunset ..." o/'

MGG - 5.32 - HWYD - Smuggling

I wonder if I should tell this story, because it clearly states that I broke the law.

On one of the trips down to Agora, with a car full of other colleagues from the Vancouver security Special Interest Group, we got through in fairly short order, but the last question that the agent asked was, "Is there anything that you are bringing down which will be left in the United States?"  It wasn't an uncommon question, and, as usual, we said no.  It wasn't until we had pulled away, back onto the highway, and were trundling down the road, that I realized that I had just lied to the border agent, and had lied to several border agents before him.

I had $20,000 worth of books in the trunk of the car.  And I was going to leave them in the United States.

The reason that this hadn't struck me was because the books hadn't actually cost me anything.  You remember that I mentioned the book reviews?  Well, Gloria had always said that I couldn't keep all the books.  I never intended to keep *all* the books, of course, only the best ones.  And, in fact, since I was reviewing the books, it was pretty easy to determine which ones were worth keeping, and which ones weren't.  And, I've got to say, an awful lot of the books were not worth keeping.  The books that were worth keeping were, in fact, fairly rare.  (I suppose that I should mention, since I've mentioned it before, that "Bugs in Writing" is one of the books that I *did* keep, and still have.)

But what to do with all those other books?  I had started by donating these books to the North Vancouver District Public Library, a branch of which was very near where we lived.  I had donated so many books to the NVDPL, that it had apparently gained a reputation as having the best collection of computer and technical books in the entire library systems of the lower mainland and Fraser Valley.  I heard from people, who did not know that I was doing the reviews and donating the books, that friends of theirs were traveling from as far field as White Rock to come to the NVDPL, to do computer research.  But even the district library had its limits in terms of capacity.

I had taken books to Cap College.  I had taken books to Simon Fraser University, and the University of British Columbia.  I had taken books to BCIT.  I had taken books to the Vancouver Public Library.  I had maxed out all of those venues as being recipients of the book donations.

So, I'd started taking them down to Agora meetings.  I would load up the trunk of the car with books, and those who came with me were dragooned into acting as mules to carry the bags of books to the venue for the meetings.  We would then line up the books along the stage at the front of whatever lecture hall we were meeting in.  The attendees at the Agora meetings got to know this, and started coming early in order to get first crack at the piles of books.

When I said that there were $20,000 worth of books in the trunk, that's an estimate.  I didn't keep track of the costs of each book, and I certainly didn't list up a total amount of the books that were being donated in this way.  I didn't pay for them, and I didn't particularly care what they cost.  Because of a requirement for another situation, I had, on occasion, done a totaling of the value of piles of books, and I had come up with a rough metric of a cost per linear shelf foot.  So, I knew approximately how big a pile would have been if all the books were in one pile.  I tended to take between $10,000 and $20,000 worth of books down to Agora on any of the trips.

However, having realized that I had just lied to that border agent, I realized that it was possibly pushing our luck.  While it was undoubtedly highly unlikely that the border guards would suddenly decide that we were suspicious and ask to search the car, if it happened once, all of us traveling in the car would have had a very difficult time crossing the border again.  The US border guards are pretty paranoid.

In my defense, it would be really pushing things to say that I was smuggling books.  For one thing, I didn't pay for them.  They were sent to me for free.  (Well, I suppose not free, but it was just the cost of my labor in terms of reviewing them. Nobody ever paid for that, so it was really open to question whether this had any commercial value.)  In addition, I wasn't charging anybody for leaving the books in the United States.  And, finally, pretty much all the books came from the United States in the first place.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/07/mgg-531-hwyd-visas.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/07/mgg-533-hwyd-cissp-and-narcolepsy.html

Review of "Three Roads Back" by Robert D. Richardson

The subtitle of Richardson's book is "How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives."  So, one would expect this work, small though it is, to have something useful to say about grief and loss.

It doesn't.

Richardson has distilled three biographies of three individuals into this book, supposedly about loss and grief.

The distillation seems to be a little bit too condensed.  In the piece on Emerson, we are told that his first wife died, and that he was strongly affected, but that is about it.  The material that is provided in the book doesn't really indicate much of the effect that the death of Emerson's wife had on Emerson, we are simply told that it was extensive, and even that Emerson's health had suffered.  We aren't even really told that his loss of health was as a result of the loss of his wife, just that he was in poor health.  Then comes his trip to Europe, and his interest in naturalism (which, today, we would call science), and some of the people that he met, and then the publication of his book, "Nature."  And that's about it.

We are told about the loss of Emerson's faith, following the death of his wife, but the evidence for this loss of faith, as expressed in the book, seems rather to indicate that Emerson's faith was rather ill informed to begin with.  We are told of a piece of his writing that lists the shortcomings of Jesus, but those specific shortcomings, if one actually has read the gospels, are extremely easily refuted.  I am forcibly reminded of the writings of another author, who said that Christianity had not been tried and found wanting, but found difficult, and therefore not tried.

This is to say, we are simply not given enough detail about Emerson, and Emerson's grief, to draw any particular conclusions about the quality of his eventual work, and from whence it arose.

It is hard to say that the book then moves on to Thoreau.  The Emerson, Thoreau, and James families were closely connected.  So there are still plenty of references to Emerson in the section on Thoreau.

It is equally hard to say that any of this, so far, is applicable to grief, generally.  Yes, this is an interesting academic exercise in the development of an area of American philosophy, and philosophical thought.  But the actual experience of grief seems to be missing.  Indeed, in regards to Thoreau and the death of his brother, Thoreau seems to be making universal statements about grief within six weeks of the death.  While everyone experiences grief and loss in their own way, six weeks does seem to be an extremely short space of time.  Yes, in those days death from tetanus and scarlet fever were more common, whereas nowadays they would be mere medical inconveniences, but even so, death was not necessarily a daily occurrence, and a mere month and a half doesn't seem to provide enough time for anyone to deal with grief, and make profound and universal philosophical statements about grief, on that basis.  Yes, C. S. Lewis wrote "A Grief Observed" while he was undergoing the grief, and ended the book, rather abruptly, while he was probably still in the grieving phase.  But he was making observations, not universal philosophical statements about the nature of grief and how to approach it.

At this point there is an interesting fact to note in clumsiness in copy editing of the book.  One particularly glaring error is the inconsistency of the name of Emerson's second wife.  Is it Lydia?  Or is it Lidian?  With errors such as this, it becomes hard to trust some of the rest of the material in the book, even though there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of useful information in it at any rate.

Is the title misleading?  Are there, in fact, three roads back, or is there merely one?  A pleasant nature walk?  Yes, nature can be very therapeutic.  I yield to no one in my appreciation of forest bathing.  It can be extremely helpful (unless you are terrified of being eaten by a bear.  In my case, of course, being eaten by a bear sounds like a really good idea.  But, I understand that other people might be somewhat frightened of it.)

In finishing with Thoreau (although it is hard to say that Richardson ever finishes with any of his subjects), he credits Thoreau with a clear exposition of the idea that death is a natural part of life, and that, therefore, there is, actually, no death.  The matter of which individuals are made, may fail to contain the individuals anymore, but the matter remains, and gets reused in other life forms.

The problem is that this idea has already been formulated, and expressed, although in scientific terms, and perhaps with not so much poetry.  This is, in fact, the first law of thermodynamics.  Energy, and matter, can neither be created, nor destroyed, but only transformed.

And this idea, as a philosophy of life, only would appear to be acceptable, and a comfort, to those who already are willing to subsume the fate of the individual in that of the collective.  The collective, the totality of all life, and all life forms, is more important than any individual.  Yes, if you can accept this, love life in general, and are willing to accept that individuals die, then probably your attachment to any individual is weak anyway.  And, as C. S. Lewis also said, later, the price of love (and in this case we are speaking of love for an individual), is grief.  When the individuals dies, you grieve.  That's the deal.

If you just love life, in broad, general, terms, then the death of an individual does not matter.  You probably weren't too terribly attached to that individual, only the general expression of life that they represented.  If they die, what does it matter?  Life goes on.  Their life doesn't, but life, in general, does.  At least it does until a sufficiently large asteroid hits the earth, and wipes out all life.  Of course it doesn't wipe out *all* life, it just wipes out life as we know it.  Life, in broad and generic terms, seems to be, if not exactly resilient, at least capable of restarting.  So, it really doesn't matter if life as we know it ends.  Life in some other form will occur.  In that case, the interest in ecology, and in balancing and supporting the so-called "natural" order, of which position Thoreau is often quoted as a prime exemplar, is pointless anyways.  Why should we care about this particular ecology, and not another that will occur in another million, or billion, years, arriving along completely different paths?

All the same, I'm not really sure that this helps anyone with grief or dealing with loss.  Indeed, the position I have just proposed is, in fact, seconded by William James, in the quote from his "The Will to Believe," which Richardson uses to start the section on William James.  It says that if *this* life "be not a real fight, in which something is gained for the universe by success ..."

This would indicate that the life is, somewhat, separate from the universe: that an individual life has some meaning and merit quite apart from the universal generic life which inheres in the universe.  Which would seem to fly in the face of what we've just had laid out by Emerson and Thoreau as a philosophical basis for, well, everything.

So, what the whole point of this book is, is rather confusing.

Lamentations 1:2

Bitterly she weeps at night, tears running down her cheeks.  Not one of all her lovers is there to comfort her.  Her friends have all betrayed her; they have become her enemies.

Even Gboard can't be bothered ...

Gboard has decided that when I say "Robert Michael Slade," it should transcribe that as "635 Bristles Lane."

Sermon 34 - Edit, Audit, Prophet

Sermon 34 - Edit, Audit, Prophet

Hebrews 12:11

No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

Job 5:17

Blessed is the one whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty.

Micah 6:8

The LORD has shown you what is good. He has told you what he requires of you. You must act with justice. You must love to show mercy. And you must be humble as you live in the sight of your God.

Jeremiah 7:28

Therefore say to them, ‘This is the nation that has not obeyed the Lord its God or responded to correction. Truth has perished; it has vanished from their lips.

Micah 2:11

If a liar and deceiver comes and says, ‘I will prophesy for you plenty of wine and beer,’ that would be just the prophet for this people!

Isaiah 30:10-11

They tell the prophets, "Don’t see dreams about things we should do.  Don’t tell us the truth.  Say nice things to us and make us feel good.  See only good things for us.  Stop seeing things that will really happen.  Get out of our way.  Stop telling us about the Holy One of Israel."

Jeremiah 35:15

Time and time again I have sent you all My servants the prophets, proclaiming:  Turn, each one from his evil way of life, and correct your actions.  Stop following other gods to serve them.  ...  But you would not pay attention or obey Me.

We do not like prophets.  (Gboard, my main transcribing program, doesn't like prophets either: it just transcribed them as profits.)  Oh, we give them lip service: they are supposed to speak for God.  They proclaim God and God's words.  God's message to us.  But we don't like them.

We represent prophets as dour, humorless, angry old men.  And, in our age-ist society, that epithet of "old" is about as damning as you can get.   Prophets are killjoys.  Prophets are there to spoil all of our fun.  We don't like prophets.

You know who else doesn't like prophets?  Writers, that's who.  Only they call them editors.  And accountants, and information security specialists.  Only they call them auditors.

I am a writer.  I have published books.  I have not just self-published books, I have been paid, and given advances, and given royalties, by established and reputable publishers.  I have written books that have been accepted as national college textbooks.  I am a writer.  And Gloria was my editor.

So, no, I do not automatically dislike editors.  I am well aware of the value of a good editor.  When I started publishing books, my colleagues, those of them who thought that they might like to publish books as well, asked me how to do it.  My first piece of advice was: when you have actually *written* the book, that's the *easy* part done.  I said this in reference to the seemingly endless rounds of editing that happen once your book is accepted.  My other standard piece of advice was, when you find a good copy editor, you marry her.

Gloria wasn't just a good copy editor, she was a *great* copy editor.  She was the best copy editor I have ever encountered.  And she wasn't just a copy editor.  There are seven different levels of editors.  Gloria encompassed every level, and did all of them supremely well.

I tell a story about editing my first book.  At this particular stage, we had already been through three rounds of copy editing.  At this stage we were into type setting, and the checking of what are known as galley proofs.  Galley proofs are the typeset pages, which are, supposedly, ready to be printed and bound into a book.  In reality, of course, typesetters have managed to introduce a completely new and bewildering variety of errors into the text: errors that you never would have considered, and never would have thought possible.  In any case, I had received the first third of my book in galley proof form.  It was about 140 pages.  I sweat blood over it, for eight hours, reading, as far as possible, line by line, and word by word.  In the 140 pages, I managed to detect twenty separate errors.  Then I gave it to Gloria.

She found four errors on the first *page*.

Now, Gloria had two advantages over me, in pursuing this process.  The first is that Gloria was a better editor than I ever was, or ever will be.  The second advantage is that Gloria was not me.

You see, the thing is, when you read your own material, you know what you meant to say.  You know how you meant to say it.  You know what point you wanted to emphasize in saying it that way.  And so, when you read your own text, you automatically read it from that perspective.  You understand it from that viewpoint.  You also automatically, mentally, correct any minor errors, without even noticing them.  You know what you meant to say; the fact that the text on the page doesn't say it quite right doesn't even register with you.

But, of course, it doesn't matter what you *intended* to say.  What really matters is what you *actually* said.  And what it actually turned out like, on the page.  And, even more important, is how the reader, who is not you, will actually read, and understand, the text that is there in front of them on the page.  You, as a writer, cannot see the text in that way.  You are already predisposed to understand the text the way you intended it to come across to someone.  You read it, understanding the point that you want a reader to take away from the text.  Even if the text is not very clear about that particular point.

So, it is essential, that somebody else, who is not you, read your material.  It is absolutely vital that someone else read the text.  And tell you, what they understood the text to say.  Or, even more importantly, tell you that they cannot understand what this text means at all.

That actually is one of the higher levels of editing; not the basic copy editing part.  But copy editing, proper copy editing, certainly helps. 

Generally speaking, I do not tell this story to writers.  I don't teach an awful lot of writing workshops.  What I *do* teach is information security.  And I tell this story to prove a point about auditors.

Information security practitioners, and administrators, and managers, and specialists, and consultants, all hate auditors.  They consider auditors to be the enemy.  Auditors, so the saying goes, are people who go through the battlefield, after the battle is over, and bayonet the wounded.  Nobody likes auditors.

I understand this point of view.  It is not fun to sweat blood over your plans to defend the enterprise that you have been hired to defend, and then have some stranger come along and poke holes in your beautiful security plan.  It is even more annoying when you have to admit that they are right.  So it is no wonder that so many information security specialist, my colleagues, consider auditors to be the enemy.

But auditors are not the enemy.  Auditors are, in fact, your best friends.

Auditors will write a report, pointing out all the holes and flaws in your beautiful plan.  They do not take account of how much work you have put in.  They do not take account of the sleepless nights when you worried about how to defend against this vulnerability surface, or that particular attack.  They don't care.  They just see a hole, and point it out.  Possibly poking at it, rather deeply, and sometimes painfully, along the way.  So, when they write a report, not knowing all of the great stuff that you have done, but only noting where you have failed, it is understandable that some people would get upset.

Not me.

No, when I am presented with one of these audit reports, pointing out every single flaw, and every single error, in the plan that I have sent spent six months creating, I thank the auditor kindly.  Then I go to the board, slap down a copy of the audit report in front of every board member, and tell them see?  I told you I needed more money!

OK, yes, it's a joke.  But not really.  We don't like people who point out problems.  If we don't give them a specific title, like editor, or auditor, we call them complainers.  We don't like people who complain.  People who complain are whiners, annoyances, and nuisances.  We wish they would just shut up.  Why don't they just chill?  Actually, I just recently realized that the term chill (which we never really define) is kind of a reformulation of a quote by G. K. Chesterton, noting that if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.  This is something that many people, even if they have never heard of it, have taken too much to heart.  The Christian church, in particular, seems to have almost taken it as a command.

If you want to fix things, you have to be honest about what the problems are.  If there is a problem, you have to identify the problem in order to be able to fix it.  If you do not know what the problem is, then simply doing random things is not going to fix the problem.  And Einstein's famous quote, that it is the very definition of insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result, is the seed of the issue of not identifying the problem before you try and fix it.  Therefore, we need complainers.  If we don't allow, and even encourage, complaint, we don't let ourselves (and other people) know, number one, that there *is* a problem, and number two, what a perception of the problem is.  It is important to have different perceptions.  If I complain, this gives other people an opportunity to correct my misapprehensions, if I have misidentified either the problem, or the causes of the problem.  If I say nothing, I do not allow people the opportunity, themselves, to see whether or not there is a problem, or, to correct me if what I am seeing as a problem is not, in fact, a problem.

(Of course, there is also the issue that I, in pointing out a problem, may need to have an *editor* to point out that the *way* I am outlining the problem may simply be sounding, to those to whom I am expressing it, like whining and complaining, or even insulting.  [Sigh.]  Communication is a difficult task.)

As I pointed out above, in talking about editors and auditors, very often it takes an outsider to identify a problem.  We grow used to our own problems.  We also know that we accept what is acceptable to us, and don't realize that the issues we find acceptable could be a much more serious problem to other people.  So, what people see as being "chill," and tolerant of problems or issues, is mostly just that they are tolerant of those particular issues, but strongly resent other ones.  The other ones they address, the ones that they are tolerant of they tolerate.  But people's resentment and tolerance, of different issues, differ.  So, a group of people may have learned, or tacitly agreed, to tolerate a certain group of problems, and don't realize how bad those problems are, until an outsider comes in with a fresh perspective.  This is why writers need editors.  This is why accountants need auditors.  We grow used to what we are used to.  When I first went to work at the hospital, I thought that it would be impossible to work there because of the stench.  I quickly grew accustomed to it, and within two weeks I didn't even notice it.  This is, in fact, a known issue, and is understood as being "nose blind."  We elderly are frequently victims of this: bladder leakages may be minor enough not to be a problem, and the elderly quickly grow accustomed to the smell of urine, and don't even smell it anymore.  But others that they encounter definitely *do* smell it.  So, sometimes you need an outsider to come in and say, this stinks.

Okay, so what does all of this have to do with prophets?  Well, if you go through the book of Proverbs, and, in fact, if you go through an awful lot of the other books in the Bible as well, you will find all kinds of passages noting that a fool does not like to be corrected.  But a wise man accepts reproof.

When the prophets speak, they aren't, generally speaking, telling us anything new.  We already know what God requires of us: to love mercy, and to seek justice, and to walk humbly before our God.  Okay, well, as a matter of fact it was a prophet that said that.  But it's not new.  The Bible is full of references to widows and orphans.  This is not, as some people would have it, simply a reference to broken families.  No, this is shorthand for the disadvantaged.  The poor.  Those for whom we should provide mercy.  Those for whom we should seek justice.  Those who are an example to us, that we'd better be humble, because there but for the grace of God...

So the prophets, even the Major Prophets, even Jeremiah, the father of the term jeremiad (which we tend to use to define something that someone says or complains about, very strongly), are not giving us the word of God anew.  They are not telling us anything we didn't already know, going right back to Moses.  They are proclaiming the word of God, but it turns out, we already *knew* the word of God.  We just needed to be reminded.  We needed to be corrected.  We needed to be reproved.  We needed to have our mistakes, and our flaws, and our holes, and our errors, pointed out.  And sometimes poked at.  With a stick.

So we don't like prophets.

But we definitely need them.

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html

Isaiah 30:10-11

They tell the prophets, "Don’t see dreams about things we should do.  Don’t tell us the truth.  Say nice things to us and make us feel good.  See only good things for us.  Stop seeing things that will really happen.  Get out of our way.  Stop telling us about the Holy One of Israel."

Slow down

On a recent Friday we were out at Tsuma-as school doing speedwatch.  Normally, on speedwatch, about one percent of the cars that pass our location are "speeding" (within the limits of the margins we give them).    On our "high speed" locations, like Stamp and Beaver Creek, it's maybe two percent.

On Friday, checking cars eastbound, *five* percent of the cars going through the school zone were speeding.  After break, we did westbound.  Since it was later, there were fewer cars, but *fifteen* percent of them were speeding!

So, on Monday, we tried again.  For about the first fifteen minutes, we were thinking that Friday had been an anomaly: we weren't getting many speeders.  And then it fell into the same pattern that we saw on Friday.  By the end of shift we had about five percent speeders: a total of thirty-five (including the only motorcycle for which I've ever been able to get the full plate number  :-)

I'd say Tsuma-as needs us.

Psalm 41:1

Blessed is one who considers the helpless; The Lord will save him on a day of trouble.

MGG - 5.31 - HWYD - Visas

I'm not very sure how far back this goes.  In the dim and distant reaches of my memory, I seem to recall not having any particular problems going down to seminars, and speaking at conferences, in the United States.  Then we got NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.  This was supposed to make things much easier.  This was supposed to make travel and work between Canada and the United States more accessible.  Horse feathers.

I used to go to the border, they would ask business or pleasure, I would say business, they would say what kind of business, and I would say I'm teaching a seminar.  They would say, "Drive on."

Under NAFTA, you needed to get a visa.  A TN-1 visa, specifically.  This came in a variety of flavours.  I was mostly there as a computer systems analyst.  As a computer systems analyst, I was supposed to have a degree, and at least five years work experience.  Well, no problem.  I had two degrees, and more than twice the requisite experience.  The first time I was told to apply for a TN-1 visa, somebody told me to take my book along as proof that I had to work experience.  At this point, in fact, I had two books out.  So I took my Bachelor's degree, my Master's degree, and my two books, when I went to the border to get the visa.  I also had a number of letters attesting to my experience, and work for various individuals and companies.  So I get to the border, and say I want a TN-1 visa, and they direct me inside.  So I go inside and wait for a while, and then get called up to the counter, and say that I want a TN-1 visa as a computer system analyst.  I have the letter from the company attesting to the fact that they want to employ me as a computer systems analyst.  So I give that to the agent.  Then he asks if I have the relevant degree.  I pull out my framed Bachelor's degree and place it on the counter.  Then I pull out my framed Masters degree, and place it on the counter.  At this point the agent who is dealing with me is joined by one of his colleagues who comes and peers over his shoulder.  The agent dealing with me looks at the other agent, and the other agent says, "I want to see him pull out his doctorate."  So I say, "Well, I haven't got one of those, but I do have..." and I pull out my two books.

Up until now, things have been polite, but business-like.  When I pull out the two books, it's fairly obvious that, yes, I do have work experience.  I know what I'm talking about.  So then the two agents start talking about all the requests they get for TN-1s from people who still have the ink wet on their diplomas.  So, with someone with experience, they regale me with tales of the dodges that people try to use at the border to try and get a TN-1 visa without any experience at all.  I am their new best buddy.  I'm actually qualified.

But that's only the first time.  Now apparently the directions, the policy, for TN-1 (as I get from my DHS buddies at Agora) visas is that if you have the degree, and you have the experience, you get the visa.  So now the guys at the borders are starting to ask all kinds of irrelevant questions to try and safeguard the sanctity of these very common visas.  And they find all kinds of reasons to turn you down, even if you have the proper diploma, and the proper experience.

So there's all kinds of objections raised.  There's all kinds of questions asked.  And there is no recourse.  There is no one you can appeal to, when one of the frontline border guards has ruled against you at the border.  That's it.  Full stop.

So, on another trip down, one of the guys at the border is asking all kinds of questions.  Irrelevant questions.  Having nothing to do with my experience or qualifications.  And, even though I have answers for all of these questions, eventually he goes away and starts writing up a form.  At great length.  And one of his colleagues walks behind him, as he's seated at the desk writing, looks over his shoulder, and then rears back and almost shouts, "You can't turn him down for *that*!"

I never did learn what "that" was, because when you are rejected you don't even get a copy of the form.

One of the times I was crossing the border for the Agora meeting, was back in the days when Agora still sent out letters, actual paper letters, in the postal mail.  I had brought the invitation with me, detailing the meeting, and who was speaking.  So, on this particular occasion they decided to call me into the office (it was early on, and I had inadvertently used the s-word), and an agent spent forty-five minutes grilling me about this meeting, and who was speaking, and what they were speaking about.  Over, and over, and over, and over again.  And at one point, faced with such repetition, my brain kind of froze up, and the next time he asked me, "And who is the *other* speaker?"  I said, "I'm sorry, it's early in the morning, and I can't remember anymore; the paper is there on your desk."  And he looked at the paper, and he looked at me, and he looked at the paper, and he looked at me, and he finally said, "You want me to *read* this?"  And I did know, even in my sleep deprived and beleaguered state, that the correct answer to that question was not, "Can you?"  (The DHS guys *really* enjoyed that story ...)

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/07/mgg-530-hwyd-worlds-longest-undefended.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/07/mgg-532-hwyd-smuggling.html

Uber Kids

Child care for the gig economy!  Download the app, and create an account!  When you need a break, or have something you need to do, click on the "Pickup" button, and one of our drivers will come and pick up your kids.  Then, when you want them back, just click on the "Deliver" button on the app, and your kids (or a reasonable approximation, carefully selected by our AI-based algorithm from the nearest available pool and/or driver, according to age and gender) (Premium subscribers can also specify "Race," and Ultra Premium accounts "Gender Belief"), will be delivered to your door!

Isaiah 49:21

And you will think to yourself, who bore me these?  I was bereaved and desolate, exiled and sent off.  So who raised these?  I was left behind, I was alone, bereaved, barren; but these--where have these been?

Sermon 24 - "Ordinary" vs "big global problem" sermon topics

Sermon 24 - "Ordinary" vs "big global problem" sermon topics

Job 5:10

God sends showers on earth and waters the fields.

Deuteronomy 10:18

He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing.

When Gloria and I started hanging out together I called up one Saturday and asked if I could come over.  She said that she wasn't going to be doing anything special, she just had boring jobs to do.  So I said that that was fine.  I was keen on doing boring jobs with her.  I believe that day we went out and got her kettle's cord replaced.

We seem to think that we need to do something special.  And, in particular, with regard to sermons.  You can't have a sermon about "ordinary" things.  You have to have big ideas and big concepts to be worthy of being put into a sermon.  The thing is, that what you do put into a sermon can be triggered by anything.

I sat through a sermon, this weekend, from somebody who was talking about "Christian Hope."  That we, as Christians, hope for salvation, we hope for God's power and presence, and that that is justified.  Well, that's a big topic.  It's an important topic.  There is no question that it's an important topic.  But, having said that, why do you have to talk about that for half an hour?  Or, rather, if you're going to talk about that for half an hour, you'd better make sure that you have something to say.  Something interesting.  Something important.  Something supportive.  Something that builds up the people who are listening to you, and listening to your sermon.  This guy didn't.  It was a pretty terrible sermon.  It was a slurry of scripture texts and Christian cliches without much structure, and really without much point at all.

As a matter of fact, I'm not alone in thinking that it wasn't a very good sermon.  The minister, himself, couldn't have thought that it was a very good sermon.  He forgot what he was saying.  Towards the end of the sermon he knew that it was the end of the sermon because it was about the time that sermons should end.  But he had no idea where he was, because he wasn't anywhere.  There was no structure to his sermon.  There was no point.  There was no argument.  There was no building on basic ideas and extending them.  I know that he lost track of what he was saying, because he *said* so.  He said, out loud, to all of us, that he didn't know how many more slides he had.  He didn't know how much further he was going to be going with this.  And, in fact, when he clicked for the next slide, what came up was the closing hymn.  He was, in fact, at the end of his sermon.  But his sermon was such a mess that he didn't actually realise that.

Anyways, that's the one hand.  If you pick a big important topic, you probably have to put some time into working on it, and making sure that your sermon is, in fact, worthy of the topic.

But there's the other side.

I've written sermons about blackberries.  I have written sermons about broad beans.  I've probably got two months worth of sermons about gardening.  I've written lots of sermons about very ordinary things.  Because very ordinary things can present you with the opportunity to make an important point.

Swinging back to the other end of the spectrum, I had a conversation with one of the ministers in town who was having trouble with his sermon.  He was talking about all the troubles of the world.  Literally.  The state of the world as it is, and as we know it to be.  The political trouble.  The wars.  The famines and lack of food security for people who are in war zones.  The attempts, by large groups of populations, to try and get away from war zones, only to be turned back by people and countries that they flee to.  All of this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad stuff.

Well, the thing is that it's a huge problem.  It's disastrous, there is no question.  It's really, really bad.  But what do you say about that?  The world is really really bad.  We don't see much help, much support.  Well, that's unfortunate.  What can we do about it?

I have a saying in situations like this, where you don't think you can do much about a huge disaster.  Never let what you *can't* do, prevent you from doing what you *can* do.  If you don't like mine, take Mother Theresa's: "Don't do nothing because you can't do everything."  Or, there's a line from the chorus of Josh Wilson's "Dream Small": "Don't buy the lie you've got to do it all."

Maybe we can't end world hunger today.  But you can, today, take someone to lunch.  And maybe it's not even because they need the food, that they need the meal.  Maybe it's because they need to be fed a little bit of fellowship.

You can do that.  That's not a hard thing.  It doesn't even have to be an expensive thing.  It's just a little bit of your time.  Now, I know we don't have unlimited time.  You can always get more money, but you can never get more time. And sometimes time is a very precious gift to give.  But everybody has it to give.  So, do that.  Maybe you can't end world hunger.  Maybe you can't end all the suffering in the world.  But you can do a little bit to reduce the total suffering of the world by helping someone right in front of you.  You don't have to end the war in the Middle East.  After all, they've been fighting in the Middle East for at least thirty-five hundred years.  But you can go to someone that you have upset and ask them to forgive you.  You can always do that. 

You can go out and help at Shelter Farm on Tuesday morning.  You can join any one of a hundred different organizations here in Port Alberni that are looking for volunteers to help out.  You can go out for Community Policing and help to keep people alive.  (Because you guys are the worst drivers in the entire world, and you don't need to speed, too.)  You can go out for emergency support services, and be trained and ready when and disaster happens, so that you are part of the solution, rather than being part of the problem of people running around screaming that we're all going to die.

You can help out with the hospice society, which doesn't just mean sitting with the dying.  If you don't like being around people who are dying, there's plenty of opportunities for people who can cook breakfasts and lunches and dinners.  For people who can do fundraising and can plan fun events.  For people who can do fundraising and go around to businesses and ask if they will donate something to help the cause.  You can do administration of all of this stuff.  You can do something as simple as collecting Quality Foods receipts and sorting them into bundles of certain total amounts of money so that some funding can flow to the organisation.  There's all kinds of things you can do.  Just because you can't do something, don't let it stop you from doing what you can do.

I was talking to somebody today about writing all these sermons.  I'm not sitting in front of a desk writing this.  I'm walking down the street.  At the moment I was dictating this, I was walking down Tenth Avenue and going through the dip.  (Or, The Mound, for you real old timers.)  I'm dictating this onto my phone, which has an app that does a very, *very* bad job of transcribing what I am saying.  But at least it writes it down in some form or other, and later on I can sit at my desk and I can actually edit it and turn it into something of a sermon that's worth preaching.

And that's another thing.  As I am dictating this sermon, I have approximately thirty-five or forty sermons that I have, in fact, written.  I haven't preached a single one of them.  Now, I have *posted* some of them, and some other ministers may have taken my sermons and preached them.  I don't know.  Maybe this sermon will never be preached.  I do keep thinking about the line out of the song, "Sounds of Silence," about people writing songs that voices never share.  I am writing sermons that people never hear.  But, maybe, some day, somebody *will* hear.  Maybe somebody will hear this sermon, and it will help them.  Maybe it will get them to get off their back, and maybe that will help somebody else.

I don't know.  You know that God is in control of these things, and I'm not.  God can use what we do, even if what we do isn't perfect.  But I can do this, so I'm doing it.  I can't preach.  I have not been called to the ministry of any church.  Nor has anybody taken me up on my offer of pulpit relief.  At least not yet.  But I can write the sermons.  So I do.  And this is ordinary.  This is not sitting in an office full of theological tomes surrounded by the great thoughts of Christian thinkers of past centuries.  No, this is me, walking down 10th Avenue, on my way to the hospice society office, to sort Quality Foods receipts. 

But I can think while I'm doing it.  And God has given me a phone that will take down this dictation.  So I'm doing it.  I'm writing a sermon, or, at least, the draft of a sermon.  I can't preach it because nobody has given me the opportunity to preach.  But I can *write* it. So I will.  On a very ordinary day.  On a very ordinary street, just making my way from one appointment to another.  I can do this.  So I am doing this.

From the ordinary may come the extraordinary.  I don't know.  I don't know how God is going to use this.  I don't know *if* God is going to use this.

Gloria was a singer.  (No, I'm not changing topics.)  She had an amazing voice.  Maybe not the most amazing voice that there ever was, musically speaking, but she had an amazing voice and an amazing gift which I have never heard from any other singer.  She could sing with full emotion, but still enunciating everything so clearly that every single word that she sang could be heard and understood.  That was extraordinary.  It wasn't ordinary at all.  But here's the ordinary part.  Gloria was asked to sing a lot of different places.  As a matter of fact, when people asked what church we went to, Gloria would frequently say that when you are a soloist, the church that you're a member of is the church you *don't* go to, because you are asked to sing so many other places.

Gloria told me that she can considered God to be her booking agent.  She knew, at the age of twelve, that her voice was special, and that it was a gift from God, and that it was to be used *for* God, and in his service.  Gloria didn't do light opera or amateur musicals.  Gloria sang in church.  Gloria sang for services.  Gloria sang for weddings and funerals.  Gloria sang for God, and, as she said, God was her booking agent.  When she was asked to sing, she said it wasn't her job to decide whether or not this venue or this service was important enough for her to sing at, or whether the audience was big enough.  Whether the need was enough.  That wasn't her job.  It was God's job to bring her the offers.  Gloria said her job was just to say yes.  Which, if she didn't have a conflict, she did.  She said yes.  And I would drive her to wherever she was asked to sing and she would sing.

Gloria *also* said that every time she sang she knew; she could feel; that someone within the sound of her voice needed to hear that song.  She didn't know who.  And she didn't know why.  She didn't necessarily know what part of the song that they needed to hear.  That wasn't her job.  Her job was to say yes.  God was her booking agent, and she knew that someone needed to hear that song.  And she could sing it.  So she did.

Maybe it was an ordinary song.  Maybe what you can do is ordinary.  Maybe my sermon topics are ordinary.  You do what you can do.  Let God take care of what you can't.

Sermons: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html

Ecclesiastes 1:2

It is vanity.

Nothing but vapour, that goes.

Life: futility.

Madame Web: With responsibility comes power

 "Madame Web" is a superhero movie.  Even worse, it's a Marvel superhero movie: part of an enormous franchise of similar movies.  It's a little bit different than most of the superhero movies.  The superheroes are all women, for one thing, which is unusual enough.  But it makes a more significant effort to have a little bit more depth than most simplistic superhero movies.  Yes, it has fights scenes.  (Of course it has fight scenes.  How can you have a superhero movie without fight scenes to prove that the hero is a hero, and also super?  That's kind of required.)  But it does have some odd depths to it.  I'm not going to say that it's a classic.  I'm not even going to say that it's a classic of the superhero genre.  But it's different.

One of the differences is is a kind of a mantra that gets repeated, as mantras do, throughout the movie.  You will have heard the phrase that with great power comes great responsibility.  This mantra is used in a number of other superhero movies.  "Madame Web" turns it upside down.

It's interesting when you turn a cliche upside down.  Somebody once said that the opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth may, in fact, be another profound truth.

"Madame Web" turns the statement about power and responsibility upside down in an interesting way.  The statement becomes "when you accept great responsibility, you attain great power."  I'm not sure of the truthfulness of this statement.  I think there are many times when you can accept responsibility when the responsibility is not, in fact, yours, and accepting that responsibility is, in fact, a bad thing.  So, as I say, I'm not sure of the truthfulness of the "Madame Web" mantra.

But I think it is profound.

And I think that it bears closer examination than the movie gives it.  (Movies making profound, or semi-profound, or *seemingly* profound, statements, and then failing to examine them does seem to be a trademark not only of superhero movies in general, but of the Marvel Universe in particular.  But we'll leave that for the moment.)

We tend to avoid responsibility.  We try very hard to prove that the responsibility, particularly for a problem, belongs to someone else.  We make significant efforts to try and prove that someone else has created the problem, and, therefore, the problem is not our responsibility.  Avoiding responsibility for a problem seems to be one of the major reasons that we lie so much.  We even lie to ourselves to avoid responsibility.  We will edit, or modify, or amend our memories so that we remember, truly and deeply, that whatever caused a particular problem was not of our doing; was not our choice.  If it was of our doing, we were forced into that action by the actions of someone else.  We remember, very clearly, the fact that we were not responsible.

So avoidance of responsibility is a very human trait.  And we spend enormous effort, and a great deal of time, in trying to avoid responsibility, and trying to figure out how to pin responsibility on someone else, and to prove that someone else is responsible.

Pretty much all of our legal system is based on this.  Oh, yes, there are criminal offences and there are civil lawsuits, but really, almost all of them boil down, in the end, to who is responsible for this act or this crime or this problem.  And our system is adversarial, so that one person is responsible, and another person is not.  (There are some variations on this.  Insurance companies seem to be very good at assessing blame to both sides in an action, in such a way that neither party to the action is actually fully responsible.  And therefore the insurance company, who may be ensuring both parties, is not responsible for paying anything.)  So responsibility is something we avoid.

Well, what if we stopped avoiding it?  What if we accept responsibility?  In a sense, that gives us great power.  If we are not fighting to prove that we are not responsible, we are not wasting that responsibility-avoiding effort.  That means that the effort we are not expending in proving that we are not responsible, can, instead, be directed at solving the problem.

Okay, this isn't a magic power.  This isn't a magical provision of extra power.  This is just the fact that we can use the power that we have to fix the problem, instead of constantly wasting effort and resources trying to prove that the problem does not belong to us.  Even so, it gives us power: it gives us the power to actually fix the problem rather than wasting effort in vain attempts to assert that the problem isn't ours.

This is (one of) the lesson(s) of Dickens' book "Bleak House" where a central theme is the fact that a court case is going on--between two branches of the same family--in regard to an inheritance.  By the time the court case is settled, decades and possibly generations after the fact, the inheritance has been entirely consumed by the legal costs of the court case.  All of the resources, all of the money and wealth, has been taken up in this avoidance, in a sense, of responsibility.  So the effort, the resources, the power have been completely, utterly, and absolutely wasted, and nothing is left of any benefit.

Except, of course, to the legal teams who have worked for all of this time.

Psalm 30:10

Hear me, Lord, listen!

Be merciful to me, Lord!

Lord, be my helper!

MGG - 5.30 - HWYD - World’s longest undefended border

Around 2000, or 2001, I got involved with Agora.  The Agora meetings were one of the worst kept secrets of the security world.  They were absolutely wonderful.  This was not a conference, or any kind of formal organization.  It had no legal or societal, or business standing.  It didn't have a bank account.  It had no money.  There was no charge for the meetings.

However, I have never been to any conference where there was such a range of people attending.  Security doesn't actually have a community, as such.  Security has a bunch of siloed communities.  The business people don't talk to the industry people, who don't talk to the military people, who don't talk to the academic people, who don't talk to the intelligence community: all of these different communities exist in isolation from each other.  Even though they are all basically doing the same stuff.  The Agora meetings were one of only two sets of meetings that I ever found where all of these different communities came together and shared information.  The Agora meetings had one rule: a sort of variation on the Chatham House rules, meaning that what happened at Agora stayed at Agora, unless you contacted the person who told you something, and got their permission to tell somebody else.

So, I won't talk about specific Agora meetings.  I will say that I got to meet people from the academic world, the business world, government, the military, and the intelligence community.

Okay, I suppose that one Agora story won't hurt.  People came to the Agora meetings from government, and from fairly high up in government at times.  Since the meetings were in the States, many of those came from Washington, DC, and flew across the country to attend the meetings.  And, one of the things that I'm going to talk about here, is the great difficulties in crossing the world's longest undefended border.  In the United States the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, amalgamated and has charge of a great many areas within the United States government.  One of them is the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, and the border patrol guys.  The Agora meetings took place in the mornings.  It was very short.  And, after the meetings, those who could stay frequently met over lunch.  If I could stay for lunch after the Agora meetings, the DHS guys would always grab me for their table.  And, once I was seated there, they wanted to know the latest border horror story.  (Samples of which I will be recounting to you shortly.)  The DHS guys, of course, were far above the level of the agents at the border.  But, they were the ones responsible for writing the policies that the border agents supposedly carried out.  My stories set them into fits of hysterics over the boneheaded interpretations that the agents, on the front lines, gave to the directives and policies which they, the DHS guys, had written and promulgated.  I would tell them what I went through at the border crossings, and they would roll on the floor laughing.

This happened because the Agora meetings were in Seattle.  A number of us from the Vancouver security Special Interest Group would carpool down in order to go to the Agora meetings.  The Agora meetings were roughly quarterly.  I, living in North Vancouver, was frequently the one delegated to rent a car, or a van, or drive my own car, and pick up people from the security group on my way driving south to the border.

And then we would get to the border.  And then the fun would begin.

One of the things that we learned early on was that we didn't use the s-word.  When we used the word "security," the border agents got weird.  So the standard set of questions tended to go something like, "Where are you from?" "Vancouver area." "Where are you going?" "University of Washington." "What are you going to be doing there?" "Going to meetings." "What are the meetings about?"  At this point we learned to say "computer assurance."  I suppose that the border agents really didn't know what computer assurance *was*, but it didn't sound dangerous to them.  Apparently saying "security" sounded dangerous.  So, when we had a new person coming with us, who hadn't been to Agora before, and didn't know the process for getting through the border, we would warn them not to use the s-word.

So one time we had a new person along for the ride, and we hadn't told him about the s-word on the way down.  As usual, I was driving, so I was the one answering the questions.  We got through the usual ones until we got to the business about meetings.  And what were the meetings about? said the border agent.  I didn't have time to reply.  The newbie, from the back seat, piped up "Security!"  All of us cringed.  We figured that we were in for the usual grilling whenever we used the s-word.  Instead, this particular border agent laughed and said, "What does the University of Washington know about security?"  This response was unexpected.  I kind of looked at him, and he said, "When all the college computer facilities were being bombed, in the sixties, the University of Washington got bombed *twice!*"

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/07/mgg-529-hwyd-ndas.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/07/mgg-531-hwyd-visas.html

Sermon 28 - This sermon does not exist: Being, nothingness, and transcendental meditation

Sermon 28 - This sermon does not exist: Being, nothingness, and transcendental meditation

Exodus 3:14

I am that I am.

Say to those of my people,

"I am" has sent me.

I am depressed.  I have to stop in at the mental health office every week to reassure them that I haven't killed myself yet.  The mental health people seem to refer to my condition as "treatment resistant" depression.  I may be depressed because I am a grieving widower, or I may be depressed because of a chemical imbalance, or I may be depressed because I have the wrong balance of bacteria in my gut, or I may be depressed because the mental health people keep saying that I am doing everything right, but I'm not getting better.  (That's a depressing thought.)  They are trying various things at the moment, like drugs, and psychotherapy, and various counsellors.  They are asking me to try mindfulness.

Mindfulness has been very popular, of late, in educational fields, and also in mental health and various types of counselling.  I can see that mindfulness could be used to address various mental health problems.  I have had some experience with mindfulness before.  In fact, it was emphasized to Gloria, at one point, for her own depression.  So I am not completely new to it.  I have also experienced it being used in school situations with my grandchildren.  In the classroom situations, it is generally suggested in an attempt to encourage mental discipline, clarity of thought, and sometimes to address certain behavioural problems.  I do not know what either educational or psychological research has to say about the efficacy of mindfulness for a variety of problems and situations.

However, I do know one thing about mindfulness.  Mindfulness, even in its current rather mechanised form, derives from the practice of Transcendental Meditation, or TM, as it was promoted in the 60s and 70s.

At that time I did not experience or participate in Transcendental Meditation, but I do know that there was some controversy in regard to transcendental meditation and possible unintended consequences.  Unintended by the practitioner, in any case.  It is very likely that those who were promoting transcendental meditation understood, at least to a certain extent, some of the consequences that were not made clear to those they were exhorting to try transcendental meditation.

I attended a presentation from the Spiritual Counterfeits Project (SCP).  This presentation was put on while I was attending UBC.  A great number of the university student population were interested in, and, to a certain extent, tried Transcendental Meditation.  Once again, this was primarily as an aid to studying, mental discipline, clarity of thought, and stress relief.

The Spiritual Counterfeits Project addressed a number of cults and cult organisations operating in the United States, but had a particular interest in transcendental meditation.  The speaker from the Spiritual Counterfeits Project had, in fact, been a trainer or guru in the practice of transcendental meditation, so he was well familiar with the practice, but also with some of the hidden agendas involved in the practice, and the promotion of the TM brand.  And at least one point in the formal presentation, he made the point that a number of people thought that they could practice transcendental meditation without buying into the Eastern religion and mysticism with which it was associated.  And that the mysticism tended to influence them, regardless of their intent.

During the question period at the end, a number of those commenting or raising questions challenged his assertion.  They said that they practiced or were interested in transcendental meditation solely as an aid to study, and that they did not believe the Eastern mysticism associated with it.  One particular questioner made this statement very strongly.  He insisted that he was not affected in any way.  His practice of transcendental meditation was just to aid in studying.

The Spiritual Counterfeits Project speaker said that even though this student questioner believed that he was unaffected by the religious and philosophical underpinnings of transcendental meditation, he was still being affected by it, without realising it.  The student said, no, he wasn't.  The speaker said, yes, he was.  This went back and forth several times.  And just as I was feeling that this was a pointless exercise,  the speaker suddenly changed tack.  He said, all right, if you are not affected by the belief systems of transcendental meditation, and if you are using it only as a tool, and only for your own purposes, then tell us your mantra.

I have to explain mantra.

When training in transcendental meditation, when the student had achieved a certain level of supposed "mastery," they were given a mantra.  The putative student of TM would be told that this mantra was given to him (or her) in order to aid in meditation, and that it was unique and related to their individuality, and that they should never, under any circumstances, reveal the mantra to anyone else.

The speaker from the Spiritual Counterfeits Project had explained all of this, and then had gone on to say that there were, in fact, only eight mantras, and that they were assigned to students of transcendental meditation purely on the basis of the student's age.  In addressing his challenge to the student, the speaker reminded him of all of this, and reminded the student that since the student had said how long he had been practicing TM that the speaker knew how old he was when he started, and therefore, what mantra he would have been assigned, and therefore the speaker actually already *knew* this student's mantra.  But, he said, if you do not believe in the philosophy, if you are not being affected and *in*fected by the belief systems of transcendental meditation, tell us your mantra to prove to us that you are not being so affected.

The student would not do so.

As mentioned, I am being encouraged to participate in my treatment of depression by going through a mindfulness course.  The course that has been proposed is not my favourite type of material.  It's extremely repetitive.  I suppose this is partly deliberate.  To keep repeating over and over again the same practice of scanning your body and paying attention to the sensations and feelings and other aspects that are all part of mindfulness. 

I am also aware of the risks as outlined in the Spiritual Counterfeits Project story.  Participating in a mindfulness exercise, and even more an entire course, exposes one to, and promotes, certain philosophies or beliefs that I might not wish to be involved with.

However, I am a security expert.  Therefore, I am an expert in risk management.  I am not unaware of dangers and risks.  Therefore, I am watching out for warning signs, and trying to do what I can to mitigate the risks.  For example, there is the aforementioned repetitive nature of the material.

As we have seen recently with the various populist politicians promoting Big Lies, the way to get people to believe lies is not to argue the point.  The way to get people to believe lies is simply to keep repeating them over and over and over again.  Advertisers have known this for decades.

So I'm watching this idea of repetition, which is, after all, the basis of the Eastern or apprentice style of teaching, as opposed to some more academic styles with which we, in the western world, are more familiar.  The Eastern style of teaching relies heavily on repetition.  Repetition of simple activities.  Getting the student to observe what the master does, and repeat motions or processes until they get them right.  Repetition is one way of learning.  It is very conducive to rote, or field independent, learning.  Field dependant learning relies on understanding.  Any understanding that comes from the repetitive, rote style of teaching comes long after the actual teaching, when the student has achieved a certain level of mastery, and if he or she so desires, goes on to consider what has been mastered, and whether what has been mastered can be improved, amended, corrected, or modified.  The repetitive or rote style of teaching does not provide for questioning of the material being taught, let alone questioning the teacher.  You just repeat until you've got it right.  At least, "right" according to the master.  Basically, the rote repetitive style of teaching encourages you to switch off your brain.  That is a possible problem.  And it seems to be very much a part of the mindfulness types of curricula.  You are encouraged not to examine what you are doing or being told.  You are encouraged to just do it, and to accept what you are told.  Therefore, you can be told certain things, and very likely grow to accept them, whether they are true or right, or consistent with what you have previously established as principles for your life, or your understanding of reality.  It's a good way to slip in possibly, contrary ideas or worldviews, without you really noticing it.

But that's a very general objection.

Well, this morning, I was reading some of the material, and I noticed something standing out to me.  Having started, and continuing to promote the idea of doing the body scan and paying attention to feelings and sensations in your body, the material, of course, diverted into some editorializing.  It was talking about the benefits of noticing not only sensations in your body, but sensations you encounter when you are out in nature.  Feeling the breeze on your skin.  Being out in nature and noticing the smell of flowers.  This then turned to the beauties and joys of being "at one" with nature.  All of this sounds very nice.  And then there was a quote from a Chinese poem, part of which said something about "I am together in peace with the mountain until there is only the mountain."

Okay, this sounds very peaceful.  It sounds very one with the universe, and being one with the universe, well, it's something that we are repeatedly being told, these days, is a good thing.  Repeatedly told.  (Remember what I said about repetition?)  This concept, of being "one with the universe," is fairly common in newage stuff: so common that we don't really think about it.  (Which may be a danger?)  Being one with the universe makes us tolerant of diversity.  Being one with the universe makes us realise that we should love our neighbours.  Etc. etc. etc. 

However, going back and reading that bit about the poem again, there is only the mountain.  What happened to me?

Now, initially, that may sound very selfish.  Why should I care about me?  There is this beautiful idea of being one with the universe.

This actually is one of the major differences between eastern and western philosophies and, particularly, religions.  This is the idea, or certainly related to the idea, of Nirvana.  Nirvana is a state of nothingness, a state of non-being.  It is possible to think of it as a state of dissolving in order to be one with the universe.  When we have been enlightened, we can achieve Nirvana, or nothingness.  And this is something that comes back in another segment of a later session in the mindfulness course.

Nirvana means that we escape the pain and frustration of mortal existence.  This is probably expressed most clearly in Buddhism.  Striving results in pain because we want something, and generally something that cannot be achieved.  Some kind of perfection that cannot be achieved.  Whether it is a perfect love, a perfect friendship, a perfect relationship, or a perfect cheeseburger, it cannot be obtained.  And therefore, this leads to frustration and pain.  Striving results in pain.  Striving results in suffering.  Therefore existence results in suffering, because even striving to escape suffering by achieving Nirvana (or nothingness) is, in fact, doomed to failure.

Go ahead.  Think of nothingness.  Quiet your thoughts.  Still your mind.  Remove any strivings.  Don't think.  In particular, don't think about a white unicorn.  Oh sorry.  You're thinking about a white unicorn, aren't you?

Your attempt not to think of a white unicorn, or a pink unicorn, or a polka dotted unicorn, once I have mentioned that you shouldn't think about it, is doomed to failure.  You are always going to be thinking, am I thinking of a pink unicorn?  You are going to be questioning yourself as to whether you are thinking about a pink unicorn.  And of course, as soon as you think about *not* thinking about a pink unicorn, you are going to think about a pink unicorn.

One of the exercises in the mindfulness course is to "not be aware," even for only ten seconds.  It's impossible.  (Unless you're asleep.  And, given that this is a sermon, you may well be.)

I'm sorry, but the idea of talking about nothingness can get very difficult at times.  I rather suspect that we are not intended to think about nothing.  About pure nothingness.  I rather suspect that the being who created us, and created our minds, did not intend us to think about nothing.

Anyway, that's the basic intent of most of the eastern religions.  We are to escape from the world.  We in the western world, and in particular the Judeo-Christian philosophies and religions, get accused of creating a dualism in the world.  We are accused of saying that things of the spirit are good, and things of the body are bad.  And a lot of people do make that mistake.  But the eastern world has an equal and even stronger dualism: between existence and non-existence.  Non-existence is good.  Existence is bad.

Now, this is, as I say, one of the major, differences between eastern and western religions.  To be more specific rather than generic, Buddhists wish to achieve Nirvana, or nothingness.  They don't even wish to be one with the universe.  What they want to be is "not."  When they don't exist anymore, they won't suffer anymore.  I have to admit that, as a grieving widower and a depressive with suicidal ideation, this idea of non-existence can be extremely tempting.  But that is not what we are promised in Christianity.

In terms of a life after ... or a life beyond this present life ... well, can I just call it the afterlife, so that I don't have to keep defining terms?  Anyways, the Jewish or Hebrew belief in an afterlife was as a kind of a half-life, or shadow life.  The Psalms and Job tend to have references to continued existence, but one that wasn't particularly useful.  However, that is, at the very least, modified in the New Testament.  We are promised that we will be with God.  We are promised that we will be in communication with God, in relationship with God.

We will be with God, but being with God, in the Biblical sense, is not the same thing as tends to be described in the "being one with the universe," mindfulness type material.  In mindfulness, the mountain stays, and you go.  You dissolve.  This is different from the Christian idea.  We are with God.  Yes, we are in communication with God.  Yes, we are probably in a more, perfect communication with God than was ever possible during our life on Earth.  Yes, we are therefore in an extremely close relationship with God.  But we aren't dissolved.  We are still there.

Although "there" may be a difficult concept, when we're talking about heaven.

Once you begin to look for the eastern mysticism in mindfulness, the evidence starts to present itself more quickly.  In a subsequent lesson, we are told to embrace pain.  We are not to thrust it away as negative, but to welcome it.  But this lies alongside another statement: we are to embrace pain because, after all, pain is temporary.  Everything, both good and bad, is temporary.  It will change.  And this is very similar to the teachings of eastern religion that *everything* is temporary.  Not in the same sense that Christianity says that the current heavens and the current Earth will one day disappear because they are imperfect, and will then be replaced with a perfect heaven and a perfect Earth, but because, in the eastern view, all of reality isn't real anyways.  All of reality is an illusion.  Therefore to cling to reality, good or bad, is to cling to an illusion.  The only reality is, you guessed it, nothingness.  Reality is a illusory: only non-existence, or nothingness, is real.

(This sounds an awful lot like what the populists are preaching these days: you cannot find the truth, because there *is* no truth.  You have to believe what I say.  There is nothing out there.)

This latter idea about embracing pain, and pain not being real, came to me in the middle of the night when my leg seized up in very painful spasms.  I'm sorry, mindfulness, the pain was just too severe to embrace.  Obviously, mindfulness, I am unsuited, or too weak in my faith in nothingness, not to believe that the pain is not real, and that, not being real, it was going to pass away.  In fact, by hobbling out to a chair, to support my leg in a slightly different angle, the pain did pass away.  But that may have had to something to do with the fact that I was using cognitive behavioral therapy, rather than mindfulness, to distract myself from the pain by getting my phone out and dictating a few more paragraphs of this sermon.  Oh dear.  So far cognitive behavioral therapy one, mindfulness zero.

I did pay attention to the sensation of pain, but only to the extent of being careful not to make it worse, while I changed position and situation.  Okay, maybe CBT .83, mindfulness  .094.

But back to the daily "lessons" that started talking about walking in the woods, feeling the breeze, smelling flowers, and then realizing that the sensations, and the brain perceiving them, were the same, and then "we sit together, the mountain and I, until only the mountain remains."

(I have to digress, for a moment.  A few days after I was working through this section, I was out, in the woods, working, but by myself.  Being out in the woods is not *always* completely tranquil.  It's really amazing how many strange sounds the woods can make, and, if you are by yourself, in country that also harbours bears and cougars, it can be a bit nerve-wracking to try and identify them all.)

In the mindfulness course, there are more lessons that relate to eastern mysticism than I have examined here.  In relation to everything is changing, nothing is permanent, we are told to think of a beautiful glass.  Then we are told to let go of our concern or admiration for the glass, since, if the glass is breakable, it is already broken (presumably in some future state?).  Since everything is changing, nothing is real.

In relation to striving bringing pain, we are to embrace pain, since "resistance to pain brings suffering."  Again, in relation to pain, we are not to worry about pain.  We are to think of pain as dye, and we are pouring the dye into a large lake.  "The lake is big enough to allow the dye without trouble."  Again, we are to consider that the dye is not real.  Only the lake is real.  (Wait ... *is* the lake real?  I'm sorry: as I say, this business of nothingness is really difficult at times.)  (Oh, and how about putting yeast into a huge amount of flour, and leavening the whole lump?  Is dye not real, but yeast is?)

There's another idea that the mountain poem brings up.  I mentioned that "what about me" might be seen as selfish.  Well, mindfulness itself is very selfish, in a sense.  We are to think about ourselves, and what bodily sensations we are feeling, and what emotions this might indicate that we are feeling.  But, is thinking about "nothing" any better?  Is thinking about the mountain any better?  Should we not be thinking about God, and God's directives, purposes, and plans for us?  Is mindfulness making "nothing" a false idol?  Or the mountain?

It may surprise you to learn that I am not calling for jihad against mindfulness.  We are meant to be distracted.  We were built to be distracted in earlier days when dangers lurked everywhere.  We had to be situationally aware, and we had to pay attention to slight clues that would distract us from what we were immediately doing, and prepare us to fight, or run away from, opportunities or dangers.  We now live in a massively complicated and over stimulated environment where we are constantly being distracted by unimportant things.  We need mindfulness, or something like it, to help us to focus and concentrate.  By and large, in our society and in our environment, we are safe.  And so the constant distraction is a problem.  We need to find a proper balance between being situationally aware of the events all around us, and internally, of our feelings, of our sensations, of our emotions, of our bodies, of our feelings, and emotions.  And even of our thoughts.  But we need to find that balance.  It can't be one or the other.

The balance that I am talking about is not between eastern and western religion.  I am not arguing for a kind of synthesis of the two kinds of thought.  (Somehow I don't think that you *can* synthesize existence and non-existence and come up with anything even remotely useful.)  Wherever the balance lies, it lies on the side of existence.  We need to balance our understanding of, and our need for, awareness of the environment around us and external to us, and the internal environment of our emotions, sensations, bodily needs and thoughts.  But all of these exist, and all of them have been created by God.  God exists, and we exist.  We are on the side of existence.  We have nothing to do with nothing.  (Sorry about that.  I *told* you it's extremely hard to talk about nothingness.)

I remember a film called "The Edifice," which is an extremely short and abbreviated animated cartoon history of the world.  The Arabs invented the concept of zero.  When it gets to the point where the zero was invented, the film has two Arab scholars sitting and writing.  Suddenly one jumps up and exclaims, "Allah be praised!  I've invented the zero!"  The other one says, "What?" and the first one goes back to writing, muttering, "Oh, nothing.  Nothing."

But it isn't nothing.  Is a very important concept.  (And we can be really grateful to the Arabs for it.)  Both in notation of numbers, and in various processes of calculation.  When we get to computers, it's even more important.  As we who work in information technology tell people, frequently, don't worry about it; it's all just ones and zeros.

One is on.  Zero is off.  One is true.  Zero is false.

And you can record and present all kinds of data in all kinds of ways, but they all use ones and zeros.

So zero isn't actually nothingness.  It has a meaning.  It is a placeholder.  It is an opposition.  It is something that you use to define.  And, in a sense, as long as we keep this in mind, the "nothing" behind mindfulness can be useful.  Not to follow slavishly, but to stand in opposition to some things that we tend to accept uncritically, and probably shouldn't.

As long as we know the origin of something, we can be aware of the principles and philosophies contained within it, and we can be aware of any risks in relation to it.  Once we understand the principles that descended to mindfulness from the original Transcendental Meditation, we can watch for this push towards nothingness.  We can be aware of its dangers.  We can see its relation in the populist politician's insistence that we do not know the truth, because we *cannot* know the truth, because there *is* no truth.  (And all we can do is believe them.)  As long as we see these lies for what they are, we can still use mindfulness.

I have used the breathing and relaxation exercises in the past, to help with headaches.  I have used mindfulness to try to be more aware of my own body.  Of my emotions.  Of the huge storm of emotions that grief, almost inevitably, creates in you.

We can use these tools as long as we are aware of the externalities that have been layered on top of them that are not helpful for use.  In a sense, my own form of meditation or mindfulness, of alerts to distraction, is part of a type of cognitive behavioural therapy in addressing depression.  When I started walking all over the place, I also started realising that I was walking around railing at God for my grief and loneliness, and the pointlessness of my existence without Gloria.  So I tried to address that by distracting myself.  I started praying.  When I got to Port Alberni, I added the people and the churches of Port Alberni to the list.  Initially, I was praying through my prayer list sometimes, five and six times a day.  And then I got depressed.  And it was hard to make it through even a single complete run through the list.  Apparently, it was the depression.  Depression makes it hard to focus.  It makes it hard to concentrate.  It means that you are easily distracted.  Even when there is nothing to distract you.  Sometimes you just stop.  So, I felt that praying through the list only once a day was a bit of a failure.  And I was beating myself up over it.  Although I tried to continue to get through the prayer list, at least once every day.

At one point, I was estimating that I was praying for eighty people every day.  I decided that I shouldn't be quoting that number if it was an overestimation.  And so I decided to write down the list and count it all up.

There are over two hundred entries on that list.  That's the churches, and the people that I know in the churches, in Port Alberni.  (Plus a few others.)  Then there's the list changes.  When people die, they get dropped off.  When I meet new people, they get added.  And of course, as people's situations change, what I pray for them, about the concerns that relate to them, their concerns change.  And, as noted, I don't have this list written down.  I pray it while I'm out walking, and so I have to remember it all, and keep it all in mind when I'm praying through the list.

Now that I come to think about it, it's not a failure.  It's a pretty impressive accomplishment, that I keep more than two hundred people, and their concerns, in my mind all the time.

So, what does this have to do with mindfulness?  Well, I know how easy it is to get distracted.  I know how many things in our environment impinge on our consciousness, and can distract us.  So I don't need mindfulness to inform me of how difficult it is to concentrate, to pay attention.  And I know how important it is to pay attention.  As the only pedestrian in Port Alberni, I also know the importance of slowing down and paying attention.  Not just because you guys are all terrible drivers.

When I came to Port Alberni I discovered how bad Port Alberni drivers were.  When, shortly after I got here, I was driving, I suddenly realised that as I approached an intersection, I was defocusing my eyes.  This is something that you learn automatically when you drive in heavy traffic situations.  It prevents attentional blindness.  Attentional blindness is when you devote your attention to, and focus on, a particular item, and therefore do not notice other things that are happening around you.  When you defocus your eyes, you cannot focus on a particular item in the field of view, and therefore you are more aware of gross movement, which might indicate a potential danger source like an approaching car.  Defocusing allows you to be ready to be distracted by a possibly dangerous signal.  Focusing and concentrating renders you attentionally blind to items that may indicate a potential danger.  Once again, we need to have a balance between concentration and distraction in life.

So we do need to be aware.  We do need to pay attention, and mindfulness can be a tool to do that.  But there are other tools that can help us to be aware.

I very strongly suspect that there is an awful lot of which God wishes we were more aware.

Sermons: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html