My Contemplations

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Chess, Starcraft... and Everything

2011-08-23T09:16:00.002-07:00

For the past several years I have had a question that has kept coming back to me. To explain its significance I need to give it some context. When I was fifteen I casually noticed a chess program for sale at a computer store. It looked fun, and it was only a few dollars. I had played chess several times with my older brothers and my dad, and regarded it as equivalent to any other household board game. When I installed Chessmaster 5000 I admired the flashy graphics and various visual settings for the board and pieces. I also noticed that during the first few moves of a game, the computer would display things like English Opening or Sicilian Defense. Had these same moves been played before? And did they actually have names? Upon further investigation, I found a portion of the program that discussed the history of these opening sequences and the stories of the players behind them. It was a whole new world, and I was hooked.

During the years that followed I pursued chess as my primary interest. I left public school and spent most of my home school time studying chess books. I wasn't especially talented, but after a few years I reached an intermediate competitive rating of about 1700. I was able to easily handle most casual players, but had only mediocre results in tournament play. Driven by a competitive spirit I studied for hours each day, painstakingly committing dozens of games to memory in hopes of becoming a master. I kept this up for years, but my rating still hovered in the mid-1700's. I had heard that practice makes perfect, but it wasn't working with chess.

And I wasn't the only one. Most of the Utah players had all kept the same rating they had when I first started playing chess. The highest rated player at my first tournament was rated 2050, and several years later was still about 2050. With others it was 1800, 1500, 1200 or even 1000. Regardless of what the rating was, each player seemed to have a number, and when it was reached, progress stopped.

Stagnation isn't unique to chess, but with chess it seems to be more of a mystery. With other sports it is easier to identify why someone plateaus. When tennis players want to improve, they can focus on their speed, accuracy, placement, or a number of other obvious areas. A basketball player also has a range of abilities to improve on, such as coordination, shooting, passing, etc. But chess seems different. In chess there are just moves, and anyone can make moves regardless of size, strength, speed, dexterity or coordination. A chess player doesn't get better because he doesn't make better moves.

This frustrated me. How do I start making better moves? I wanted to get better at chess, but didn't know how. My tutor gave me a small chess book that claimed to have the answer. It explained that all of the grandmasters had thousands of games and critical positions memorized, and that the more I memorized the better I would become. This was an inspiring promise. Every morning I would attend religious seminary for two hours and then drive to the Washington County Library. Its parking lots were well-shaded and its benches were usually occupied by a number of homeless people who spent their time there. I became well acquainted with a heavily-tattooed librarian who managed the room reservations. He became used to seeing me come in with my books and chess set, asking if there was a study room available. Once in the safety of my private study area, I’d set up the pieces and open up a game collection, going through the moves until I could replay the game from memory.

Sometimes a homeless person would tap on the glass and gesture to me. They all wanted to play games with me. I didn’t have time or desire to play with them – I was too busy becoming a grandmaster. Once, however, there was no study room available so I did my best to conceal myself in a secluded corner. It didn’t take long to be spotted. A scruffy man in dirty clothes sat down in front of me and proposed a match. Not knowing how to get out of it, I accepted, and decided that I’d try to dispose of him quickly so I could get back to my real work.

The game ended in a draw. I was furious. There was no question that I was a superior player, and on account of some fluke he had managed to draw. I decided I needed to start memorizing even more games. Instead of one a day, I’d do three, thus tripling my rate of progress. Nothing could stop me now.

Eventually memorization gave way to other ideas and strategies. Training with and observing masters made things look simple. Studying opening lines from books also seemed easy and made sense. However, when playing the game, my results were poor and I couldn't see why. Why do people hit a wall? What keeps them from progressing? That is the question - the thorn in my side.

Over the years I came up with many possible answers to this question. I was always hopeful about each one, but they all failed to produce significant progress. About a year ago I was required to read the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for a systems design class at Brigham Young University. I bought the audio book version and listened to it on my drives to and from school and work. It was a ridiculous book, and I eventually ran out of ways of criticizing its absurdity. I was relieved when I finished it, and was annoyed to notice that we were never seriously tested or quizzed on it. What a waste of time.

A few months after the semester I found myself listening to it again. I can’t remember why, but I suppose that I had bored from the radio and my other audio books and wanted something different. Or perhaps the book had succeeded in implanting some subliminal message that brought me back. Since then I have gone through it about three more times. For whatever reason, I started listening to it with my chess frustrations in mind. I realized that many of the book’s ideas seemed to address the problems I had been struggling with. I took the ideas and tried to apply them to chess, and in a month's time I gained 175 points to achieve an all-time peak rating 1872. This included beating one player who was rated 2100 and a few others who were close to 2000. For the first time in years, I knew something had changed.

What follows are some excerpts from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author, Pirsig, uses motorcycle maintenance to illustrate his ideas, but just about anything could also be used, including chess. Along with Pirsigs words I will include my own, applying these ideas to chess, but I believe that these ideas can help in any endeavor. The entire book is sprinkled with useful insights, but since these are only a couple of excerpts I will try to fill in the gaps where I can. All italics are my comments.

Now I want to show that that classic pattern of rationality can be tremendously improved, expanded and made far more effective through the formal recognition of Quality in its operation. Before doing this, however, I should go over some of the negative aspects of traditional maintenance to show just where the problems are.

One of Pirsig's main thoughts it that rationality itself is a creation, and that new problems require new levels of reason. He illustrated this by using the invention of calculus as an example. Infinite rates of change could not be addressed rationally, so Newton and Leibniz expanded reason to account for it.

The first is stuckness, a mental stuckness that accompanies the physical stuckness of whatever it is you're working on. The same thing Chris was suffering from. A screw sticks, for example, on a side cover assembly. You check the manual to see if there might be any special cause for this screw to come off so hard, but all it says is "Remove side cover plate" in that wonderful terse technical style that never tells you what you want to know. There's no earlier procedure left undone that might cause the cover screws to stick.

If you're experienced you'd probably apply a penetrating liquid and an impact driver at this point. But suppose you're inexperienced and you attach a self-locking plier wrench to the shank of your screwdriver and really twist it hard, a procedure you've had success with in the past, but which this time succeeds only in tearing the slot of the screw.

Your mind was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off, and so it takes a little time to realize that this irritating minor annoyance of a torn screw slot isn't just irritating and minor. You're stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It's absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle.

This isn't a rare scene in science or technology (or chess). This is the commonest scene of all. Just plain stuck. In traditional maintenance this is the worst of all moments, so bad that you have avoided even thinking about it before you come to it.

The book's no good to you now. Neither is scientific reason. You don't need any scientific experiments to find out what's wrong. It's obvious what's wrong. What you need is an hypothesis for how you're going to get that slotless screw out of there and scientific method doesn't provide any of these hypotheses. It operates only after they're around.

The most important part of the scientific method - coming up with a good hypothesis - is the part that is least discussed in western society, when in reality, it's 99% of the work.

This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It's a miserable experience emotionally. You're losing time. You're incompetent. You don't know what you're doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take the machine to a real mechanic who knows how to figure these things out.

It's normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge if necessary. You think about it, and the more you think about it the more you're inclined to take the whole machine to a high bridge and drop it off. It's just outrageous that a tiny little slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.

Just as it's outrageous that all that thought and work is spoiled by some homeless person who you can’t seem to beat.

What you're up against is the great unknown, the void of all Western thought. You need some ideas, some hypotheses. Traditional scientific method, unfortunately, has never quite gotten around to say exactly where to pick up more of these hypotheses. Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination..."unstuckness," in other words...are completely outside its domain.

...

We're still stuck on that screw and the only way it's going to get unstuck is by abandoning further examination of the screw according to traditional scientific method. That won't work. What we have to do is examine traditional scientific method in the light of that stuck screw.

As Einstein put it, “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” To progress, we must move beyond our current level of reason by analyzing how we reason. This is difficult because it's hard to analyze reason without incorporating that same level of reason and therefore nullifying the entire process.

We have been looking at that screw "objectively." According to the doctrine of "objectivity," which is integral with traditional scientific method, what we like or don't like about that screw has nothing to do with our correct thinking. We should not evaluate what we see. We should keep our mind a blank tablet which nature fills for us, and then reason disinterestedly from the facts we observe.

He is saying that traditional reason assumes an objective and clear vision of reality where all facts are immediately apparent - that the hypothesis will just show up ready for processing, and that all the work comes after the hypothesis.

But when we stop and think about it disinterestedly, in terms of this stuck screw, we begin to see that this whole idea of disinterested observation is silly. Where are those facts? What are we going to observe disinterestedly? The torn slot? The immovable side cover plate? The color of the paint job? The speedometer? The sissy bar? As Poincaré would have said, there are an infinite number of facts about the motorcycle, and the right ones don't just dance up and introduce themselves. The right facts, the ones we really need, are not only passive, they are damned elusive, and we're not going to just sit back and "observe" them. We're going to have to be in there looking for them or we're going to be here a long time. Forever. As Poincaré pointed out, there must be a subliminal choice of what facts we observe.

This is the essence of talent. A grandmaster and an amateur can both be smart and even have comparable calculation abilities. The difference is which facts they find important and/or interesting.

The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to select the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality. He has to care! This is an ability about which formal traditional scientific method has nothing to say. It's long past time to take a closer look at this qualitative preselection of facts which has seemed so scrupulously ignored by those who make so much of these facts after they are "observed." I think that it will be found that a formal acknowledgment of the role of Quality in the scientific process doesn't destroy the empirical vision at all. It expands it, strengthens it and brings it far closer to actual scientific practice.

I think the basic fault that underlies the problem of stuckness is traditional rationality's insistence upon "objectivity," a doctrine that there is a divided reality of subject and object. For true science to take place these must be rigidly separate from each other. "You are the mechanic. There is the motorcycle. You are forever apart from one another. You do this to it. You do that to it. These will be the results."

This eternally dualistic subject-object way of approaching the motorcycle sounds right to us because we're used to it. But it's not right. It's always been an artificial interpretation superimposed on reality. It's never been reality itself. It is important to distinguish descriptions and interpretations of reality from reality itself. Doing this opens up new possibilities of thought, and we need new ways of thinking to get us past stagnation because all stagnation begins with stagnation of thought. When this duality is completely accepted a certain nondivided relationship between the mechanic and motorcycle, a craftsmanlike feeling for the work, is destroyed. When traditional rationality divides the world into subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you're really stuck it's Quality, not any subjects or objects, that tells you where you ought to go.

By returning our attention to Quality it is hoped that we can get technological work out of the noncaring subject-object dualism and back into craftsmanlike self-involved reality again, which will reveal to us the facts we need when we are stuck.

In my mind now is an image of a huge, long railroad train, one of those 120-boxcar jobs that cross the prairies all the time with lumber and vegetables going east and with automobiles and other manufactured goods going west. I want to call this railroad train "knowledge" and subdivide in into two parts: Classic Knowledge and Romantic Knowledge.

In terms of the analogy, Classic Knowledge, the knowledge taught by the Church of Reason, is the engine and all the boxcars. All of them and everything that's in them. If you subdivide the train into parts you will find no Romantic Knowledge anywhere. And unless you're careful it's easy to make the presumption that's all the train there is. This isn't because Romantic Knowledge is nonexistent or even unimportant. It's just that so far the definition of the train is static and purposeless. This was what I was trying to get at back in South Dakota when I talked about two whole dimensions of existence. It's two whole ways of looking at the train.

Romantic Quality, in terms of this analogy, isn't any "part" of the train. It's the leading edge of the engine, a two-dimensional surface of no real significance unless you understand that the train isn't a static entity at all. A train really isn't a train if it can't go anywhere. In the process of examining the train and subdividing it into parts we've inadvertently stopped it, so that it really isn't a train we are examining. That's why we get stuck.

Like in physics, you can’t simultaneously know both the location and direction of a particle. Classical knowledge is analogous to location whereas romantic knowledge is more like direction. Since most facts are hidden to us, it is our direction that will determine which ones we will notice.

The real train of knowledge isn't a static entity that can be stopped and subdivided. It's always going somewhere. On a track called Quality. And that engine and all those 120 boxcars are never going anywhere except where the track of Quality takes them; and romantic Quality, the leading edge of the engine, takes them along that track.

Romantic reality is the cutting edge of experience. It's the leading edge of the train of knowledge that keeps the whole train on the track. Traditional knowledge is only the collective memory of where that leading edge has been. At the leading edge there are no subjects, no objects, only the track of Quality ahead, and if you have no formal way of evaluating, no way of acknowledging this Quality, then the entire train has no way of knowing where to go. You don't have pure reason...you have pure confusion. The leading edge is where absolutely all the action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the future. It contains all the history of the past. Where else could they be contained?

If you haven’t been to your desired destination before, you can’t get there by returning to each of your previous stops. To get there you need what Pirsig calls quality. The following paragraphs discuss what quality is.

The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.

Value, the leading edge of reality, is no longer an irrelevant offshoot of structure. Value is the predecessor of structure. It's the preintellectual awareness that gives rise to it. Our structured reality is preselected on the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an understanding of the value source from which it's derived.

Reality is filtered and interpreted for us through a lens of values.

One's rational understanding of a motorcycle is therefore modified from minute to minute as one works on it and sees that a new and different rational understanding has more Quality. One doesn't cling to old sticky ideas because one has an immediate rational basis for rejecting them. Reality isn't static anymore. It's not a set of ideas you have to either fight or resign yourself to. It's made up, in part, of ideas that are expected to grow as you grow, and as we all grow, century after century. With Quality as a central undefined term, reality is, in its essential nature, not static but dynamic. And when you really understand dynamic reality you never get stuck. It has forms but the forms are capable of change.

For all practical purposes, we have very little experience with reality itself. What we experience are our descriptions and interpretations of reality. When we realize that these are not reality itself then we are able to adjust ourselves to new facts that may contradict models of reality we’ve relied on before. This has to happen in “the cutting edge of this instant” which is “nothing less than the totality of everything there is.” Earlier in the book, Pirsig put it this way: “Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.”

To put it in more concrete terms: If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn't enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good. That is what carries you forward. This sense isn't just something you're born with, although you are born with it. It's also something you can develop. It's not just "intuition," not just unexplainable "skill" or "talent." It's the direct result of contact with basic reality, Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal.

It all sounds so far out and esoteric when it's put like that it comes as a shock to discover that it is one of the most homespun, down-to-earth views of reality you can have.

…

I keep talking wild theory, but it keeps somehow coming out stuff everybody knows, folklore. This Quality, this feeling for the work, is something known in every shop.

Now finally let's get back to that screw.

Let's consider a reevaluation of the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring, the zero of consciousness, isn't the worst of all possible situations, but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it's exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce; through koans, deep breathing, sitting still and the like. Your mind is empty, you have a "hollow-flexible" attitude of "beginner's mind." You're right at the front end of the train of knowledge, at the track of reality itself. Consider, for a change, that this is a moment to be not feared but cultivated. If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.

From this perspective, you are ready to move forward. Without this perspective, you’re just spinning your wheels.

The solution to the problem often at first seems unimportant or undesirable, but the state of stuckness allows it, in time, to assume its true importance. It seemed small because your previous rigid evaluation which led to the stuckness made it small.

But now consider the fact that no matter how hard you try to hang on to it, this stuckness is bound to disappear. Your mind will naturally and freely move toward a solution. Unless you are a real master at staying stuck you can't prevent this. The fear of stuckness is needless because the longer you stay stuck the more you see the Quality...reality that gets you unstuck every time. What's really been getting you stuck is the running from the stuckness through the cars of your train of knowledge looking for a solution that is out in front of the train.

Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors. It's this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.

“Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.” Egoless acceptance is a powerful concept, and a lack of this acceptance can be blinding. When you’re trying to justify yourself, you are unwilling to change because you feel vulnerable. Ultimately, you want better results with the same level of understanding and behavior. I have experienced this many times with chess.

Normally screws are so cheap and small and simple you think of them as unimportant. But now, as your Quality awareness becomes stronger, you realize that this one, individual, particular screw is neither cheap nor small nor unimportant. Right now this screw is worth exactly the selling price of the whole motorcycle, because the motorcycle is actually valueless until you get the screw out. With this reevaluation of the screw comes a willingness to expand your knowledge of it.

With the expansion of the knowledge, I would guess, would come a reevaluation of what the screw really is. If you concentrate on it, think about it, stay stuck on it for a long enough time, I would guess that in time you will come to see that the screw is less and less an object typical of a class and more an object unique in itself. Then with more concentration you will begin to see the screw as not even an object at all but as a collection of functions. Your stuckness is gradually eliminating patterns of traditional reason.

Obtaining new levels of clarity often means taking off the lens you’ve been wearing. New facts and characteristics of reality can’t be noticed until you eliminate previous patterns of reasoning.

In the past when you separated subject and object from one another in a permanent way, your thinking about them got very rigid. You formed a class called "screw" that seemed to be inviolable and more real than the reality you are looking at (you replaced reality with your description of reality). And you couldn't think of how to get unstuck because you couldn't think of anything new, because you couldn't see anything new.

This is the heart of the matter. Mistaking your interpretation of reality for reality itself limits your ability to see reality at all.

Now, in getting that screw out, you aren't interested in what it is. What it is has ceased to be a category of thought and is a continuing direct experience. It's not in the boxcars anymore, it's out in front and capable of change. You are interested in what it does and why it's doing it. You will ask functional questions. Associated with your questions will be a subliminal Quality discrimination identical to the Quality discrimination that led Poincaré to the Fuchsian equations.

What your actual solution is is unimportant as long as it has Quality. Thoughts about the screw as combined rigidness and adhesiveness and about its special helical interlock might lead naturally to solutions of impaction and use of solvents. That is one kind of Quality track. Another track may be to go to the library and look through a catalog of mechanic's tools, in which you might come across a screw extractor that would do the job. Or to call a friend who knows something about mechanical work. Or just to drill the screw out, or just burn it out with a torch. or you might just, as a result of your meditative attention to the screw, come up with some new way of extracting it that has never been thought of before and that beats all the rest and is patentable and makes you a millionaire five years from now. There's no predicting what's on that Quality track. The solutions all are simple...after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

…

The excerpts that follow are from an entirely different section of the book, and make up some practical, easy-to-apply techniques for maintaining quality as the emphasis of our work. The tendency to lose quality is called a “gumption trap.”

As the course description of gumptionology indicated, this internal part of the field can be broken down into three main types of internal gumption traps: those that block affective understanding, called ``value traps''; those that block cognitive understanding, called ``truth traps''; and those that block psychomotor behavior, called ``muscle traps.'' The value traps are by far the largest and the most dangerous group.

Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity. This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values. In motorcycle maintenance, you must rediscover what you do as you go. Rigid values make this impossible.

This is why blind imitation kills progress. When you are thoughtlessly imitating what you think is right, you’ve succumb to one of the most vicious forms of value rigidity.

The typical situation is that the motorcycle doesn't work. The facts are there but you don't see them. You're looking right at them, but they don't yet have enough value. This is what Phædrus was talking about. Quality, value, creates the subjects and objects of the world. The facts do not exist until value has created them. If your values are rigid you can't really learn new facts.

This often shows up in premature diagnosis, when you're sure you know what the trouble is, and then when it isn't, you're stuck. Then you've got to find some new clues, but before you can find them you've got to clear your head of old opinions. If you're plagued with value rigidity you can fail to see the real answer even when it's staring you right in the face because you can't see the new answer's importance.

The birth of a new fact is always a wonderful thing to experience. It's dualistically called a ``discovery'' because of the presumption that it has an existence independent of anyone's awareness of it. When it comes along, it always has, at first, a low value. Then, depending on the value-looseness of the observer and the potential quality of the fact, its value increases, either slowly or rapidly, or the value wanes and the fact disappears.

The overwhelming majority of facts, the sights and sounds that are around us every second and the relationships among them and everything in our memory...these have no Quality, in fact have a negative quality. If they were all present at once our consciousness would be so jammed with meaningless data we couldn't think or act. So we preselect on the basis of Quality, or, to put it Phædrus' way, the track of Quality preselects what data we're going to be conscious of, and it makes this selection in such a way as to best harmonize what we are with what we are becoming.

In another part of the book, Pirsig said “You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.” We can’t be one person during a game of chess and another person afterwards. If I am clumsy, undisciplined and chaotic in my thoughts, I can’t sit down to the chess board and expect quality to kick in. “[Quality makes the selection of facts] in such a way as to best harmonize what we are with what we are becoming.”

What you have to do, if you get caught in this gumption trap of value rigidity, is slow down...you're going to have to slow down anyway whether you want to or not...but slow down deliberately and go over ground that you've been over before to see if the things you thought were important were really important and to -- well -- just stare at the machine. There's nothing wrong with that. Just live with it for a while. Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long, as sure as you live, you'll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you're interested in it. That's the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it.

I think it was this idea alone that boosted my rating more than 100 points. Just stare at the board! Don’t be in a hurry. Sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for, so just let yourself observe and listen. Facts will start to nibble if you let them.

At first try to understand this new fact not so much in terms of your big problem as for its own sake. That problem may not be as big as you think it is. And that fact may not be as small as you think it is. It may not be the fact you want but at least you should be very sure of that before you send the fact away. Often before you send it away you will discover it has friends who are right next to it and are watching to see what your response is. Among the friends may be the exact fact you are looking for.

This is exactly how it happens.

After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine. When that happens you've reached a kind of point of arrival. Then you're no longer strictly a motorcycle mechanic, you're also a motorcycle scientist, and you've completely conquered the gumption trap of value rigidity.

…

I keep wanting to go back to that analogy of fishing for facts. I can just see somebody asking with great frustration, ``Yes, but which facts do you fish for? There's got to be more to it than that.''

But the answer is that if you know which facts you're fishing for you're no longer fishing. You've caught them. I'm trying to think of a specific example. --

All kinds of examples from cycle maintenance could be given, but the most striking example of value rigidity I can think of is the old South Indian Monkey Trap, which depends on value rigidity for its effectiveness. The trap consists of a hollowed-out coconut chained to a stake. The coconut has some rice inside which can be grabbed through a small hole. The hole is big enough so that the monkey's hand can go in, but too small for his fist with rice in it to come out. The monkey reaches in and is suddenly trapped...by nothing more than his own value rigidity. He can't revalue the rice. He cannot see that freedom without rice is more valuable than capture with it. The villagers are coming to get him and take him away. They're coming closer -- closer! -- now! What general advice...not specific advice...but what general advice would you give the poor monkey in circumstances like this?

Well, I think you might say exactly what I've been saying about value rigidity, with perhaps a little extra urgency. There is a fact this monkey should know: if he opens his hand he's free. But how is he going to discover this fact? By removing the value rigidity that rates rice above freedom. How is he going to do that? Well, he should somehow try to slow down deliberately and go over ground that he has been over before and see if things he thought were important really were important and, well, stop yanking and just stare at the coconut for a while. Before long he should get a nibble from a little fact wondering if he is interested in it. He should try to understand this fact not so much in terms of his big problem as for its own sake. That problem may not be as big as he thinks it is. That fact may not be as small as he thinks it is either. That's about all the general information you can give him.

…

The next one is important. It's the internal gumption trap of ego. Ego isn't entirely separate from value rigidity but one of the many causes of it.

If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. Your ego isolates you from the Quality reality. When the facts show that you've just goofed, you're not as likely to admit it. When false information makes you look good, you're likely to believe it. On any mechanical repair job ego comes in for rough treatment. You're always being fooled, you're always making mistakes, and a mechanic who has a big ego to defend is at a terrific disadvantage. If you know enough mechanics to think of them as a group, and your observations coincide with mine, I think you'll agree that mechanics tend to be rather modest and quiet. There are exceptions, but generally if they're not quiet and modest at first, the work seems to make them that way. And skeptical. Attentive, but skeptical, But not egoistic. There's no way to bullshit your way into looking good on a mechanical repair job, except with someone who doesn't know what you're doing.

-- I was going to say that the machine doesn't respond to your personality, but it does respond to your personality. It's just that the personality that it responds to is your real personality, the one that genuinely feels and reasons and acts, rather than any false, blown-up personality images your ego may conjure up. These false images are deflated so rapidly and completely you're bound to be very discouraged very soon if you've derived your gumption from ego rather than Quality.

In a way, humility and honesty are a willingness to accept reality and every moment for itself, regardless of what you’d like it to be.

If modesty doesn't come easily or naturally to you, one way out of this trap is to fake the attitude of modesty anyway. If you just deliberately assume you're not much good, then your gumption gets a boost when the facts prove this assumption is correct. This way you can keep going until the time comes when the facts prove this assumption is incorrect.

Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than ``laziness,'' is the real reason you find it hard to get started. This gumption trap of anxiety, which results from overmotivation, can lead to all kinds of errors of excessive fussiness. You fix things that don't need fixing, and chase after imaginary ailments. You jump to wild conclusions and build all kinds of errors into the machine because of your own nervousness. These errors, when made, tend to confirm your original underestimation of yourself. This leads to more errors, which lead to more underestimation, in a self-stoking cycle.

A lot of chess players suffer from this. This is also a serious gumption trap for those who struggle with technology and can’t seem to remember how to do anything on the computer when their younger companions make it look so easy.

The best way to break this cycle, I think, is to work out your anxieties on paper. Read every book and magazine you can on the subject. Your anxiety makes this easy and the more you read the more you calm down. You should remember that it's peace of mind you're after and not just a fixed machine.

This is a very empowering realization. It’s peace of mind you’re after, not a won chess game, although a chess game can be the experience that helps you realize this peace of mind. “Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the centre of it all.”

When beginning a repair job you can list everything you're going to do on little slips of paper which you then organize into proper sequence. You discover that you organize and then reorganize the sequence again and again as more and more ideas come to you. The time spent this way usually more than pays for itself in time saved on the machine and prevents you from doing fidgety things that create problems later on.

You can reduce your anxiety somewhat by facing the fact that there isn't a mechanic alive who doesn't louse up a job once in a while. The main difference between you and the commercial mechanics is that when they do it you don't hear about it...just pay for it, in additional costs prorated through all your bills. When you make the mistakes yourself, you at least get the benefit of some education.

Boredom is the next gumption trap that comes to mind. This is the opposite of anxiety and commonly goes with ego problems. Boredom means you're off the Quality track, you're not seeing things freshly, you've lost your ``beginner's mind'' and your motorcycle is in great danger. Boredom means your gumption supply is low and must be replenished before anything else is done.

Boredom and complacency mean that you don’t care about chess anymore. You don’t care about much anything. But you still want to win. I feel this way when I play hours of speed chess to the point where chess has lost all meaning, but I continue because I want to win. My play deteriorates, and instead of being humbled, I actually reinforce my ego by blaming my losses on chance or luck and asserting that I am actually the better player. No peace of mind there!

When you're bored, stop! Go to a show. Turn on the TV. Call it a day. Do anything but work on that machine. If you don't stop, the next thing that happens is the Big Mistake, and then all the boredom plus the Big Mistake combine together in one Sunday punch to knock all the gumption out of you and you are really stopped.

My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. It's very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest. My next favorite is coffee. I usually keep a pot plugged in while working on the machine. If these don't work it may mean deeper Quality problems are bothering you and distracting you from what's before you. The boredom is a signal that you should turn your attention to these problems...that's what you're doing anyway...and control them before continuing on the motorcycle.

For me the most boring task is cleaning the machine. It seems like such a waste of time. It just gets dirty again the first time you ride it. John always kept his BMW spic and span. It really did look nice, while mine's always a little ratty, it seems. That's the classical mind at work, runs fine inside but looks dingy on the surface.

One solution to boredom on certain kinds of jobs such as greasing and oil changing and tuning is to turn them into a kind of ritual. There's an esthetic to doing things that are unfamiliar and another esthetic to doing things that are familiar. I have heard that there are two kinds of welders: production welders, who don't like tricky setups and enjoy doing the same thing over and over again; and maintenance welders, who hate it when they have to do the same job twice. The advice was that if you hire a welder make sure which kind he is, because they're not interchangeable. I'm in that latter class, and that's probably why I enjoy troubleshooting more than most and dislike cleaning more than most. But I can do both when I have to and so can anyone else. When cleaning I do it the way people go to church...not so much to discover anything new, although I'm alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. It's nice sometimes to go over familiar paths.

Zen has something to say about boredom. Its main practice of ``just sitting'' has got to be the world's most boring activity...unless it's that Hindu practice of being buried alive. You don't do anything much; not move, not think, not care. What could be more boring? Yet in the center of all this boredom is the very thing Zen Buddhism seeks to teach. What is it? What is it at the very center of boredom that you're not seeing?

Impatience is close to boredom but always results from one cause: an underestimation of the amount of time the job will take. You never really know what will come up and very few jobs get done as quickly as planned. Impatience is the first reaction against a setback and can soon turn to anger if you're not careful.

With chess, impatience is often manifested by how gradual progress can seem to be. Again, when you realize what you’re really after – peace of mind – you will appreciate each moment you’re given, even if you’re not a master yet. The real journey is self-mastery, and every step can be as enjoyable as the last.

Since my rating increase, I have played very little chess, mainly because of the demands family, work and school place on me. I would like to get back into it, and I might in a little while. In the meantime, here are some annotated games I played in one of my last tournaments.

Acceptance

2011-04-17T19:40:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I was in Las Vegas at the National Open chess tournament. Going into the last round I was four for five and winning my last game would mean that I’d likely place in the top three and win a considerable amount of prize money. My previous games had been tough, but I was hopeful that I could win one more. It turned out that I lost rather quickly, but all of my fatigue cushioned the loss, and instead of sulking like I normally would I decided to go watch the games of the top boards. At national events, the top ten boards or so are displayed on large demo boards so spectators can accompany them move-by-move. I noticed that on board four there was a Grandmaster playing a young master rated around 2350. The master was probably about eleven or twelve years old. Coming from a state of fatigue and frustration with the game, I was captivated by the image of a boy half my age playing on a level beyond my ability to fully appreciate.

I asked myself the question, “What is it that this boy has that I don’t? Why is he able to create works of art with the pieces when my greatest efforts tend to be clumsy disasters at best?” I was too tired to contemplate this question, so I sort of just sat there with it lingering in my mind. Suddenly, I was hit with a realization: it isn’t what he has that I don’t, it’s what he doesn’t have that I do. The thought seemed to engulf me and watching the master play gave me a reflective, happy feeling. I thought, “He is a master because he is able to see clearly. He is able to see the truth presented in the position. He is able to see because he doesn’t have the obstructions to clarity that I have. I am unable to see because of all of the junk in my way.”

I think there is a lot of truth to this principle. I remember hearing once that a book on the great scientific achievements of mankind opened by explaining that progress doesn’t stop because we lack knowledge, but because we possess untrue or incomplete knowledge that we don’t question. And as Stephen R. Covey taught, “All breakthroughs are break-withs.” Sometimes progress is a matter of removing a false premise or ideas from our belief system. When this happens, we are amazed with how many obvious truths we see.

So, what are the obstacles to clarity that get in our way? I am sure there are many. Chess has shown me some of my own. Often, when I play a game I’ll form an opinion or perspective about the position early on. Most of the time, this opinion stems from whatever emotional state I find myself in at the time of the game. For the remainder of the game, I try to justify my opinion and force it to be played out on the chess board. Sometimes I’ll defend my opinion even after I have lost. If I am reviewing it with a master who wants to teach me a few things, I tend to defy plain reality and insist that my ideas were correct. I am unable to see the obvious truth because I don’t want them to exist. I am looking for whatever I can find to justify my own beliefs and opinions, even if they’re not there. My stubborn resolve to do so is capable of convincing my I’ve found what I am looking for when in fact I am only deceiving myself.

Insomuch as anger tends to be stubborn, being upset seems to augment this problem. Earlier today I was very upset with one of my professors, and in my mind I employed all of my resourcefulness to portray this person as ignorant and lazy. I wanted to degrade his reputation and insult him personally. In this state of stubborn, angered resolve, I opened up a chess program and looked at the computer analysis of a game I had recently won online. It was the final position before my opponent resigned, and the computer evaluated his position to be very inferior. I glared at the evaluation and was determined to prove it wrong. I didn’t care about reality; I only wanted the computer to be wrong. I looked for good moves, but of course there were none, and this only intensified my frustration. The fact that reality wouldn’t comply with my whims upset me. But then, suddenly, I remembered that the evaluation favored me because I had been the winner of the game. Instantly, I appreciated the evaluation and its truth became obvious to me. I could see again.

Another moment passed and I realized what had just happened. My own emotions and opinions had literally blinded me. As a few hours passed and I reflected on this, I realized that I had committed the same error with my professor. Despite his weaknesses, he is a genuine person trying to a good job and positively impact the lives of his students. He is in no way ignorant or lazy. Having achieved a bit of clarity, all of this is obvious now.

So it would seem that both our belief system (i.e. our current knowledge) and our emotions have a powerful impact on what we are able to see in any given situation. There is good reason for this. Previous knowledge aids us so that we can be selective in what we see. A computer chess program, for example, has to analyze every single move when evaluating a position, whereas a person can use his previous knowledge to immediately eliminate 99% of the possibilities and focus his attention on what his experience recommends as viable continuations. Emotions such as fear, anger or compassion also have practical purposes. Someone who might normally pay attention to beautiful roadside scenery might ignore it when he hears his tire blow out and finds all of his attention focused on avoiding an accident. Essentially, our knowledge and our emotions are ways to have us focus on tiny portions of an experience. Several people can all witness a scenario but each one will likely focus something unique depending on their past experiences and current emotional state.

And this brings me to an important problem. On the one hand we have clarity - the childlike ability to discern all there is in a given experience. On the other we have the focus that arises from experience and emotion, allowing us to maximize our attention on what might be most important. There are advantages to both, but they seem to be in opposition with one another. Is there a reconciliation to be had?

While pondering these questions, a state of being has crept into my awareness. I call this state of being Acceptance. The idea of acceptance as a state isn't my own, but only recently have I really begun to delve into its meaning. As noted before, a downside of seeing through the lenses of experience and emotion - a paradigm - is that we tend to reject whatever is incompatible with that paradigm. We can find ourselves trying to alter reality to meet the criteria we're looking for. I believe that herein lies the danger. Acceptance, on the other hand, is characterized by removing the need to justify your paradigm. Rather than trying to avoid the lenses of experience and emotion altogether, we wear them with the constant awareness that they are incomplete. Acceptance means that we embrace the possibility of reality conflicting with what we might believe or feel, and in turn we are willing to change ourselves and the way we see the world to conform to the new truths we have experienced.

I believe acceptance to be a very enlightened state of being achieved by relatively few people. It is easy to come to define ourselves by what we think and what we feel. Acceptance ultimately requires that we let go of the security we seek from holding onto a superficial sense of personal identity. We define ourselves by our beliefs and the way we see the world. Acceptance means that we embrace the truth that our own notion of ourselves is incomplete. We define ourselves by the things we feel. Acceptance means that we stop trying to have reality conform to our feelings, and instead let our feelings evolve from truths found in reality.

Acceptance does not mean passivity. I think that in principle, passivity for its own sake is not productive. However, as temporary exercises, certain applications of passivity can be effective ways to experience acceptance. I can speculate that one of the advantages to the Eastern practice of living in silence for a period of time is that by refraining from speaking we learn to listen, and to some extent, accept what's around us. Acceptance doesn't mean that we have no convictions of our own. I can accept the full extent of some evil and still be fully opposed to it. In fact, I can't really be fully opposed to it until I accept it for what it is. Acceptance means to we are able to see and discern, and the understanding gained can extend our view of the world. Acceptance is an essential component of clarity.

Clarity

2011-03-28T15:32:00.000-07:00

Thought Experiment -- Life and Death

2010-11-27T18:03:00.001-08:00

I was working on preparing my Sunday School lesson for Church but got sidetracked. Somehow the Biblical writings of Ezekiel led to this...

Prologue

I am not an official star-trek guru, so forgive me for any trekkie blasphemy committed... I remember seeing the teleporting technology in star-trek and trying to imagine ways it could work. Perhaps it created a perfectly detailed model of your body, obliterated you, and then reconstructed you in a different location? A crude way of teleportation, but it gets the job done, right? However, a question needs to be asked -- what happens to your old, obliterated self? Well, it is, of course, obliterated and is therefore dead. Your new self doesn’t know the difference because the new consciousness inherits your memory and thus starts exactly where your old consciousness left off. So, whenever you're teleported you essentially die and will never come back to life, but a new perfect copy of you is created and it assumes that it has been you for your entire life and doesn’t know that it was just now created -- it feels like you because it has your complete memory.

So, if that is how the teleportion machine works, here is another question -- how would you feel about being teleported, knowing that it would be the end of you forever? Sure, your overall person would continue to exist, but you -- your feelings, self-awareness and consciousness -- would die forever. Would you allow yourself to be teleported and therefore wiped out?

Analysis

This is a scenario where you as a consciousness would cease to exist, but another consciousness would instantly take your place. Since the new consciousness would inherit your memory, it would not know that you used to but no longer exist -- it would have no idea at all. You, however, would no longer exist, and thus couldn’t even acknowledge this fact because you are no longer part of reality at all. The question is if you should be afraid of such a scenario -- while you will become non-existent and dead forever, your overall self will continue without any change because the new consciousness will start exactly where yours left off. You will never be able to experience anything more, and all your desires for the future will be gone because you are gone, but your person continues exactly the same as before. Your family and friends won't know the difference, because the only difference is that you as you are now -- your current feelings, thoughts, hopes, desires, fears and ambitions -- are all gone and dead, replaced by a new consciousness that starts where you left off. Should you fear this? If you are your person -- your body, past and future -- then there is nothing to fear because none of that changes. However, if you are something different than your body, past and future, then perhaps you should be afraid.

When I think of this, I am afraid of the idea. I was recently considering the whole concept when I realized that this transition seems like a logical explanation of how the human mind might work. If consciousness is only matter and no spirit, then in reality we are dying every second and being replaced. As a consciousness, I exist for only an instant, and am then replaced by the next physical state of my brain and body. At each instant I inherit my brain’s memory, but only long enough to be purged from existence and taken over by the next instant of self-awareness or consciousness. Of course, as a self-aware consciousness, we don’t realize that we’ve replaced anything or that we ourselves are also doomed to an instant annihilation because we simply inherit our brain’s memory. In this way, I am incapable of experiencing anything in the future because I will be dissipated from existence by then, and each instant is experienced by a physical state of my brain, only to be superseded by the next physical state. And who is to prove this wrong? How can you argue that this isn’t the case?

Unless the existence of spirit is allowed, I don’t see anyway around this scenario, and life suddenly gets much bleaker and less interesting. What’s the point if I am to die before I can realize I am alive? In reality, this discussion is a matter of identity -- it’s easy to get confused with who or what we are, and this confusion can lead to all sorts of results. If I am nothing more than my body, past and future, then I am in fact nothing at all.

Problems

I acknowledge that this thought experiment relies heavily on the notion of a linear progression of time, which is quite likely a substantial weakness. If time and its progression as such are absolutes, then even spirit falls victim to the same problem.

Conclusions?

My initial thoughts tell me that there are only a few possible conclusions here:

1. Our consciousness is purely physical and is thus a collection of points rather than a continuity, and thus each instant we are alive our consciousness dies and our brain gives place to a new one. Life is essentially meaningless because whatever power of choice or desire you (and by you, I mean your self-aware consciousness) exercise in any given instant has no relevance to you as a consciousness because you’re dead by the time you begin formulating such choices or desires. Given the physical consciousness assumption, I am having a hard time seeing any other alternative to this bleak outlook.

2. Our consciousness consists not just of our physical brain, but of some other aspect as well, and this aspect connects all the dots of physical consciousness into a continuity of spiritual awareness, which is our self.

3. Perhaps the assumptions of the absolute nature of time and its linear progression are wrong, and thus the whole thought experiment is irrelevant; e.g. if time is not necessarily linear, or perhaps some sort of illusion, then perhaps consciousness is one single dot (rather than a continuity) but it doesn’t matter because we stay on that dot for eternity?

Questions

2010-10-13T12:01:00.001-07:00

I think that the question is an important part of learning. Answers don't mean much without an accompanying question. Nevertheless, teachers go on lecturing about answers, and then give you the questions at the end in the form of a written test. In my opinion, giving someone the answer without first preparing them with the right question is worthless, and any learning that results happens in virtue of the student's ability to make raw data meaningful by linking them to a revealing question.

And worse, many teachers discourage questions, partly it threatens the rigid standardization policies like "leave no child behind" encourage. Standardized education is a contradiction in terms. America's educational system, however, sees schools as an assembly line and classes as means of classically conditioning students.

School Part 1

2010-09-13T15:22:00.000-07:00

The other day I opened my locker for the first time in months. I hadn't taken classes for the Spring or Summer terms but I had kept paying for my locker in the library to ensure I wouldn't lose it. I wasn't sure I remembered the combination, and even less sure of what I might find inside. I hoped it didn't have any forgotten lunches waiting for me. Through muscle memory I got the locker open and began surveying its contents. My scriptures were there -- I had been wondering where they had ended up for a while now. A collection of used notebooks from previous semesters also took up a good deal of space, and I decided that I needed a better system of taking and preserving notes for future reference. As I shuffled through all of the stuff I noticed a headband that I had used a few times during my first semester at BYU when it got cold. I remembered buying it with Juliana at Wal-Mart. I remembered using it when for some reason I decided to ride the bike to my early-morning economics class during a blizzard. I had nearly fallen off the bike several times as I made it up the hill to campus, and for the first half of the class I couldn't pay any attention because I was too busy trying to recover from exhaustion.

The memories came back in a surprising way. I think that I had lost confidence in memories in general and had told myself that they weren't worth much anyway. Going through my locker, however, was such a pleasurable experience that I began to wonder if there was something to that whole remembering bit. That was about a month ago, and since then I have told myself that I ought to take some time and record what I remember about all of my previous classes. I think I'll go through each class and record the experiences I remember about them. I realize that a potential problem in such an activity is that I can become too analytical. I think that there is value to simply recording life events as they happen. A good scene will convey meaning in a more vivid and timely manner than any treatise on philosophy ever could. I hope I'll be able to focus on the images of past experiences and leave the speculation for later.

I'd like to begin and reflect on my classes at Dixie State College, but I need to get started on my Information Systems reading now. I had planned on starting it 20 minutes ago, but the thought of beginning this journal overpowered me. I have put it off for so long and if I don't get started now I never will.

I am still not sure about the value of looking back. I feel confident in asserting that if looking back does nothing to change us now, then it's pointless. Anything that doesn't change us now, for that matter, is pointless. I felt changed, however, by the memory of feeling the sweat build up around my ears as I breathed the icy air and peddled up that hill. I'm not sure why.

Change

2010-08-06T22:17:00.000-07:00

I think that inspiration is an awakening. It is the realization that exists just below the surface of conscious attention. It is the obvious knowledge that I take for granted but never confront. It is a premise that affects my thoughts and attitudes, but since I fail to discern it in its pure form, it remains elusive to my creative powers. I feel no need to defend or explain myself in feeling inspired at times. When these moments come, the inspiration is always a conscious acknowledgement of something that I had already known and taken for granted – something that somehow gradually made it to the surface.

I suppose that there are numerous such inspirations that never surface. I think that above all, honesty is necessary to allow these inspirations to break into our consciousness. Honesty makes meditation and pondering possible. Without pure, perfect honesty, no meditation, pondering, or inspiration is possible. This honesty is the undefiled acceptance of every moment as itself, which allows full discernment of my own power – power resulting from my reason, volition, and purpose.

During the last hour or so, I was in my bed reading Atlas Shrugged. A certain paragraph struck me as very important – it encapsulated an important principle that I needed. I decided to make a note of it. An hour after I began reading, I was lying in my bed with the lights off. My mind was busy at work, taking me off to sleep. Suddenly, I found myself trying to regain that paragraph – what was it? What did it have that I needed so desperately? I realized that I no longer knew.

I have often thought much about the fact that many people don’t do anything about what they read or learn. I and others read powerful books and become absorbed in them. However, once we’re done, we move on. As the months go by we are left without any trace of what we had thought we understood and appreciated. I have seen this in many people I associate with – they demonstrate a sense of excitement as they relate the realizations that flow from what they study. Months later, I see them struggling to rediscover the same realizations – the realizations that would save them from the absolute terror, agony, and paralysis that dominates them. It seems impossible, but it is unmistakable: the person who had looked at me with a face filled with hope and certainty is gone, nowhere to be found.

I believe that one of the reasons I don’t read much is because of how much I find myself thinking. I am a slow reader and often can’t make it through an entire book before discarding it in favor of the ideas it gives me. However, I have noticed that I am also guilty of discerning power, and then finding myself devoid of it as time goes by. Contact with energy doesn’t guarantee empowerment.

The question – the inspiration – that has been lurking inches below my consciousness is: How can I remember? How can I remember what I read and learn, and thus employ it for my purposes? How do I not become like the people I know, who can read a book, discern power, and then let themselves become foreign to it? How can I remember the paragraph that I read moments ago, and be true to my desire to retain its power? The answer – which always comes as fast as the question is defined and articulated – is that it is impossible to remember. Remembering implies recalling something that is in the past. No matter how hard I try, I will forget the past – it will become distorted and unrecognizable. I cannot, no matter what, learn how to remember in its entirety what has gone by. I am capable of consciously remembering some details, especially if it's something I recall a lot, but the idea that incorporating power is accomplished by remembering it better is wrong. All I can really know is now – the present moment. If I, at the present moment, am not what I have studied and learned, then I will most absolutely never remember nor become what I had once admired. To choose to retain and forever embrace power is to become that power – now. If there is no action, there is no creation of self, and nothing else matters. With action comes identity, and identity continues moment to moment, forever responding to the actions I choose to take. The only way to remember truth is to take it with me. It is impatient, and at the first signs of neglect will slip from my mind before I can notice its absence.

To discern truth and power and still refuse it is to defile it. One can’t incorporate truth while ignoring it simultaneously. Acknowledgement of power and abstaining from action is a damning sin. Honesty – perfect morality in a full recognition that reality cannot contradict itself – allows one to embrace and act. This is the only way to avoid the miserable state of those who are ever learning, but never changing.

Intelligence

2010-07-26T01:11:00.000-07:00

As I study and work I have been able to recognize moments that distinguish themselves from all of my other normal actions. I recognize the spark of creativity and imagination purposefully directed toward a constructive purpose. I also realize that I often shy away from this so fast that the moment barely lasts long enough for me to catch a glimpse of its nature, and realize that the moment ended as a result of my own volition. They are moments where I am driven, not by my ability to repeat, but to use my knowledge as power, and employ my imagination for a specific purpose. These are moments where I employ the God-like nature of my self, where I shape my reality. I realize that these moments pass so quickly because there is something within me that resists it. Something about my fights it. As I write this, I was asking what it was that I was resisting. I think it may be responsibility.

I realize that there are two types of learning. One type is observing and then repeating. I can do this like anyone else. In my math book, I can go through the examples, see how the problem is worked, memorize how it is worked, and then proceed to solve similar problems. If I run into a problem that hasn't been covered, I seek to find the "solution" or the technique that I can copy. I realize that this is how I spend most of my time learning at work, and learning anything in general. I learn with the idea that I can only repeat what I see. I can copy.

I also realize that the moments of spark that I have been aware of represent a different type of learning. They are moments where, when I am presented with the basic tenets of a mathematical subject, my mind begins to process them and I feel the power associated with the knowledge. I am fueled by the power and am able to solve anything I am presented with. I own the material because I feel the power that is associated with the knowledge. This feeling only comes with willful application. I realize that this is a choice -- it is choosing to employ my knowledge and imagination to create. It is as if I am accessing a faculty within myself that is normally dormant, but for an instant, it awakens immediately with full vigor. It is awakened because I choose to employ it. I can create. Not repeat, but wield the power that comes from reason and knowledge. I access my own volition, my own will, and the knowledge that I am capable of employing my volition and will and knowledge and imagination to whatever end I choose.

I feel that this is thinking. This is thought. I realize that learning with mere object of repetition is not thought. It could almost be choosing not to think, which is the only evil thought.

I was reading Atlas Shrugged just now. I realize how important it is: the decision to think. To think! I realize how easy it is to not think, and how we can fool ourselves into not realizing that we have chosen to not think. The moments where I feel that the material I study is above me, where I feel like I am a victim, pleading for mercy, pleading that I will be able to remember enough to get an A on the test, I realize that I am wanting to hold onto my decision to not think. When I feel that I own the material, that it's mine, then it really is mine! I own it because I have chosen to think. I feel the power associated with the knowledge. I am not afraid to choose, to employ my imagination and intellect and reason. I don't shrink at the task of employing conscious effort to a definite end. It is the process of conscious creation. It is human, reason, and God-like.

To think is a choice. To think is to choose, to employ my best virtues: reason, logic, imagination, purpose, determination, drive, ambition.

Last Friday I was in Science class learning about astronomy. I realized that I was so incredibly happy. So very happy. The knowledge I was learning gave me so much joy. The thought that I could be afraid, terrorized, helpless -- all of this seemed so distant that the possibility of it ever being part of me existence was ridiculous. As I learned about the techniques of measuring distances to galaxies and stars, I thought on how great and marvelous the human intellect is. I admired and loved the men who had employed their reason in a conscious effort, directed at a specific point of focus, out of their sustained choice and volition, to achieve this power. They employed their power to the extent of their own will. I was so very happy. I had never known such happiness. I turned over to my friend Brad Hill and told him that I was so happy. I went to a review session after class to review the unit. I was so happy. The knowledge was flowing into my intellect, not quenching a thirst or satisfying an urge, but increasing my capacity for joy and reason and purpose.

I know the spark of all of this. It is reason and creativity and purpose and choice and decision. It is thought. It is thinking. To think. The moment I choose to think, there is no limit to what I can achieve. To think is to be a god, capable of shaping my surroundings.

Would the type of God that I profess to worship -- a loving father -- hold as his ambition that his children would forever be dependent on him for their every desire, breath, and sustenance? Would he not joy at the sight of his children employing their godlike faculties of reason, purpose, and choice?

Reply: Balance

2010-06-29T14:43:00.001-07:00

Here is my reply to Tory:

Thanks for the reply.

Based on your thoughts, it seems that interdiscplinarity doesn't really mean what it used to. It isn't that we need to practice various disciplines, but that each individual discipline requires a broader skill set. While economic progress makes specialization more important and practical, we've gotten to a point where each specialization is so interconnected with others that it would seem you'd need to diversify in order to specialize.

However, I am more concerned with the fundamental principle of diversifying vs specializing. I believe that success is achieved from focused effort on a single and specific objective. When I hear the word interdisciplinariazation, I think of the idea of pursuing several endeavors that are not necessarily intertwined. I think what you mean by interdisciplinariazation, however, is that any single discipline now requires a broader knowledge base, and that relatively diversified learning is needed in order to specialize. Is this what you mean?

I think it's easy to mistakenly understand that diversification is better than specialization. I believe that specialization is #1, and if some initial diversification is required to specialize in your field, then it's not diversification at all. If you require computer science to do computational linguistics, then computer science has become part of computational linguistics and isn't detached as a separate field. Medicine is an example of this -- Doctors have to study a wide variety of things, but all of those things are medical science. If it's necessary, then it's part of the whole.

As the knowledge level in an specific field increases, you need to know more to specialize in that field, which naturally means you'll need to study things that before were not related to that field. But since they are now related, they are part of the field. You are still specializing and focusing on one discipline, but you have more to keep up with.

As with all topics, this can come down to semantics, and there is nothing wrong with that simply because it's always true. We can't get around semantics. I think it's unfortunate how semantics get such a bad wrap -- if we paid more attention to them initially we'd get a lot more accomplished in the world, but that's your specialization, not mine :)

I think this topic is more apparent now because of the rate at which knowledge is increasing. It used to take years for new knowledge to change the nature of a field, but now it can take mere weeks or days. Our universities have a hard time keeping up with that, and because they fail to integrate new knowledge fast enough, to stay on the edge of your chose field you may have to double or triple major. Information Systems is an example of how Universities are trying to keep up -- technology has become such a central part of business that it's impossible to separate the two. Business is technology, and technology is business. Thus, studying business means you are also studying technology. This doesn't mean you are diversifying, rather it means that the nature of your field has changed, and hence Information Systems is one of the fastest growing majors in both enrollment and relevance.

Thoughts?

Tim

Regarding balance

2010-06-29T14:39:00.000-07:00

The following is an email from my friend Tory

Tim,
Balance: "The harmonious distribution of elements within a system." This is a dictionary definition but also the most profound and useful that I have discovered. System should be considered broadly (life is a system). I would add to this the concept of balance in motion, which is one definition for grace (physical grace when considering physical balance / separate from, but perhaps related to, the concept of Christ's enabling grace). Balance is upset in two ways that I am aware of: spreading oneself too thin, when the balance breaks in places and harmony is lost, and obsession, where harmony was never created in many important things.

Interdiscplinarity is increasing, as is seen in my fields. Heading towards computational psycholinguistics means being schooled in three separate fields: computer science, psychology, and linguistics, and being capable of participating in discussions and absorbing the distinct literature and "language" of each of these. It is seen with teachers, for whom it is frequently desired that they may teach multiple subjects. It is demonstrated by the preference of grad schools for students with varying backgrounds, as you have mentioned to me regarding the popularity of the psychology undergraduate degree, even for business majors, or the economics degree for lawyers. Perhaps I am using the term more loosely here, but in this age of networking, where realms are blurring more quickly than ever before as information and technology applications spill from one field to the next, being able to adapt and having a rounded proficiency is very desirable.

Having a specialty is crucial. I think you hit the nail on the head: there is an assumption that being balanced somehow opposes being exceptional. Balance and normality are by no means equivalents. In fact, I think that true, graceful balance -- again, harmonious distribution of elements -- is the most rare and precious of virtues, above "jack-of-all-trades, master of none" and also "master of one". I believe there is eternal truth in the principle of synergy, in which proper composition of elements (balance) results in something greater than the sum. This is why we believe (I assume you are with me in this) that we can still possess world class skills or abilities or accomplishments despite the time and effort we put into our church effort. Those who consider themselves freed from religion would argue that they have much more time and resources than do we, but we know that the balance created by our Faith actually strengthens the whole more than the price it demands.

hmmm.... that concept "world-class abilities" needs scrutinization...

These are my thoughts. Sorry it took so long to get back to you on what I consider a very important topic.
- Tory

Truth in Words

2010-04-28T21:28:00.000-07:00

I have for some time been intrigued by how words can denote truth. It seems clear that words represent ideas or concepts, and that when people use words they are trying to communicate correlating ideas and concepts. It also doesn't take too much observational talent to realize that words mean different things to different people. A word may refer to a certain concept for one person and refer to an entirely different concept for another person. When this is the case, the meaning of the word - its corresponding idea or concept - depends entirely on the person using the word.

This does not imply that truth is at all subjective, but simply that different people can have different ways of communicating the same thing. Those who understand the purpose, meaning, and power of words understand that the actual concepts behind the words are what is important. The actual vocabulary used is far less significant than the idea that is trying to be communicated.

I don't find any of this very surprising or even that profound. I do, however, find it surprisingly difficult to have people understand this principle of language. My experience shows me that people are generally unwilling to even entertain the idea that a word could mean different things to different people, and I am interested in understanding why this is.

The first thought that comes to me is that those who ignore differing understandings of a certain word do so because they themselves have no definition of their own. They never think seriously about what a word means to them, and thus it would be difficult to understand the idea that the same word could mean something different to someone else - they have not yet reached the concept of meaning at all.

My second thought is that some people do not really care about meaning. For them, words are merely a way to identify or label things and themselves. Someone could say, "I am an atheist" or "I am a Christian" without deliberately defining what words like atheist or Christian mean to them. They avoid the task because they do not care about meaning, but only about the security that comes from feeling sure and secure in something - that the person belongs somewhere. I have seen that for many people, religion is not about truth so much as it is about feeling secure and reassured. Likewise, I think that many people do not appreciate words for being tools to express meaning, but rather as mere avenues to those same feelings of security and reassurance.

These possibilities may be off the mark, but so far they all that I can come up with to explain the stubborn ignorance that we witness every day. If you make a serious and sincere study of how different people understand a certain word, you'll readily see that a wide variety of definitions abound. Take the word, Faith, for example. Some people believe faith to mean an irrational whim or a superstitious hope. Others would say that faith is a strong belief or hope for something. And others would say that faith is a process of reason and logic. These are just a few of the understandings that I have come across, and I am sure that there are hundreds more. It is important to note that while you may not succeed in getting someone to deliberately define a certain word, you can discern their understanding by observing how they use the word. And as stated before, none of these definitions can be wrong, for faith is a word, and words are references to concepts or ideas. You cannot say that someone is wrong in using a certain word to refer to a certain idea, because that is how language works.

We would certainly hope for mutual understanding of commonly used words, but I have learned to always be on the lookout for differences in understandings. If people would first be deliberate about understanding their own usage of a word, and then expend the same amount of energy to understand how another uses that same word, understanding would come much easier. This, unfortunately, doesn't seem to happen very often. Instead, you have the objectivist arguing with the Christian, both using the word faith, and both referring to completely different concepts. For the reasons already suggested, neither person makes the effort to see past the vocabulary in order to understand the concepts behind the words being used.

I do not see anything wrong with adapting to another's proposed usage of a word, as long as that usage is mutually understood by all participants in a discussion. If someone wants to define faith as an ungrounded, irrational hope, then so be it! If I can confirm that I understand the concept behind the word, then I will be able to engage in a meaningful discussion. If another person, in a different discussion, wants to use faith to represent the ideas of reason and knowledge, excellent! As long as we are both talking about the same underlying ideas, what difference does it make?

I have not met very many people (myself included) who have the habit of taking time to understand what someone is trying to say - what concepts and ideas they are trying to discuss. Instead, the listener will take the vocabulary to mean whatever he/she would have it mean, and then jump to a hasty verdict. Every now and then, people even go so far as to condemn another because his usage of a word is simply wrong. I say, who cares how he wants to define a word? If the purpose of a discussion is to reach understanding, let's be open and flexible and clarify which concepts we are discussing in the first place!

Truth and Culture

2010-02-06T16:07:00.000-08:00

The following is a required response to a recent lecture in my Honors Lecture Series class

I was fascinated by Professor Van Gessel’s lecture. I am married to a Brazilian and have learned a new language, but I never seriously considered how significant culture and language is to our learning and understanding. What really interested me about the Japanese’s difficulty in understanding the gospel is that my language and culture surely presents similar obstacles when trying to learn the things of eternity. I think that we are similarly obstructed by our tradition, language, culture, etc.

Firstly, I don’t think that any language or culture is the “right” language or culture. We have the assumption that the gospel truths we are trying to teach the Japanese are the complete truth and the “right” truths. In reality, however, the truths we have are results of a difficult translation into our language, culture, and understanding. I believe that there are many higher and purer truths that could be easier to teach to the Japanese than to us. We should reevaluate our assumption that our understanding, tradition, and background is necessarily the ideal format to learn eternal truths.

I really like how the Japanese tend to make little distinction between God and man. In a lot of ways, it seems that the Japanese understand eternal truths more intuitively than we do. I don’t blame people for avoiding organized religion because I too get fed up with it very often. And I know we like to make fun of the “smorgashboard” approach, but in reality, that isn’t 100% bad. Truth is to be found all over the world, and I believe most religions to have originally been divinely inspired. Just like modern Christianity has taken a dramatic detour from its original foundings, I suppose that most other religions have as well. This being the case, I don’t see the necessity of strictly adhering to just one specific religious organization. Religion should be less about any specific institution and more about our relationship with Father.

I also really like how interested the Japanese are in their ancestors. I remember Elder Faust describing how sweet it is to have ancestors visit you in your dreams, and I believe that they can play a strong role in our lives. This lecture really made me want to learn more about Japanese culture.

Becoming a lifelong learner

2010-01-09T09:13:00.000-08:00

As part of a lecture series that I am taking at school, I am required to submit a weekly response to each lecture. Here is my response to a lecture entitled "Lifelong Learning."

Education has become so institutionalized as to make the notion of learning outside a formal setting seem absurd. People see learning as a means to an end, but they don’t admit the blatant fact that they have no idea what end they seek, and as such they do their best to hide from the fact that to them, learning is an abstract exercise whose purpose is unclear.

I enjoy reading and listening to material produced by successful people. Regardless of their area of expertise, all successful people seem to have one thing in common – they love learning. Jay Abraham is a business expert and one of the highest paid independent consultants in the country. One of his main messages is how critical it is to develop a love for learning and discovery. He says that we need to reacquire a childlike ability to learn. I want to use this idea as the central theme to this, my written response.

The Thursday lecture focused on several learning techniques that we could employ to try to reach the status of a lifelong learner. I think, however, that techniques can come and go and honestly depend on each person. To me, the ability to learn like a child is key to becoming a lifelong learner. Firstly, children love to learn because they never – not even for a second – entertain the idea that they are incapable of learning. For children, learning is their natural state of existence, and the alternative of not learning is considered a nonsensical paradox. Children also love to learn because they are experts at living in the moment. This is perhaps the most important ability one can possess in this life. Living in the moment aligns one’s self with perfect harmony, love, perspective, and clarity, and is the only way to enjoy the full potential of learning.

I believe that the loss of these two essential childlike characteristics – permission to learn and living in the moment – is the culprit of the loath of learning that we witness in the world today. Giving the Honors’ Great Works list a sense of mystique and exclusivity is fun, but is no substitute for helping students recognize the importance of returning to a state where learning is the rule, not the exception.

In a way, our lives are somewhat paradoxical in that we are trying to regain what we once had. I feel that learning to learn means eliminating the obstacles that prevent us from learning. As soon as clarity is achieved then learning happens at an almost instantaneous rate. For me, this is what it really means to be a lifelong learner.

Note to TA: I don’t know if you wanted a mere summary of the lecture, or if you wanted our own ideas. I have given you my own ideas, but if you’d prefer a simple regurgitation of the lecture, then please let me know and I’ll be happy to accommodate.

Easy and Hard

2009-12-22T20:49:00.001-08:00

I am starting to feel that the ideas of "easy" and "hard" are abstract notions that don't really fit in that well with reality. As such, I am beginning to tell people that I don't believe in hard or easy. I believe in focused energy -- deliberate thought and deliberate actions. "Hardness" could be a measure of required precision. More deliberateness is required to accomplish what is called "hard", but that doesn't mean that the thing is hard to do, it just requires more attention, focus, preciseness, and deliberateness. When these factors are applied, the thing will inevitably come to pass rather "easily". One could say that it's hard to start a fire without any action or effort, or one could say it's easy if you just expend the effort to strike the match. From my perspective, lighting the fire isn't a matter of hardness or easiness, but just a matter of doing -- of exerting focused thought, focus, and effort. The amount isn't really a big factor either -- thought is the most powerful lever in the universe that can be used to move any Earth in an instant.

Fallacies

2009-11-27T16:09:00.001-08:00

I think we are making some progress. The argument that I am seeing quite often is:

1. A belief is only rational if you experience evidence that supports said belief.
2. I acknowledge no evidence that would support belief in a conjecture, B.
3. Therefore, B cannot exist.

This is the same as: If A (me experiencing evidence), then B (belief in B's existence). Not A, therefore not B. These lines of reasoning represent a fallacy of logic.

Just because I don't acknowledge the existence of any evidence for the existence of a god does not prove that such evidence does not exist, nor does it prove that it does.

Many of my objectivist friends have argued that there is no god because they have no evidence for him. While this may be reason to not believe in god, it is not reason to rule out the possibility of there being a god.

I think that we are all guilty of this fallacy quite often. I often catch myself thinking things like, "Well, I've never heard that before, so it can't be true."

There are deductive and inductive proofs that something is true or false, however. If such a proof succeeds in proving that something does not exist, then it conclusively demonstrates that it is impossible for the thing to exist, and thus a search for evidence is not needed.

The reverse is also possible -- a proof can prove that it is impossible for something to not exist, and thus a belief in that thing is immediately justified.

Many a priori and a posteriori proofs for and against the existence of god have been attempted, and it's difficult to assess them. Their validity often hinges on the definition of god himself. Some anti-god proofs are successful in disproving certain conceptions of god. We should try to benefit from such proofs by refining our understanding of god.

Interaction with an objectivist

2009-11-19T09:59:00.001-08:00

This post consists of a message sent to me by an objectivist philosopher. In my reply I discuss some of my most pressing thoughts regarding philosophy in general.

From: cleomonsx90
Subject: objectivism

I understand that you're trying to be rational, and in the Decartes sense you are being rational, but you've a number of misconceptions of the definitions and language Objectivists use. You said that a concept of a table can be incomplete, but that's not what a concept means under objectivism. To say one has an incomplete concept of a table would mean that when one specifies that he needs a table to set his drink upon that he isn't completely sure he is asking for what we call a table.

Under objectivist epistemology a definition is rooted in a concept gained from reality, however that does not mean one has complete knowledge of 'referents'. Every concept has referents or real world examples. Both concepts and knowledge of the referents of concepts come from reality, and new concepts may be discovered by the _integration_ or _differentiation_ of knowledge of referents. This means that when someone grasps that he is a human, he doesn't need to know everything about psychology or physiology to know EXACTLY what he means when he says that he is a human being. When one learns more about a concept, his knowledge of the referents changes, and new concepts may be required, but the initial concept remains immutable.

However, it is important to designate that concepts are valid only within certain contexts. You're only able to know things within the context of your life and experience, and that does not invalidate the things you know. As a child you may learn that medicine makes you healthier without understanding that sometimes it can have negative side effects. Later, gaining knowledge of medicine in a more general context and understanding that it can have negative side effects does not invalidate the knowledge you gained in the prior context.

Also, when you're speaking to objectivists on the issue of objectivism its no good to try to assert your definition of faith, which seems to be either certainty or knowledge. We reject faith insofar as it means believing something or 'gaining knowledge' of something by way or something other than rational induction or deduction.

(Just in case you aren't familiar with the terms, deductive logic is logic in the mathematic sense whereas inductive logic is logic in the scientific method sense.)

From: tstakland
Subject: re: objectivism

Thank you, clemonsx90, for your thoughtful message. I appreciate you taking the time to better my understanding of reality and objectivism.

You said, "We reject faith insofar as it means believing something or 'gaining knowledge' of something by way or something other than rational induction or deduction." Perhaps you can help me here. My religious studies have shown me that Christian texts consistently teach that faith is based on reason and evidence. Many Christians do not understand this and prefer to believe in mysticism. Much of my work among my fellow Christians consists of trying to teach them to base their beliefs on reason and evidence.

When I am among my fellow Christians I use the word Faith to mean exactly what John Galt described as Thinking. It's a process that involves individual volition, and this is at the heart of the matter. However, when discussing these ideas with objectivists I run into the same problem I get when discussing anything with a philosopher -- rigid semantics.

My understanding was that philosophy is the search for truth, and as such, should be capable of addressing all backgrounds, perspectives, and understandings. This does not mean that it is subjective, but that when I express what I mean by faith, the philosopher is able to understand what I mean and then expresses to me the word he uses for the same idea. We can agree on which word to use as long as we know we are both talking about the same thing. On the youtube forums I have tried (unsuccessfully) to communicate this simple idea -- not everyone considers to faith to be the same thing! Is this really such a hard concept to grasp, or am I missing something?

My brother is currently in grad school studying philosophy. I am confident that an objectivist would never be successful in discussing anything with him because instead of worrying about truth, he worries about semantics and his specialized branch of philosophy (which addresses the premise of reality, he claims). This is the same problem we get with religion -- people are less concerned with truth and more concerned about preserving their perverted sense of security.

I am worried that many objectivists shun their own teachings when they shun anyone who uses the word faith. I hope that I will never condemn an idea until I understand it, for if I did, I could be condemning my own beliefs. I try to help objectivists understand how some people regard faith so that they will not unknowingly condemn something that they themselves believe in.

You said, "Also, when you're speaking to objectivists on the issue of objectivism its no good to try to assert your definition of faith..." Are objectivists really so attached to their own realm of semantics that they would rather condemn their own assertions than attempt to understand another's background and perspective?

Now, if you want to argue that what I regard as faith is irrational, that would be great. Maybe I am incorrect and my definition of faith has nothing to do with thinking. If this is shown to be the case I will have benefited greatly. However, if all objectivists can do is condemn me for my usage of a word without addressing the concept behind the word, then I am convinced that just like much of modern religion, "modern objectivism" has deviated from its intended course.

Movies

2009-11-12T07:05:00.000-08:00

Whenever I am asked what my favorite movie is, can't seem to remember any selections from my list of top picks. I thought that I might as well go ahead and list a few in case I am ever asked. The following list is not in any specific order, but I consider all of them to be uniquely valuable in their own rite.

The Legend of Bagger Vance
Peaceful Warrior
2001: A Space Odyssey
Slumdog Millionaire

That was an initial draft of my first-pick list. My secondary list contains movies that I would also recommend:

Pan's Labrynth
The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Big Fish
Akeelah and the Bee
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead
The Matrix (just the first one)
Marley and me

I will probably add to this list as I remember more.

Baby's tea and more...

2009-11-07T20:58:00.000-08:00

In Portuguese, "baby shower" is called "The Baby's Tea." So, today the baby had tea, which meant that my entire evening was spent watching Juliana showcase the gifts she received. Emma hasn't been born yet and already has more clothes than I do (but still not NEARLY as many as Juliana!). I have to admit that I am a little jealous of all the varieties of pacifiers and baby devices she has stored up. I wish I could eat grapes via a teething device too!

On to other matters... things are all stirred up on the objectivist's forum... I am currently engaged in a conversation with the youtube community. It's hard to have a discussion on youtube because you are limited to only a couple of paragraphs per post:

Me: Ayn Rand's purpose was to fight for reason, not against religion. Many so-called objectivist have become a little confused, however.

While much of modern religion deserves nothing more than harsh condemnation, the fundamental axioms of objectivism don't necessarily cancel out the basic precepts of religion.

Community: Rand fought against all forms of irrationality, including religion. All religions rely fundamentally on faith and mysticism as sources of knowledge. She defined faith as "the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one's senses and reason. ... Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as 'instinct,' 'intuition,' 'revelation,' or any form of 'just knowing.'"

Me: Using the definition you gave of Faith, I agree with you completely. Unfortunately, most of modern religion has come to believe that faith really is acceptance of allegations with no evidence, thought, or reason. I believe, however, that the basic precepts of religion are not to blame for this. The original teachings of Christianity, for example, state that faith must be based on real evidence and true knowledge. Much of modern religion is corrupted religion, and as such, should be condemned.

Community: What evidence is there to have faith? If there was evidence it'd be immoral for an Objectivist to deny that evidence. Reason leaves no room for subjectivism. Religion fundamentally clashes with objectivism and the concept of objective reality. Proof, knowledge, consciousness, existence are all concepts derived from reality. Holding a concept not based on evidence (i.e. god) can never be reconciled with reason.

Me: Let me illustrate my understanding of faith so I can better understand your perspective. The investors who gave Dagny money to build the John Galt line were exercising faith in the knowledge that they had of Dagny. They had knowledge of her character and ability, and even though they didn't know exactly how the railroad line would be built, they were willing to exercise faith in Dagny and her claim that she would build a profitable railroad. Their faith was necessarily founded on knowledge.

This is what I mean by faith -- rationally adhering to a principle you know to be true. In this sense, science itself is based on such faith-driven actions. Experiments are conducted to verify the premise of a scientist. Once a scientific model is proven, a scientist can adhere to it with confidence. This is what I mean by faith -- an assurance and certainty of something you don't see, but that is true.

Just as a scientist must explore the unknown before he or she can be certain of anything, so it is with us. If a belief or practice appears to have a positive result for someone else, you can look into it and conduct a preliminary experiment. If the results encourage further experiments, you proceed with your investigation. Your journey must be guided by reason. As you proceed you will often uncover incorrect premises and will have to take some steps backward in order to correct them.

Thus it is with true religion. Life itself is proof that existence exists, and the only way to knowledge is exploration. Man has no inherent knowledge and thus must ask questions -- man must explore what he isn't familiar with. Thus is identification -- a process fueled by questioning that must be grounded in reality. A reasonable god who is concerned with his creations would have us develop our capacity for reason and to explore his existence the same way he does.

Community: Religion demands one gives up his mind and seeks only God for guidance. Objectivism is fundamentally opposed to religion. Look it up, Ayn Rand was very specific about it, she hated religion and considered it evil.

Me: I agree that objectivism is opposed to any creed that demands the surrender of the mind. Thomas Jefferson's statement of having sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility toward any form of tyranny over the mind of man was directed toward the religious leaders of his time who were teaching mysticism. Much of modern religion really is no more than mysticism.

I am sending you a message with specific quotes where Rand states that she is not against religion, but only for reason. Hope it helps.

Community: there is no evidence for the existence of any god. belief in such is irrational. any form of theism is contradictory to objectivism.

Me: I understand your premise -- there is no evidence for the existence of any god. If this were true, then belief in a god would irrational.

Firstly, it is necessary to define what you mean by god. If god is a being whose nature is self-contradictory, then you know immediately that such a being does not exist. Thus, it's important to be clear on what you mean by god. If god is defined as a being who can shape reality to match his values, then why couldn't there be a god?

Furthermore, if you hold the premise that religion requires people to accept ideas without evidence then I would like to argue this point with you. True Christianity, for example, teaches that faith is impossible without sure knowledge of something, and that faith is built upon knowledge. Faith is to be certain of a principle, and to know what the eventual result of adherence to that principle will be, even if you don't yet see exactly how things will play out.

Rand stated reason was her only way to deal with other people. If a religion is based on reason, then there is no reason to shun it without first analyzing its premises. If its premises are faulty, then the religion is irrational despite the fact of being based on reason. Reason is only as powerful as the perfection of the premises upon which its based.

If there were evidence for the existence of a god, it would be reasonable to look into it. I believe that such evidence does exist.

Community: You're trying to get away with defining god as the opposite of that which cannot exist, but the fact is that you have no definition of god yourself. Concepts come from reality or from evidence and as such you cannot have a proper objective concept of god without proving the existence of god. A proof and a concept go together because reason itself is the non-contradictory identification of facts. A concept without a proof is not a concept.

And there were bodies Terrestrial, Telestial, and Celestial

2009-11-02T07:19:00.001-08:00

Claim:
"That [evolution] is an explanation for the origin of man is utterly incompatible with our religion."

Premises upon which this claim is based:
1. The historical validity of certain scriptures
2. That said scriptures support the claim
3. That Adam was the first man to ever be on earth
4. That there was never any death before the fall
5. The accuracy of church leaders in regards to historical truths
6. That said church leaders currently come out in defiance to evolution

I personally feel that all of these premises are faulty. I may be wrong, and hope that we can examine all of them. Like I said before, I have never put much though to this subject, and as such, I wouldn't rule out either alternative.

A brief introduction:
Just as the scriptures never mean that the earth was created in 7 actual days, so it could be with the creation of man. For all we know it could have taken trillions of years to complete each step in the earth's creation, and as such, it could have taken billions or trillions of years to create man. Whether or not man came from the dust of the earth has no bearing on how long this process took or to the exact nature of the process. Many Christians have assumed (Mormon Christians included) that the Earth is only seven thousand years old. The LDS Church has recently made it clear that we can't know how old the Earth is and that scripture never specifies. The scriptures also never specify how long it took for man to be created. We also know that God likes to deal only with things that are relevant to our sphere of existence. For example, he told Moses, "And the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many." Well, we know that Adam is not the first man that God ever created, but he is speaking of things that are relevant to Moses, and in that respect it would be true. If one stated that God never created any man before Adam, regardless of sphere of existence, then it would be false. Surely spheres of existence upon the Earth before this era would not be relevant to us or Moses. Or, you may say, that this is Jesus Christ speaking, and that it was the first man that He ever created. Well, that still doesn't rule out the possibility that Earth was inhabited by others before Adam, inhabited by people that God Himself could have created. While you might be able to argue that Adam was alone at the time he was on the Earth, I don't know of any conclusive evidence that rules out the possibility of men existing on the earth before Adam. I admit that these facts may not have any serious bearing to our sphere of existence, and as such, should not be assumed true or false without conclusive evidence. To state that an alleged fact has no importance and should thus be ignored, and then to use that same alleged fact as an argument to support tradition or belief, is wrong. The Biblical account of the creation is an allegory. The important message is that the Gods created the earth over a period of phases or steps. And God(s) plural really does mean multiple Gods.

It of course would be impossible for death to occur as long as one remains in the presence of God, and as such, there was no death in the Garden of Eden (or perhaps on the entirety of Earth) while God was on Earth. Once Adam fell from God's presence, he was able to die. Whether or not this meant that Earth was literally distanced from the presence of God does not matter -- the meaning of the fall was to fall from God's presence. I would agree that while the Earth was in God's presence, or at least while Adam was in God's presence, that there could be no death. I don't know of any conclusive evidence that would show that the Earth was always in God's presence, and only left it when Adam fell.

We know very little about everything that went into the creation. We know much less about the grand scheme of the Universe and of the Gods that inhabit it. We know very little about the progression of Elohim and the stages of His progression. Much of what we assume we know is based on nothing but mere tradition. It seems that in regards to religion, people generally want to believe that they are absolutely right, which is rarely the case. Religion may be correct in regards to certain spheres, but people somehow want to feel that they are special and/or unique -- that they have the only truth and thus are privileged. Take the LDS Church for example. The purpose of this life is not the church. We did not come to Earth to try to avoid sin and be good members of the church. The church exists to serve us. The church is a tool that can help us better know God and also strengthen out families. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not eternal. The book of Doctrine and Covenants explains that membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints is a preparatory step. Membership in The Church of the Lamb of God is a higher law, and so far we only have access to this higher church after we die. As such, anything that helps us progress spiritually and draw close to God is helping us gain eventual membership to The Church of the Lamb of God. We do not have authority over anyone's spirituality, nor do we have a monopoly on revelation, truth, ordinances, or progress. God really is no respecter of persons, and he really does live up to that.

The other day a group of people were talking about how other religions are sometimes well-intentioned. Juliana then said, "Well, they are good people, but just don't have all the truth." I responded, "Neither do we! Where do you think revelation comes from? Do you really think that Joseph Smith, for example, gave us a tenth of everything that was revealed to him?" And that's just Joseph Smith, a man who certainly didn't know close to everything that there is to know. Revelation comes from God, and any person on Earth has as much access to it as anyone else. God is no respecter of persons, and is just as anxious to discuss truth with a non-christian in China as he is with President Monson.

I love the Church. I know that the Church was instituted by Jesus Christ to help us come unto him and know our Heavenly Father. I have not found any better way to rapidly progress toward Father. The gospel is the best way I have ever seen to develop godlike attributes and to help us become reborn. The gospel is about rebirth. Rebirth isn't about baptism. Baptism is about rebirth. We need to understand that. The gospel and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is about rebirth and becoming like God and knowing Him. Just as women are not here to serve the relief society, but the relief society to serve women, so we are not here to merely be good members of the church. Many of us really believe (whether we think we do or not) that those who don't become members of our church are consigned to hell unless they someday do become members. Such a belief erodes a correct understanding of the nature of God.

God will always answer our prayers immediately.We may not always receive an immediate response, because receiving is an action that we must perform. God is perfect and consistent, and loves to talk with us. Sometimes it takes us years to receive a response that God gave us immediately. We teach, however, that God doesn't always answer prayers. We teach our children to not receive answers. We teach that God or Jesus Christ or Angels would only appear to us if there were some "special" reason. All of these teachings are only assumptions that are based on tradition, and they are all false. They all erode a correct understanding of the nature of God. We also speak of the Atonement as a past event -- as if atonement were bottled and placed on a shelf, and that we can gain access it it if we should sin by simply asking the Bishop for a bottle. This violates everything that the Atonement is. The Atonement is, not was. The atonement is about growth and progress, not sin. The atonement is about becoming one with Father, not about sin. This life is not about sin -- it is about progress. In the church we sometimes make the focus of this life to be sin. For many, "endure to the end" means to avoid sin to the end. All sins are sins of omission in that they prevent us from the better alternative: progress and growth. Thus, sin is not inherently bad in that it isn't bad unless were a better alternative. The atonement is about growth, not sin. The atonement can be an active, real-time experience in each of our lives. Christ's mortal ministry was an initiation or an enabling experience for him. It never stopped, and he wants to walk with us every day of our lives. Not just passed sin, but onward to everlasting growth and progress.

Paid for groceries

2009-10-24T15:02:00.000-07:00

This is in response to an assignment for our business writing class. We were to buy something for a complete stranger and then write a blog post about it.

I have been doing calculus for 6 straight hours, so I am not thinking straight. I will, nevertheless, attempt to relate a recent experienced I had paying from someone else's groceries. Juliana and I were at Wal-Mart buying some things, and a Hispanic woman and her young daughter were in line in front of us. After a while I noticed that the woman was taking things back out of her grocery bag, and it eventually dawned on me that she was significantly short of what her total was. I handed the cashier a $10 bill and asked if that would cover the rest. The Hispanic woman showed her appreciation.

Money is a representation of value that I have created or will create for someone else. When a beggar on the street gives me a contemptuous look and demands that I give him money because I have extra and he needs it, I want to slap him in the face. The beggar is using pity as a weapon, and is claiming that personal need is an inviolate claim on another's life. I won't give a dime to such an individual. Providing help to a moocher or a looter does nothing to benefit from my life, but in helping a sincere individual I hope to gain personally.

The virtue of selfishness

2009-10-19T07:39:00.000-07:00

The following is a response to a friend of mine who wanted my thoughts on self-interest and how it can be reconciled with a talk by Elder Oaks that is titled "Unselfish Service."

The mere act of defining self-interest refutes those who preach that self-interest is evil. It’s interesting how such people avoid defining self-interest at all.

To borrow from Elder Oak’s talk: He who lives only unto himself withers and dies, while he who forgets himself in the service of others grows and blossoms in this life and in eternity. It seems like it is a paradox, but this is only because of the way this was said. Unfortunately, this phrase is self-contradictory. I believe this was done intentionally because paradoxes are a way to grab people’s attention. A contradiction will often cause people to examine something more closely. “If I live for myself I’ll die, but if I don’t then I’ll live… so if I want to live, I must not live for myself, but the only way to not live for myself is to seek death, so to get death I must live for myself, but living for myself means that I don’t want death…” If one tried to logically sort out this paradox he would end up chasing a never-ending contradiction. Most people, however, don’t question the meaning of the statement, and for them the take-home message is that happiness is found from service. This is true, and if the above statement helps people realize this, then it is useful.

Another quote from Elder Oak’s talk: Those who are caught up in trying to save their lives by seeking the praise of the world are actually rejecting the Savior’s teaching that the only way to save our eternal life is to love one another and lose our lives in service. This is not as paradoxical and makes more sense. Jesus is a bit more consistent here than was President Hinckley, but the important thing is what the intended audience will learn. The meaning of a message is relative to the vantage point of the listener.

And from C.S. Lewis: The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first—wanting to be the centre—wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race. Some people think the fall of man had something to do with sex, but that is a mistake. … What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could ‘be like gods’—could set up on their own as if they had created themselves—be their own masters—invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come … the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy. Alas, someone who explains the relationship of spirituality and self-interest logically. C.S. Lewis refuses to use contradictions to get his point across. This doesn’t mean that the other statements are bad – they were designed to bring understanding to certain types of people. C.S. Lewis explains exactly why it is in our own self-interest to obey God.

Another quote from Elder Oaks.

The ancient evil of greed shows its face in the assertion of entitlement: I am entitled to this or that because of who I am—a son or a daughter, a citizen, a victim, or a member of some other group. Entitlement is generally selfish. It demands much, and it gives little or nothing. Its very concept causes us to seek to elevate ourselves above those around us. This separates us from the divine, evenhanded standard of reward that when anyone obtains any blessing from God, it is by obedience to the law on which that blessing is predicated.

From this we can get an idea of how Elder Oak’s defines selfishness. For him, selfishness is an attempt to negate reality. The person who wants something for nothing wants to sidestep reality. This is related to non-thinking. Non-thinking is an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists. Reality will not be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper! Another quote from Oaks: Gambling is another example of greed and selfishness. The gambler ventures a minimum amount in the hope of a huge return that comes by taking it away from others. No matter how it is disguised, getting something for nothing is contrary to the gospel law of the harvest: “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap". Here we see that reality dictates that you cannot reap what you do not sow!

The non-thinker wants to wipe out reality and claim that by virtue of his vices, he has a claim on another’s life. “It’s immoral for you not to serve me! I need you!” Such individuals demand to be loved, not because of their virtues, but because of their vices.

Ayn Rand shows that morality must be anchored in reality. The non-thinker, the mystic, the moocher, and the looter all try to wipe out reality and claim that morality is outside of reality. Ayn Rand illustrates the scenario by saying,

You who prattle that morality is social, and that man would need no morality on a desert island. It is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today, and reality will wipe him out as he deserves. Reality will show him that life is a value to be bought, and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

Morality dictates that you cannot reap what you do not sow. My need, vices, and inability do not warrant me a claim on your life. I cannot demand that you sacrifice your life to support my aversion of reality.

Sacrifice is another issue where a solid definition is needed. Much of modern Christianity believes that sacrifice is to give up what one values for no personal reward whatsoever. They say that if one gains from sacrifice, then the sacrifice was not really a sacrifice. Using this definition, the most virtuous thing someone could do would be to reject all that is dear to him. Reject your love of God, of your family and friends. Reject your desire to live and be happy. Consign yourself to a state of misery. Torment your body until you die. This is the full meaning of the above definition of sacrifice. According to this definition, to die is only a sacrifice if you have a burning desire to live. The idea of sacrifice is preached by the looters and moochers.

As stated before, with the understanding that a self-interested act is self-benefiting, then to act against one’s owns elf-interest is to act against his life. Many people hold death as their standard of value, and for them, it is virtuous to act against their own self-interest. What is virtuous depends on one’s standard of value. In the universe there are only two alternatives: life or death. Those who hold life as their standard of value know that virtue is not an end in and of itself. Virtues are means to obtain what one values. The reward of virtue is life and happiness.

Letter response to a fellow objectivist

2009-10-17T20:44:00.001-07:00

Objectivists are also often atheists. This was a quick (not very well crafted) reply to a friend of mine:

Thank you, L1, for taking the time to share your thoughts. I am in complete agreement to everything you said in your message. I have already gotten a sense of your solid understanding of much of what I am interested in.

I am a BYU student and an active Mormon, but I often relate more to self-professed atheists or agnostics than my fellow latter-day saints. As I have taken time to ponder, I realize that much of modern Christianity is based on cultural trends and tradition, and Mormonism is perhaps one of the most obvious examples of this. I can understand why so many rational thinkers are inclined to shun religion or Christianity, and I believe that much of what has become our modern religion deserves nothing better.

As I read and contemplate Ayn Rand's writing, I have recognized that her arguments and teachings are some of the clearest treatises on the fundamental beliefs of Christianity. A close reading of Scripture shows that Faith is nothing close to a mystical and unfounded belief, but that it is the choice to think and to act on true principle. It is impossible to have faith unless you are certain of the principles upon which you are acting. I hold Faith to be what John Galt defines as the choice to think. The choice is each individual's responsibility. The modern concept of faith -- blindly hoping for something without reason or cause, and then trying to believe (unsuccessfully) that one will obtain it without rational effort or thought -- is a distorted and misguided delusion.

Anyway, I have a lot of thoughts on religion and Ayn Rand, and I could go on for quite a while. I cannot deny any of Ayn Rand's reason in Atlas Shrugged, but I don't believe that any of it necessary negates the existence of a higher intelligence that is consciously concerned with our progress. If there is a God who takes notice of us, it is only reasonable that His purpose is to help us become more like Him. I believe in a personal God. I believe that His power is his capacity for thought and reason. I believe that reason is limitless in its power, and as such, I see no reason why Ayn Rand's arguments would negate the possibility of the existence of such a God, who by the power of His reason, is able to exist and shape reality to match his values.

I believe that God's concern for us is self-interested, and any serious reading of scripture makes this perfectly clear. I believe that God wants us to become like him, and as such, wants us to choose to think. Just as parents have selfish interest in the progress and well-being of their children, I believe that God has selfish interest in seeing that we learn to think and become more like Him.

My own thinking has lead me to believe in God. My own experiences has given me evidence to base my faith on. If a personal God exists, it would not be reasonable that He would want us to believe in Him with no rational reason or thought. A God that condemns thought is nothing more than a Devil, but this is the God that many Christians believe in.

I'll stop there. If you have any thoughts you'd like to share, I am eager to hear them. I have the utmost faith (assurance and certainty) in reason, and as such, do not feel any hesitation whatsoever to discard any of my beliefs if they are shown to be erroneous.

Economics

2009-10-10T09:57:00.000-07:00

With the understanding that a self-interested act is self-benefiting and enhances your life, then acting against your self-interest is to act against your life. If one consistently acts against his own self-interest, he will die. If company a gives its product away for free to the poor for the sole reason that acting against one’s own self-interest is admirable, then the company will soon cease to exist.

Much of popular thought today is based on collectivism. The public good, or the good of the collective, is put first. The public good is an arbitrary idea that cannot be defined. Collectivism has been proven to be an erroneous principle time and time again. Individualism is at the very core of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. To say that it is justifiable to act against one's own self-interest for the good of the collective, and by doing so one will benefit even more, is a dangerous misconception. The argument that the best way to benefit yourself is to act for your own individual destruction so that the collective can then act for your benefit, instead of you being responsible for your own being, is similar to Lucifer's plan. Dismissal of individual responsibility is at the core of Lucifer's attractive ideas.

Is it in my self-interest to do less than I am paid for at work? Does this enhance my life? Does it provide me opportunities for joy? Joy, by nature, cannot co-exist with contradictions. Robbing my employer destroys any meaning money might have had for me. Happiness is impossible in such a scenario, and because I have acted against my own self-interest, I have come that much closer to death. If death is my standard of value, then it is virtuous to act against my own interest. If, however, life is my standard of value, then my actions must reflect this. Is it in my own self-interest to do more than I am paid for at work? Does this enhance my life? Does it provide me opportunities for joy? Does it provide me opportunities for advancement, for respect, for new knowledge and experience?

You are right in saying that a life is enhanced by the association with virtuous people. God's love is conditional, and He loves based on virtues, not vices. The world would have you believe that it is moral to love someone because of their vices and inability. Love, however, is the payment for the benefit that one receives from another person's virtues. Just as there can be no causeless fear, or no causeless emotion, so there can be no causeless love. To demand causeless love is to destroy the meaning of love. If one experienced causeless fear you would refer him to a psychiatrist. If one is incapable of feeling a causeless love, however, you condemn him.

I am sure that the more virtuous people that I am able to associate with in this life and the next, the more joy and fulfillment I will experience. I think that Father wants to be able to associate with us throughout eternity. Heaven is about who you are with. But this does not make it about collectivism. The individual is at the heart of the Gospel, the heart of the Atonement, and the heart of Love. The Atonement was not a lump sum paid to justice. The Atonement can be a personal and individual experience.

If an animal considered its own means of survival as evil, then it would not survive. Man can't escape this fact. The person who considers his own means of survival as evil will only survive at the expense of the virtuous. You who prattle that morality is social, and that man would need no morality on a desert island. It is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today. Reality will wipe him out as he deserves. Reality will show him that life is a value to be bought, and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

Remember that modern economical thought is often degraded and full of contradictions. I agree, however, that good economics extends throughout the eternities. I cannot accept collectivism, nor can I accept the condemnation of one who acts for his own joy and fulfillment.

What is mathematics?

2009-09-26T21:42:00.000-07:00

It is hard to think of a universe that isn't ordered. Actually, it's impossible for us to believe that the universe isn't ordered -- that each effect is not preceded by some cause. To say that things happen with no cause is beyond us and contradicts every axiom of existence. It is thus justifiable to say that everything does happen for a reason -- there is a cause that precedes every effect.

This takes us to principles -- a principle describes the nature of existence. A principle is like a law in that it states the nature of cause and effect. Newton's laws of motions are descriptions of the fundamental principles that govern the universe. To deny the existence of fundamental principles is to admit that there is no order, reason, and logic, and thus contradict the very faculties of thought that could reach such a definite conclusion.

Physical science is the practice of observing the effects of principles and then by analyzing these effects, trying to discern the principles in action. If you conduct an experiment and observe the result you can ask yourself what principles are governing the outcome. As you discern and describe principles, you will hopefully uncover more fundamental and universal principles.

Mathematicians, however, begin with the fundamental principles that govern the reality of mathematics, and from these principles try to see how they would carry themselves out in different scenarios. Thus, while physical science works from the effect to the cause, mathematics works the other way around -- from the cause to the effect.

The fundamental principles of mathematics seem to apply perfectly to our reality as well. Ideas in mathematics -- such as number -- do not exist in our reality, and it is mind boggling that we are able to conceive of them. What is even more mind boggling is that the principles of the mathematical reality can tell us about our reality. It seems that the most fundamental principles that govern existence are more fundamental than mathematics because they clearly apply to both our reality and the mathematical reality.

Mathematics is a separate reality in which we can apply principle and compare the outcome to our reality.

American Brazilians

2009-09-19T17:11:00.000-07:00

Today Juliana and I went to the annual Brazilian Festival in Salt Lake City. I find it amazing how all Brazilians in the U.S. seem to know each other. It's as if when they come to the U.S. they become part of a club where everyone is required to know each other's name.

A few weeks ago Juliana and I went to a barbecue with the Salt Lake Brazilian population. While the Brazilians are happy to study and work in the United States, they often get together to celebrate their "Brazilianness" by either eating enormous amounts of churrasco (Portuguese for "barbecue") or watching a Brazilian soccer game. This time it was not only a churrasco AND a soccer game, but it was a soccer game vs Brazil's arch-rival: ARGENTINA! With every goal against Argentina the room was filled with fourty Brazilians shouting at the top of their lungs, shaking the house as they jumped up and down. Between that and eating very rare meat, it was quite the weekend.

Nesting

2009-09-12T09:33:00.000-07:00

In about four months Emma will be born. Since discovering the gender of our child, Juliana has been keeping very busy stocking up on supplies for Emma's arrival. Our tiny apartment can barely fit the stockpile of diapers and baby clothes that we have already begun to accumulate. Every day when I get home from work or school Juliana claims me for at least an hour to show me the latest outfits she has bought for Emma, or to elaborate on her latest decoration ideas. She had originally wanted to do a blue theme for Emma's room, but became dismayed when she discovered that when it comes to babies, blue is for boys. Thus, the current color of choice is lilac.

We are still waiting for a box full of baby clothes to come in the mail. Juliana won them on an eBay auction over a week ago. Every day the package doesn't arrive it takes Juliana about an hour to overcome this emotional blow.

I can imagine that Emma is also very excited to be born. It will be quite an encounter when both her and Juliana can see each other for the first time -- they are both anxiously looking forward to it.

Grades

2009-09-05T11:39:00.000-07:00

On the first day of class Professor Clarke said, "At BYU you don't take classes, you take professors." I couldn't agree more. Before this semester I invested substantial amounts of time researching all I could about my potential professors. I rejected some classes in favor of completely different ones because I was able to identify those who I thought would be effective teachers.

But then there is always that splinter in the back of your mind: GPA. While I want to pursue a true education, I have to face the reality that my scholarship and eligibility for programs and graduate school rely heavily on my ability to get an As in my classes. A revolutionary teacher that offers new life-changing insights is attractive, but it seems that the teacher known for giving As to 60% of the class and giving take-home tests ranks even higher for most students.

A genuine desire to learn is often punished by sub par grades. The student who reads not just the assigned texts, but everything he or she can find on the subject, may often score worse on tests and assignments. Tests and assignments generally do not evaluate your understanding of a subject, but just how well you have memorized a small collection of facts that were assigned specifically for this class. Your ability to create is secondary at best to your ability to regurgitate seemingly arbitrary selections of unconnected bits of information.

Evaluation is absolutely critical to growth, and just like anything else, education isn't possible without it. But what is our standard of evaluation? More than anything else, a CEO of a large company is evaluated on the end results of his efforts. When a sensible board of directors evaluates a CEO, they care more about profits and growth of the company than anything else. They care about the end product of the CEO's creative efforts. Their standard is not an arbitrary necessity to fake genuine evaluation.

I believe that education should be the same way. I don't come to school to learn to take orders or become a gopher (a term borrowed from Stephen R. Covey). A good teacher will make each individual student a steward over the material. This means that the teacher will outline the resources and constraints, paint a picture of what the end result will be, and let the students employ their creative faculties to produce value. The teacher acts as a resource, not a dictator.

Thoughts on the portrayal of wickedness

2009-06-18T07:05:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the strongest form of condemnation is full and honest exposure. Wickedness is often made to look appealing because only a small side of it is shown, and the true nature of the wickedness is only apparent when one has become a trapped victim. As such, honest portrayal of wickedness is a powerful deterrent. It is common that in movies things like violence and sex are portrayed as attractive because only one small aspect of these things is shown.

The Book of Mormon uses honest portrayal to condemn many forms of wickedness. I feel that there are some movies and books that do a splendid job of showing the effects of sin. I feel it unfortunate that many people avoid these movies because of the clearness and honesty used in condemning wickedness, sex perversion, and violence. Les Miserables shows the life of a prostitute, and Slumdog Millionaire shows how violent the environment is in the slums of India.

These thoughts have stemmed from my discovery of showing over telling. It may even be that the most powerful deterrent to sin is showing. King Benjamin used this technique when he painted a picture of the consequences of sin. The Book of Ether shows us the devastation that came come to a society that forgets the Lord, as does the honest portrayal of the downfall of the Nephites.

You tell people to be kind to each other, but I feel that it is even stronger to show someone kindness, and show them the true reality when people aren't kind. I feel that the idea to shelter each other from the true nature of wickedness is wrong. The true nature of wickedness will never draw someone to it, because the true nature of wickedness cannot be attractive to anyone. It's the watered down deceitful version that can be attractive, and since this version seems lighter, we often feel that it is okay. For example, PG-13 chick flicks that show immorality as acceptable, or movies like X-Men that glorify violence and make it look like the optimal way to conclude a disagreement are accepted, whereas books and movies that harshly condemn wickedness by showing its true colors are avoided.

Essay for Honors 300 Advanced Writing

2009-06-17T09:24:00.000-07:00

Show and tell

I stepped into the apartment and saw light coming from underneath the bedroom door. My dinner was still waiting for me on the table, and was cold and stale from having been neglected for so long. I opened the bedroom door and saw her with her eyes closed, breathing in a steady, peaceful rhythm. There were black marks on her pillowcase, and I knew they were from the tears that made her mascara run. I sighed and dropped my backpack. I was relieved to have finished my last final exam, but I wondered if all of it was worth the cost. I pulled my phone from my pocket to set its alarm for the morning. A week was all I had. Just seven more days and I’d be at it again – living life with my grade point average looking over my shoulder and listening to Juliana’s tearful pleas to spend more time with her. I had survived the winter semester, at least in the sense that my grades had been good enough to keep my scholarship, and the imminent spring semester had already begun taunting me.

Less than six hours later I awoke to the jarring quacking noise coming from my phone that had been strategically placed on the other side of the room. I slid out of bed and made my way toward the alarm and fumbled with the touch-screen until I had succeeded in silencing it. Juliana was lying on her stomach and her small feet poked out from underneath the green bedspread. I reached for the pants and t-shirt I had thrown to the floor the night before and began to put them on. With my pants halfway up my leg, I changed my mind and let them drop back to the floor. I found some clean clothes in my dresser and slipped them on as silently as possible. I closed the bedroom door and stepped into the bathroom. I switched on the light and ran my fingers through my hair, trying to neutralize the effect that not taking a shower had on my appearance. I had to get to work early to prepare for a meeting, and locking the front door behind me, I made the short jog to the car.

As I drove to Novell’s corporate campus I tried to gather my thoughts. I was part of a team that had been testing a software suite for the past several months, and we were scheduled to ship later that week. In order to keep up, I had delegated everything I could to our team in Mexico and tried my hardest to stay updated on what was going on. The school semester had ended, and I had been counting on the thrill of finishing it to enliven my spirits. The thrill hadn’t come, however, and as I walked up the three flights of stairs to my office I felt as if I was going to yet another final exam – a routine that didn’t seem to have an end.

“Good morning Larry,” I said, as I searched for the right key. Larry was a middle-aged family man who came early and stayed late. I think that the whole time I had worked there I had seen him get up from his chair once.
“How ya doin’ Tim?”

“Doing great!” I said. “And don’t work too hard Larry, you keep making me look bad!” I shut the door behind me and sat in front of the computer screen. I started up my email program and cringed as I saw the accumulated collection of unread messages. I scanned the subject lines, trying to decide which ones were most important. Over half of them were marked urgent, but instead of opening any of them I pulled up a new browser. I sank down into my cushioned swivel chair and opened Brigham Young University’s website. There were three classes I had to take before I could apply for the business program, and I needed to register before they filled up. As I scrolled through the lists of required classes, I noticed how uninterested I felt. A year ago, signing up for classes had been an exciting adventure, but this time it was a bland technicality. I needed to regain the love I used to have for school, and I knew it. I diverted my attention from the classes I needed for my major, and perused the long list of classes that were offered for the spring term. I wanted to take something fun and genuine, something that could rekindle my love for learning.

RateMyProfessor.com was a website that allowed students to write reviews about their professors, and it had become an important resource for me. Aside from being an avenue to vent about my economics teacher whom I severely disliked, I had learned to use it to evaluate prospective teachers. Professor Thomas Plummer was the first one I looked up. Only two reviews? I wonder if that’s a good thing. He was a German teacher but would be teaching Advanced Writing this semester. I thought this could be a sign that he taught because he enjoyed it, and I signed up for the class. Managerial Communication had been the more logical choice, because it would have fulfilled several requirements, but I knew that I was dangerously on the brink of disaster. One more semester of forgetting why I was even in school might have been enough to end it for me.

Tuesday was the first day of the semester. I was happy with myself for having found my math class so quickly, and sat down in a desk in the middle of the room. No one else had come yet, but I wasn’t worried, because I was about fifteen minutes early. I stared at the poorly erased chalkboard that still had faint scribbles from earlier classes. It had been a few years since I had taken any math, and I wondered if I’d be able to pick it up again. The spring term was half as long as a regular semester, which meant that more work was crammed into each class. I laid my head on the desk and closed my eyes, taking this opportunity to relax. Several minutes later I glanced at the clock and realized that class should had already started. Where was everyone? I ran into the hall and dropped my bag in front of a public computer. As I waited for it to log me in I wondered what I could have messed up this time. Did I have the right classroom? Didn’t it start at four? I pulled up my class schedule and hurriedly confirmed the details for my math class. Room 150 TMCB. Monday Wednesday Friday. The holiday had thrown me off, and I had forgotten that it was Tuesday. I was already late for advanced writing. I hit the log off button and jogged toward the corner of campus, muttering profanities to myself as I went.

I was about ten minutes late when I finally arrived at the Honors building. I walked past the large pillars and opened the wooden door. It was one of the oldest buildings on campus. Its walls were lined with wood and the floors were covered in bluish green carpet, giving it a classical feel. I looked at the post-it note that had my notes. Room 150. I ran down the stairs and scanned the room numbers. I found 149, but no 150. I paced back and forth, sure that the room was there somewhere. I looked back at the post-it note and confirmed that I had read it correct. Room 150 TMCB. Below that I read Room 241 MSRB. Realizing my error, I dashed back up the stairs. I spotted number 241 and headed toward it.

The small doorway was overflowing with a group of hopefuls who hadn’t managed to find an opening in the class and were intently listening to the teacher call roll. I was out of breath and sweating from the jog over. Ignoring the contemptuous looks shot at me by some of the girls in line, I tried to work my way through the group of people that was clogging up the entry. “Okay, it looks like we have some absences,” announced the teacher. Uh oh, I need to do something. Raising my hand from behind the group of girls and in a loud voice I announced, “Tim Stakland!” Professor Plummer looked right at me. “Oh, well, on second thought it looks like we don’t.” A girl with a dejected look got up from a desk, and afraid that the vacancy might not last, I darted into it.

It took me a minute to catch my breath and gather enough focus to survey my surroundings. The desks were in a circle formation, each one pressed close to the next. Professor Thomas Plummer was seated in front of the chalk board in a small desk just like mine. He was wearing beige dress pants, a blue dress shirt, and a pair of glasses with thin, golden rims. His hair was neatly combed and parted, and aside from the twenty ounce bottle of Dr. Pepper that he was sipping, he looked like he’d fit in perfectly at a Wall Street board meeting. Most of the other students looked like they were about my age, and for the most part were all dressed casually, but I still wasn’t sure whether or not I fit in. The teacher began reading the syllabus, and I noticed the rest of the class following along on their copies.

“This is a writing course. This is a chance to prepare for your own publications,” read the teacher in a calm, steady voice.

My own publications? I looked around at my calm and attentive classmates and wondered how many pieces each of them had already published nationally. I felt like heading for the door and shouting to the girls who weren’t able to get into the class, telling them that there was a vacancy after all. I didn’t get up, however, and instead listened to the Professor read the class description as I sat and stared at the carpet.

A couple of weeks went by. My late nights at work had made Juliana give up fighting for the weekdays, and she instead claimed the weekends as her own. It was Saturday morning, and trying not to make a sound I slipped a t-shirt over my head.

“Where are you going, Tim?” I was busted.

“Uh, I just gotta take care of a few things at school, but I won’t be long,” I stammered. She rolled out of bed and gave me a disappointed glare.

“Okay, but promise to be back by eleven. I want to leave no later than noon and we have things to do before then.”

“Don’t worry, Ju, I promise!” I pushed my last shoe onto my foot, and Juliana followed me to the front door. She stood and watched me from the door as I got into our car and pulled out of the parking lot. I had difficulty concentrating in our small apartment and had developed the habit of going to the school library on campus. There was a special bonus for going to school on Saturdays, and that was the pleasure of being able to park in the faculty parking lot. This meant skipping the normal ten minute uphill hike from the student parking. I also felt a twisted sense of accomplishment from parking in the Dean’s spot, which was only reserved Monday through Friday. I neared the library just as the security guard was unlocking the row of glass doors. I looked down at my cell phone to check the time. 7:57 am. I mentally reviewed the list of assignments I had to complete before 11:00, and hurried down a flight of stairs. I entered a long room filled with bookshelves, computers, tables, and small cushioned chairs. This will do. I let out an ambitious sigh as I approached a computer.

I opened the assigned text for the writing class and scanned through the table of contents, trying to decide which essay was shortest. We had been assigned to pick a memoir and submit a written report describing what I learned from the piece and what I could incorporate into my own writing. I sat in front of the computer, calculating that if I typed as I read, the assignment would go by faster. The name of the essay was Dumpling. We had read the first paragraph in class as an example of how to begin an essay, but I read it again, anyway. So far I liked the class. The teacher was sincere, and I felt I understood most of what he said. He had been discussing the difference between summary and scene, but I still wasn’t sure if I bought into it. “Scene is showing, and summary is telling,” he had said. My analytical mind was having trouble getting past the lure of telling the reader what to feel and think. What’s a story worth if it doesn’t have a message? I placed my fingers on the keyboard and looked back down to continue reading.

About fifteen minutes later, I looked up from the book. I had forgotten about my intention of typing as I read, and the document on the computer screen was blank. My mind raced as I reflected on what I had just read. For a moment I had entered into the life of a young Filipino girl growing up in the United States. I felt her ambitions, her frustrations, and her pain. I was enveloped in a snapshot of her reality, and I didn’t want to lose it. I looked down the long room at the vast collection of wooden desks that were scarcely populated by students. Minutes earlier, I had observed this same scene with indifference, but now I saw through different eyes, and I was filled with emotion as I reflected on what had happened in the story I had just finished. How could she do that to her mother? Did I ever do anything like that? Do I do anything like that? I sat in front of the computer screen, thinking, and no longer in any hurry to start writing. That morning had sealed it – I had become a converted follower of storytelling. Professor Plummer called it writing in scene, and I was ready for a life of devoted faithfulness to this philosophy. I felt empowered and was excited to start producing colorful stories that would leave my classmates filled with emotion and bewilderment.

It didn’t go quite like I had planned. This was more apparent than ever when a few days later I found myself staring at the red ink that covered my latest attempt at greatness. The words “confused collection of tangents” stood out to me and confirmed my failure. I still had a few days until I had to turn in the assignment, but I wasn’t so sure anymore. Could I really pull this off? I didn’t know what to expect, and when Tuesday came around I headed to class with four copies of my paper, deciding to make the best out of whatever came next. I was relieved that we’d be having peer reviews that day and that we wouldn’t turn in our final drafts until Thursday. We counted off into groups of three, and two of my classmates and I walked past the six pillars and down the stone steps in search for a comfortable setting. There was a gentle breeze, and I could hear the rustle of leaves above us. By the time I was halfway through reading my essay to the others my mouth was dry and heavy, and I nervously squeezed my fingers together. When I had finished, the other two followed protocol and began discussing my essay with each other, and I scribbled down their insights and suggestions with my pencil. By the end of class I felt my hope rejuvenated, and my mind was filled with ideas as I scanned over the feedback that the members of my peer review group had left on my essay. I could do this.

After a while I started seeing everything in terms of scene. When my wife secretly decorated my car to announce that she was pregnant, my first thought was, how could I show this in an essay? I found myself continuously surrounded by scene, and simple, everyday events were no longer ordinary. When I accompanied her to complain to the landlord and watched the discussion ignite into an argument, I found myself entertained and mentally writing the scene to myself. Everything had become a possibility for my next essay, and I loved it. During one class, a student named Tyler read an essay describing his latest experience with dental surgery. After reading his piece, he mentioned that while the experience was initially miserable, it became less painful when he eventually found himself wondering how he could describe it in an essay. I realized I wasn’t alone in this journey, and I smiled.

By this time Juliana was suffering from daily bouts with morning sickness. Like all husbands, I learned that there wasn’t anything you can say to stop a pregnant wife from taking her frustration out on you. Saying nothing didn’t help, either. “Imagine yourself describing this in an essay. That might help,” I suggested.

“What are you talking about?” came the reply.

“Oh, never mind.” I squeezed Juliana’s hand and watched her bite into a plum. She had claimed that fresh fruit was all that she could eat without vomiting, and the day before we had spent a good chunk of our food budget on peaches, nectarines, plums, grapes, strawberries, and melons. She refused to open the fridge or go near the kitchen, because she said the smell of food made her nauseous, and our collection of fruit lay scattered about the living room. “I think the strawberries are molding,” I said. “I told you they had to go into the fridge.” Juliana didn’t respond and headed toward the bedroom. When she passed the kitchen she covered her face with her hand and looked the other way. “Do you need anything?” I called out to her, trying to feel better for not being able to help.

“No Tim, you can go to class. Just don’t get home too late, again. Try to make some time for me.”

I put on my white tennis shoes and stepped out the door. I stopped for a minute and leaned against the railing on the second story of our apartment complex. There weren’t many cars in the parking lot, and our blue ‘98 Saturn sat alone in its stall close to the overflowing dumpster. The words “Just Married” were still written on our back window from the church activity last month. I looked down and saw Juliana’s tomato plant. It was wilted and hunched over. Before she had begun feeling sick she would water it and talk about it as if it were a good friend, but I hadn’t heard Juliana mention it for over a week, and I wondered if she still remembered it was out here. I thought about watering it, but instead headed down the flight of stairs to the car.

The upside to parking ten minutes away from campus was the duck pond. I stopped and watched several ducklings huddle around their mother. I stepped closer, and the protective mother opened her mouth at me, and I thought I heard her hiss. I imagined Juliana, clutching our newborn child and hissing at anyone who came too close. I smiled and thought how much easier pregnancy must be for ducks. I watched a middle-aged woman throw bread crumbs into the pond. The woman smiled in satisfaction as the hungry ducks ate up the floating pieces of bread, and she seemed to feel as if she had just added meaning to her life. I took a sudden step toward the mother and her ducklings and let out a loud “QUACK!” She spread out her wings and hissed, but I was already heading up the stairs and toward the honors building.

I sat next to the windows and watched the others trickle in. I could feel my sweaty feet inside my shoes, and I wanted to take them off and feel the smooth carpet rub against my bare skin. Within a few minutes all of the desks were filled, and this marked the official commencement of the class. The term was coming to a close, and these final classes were set aside for us to present our fifteen-page papers. I would have to turn in mine on the following class, but I still hadn’t been able to find a topic. “Ok,” began the teacher. “Let’s start off with Claire today.” Claire’s essay had been distributed to everyone in the previous class so we could read it beforehand. As she started reading selections, the others in the class followed along. I sank down into my chair and covered my desk with arms in an attempt to hide the fact that I had forgotten my copy. “Hey, can I borrow a piece of paper?” I whispered to the girl on my right. She tore out a sheet of notebook paper and handed it to me. I placed it in front of me to cover the nakedness of my desk, and jotted down notes from what was being read.

I listened to the short excerpts that were read aloud, and for the first time that day I stopped thinking about what I’d write my essay about. I smiled as Claire finished her last paragraph. She had written about a summer job at Wal-Mart , and for a few minutes I had found myself by her side, experiencing the unknown. As the others took their turns reading I stared up at the ceiling and closed my eyes. The drudgery that had engulfed me seemed to give way to the flow of colorful experiences that were being described in each essay. Shuffling my feet, I pulled my shoes and socks off and pushed them underneath my desk. I sighed with pleasure as I felt the carpet against my bare feet, and I laid my head onto the desk.

Another Short Essay

2009-05-26T13:48:00.000-07:00

This is my latest attempt to write in scene (instead of writing in summary). Read the post below this one for more explanation.

This was an assignment for my Honors English 300 class.

Education of a Farm Boy

It was six a.m. and I found myself lost in a gigantic vegetable garden. My mother stood with one hand on her side as she pointed here and there with a small garden shovel. “Go weed that row of beets down there at the end and then report back to me.” Peering in the direction I thought she had pointed, I couldn’t make out exactly which row she was talking about. The air was hot and sticky, and my ear was already sore from slapping at the knats that whirled around my head. I slumped down onto my knees and felt the warm soil fill my fingernails as I pulled up the weeds. My thoughts began to wander, and I was eventually enveloped in a blanket of boredom. My hands kept on with their chore, pulling up weeds and beets alike, while my mind wandered.

I was awakened by my Mother’s shriek yell, “The goats are in the apples!” Looking up, I saw my eldest brother whirl a garden rake as he charged the row of small apple trees that bordered the cornfield. Our several goats became tense as they saw him coming, and kept on devouring the apples as long as possible. “Thwack!” The butt of the garden-rake came down on the first goat, and the entire pack instantly dashed for an escape, stopping as long as they could at the last tree to get in a few extra bites. Recognizing a chance for my escape, I let out a yell and ran toward the fleeing herd, hoping to seem like I had an excuse to leave the garden.

Once I was a safe distance away I began looking for the baby goats. There were five of them, and I had by default been appointed their caretaker. “Baaaaahhhhh!” I called out, doing my best to imitate my flock. It was only a few seconds before I saw the first kid trip and fall as he hurriedly turned the corner from around the goat house. He was overtaken by the other four, who came running to their 9 year old pastor. I extended my fingers, letting them suck on them as I pet them with my free hand. I knew that it wouldn’t be long until I would be missed at the garden, and grabbing my wooden stick, I made my way into the forest with my small flock of kids.

“Don’t get lost Buffy!” I called out to the straggler. Buffy pranced forward, making bucking motions with his head until he eventually stumbled and fell. I picked him up and carried him to the rest of the group, and had to stop when a thorn pierced my bare foot. After removing it I sat down and watched the goats chew whatever they could find. The humid summer air seeped through my clothes and I had already become saturated with salty sweat that streamed from my body. I sat silently, and listened to the munching sound of the five goats, and heard the calls of hawks passing overhead. My thoughts began to wander into a dream, only this time it wasn’t an escape, but a pleasant indulgence.

Several hours had passed and I heard the car horn. By the short, steady rhythm I could tell it was one of my older brothers, which meant there wasn’t any hurry. If the honks had been longer and more random, it would have been my mom, who only called us in herself when she was upset. Since there didn’t seem be any hurry I meandered my way back to the house, stopping occasionally to let the goats graze on clover whenever they could find some.

Upon arriving at our graveled driveway I saw that my Father had arrived, and observed my siblings hauling large burly sacks of bulk foods from his car into the house. My young companions left my side and baaaaah’d as they rushed up to be part of the activity. “Get their bottles Tim.” my Dad told me, “I’ve got their new formula and I don’t think they’ve been fed for over a day.” Being pleasantly surprised at another prospect of avoiding manual labor, I obeyed my Father’s request and headed behind the house toward the shaded backyard. My young goats noticed my departure and came running alongside me, doing their best to keep up with their long, awkward and undeveloped legs. The six of us reached the wooden shed where the bottles were stored, and upon swinging the heavy door open, were startled to be met by the stern glare of our violent rooster. The rooster, alerted by the intrusion, let out a long, arrogant crow, and cocked his head toward me. He had recently gained an infamous reputation by attacking my younger sister, and I stayed on guard until I had managed to leave the shed with the bottles. As we headed toward the water hydrant, from behind us came a second arrogant crow, this time of triumph.

Once I had filled up the bottles two-thirds full with water, I scooped three tablespoons of the white, chalky formula into each of them. Some of the powder spilled onto the outside of the bottles, and combining with the wetness of the containers, formed a syrupy residue. By this time the kids were baaaahhing in my ear, trying to lick the nipples on the bottles as I screwed the caps back on. They hungrily sucked on the bottles, and milk splattered over their faces and on my hands, and by the time the ordeal was over, the goats, bottles, and I were all smeared by the sticky formula.

It had begun to cool off by the time the sun was setting. Still barefoot, I walked with my dad to the goat pin to lock the animals up for the night. The goats were already lingering close to the pin and were ready to sleep, and the chickens were all roosting in the chicken shed. My Dad kicked and muttered at the few goats that were still going inside, and then swung the metal gate shut. Through the dim light I looked inside to check on my own young flock, and saw the five young kids lying together. I watched their bellies inflate and deflate as they breathed. I noticed that one of them seemed still, and it had its head down on the ground. “I think he’s sick!” I alerted my Dad, and I hurried my way inside to investigate. I frantically pushed the other animals away and prodded the goat. He was motionless. I had never had contact with death before, and I began to cry. As my Dad went back to the house for a shovel, I continued to stare at my lifeless companion, who only hours before had been full of life and excitement. Occasionally I would look away for a minute, and the shock returned all over again every time I looked back at the dead animal, nearly expecting him to somehow be alive again.

My Dad began to dig a hole a few yards behind the goat pin. I did my best to carry the victim to the grave site, and he seemed a lot heavier than before. Halfway dragging the corpse, I finally reached the grave and did my best to lay the goat inside it. By this time the dusk had turned into dark, and thousands of fireflies sparkled throughout the night air. We sat on the log we had used as a tombstone, and my I listened to my Dad talk of similar childhood experiences of losing companions and friends.

That night as I lay on my bed, I still wasn’t sure if I believed it. Death still didn’t seem real. Wiping my nose with a dirty sleeve, I kneeled atop my bed and told God that I wanted my goat to be alive again. I thought that God could do it, and when I had finished I felt confident that in the morning everything would be back to normal again.

The following morning I got up before the regular wakeup call, and filled with excitement to see my goats again I ran down the stairs and to the front door. I didn’t slow down to cross the driveway, and I winced as the sharp gravel poked my feet. I hadn’t forgotten about last night’s tragedy, but I was convinced that somehow death wasn’t strong enough and that the casualty would be alive and well again. When I arrived at the goat pin, my feet were cold and wet from the dew, and I leaned over with my hands on my knees, panting. I looked through the wired fence in search of my kids, and my excitement turned into confusion as I saw another one of my goats lying in the wet, cold mud. This time I knew what the stillness meant, and in sorrow and protest I let out a tearful shout. What was death to rob me yet again? Wasn’t I stronger than it? Couldn’t it be overcome? I didn’t cry this time, nor did I rush to the lifeless goat, but instead turned and made my way back through the wet grass to the house.

New Website

2009-05-25T09:04:00.000-07:00

There is a new website: http://www.mycontemplations.com

English assignment

2009-05-19T13:23:00.000-07:00

This is an assigned written response to a creative non-fiction memoir piece that I chose to read.

Dumpling, by Angela M Balcita, from The Fourth Genre

In this short essay, Angela Balcita speaks in the present tense and relates several smalls stories from her childhood to illustrate what it was like for her to grow up in America. She begins by describing herself and her mother and how they started to cook together one summer. Angela uses scene and detail to show us the types of personalities she and her mother had. Although she was originally hesitant about the cooking lessons with her mother, she eventually begins to enjoy them. Once she is able to make a flawless dumpling she proudly takes it to school, but is mocked by the other American children who think that her food is strange. This highlights part of the cultural challenges that can come when a child is being raised in a foreign country.

I am amazed at how well Angela writes in scene. Her stories become vivid as she decorates them with details, dialogue, and emotion. As I read this essay, I realized that rarely does she ever tell the reader anything, and on the few occasions where she does, she combines her brief narrative with detail or dialogue. I think that this makes her narrative smooth and continuous, and each scene nicely transitions into the next.

I suppose that I am an analytical thinker, and much of my writing reflects this. I am often engrossed in emotion and thought as I write, and I simply summarize what is going on inside my head. Thanks to this writing class, I am for the first time beginning to realize how shallow and ineffective this approach is. As I explore the genre of creative non-fiction, I feel as if I have been watching television in black and white my whole life, and now I am beginning to see it in color for the first time. Writing has taken on more depth and possibilities, and while learning to write in scene and detail is a challenge, it is also an exhilarating experience.

Through the simple scenes and stories that Angela describes, she succeeds in conveying various emotions into the reader. The story is more than interesting; it is revealing. The essay puts the reader into the story and thus helps him understand his own self by recognizing how he responds to the emotions of the characters in the story. I feel that I have gotten so focused on what I want to say, that I have decided that this is all that is important. I have become oblivious of how I can say something. The what could be a message, an experience, or an epiphany. The how is the scene, story, and detail. The challenge for me is to not be so worried about the what and instead learn the how. I suppose that having something to say is barely relevant because if any meaning is to be gotten from an essay, it will come from the contemplative reflections of the reader himself, not the writer. Angela Balcita didn’t come out and tell me what she was trying to say; she instead did a splendid job of allowing me to experience what she experienced, and in some degree, feel what she felt.

Having read this essay has made me even more excited to improve as a writer. When my English Professor first introduced me the idea of scene over summary, I was a little skeptical. I was taken back by the notion that a central message was not a necessary component to a good essay. Since then I have been changing my mind, and this essay has sealed it. I am starting to see how superior showing is over telling. I realize, however, that this written response that I am now writing contains very little showing, but I am working on it!

What is suffering?

2009-05-17T08:58:00.000-07:00

Growth can be tumultuous and unpleasant, and is marked by confusion and frustration. Confusion and Frustration are, however, inherently positive emotions. They signal progress. Con-fusion means that one's current state of consciousness has been challenged. It is a form of suffering, and suffering is at the core of growth.

Frustration is an expression of the conscious mind. It is a step further than confusion, and signals the resolve to grow. Without frustration, it is difficult to change. Frustration is motivation.

There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons -

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes -

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -

We can find no scar,

But internal difference,

Where the Meanings, are -

None may teach it - Any -

Tis the Seal Despair -

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air -

When it comes, the Landscape listens -

Shadows - hold their breath -

When it goes, tis like the Distance

On the look of Death –

In this poem Emily Dickinson describes growth of consciousness. Notice that the “Slant of light” that brings enlightenment is by nature oppressive:

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

We can find no scar,

But internal difference,

Where the Meanings, are –

This is the very nature of progress. Heavenly Hurt, or suffering, is at the core of growth. We are motivated to find meaning to our suffering, and we are thus compelled to come to know ourselves.

There is much more to be learned from the insightful poem. Suffering and pain are points of view. As your point of view shifts, and you begin to see things differently than you have always seen them, you experience suffering and pain. Suffering is not inherently good or bad, and signals a paradigm shift. In general, we resist change and growth.

Memoir essay for my Honors 300 class

2009-05-14T10:55:00.000-07:00

I am not very good at writing in scene and detail, and this is probably my first try. Your feedback will be highly appreciated.

The Adventures of a Homeschooler

I think everyone is familiar with at least one stereo-type homeschooled social misfit. Such an individual is normally identified as the person who dresses in faded, oversized clothes and has a hard time participating in conversation. He initially raises interest as to why he seems so different, but all curiosity is satisfied the moment it is revealed that he was homeschooled. “Oh, of course, that explains everything!” People think. I too was home-taught, and I readily agree that homeschoolers generally are not normal. This, however, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and in most cases, can be far better than the alternative.

As a homeschooler, my regular teacher was my Mother. She had adopted my three older siblings and me when she married our Father, and her physical appearance alone could have qualified her as a teacher. She was tall, had long, black hair, dressed in skirts and blouses, and wore thick glasses. Her favorite teaching aid was the large dry-erase board that was carefully nailed to the wall and hung next to the coat rack facing the dining-room table. On a typical day it would feature the purple and black scribbles from her lectures, and it provided the content for many of our mealtime conversations. During the winter when it became especially cold I sat as close to the wood-burning stove as possible. I would cuddle up in the corner next to this source of warmth and listen to the sharp crackle of burning wood as I did times tables, explored National Geographics, or worked on a task that had been assigned me by my Mother. Our schooling continued year round, and in the summer we studied in settings like atop the trampoline, in a tree house, on the front porch, or somewhere in the forest that encircled our home. We learned biology by catching, dissecting, and sometimes eating crawdads and other specimen; we studied English and literature by taking part in the family tradition of reading; and the subjects of history, math, science, art, and music were studied through books, field trips, and countless other mediums.

When my mother became pregnant, my sister and I were sent to Washington Elementary for the year. Every morning we would walk up our one hundred yard, graveled driveway and around its adjacent cornfield to the bus stop. Lunches in the school cafeteria were our favorite part of public school, and our classmates were young enough to befriend us. Our brief sojourn into public school was a happy one, but we were soon re-enlisted into the familiar setting of homeschool. Our Mother tried her best to provide for opportunities for social interaction and friendships, and whenever possible we were sent local homeschool groups where we would participate in writing workshops, reading groups, and other similar activities. We also had some attention from the public school district, and every few weeks they would send Mrs. Chipman to come visit us. She was a middle-aged, quiet-mannered woman who would spend time studying with us and reviewing our progress. She sipped hot water from her thermos as she took her turn with each of us, and we liked the change in routine that her visits provided us.

When I became an adolescent, I opted to start attending public school. I entered Fairfield Middle School as an eighth grader, and I gradually began to realize how different this new reality was. As I walked through the school auditorium that was used as the lunch room, I sensed that I wasn’t free to sit at just any table I wanted. Lunch tables were treated as real estate, each one representing a social status, and I didn’t seem to have a status. There was one table in the corner of the room that was populated by a variety of loud and diverse students, and it was where I normally found myself. As I began to make friends I hoped to advance to more respectable tables, but I realized that there was one more problem. While everyone else took their lunch in small brown-paper lunch bags, mine came in wrinkled, recycled plastic grocery bags, and in my adolescent mind this was a serious dilemma. I didn’t even think of mentioning the predicament to my parents; they of course were not capable of understanding the intricacies of eighth grade social life. I instead started leaving my lunches in my locker and bought lunch from the school cafeteria. For a whole semester my locker accumulated a collection of sandwiches and side dishes, all in the condemned plastic grocery bags, and was only eventually cleaned out when a janitor noticed the smell.

With time I was able to conform to the strict social structure of public life, and I began to see it as a challenge which I enjoyed. The mystical notion of popularity became so enchanting that I didn’t think of anything else, and after a while I was surprisingly similar to the other self-conscious adolescents. I am grateful, however, that I wasn’t distorted permanently by these artificial tribal customs, and that I have in some measure been able to return to the social acceptance that I had originally possessed before eighth grade.

Over Christmas break that year I managed to purchase a computer from a local company auction for $20. I spent an entire day trying to get our 56k modem to work, stretching a phone cord back and forth through several rooms to the phone jack in the dining room wall. Once I managed to get it working, I discovered an addiction that I didn’t know I had. After having become enveloped in the artificial expectations of social life, the Internet brought me back to the refreshing freedom of my previous upbringing, and public school suddenly lost the enthusiastic anticipation that I had once felt for it. The adventures of social ambition and structured curriculums gave way to the exciting and endless possibilities of cyberspace.

When I was fifteen my family and I moved to Utah, and I arrived in St George on the first day of school my sophomore year. As I sat waiting to sign up for classes in the counselor’s office, I saw someone walk in with a large black scorpion kept in a jar. He presented it as his trophy, and claimed that he had found it that morning on his way to school. I began to realize how different of an environment this was from Iowa, and soon discovered that I liked it better. In Utah I was able to enroll in any classes I wanted, despite my lack of an official transcript. In my first semester I enrolled as a part time student and signed up for calculus, creative writing, and computer programming. Mrs. Madden, the creative writing teacher, introduced me to the freedom and possibilities of poetry and prose, and I was drawn to her free-spirited approach to teaching. Computer programming was easy and we spent most of our time playing computer games. I was worried about how well I was doing in calculus, and thought that my first test score of 82% was a disaster, until I saw that that the class average was 60%. I learned in the standardization of public school, your performance only has meaning as compared to that of others, and that to get an A I had to run only slightly faster than the slowest.

I attempted to translate my identity into public school language, and in order to categorize myself as an athlete I participated in wrestling and cross-country. Coming from Iowa, I was expected to be a good wrestler, and worked hard to try to meet these expectations. In public life, everyone must be identified and categorized somehow, and the ones that are not thus classified are the social misfits. You have to work hard to maintain your social identity in public school.

After about a year I was ready to move on. After attending religious seminary each morning I would make the twenty minute drive to the public library to conduct my studies. The building was old and cramped, and the book shelves couldn’t fit more than one person between them at a time. Since I studied alone, I was initially hesitant about asking the heavyset librarian for a group study room. He had an intimidating appearance with a thick, white beard, and arms covered with tattoos. When I finally approached his circled desk to make my request, I was surprised at his quiet demeanor and friendliness, and my regular attendance and friendship with the librarians eventually secured me a designated room for my daily study sessions.

By this time my interests varied greatly, and I studied books on science, math, poetry, and chess. After finishing a book, I would put it down and then take time to stop and admire a book shelf and fantasize about being able to instantly digest the entire contents of a book by only touching it. I was alone, but was in good company, and developed friendships with authors like David Bronstein, Emily Dickenson, Ian Stewart, Richard Feynman, and John Gribbin. The books I read during those times to this day still continue to shape my ambitions and dreams.

My study room was furnished with a hardwood table and similar sturdy wooden chairs. It contained a chalk board that I would often take notes on, and had large glass windows. Every few days one of the homeless library patrons would notice me studying a chess position on my rollout chess set and venture inside to challenge me to a game. I came to be very familiar with the homeless community in St George and got to know many of them by name. There were several who would spend their entire days in the library, chatting with each other or perusing through magazines like Cooking Smart or Garden Design. They would be waiting at the front door when the library was opened, and would often be the last to leave at night. They had all the time in the world and no ambition. I often looked at their worn, shabby clothes, and observed their disinterested countenances, and thought to myself that if they would only spend their time reading good, worthwhile books, instead of wasting their time away, that they could rapidly turn themselves into the most educated and capable of individuals. I realized, however, that they had been conditioned to depend on others for learning, and that they may never discover how satisfying and rewarding self-motivated study can be.

Daily thought...

2009-05-11T07:32:00.001-07:00

Not knowing what you don't know is the first and only substantial barrier to learning.

Study notes to the chess book, My System, by Aron Nimzowitsch

2009-05-08T10:06:00.001-07:00

Chapter 12 -- The isolated d-pawn and its decendants

Nimzowitsch begins the chapter by instructing the student to strive to play with and against the isolated d-pawn as much as possible in order to better develop an understanding of its nature. I can see that he has an enormous respect for the intricacies that are involved when dealing with the problem of an isolated d-pawn. Firstly, both sides have advantages and disadvantages.

White (with an isolated pawn on d4) has the advantage of the advanced outposts on c5 and e5. These are two outposts to Black's one (d5), but the more important point is that White's e5 outpost is far superior in the middlegame to Black's d5 outpost. Nimzowitsch also likes the b1-h7 diagonal for White's light squared Bishop in such positions. Nimzowitsch also says that the d-pawn's strength is its lust to expand. This is an interesting statement, and I feel it is an important principle to keep in mind.

Black's advantages come in the endgame. The main shift is that the evaluation of the points e5 and d5 changes once an attack on the king is no longer in question. If the position in all other regards is neutral (meaning that White has not gotten any other advantages, such as a breakthrough to c7, etc.), then Black will have the better position. Black's strongest square will be the d5 square, but the all of the light squares around the d4 pawn will also be weak for White. In his words, "...it is not only the isolani itself that tends to become weak, but also the complex of squares surrounding it. In this the principal evil is to be found." This statement is very important, and I can recall a game on ICC vs a 2300 rated player where I managed to survive a middlegame as black playing against the isolated pawn. The endgame was clearly better for me, but I failed to win because I was intent on just utilizing the d5 square, and didn't use the other resources available to me (the light squares around the pawn, namely c4 and e4).

The proper line of play as White with the isolated d-pawn is to not attack until the attack is really there, and work on building a solid position and firmly support the isolated pawn: "...White cannot be too strongly warned against attempting surprise attacks in the early stages...a solid position aimed at maintaining the security of the d4 pawn is the one and only right course..." Nimzowitsch recommends a setup of placing the light squared Bishop on the b1-h7 diagonal, the Queen on e2, dark squared Bishop on e3 (anchoring the d-pawn), and rooks on c1 and d1. It is also possible to put the rooks on d1 and e1 as to avoid exchanges on the c-file.

Since the d4 pawn is weak, the squares around it are also weak. The c4, d5, and e4 squares may all be utilized by black. This can also have black create an initiative on the queenside, using the d5 square as an attacking point or transfer point for his pieces. Thus, while the d4 pawn is definitely one target of play, it doesn't need to be the only one, and black can use his advantages for operations on the queenside as well.

The Isolated pawn couple are pawns c3 and d4, both on an open file. This normally occurs after black plays something like Nd5xNc3, thus giving the d-pawn the company of his fellow b-pawn. Hanging pawns, on the other hand, are pawns c4 and c4. Hanging pawns are to be preferred over the isolated pawn couple. If black can manage a blockade of the isolated pawn couple and thus prevent c4, which would turn the pawns into hanging pawns, then white is in serious trouble. White needs to exert every effort possible to execute the c4 push.

The hanging pawns are definitely targets (both on open files, neither defended by another pawn), but their potential to advance is there advantage. They also control a good number of squares, and can create many threats. Thus, it seems that when one possess hanging pawns, a defensive strategy (a plan that is merely trying to not lose these pawns) will certainly lose, for over time the pawns will fall victim to attacks. The correct line of play with hanging pawns is active play, thus utilizing the weapon power of the hanging pawns. Nimzowitsch shows a very interesting game where black even sacrificed a pawn to be able to play c6 - c5, thus converting the isolated pawn couple into hanging pawns, and then advanced the c pawn further, utilizing the strength of hanging pawns. Had black been more passive and defensive, a strong blockade on c5 would have been executed by White, and the pawns would become a terrible liability for black.

Study notes to the chess book, My System, by Aron Nimzowitsch

2009-05-08T10:05:00.004-07:00

Chapter 11 -- Doubled Pawn and Restraint

part 1: doubled pawns

Doubled compact pawns (i.e. pawns on c2, c3, and d3), according to Nimzo, have two weaknesses and one strength. One of their weaknesses is dynamic, while the other is static. The dynamic weakness is that when the pawns advance they only do so at great structural cost (in this example, when the d pawn advances to d5). Thus, especially when the pawn structure is c2, c3, and d4, all effort possible should be made to entice an advancement of the d-pawn. In the examples that Nimzo uses, this is often done by pushing ...e5 (but not ...c5 if it can be avoided, because after white plays d5 a knight can be posted on c5, which is often true in the Nimzo Indian opening), and then building up on the e4 pawn (if it exists, like in the Nimzo Indian), which pressure will eventually threaten ...exd with the subsequent win of the e pawn, thus forcing black to push d5. This is just one example of direct and indirect methods to entice the advance of the double pawn structure, thus exploiting its dynamic weakness. It is interesting to note that this was Nimzo's original idea behind the Nimzo Indian opening, but that has since been replaced with the direct attack on the center with ...c5 and sometimes ...d5.

The static weakness of doubled pawns comes into play when we storm them with our own pawns, and after undoubling them through exchange, they will be weak and exposed to attack. I am afraid that I don't completely understand this static aspect of doubled pawns quite yet. I suspect that this weakness is secondary to the dynamic one in that it can only be exploited after the dynamic weakness has been exploited by successfully inducing the pawns to advance.

The strength of a double pawn complex is its tenacity to remain as a strong structure, such as in the setup with c2, c3, d4. This setup is a good one, and if it can be held, illustrates the strength of the doubled pawns. The open b-file may also contribute to its advantages. The trick then becomes the question of whether or not white will be able to hold the setup or not. From this we can deduce the rule that we should only give our opponent compact doubled pawns if we believe that we can induce them to advance in such a way as to capitalize one the pawn's dynamic weakness.

It seems that perhaps the color of the pawns decides which structures are weak or not. Nimzo goes on to look at black pawn structures with a7, c7, c6, and d6, or, h7, f7, f6, and e6, with a white pawn on e4 (first position) or d4. This setup has its advantages, mainly the lack of a white outpost on d5 or e5 (because of the doubled c6 or f6 pawn). The weakness is the a7 or h7 pawn. Nimzo shows that a potential plan for black (as in the second setup) can be ...f5, ...h5, ...Rg8 ...f4, ...h4. The defense on white's side could be a setup with f4, g3, h2, and Knights on f3 and g2 (to prevent h4). Nimzo shows a game where this is true on the queenside, and he believes that this setup for white is enough for a solid position, but perhaps not a win. A tricky part of this setup for black is timing: when to turn the double pawn compact structure into an offensive weapon? In the case of pawns on f7, f6, and e6 (white pawn on d4), Nimzo recommends setting up a structure first like pawns on a7, b6, c6 (keeping the d5 square in check), Nd7, Bb7, Qd7, and 0-0-0 before going with the ...f5 push. I suppose that the main reason for this is that giving up control of the e5 square too early can give white too many possibilities to take control of the game.

Another question comes up, and that is in regards to the possibility of playing ...e5 (or with pawns on c7, c5, ad d6, playing ...d5). While we have already seen that this structure is somewhat solid, the weakness is the gaping hole on c5/f5. In the case of c5, white can play Na4, Be3, and Qa5, eventually playing Bc5 and taking control of this big weakness (game no. 12).

I suppose the moral these stories is that with doubled pawns, the possessor of such pawns must worry about restraining his opponent's center pawn as well as setting up the right structure and eventually using his doubled c or f5 pawn as a means of attack (along with the rook on the open file and the combined advanced of the a or h pawn).

part two: restraint

I am now realizing that the chapters in My System are not detailed enough to fully cover the address that they address, for to do so they would have to be at least a hundred pages each! The chapters serve as an excellent introduction to the ideas which they discuss. The idea of doubled pawns and their strengths and weaknesses and how to use and exploit these is very interesting and instructive, and I feel that having studied it helps me to look for these motifs in my games and expand upon the principles and techniques that Nimzowitsch presents.

I also have a suspicion that without applying these ideas in game play (whether it be over the board against an opponent, online slow games, or carefully following games from a book and trying to identify the correct moves and ideas), the ideas will not become habits and with time will be forgotten. So, applying the principles serves two purposes: 1. To give the play an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding and application of the principles themselves 2. To convert the acquaintance with the principles to a habitual awareness. I had been worried (and rightfully so) about my lack of opportunities to play competitive chess. There are not many chess tournaments in Utah, and to travel to Las Vegas or California is very expensive. My decision to play on ICC was a good one, and as long as I stay disciplined and focused I believe that ICC will solve the problem of too little play and help me apply the things that I am learning from Nimzowitsch.

Having studied Nimzowitsch's earlier discussions of restraint (namely those that come up in the Phillidor defense and other similar setups), I realize that it could be said that there are two forms of restraint: direct and indirect. Direct restraint is the type that we have already discussed (i.e. white pawn on e4, black pawns on c7, d6, f7, black knight on d7, rook on e8, bishop on f8), where by direct force we restrain the e pawn from advancing by simply overpowering the e5 square. The indirect form of restraint is where we technically allow the pawn to advance, but we position our pieces in such a way that if the restrained pawn were to advance our pieces would benefit from newfound activity. A crude example would be: white pawn e4, black pawn c7, d6, and instead of building up on the e5 square, we put rooks on the d file, so that if the e pawn were to advance, we could open the e file and thus enjoy this new advantage. Sometimes indirect restraint and be just as forceful as direct restraint. Nimzowitsch shows a game where he indirectly restrains White's g pawn push by pointing his queen and bishop (by means of Qd7 and Be6) at the f5 square, so that if g5 were to be pushed, black could respond with ...g6 (kicking White's knight out of g5) and then ...f5. In this case, the pawn push would be the advantage to be enjoyed if white were to move his restrained pawn forward.

This type of indirect restraint is most commonly practiced by Rooks. Nimzowitsch gives a brief and effective description of the maneuver: "The 'mysterious' Rook move, places our Rook on a closed file, which can only be opened by the enemy himself (and if he does not our Rook is left standing there with nothing to do). Such a move must never be played, except consciously and with the intention of sacrificing some of the Rook's effective strength. This sacrifice is made in order to prevent an enemy freeing maneuver, or at any rate to render it difficult."

I believe that for me, the first important step to be taken in order to effectively practice indirect restraint is an awareness of my opponent's potential freeing moves. As I looked at the games Nimzowitsch gave as illustrations of these ideas, I realized that while I could recognize the application of indirect restraint, I was having a hard time recognizing the need for such restraint because I was unaware of the candidate freeing moves in each position. Thus, as well as looking to the center for play (from the earlier chapter where I resolved that I should develop the habit of first looking to the center for plans of action, but not ruling out the wings either), I should also be deliberately conscious of my opponent's (as well as mine) potential freeing moves. With this awareness I will be able to practice both direct and indirect restraint.

Another important point is made in this chapter, and that is a warning against over-rating some "pseudo freeing moves." Basically, a freeing move aways has a grain of salt to it, and sometimes need not be prevented at all. This is especially true when you have a large advantage in tempi and may be able to benefit greatly from a freeing move executed by your opponent (even if it frees up your opponent's position and offers him greater mobility, your lead in tempo and/or development may be able to carry the day). This is especially true for positions with pawn structures similar to: white c5, d5, e4, black c7, d6, e5. In these positions black can play ...f5, a move which is very often a good one. If black is seriously behind in development, however, this breakthrough could be just what white needs to win, and thus white may not need to concern himself yet with restraining the ...f5 push.

The germcell of restraint consists of the basic aspects of a position that make direct restraint possible. "It follows that we must look for the germcell of restraint action in an open file combined with a two-fold possibility of setting up a blockade." Nimzowitsch is saying that in order to directly restrain, for example, two connected and mobile pawns, we should have at least one open file against at least one of these pawns, as well as the possibility of setting up two-fold blockade as soon as one of the pawns advances. This is the proper situation for direct restraint, and thus constitutes the "germcell of restraint action against a pawn majority." Along with a numerical pawn majority, there also exists a qualitative majority, which means that the pawns are farther advanced and void of any other weaknesses.

Restraint against the mobile center pawn: This motif follows the formula, "first restrain, next blockade, lastly destroy." Restraint of the mobile center pawn is the idea in the Phillidor defense where black plays an early ...exd. This will be followed up by placing the Knight on d7, Rook on e8, keeping the pawn on d6, putting the Bishop on f8, and perhaps even playing ...f6. The pawn of f6 illustrates what is called the "sawing position", since it is as if it saws the White e-pawn. "The sequence of events in a maneuver directed against a mobile center is usually: (1) the passive "sawing position, then (2) the more aggressive hindering action of a Rook exerting pressure on it, (3) making backward or isolated a once mobile center pawn, (4) mechanical stopping of the same by a blockading piece, (5) the winning of the pawn."

Step 3 is of special interest, because it often requires various different lines to carry out. The final arrangement can often have a Knight on c5, thus attack the e4 pawn. Nimzowitsch shows a game with white pawns on a2, b3, and c5, which black pawns on a6, b5, and c6 (pushing the b-pawn in these setups can also be a good plan because it allows for the exchange of White's c pawn, which if Black's c pawn is on c6 -- which is often the case in the Phillidor -- White's c pawn makes blacks d pawn backward. In this setup, black played ...b4! and then transfered his Knight to c5, as if it was part of the pawn chain, and it was in fact part of the pawn chain. It could not be attacked by a pawn, and his counter-part pawn on b4 would be hard to attack for White.

The fight against a qualitative majority is very common in positions where black has a Knight on c5 or f5 (or White with a knight on c4 or f4). The basic setup is: white: pawns a2, b2, c4, d5 black: pawns a5, b6, c7, knight c5. White white plays b3, and then a3 (to play b4 and kick the Knight out), black can play ...a4, and after b4, ...Nb3, which according to Nimzowitsch, is normally enough compensation. This general strategy is applicable on both wings.

Sometimes it is impossible to permanently restraint a qualitative majority, but it can often be advantageous to restrain it for as long as possible in order to create time for other operations. A game is shown where White, with a pawn on f4, plans a h3 and g4 push. Black prevents this advance long enough to vacate his King out of the Kingside.

Study notes to the chess book, My System, by Aron Nimzowitsch

2009-05-08T10:05:00.003-07:00

Chapter 10 -- Positional Play and the Center, continued

Since the tournament I have taken several days off from studying and have been playing online. I have won most of my games, and feel that my previous study is bolstering my play quite a bit. Chess is less automatic and bland, and each move is more colorful to me now. I have been more able to see the beauty of small nuances and quite finesse. I have played about 10 standard games online, and lost only one to a player rated around 2200. He clearly outplayed me, and I felt satisfied with the game. Most of my other games have been won by hard work and eventual mistakes by my opponents.

I re-engaged in study today. Yesterday I felt myself starting to slip a little bit due to too much play. I was starting to feel the urge to play automatically rather than pondering over all aspects of the position. I can see that this has affected my study as well, and a careful balance between study and play needs to be kept.

In this section of the chapter, Nimzo is discussing the center. The center can be an abstract concept because since it is mentioned so often by so many teachers, novices like myself can often think that we already understand it. Nimzo shows several examples of games where one side neglected to focus play on the center, and where the other side had possibilities of taking advantage of this. One of the examples seemed almost bizarre to me, which is a sign of how much I should try to integrate these principles into my play. The position was, White: pawns a2, b2, c2, f2, g2, h2, Rooks a1, f1, Knights b1, c3, King g1 Black: pawns a7, b7, d6, f7, g7, h7, Rooks a8, h8, Knight c6, Bishop c8, King e8. Here, Nimzo shows that the novice like idea of 1.Re1+ Be6 2.Ng5 is wrong on principle because it does not focus on the center, and thus actually leads to a fine game for black. He said that the correct line of play is 1.Nc3 with the idea of 2.Nb5 3.Nd4, with centralization. This example is great because it shows how the center must be the natural place to operate, and the wings should be considered the exception. I often find myself muddled with ideas, trying to sort through different ideas and lines. Looking first at the center can give me greater clarity and the correct plans can be easier to discover.

Other examples of play in the center are in the opening where one side makes a move that has no bearing on the center (i.e. white plays f4-f5, or sometimes moves like ...a6 don't affect the center, etc.). Common ways of immediately attacking the center (especially in king pawn games) are Bb5/Bb4 (pinning the c3/c6 knight) and c3 with d4/c6 with d5 (often preceded by the knight moving to d5/d4). I am learning that I must keep a close eye on the center in all phases of the game, and with each step in the opening, to look for opportunities to bring the fight to the center. Nimzo shows a game between two Grand Masters where in the opening the center is neglected repeatedly, and both sides miss several opportunities to capitalize on this. This comes because of distracted play on the wings, whereas overprotection of the center is ignored. These principles do not mean that one should restrict play to the center, but I feel safe saying that one should always look first to the center, and resort to the wings only when such course is absolutely essential.

To finish the chapter on the center, Nimzo gives several illustrative examples of where piece play in the center (especially when one's rook has control of an open central file) will normally render your opponent's flank attack meaningless. The lesson I take from this is that the center should be the first place of operations, and when my pieces are centrally positioned, diversions on the wings (as Nimzo calls them) will come about naturally. The rule is that the proper response to play on the wing is play in the center.

The final portion of the chapter is an article that Nimzo wrote on the surrender of the center. This happens in variations like 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d6 3. d4 exd -- black has no centrally placed pawns, whereas white has one. It seems that in olden days it was believed that black had surrendered the center and white had center control because of his e4 pawn. Nimzo teaches that influence/control of the center does not necessarily mean the presence of your pawn in the center, but it can also mean mere influence or pressure on the center. He talks about restraint of white's center pawn and pressure along the e file. Thus, when one "surrenders the center", he is also opening up a file to the center, and if used properly, can enjoy an equal share of the center. This goes along nicely with Nimzo's idea of restraint, and is one of my favorite ideas that I have learned from Nimzo so far.

Reflections On Last Weekend's Chess Tournament

2009-05-08T10:05:00.001-07:00

April 20th --

My first two games were against much lower rated players, and ended up being very difficult games to win. My third game was against a 1900 rated player, and out of the opening I was pleased with my position. As I built up pressure, my opponent gave me a free piece. A piece up, I continued to apply pressure, but began to become a little lazy and tried to induce exchanges without too much consideration. I made two such moves in a row and the game suddenly became a draw due to perpetual check! The draw was clear and my opponent offered a draw but I declined, counting on the possibility of a mistake. My opponent made the mistake and I was able to retain my extra pieces with an assumed winning position. I played my next move rather quickly, thinking that the continuation had to offer forced checkmate, and after two more moves I realized that I wasn't sure if I could stop perpetual check again! The game ended up in a draw. It seems that without fail, in every chess tournament I go to, I am reminded of the fact that chess really comes down to a fight, and that iron nerves and determined persistence and stamina are required. It is a lot like a wrestling match where the hardest worker may end up being the winner in the end.

There was a total of six games in the tournament. I was able to identify two important parts of my game that I need to work on:

1. I have been studying an average of two hours a day. My study has consisted of combinations and Nimzo's My System. I felt confident in my tactical ability and was happy to be conscious of Nimzo's positional elements during my games. As the tournament continued, however, I realized that I was having trouble creating long term plans. I was finding it difficult to play beyond the move at hand. I think that too much study without enough play made my thought process too "academic" or theoretical.

2. My emotions. were a great hindrance to me, especially later on in the tournament. In my fourth game I had negative feelings for my opponent, which feelings seemed to resurface in my last game. I seemed to be detached from the positions, and the creative flow was somewhat clogged up. In my last game, after I found myself in a tough position, I tried to draw but my opponent played the line to avoid repetition. When this happened, my expectations of losing were confirmed. It was the next day when I realized that in the very position where I had given up all hope I was actually winning! My negative emotions for myself (and thus for my opponent as well) seemed to be clouding my mind.

These are two weaknesses which this tournament highlighted. I think part of the problem may be an unbalance between study and play. Also, I have long since been aware that my emotions have been a weakness of mine, and up to now my way of coping with them is to avoid playing chess in any setting other than a formal tournament. I have done so because when I play casually or on ICC I often become complacent and frustrated with myself, and my play rapidly deteriorates. I have decided that hiding from the problem isn't the solution. I have purchased an ICC account now and will play a few games a week. I may study for an hour one day, and then play a game next day, etc. I also feel that bringing a stronger sense of balance to my life will help my emotions be a constructive asset rather than a destructive liability. It will require discipline on my part, but I feel that carefully playing more will help solidify what I study and keep the theory that I study from becoming abstract and detached from reality.

Study notes to the chess book, My System, by Aron Nimzowitsch

2009-05-08T10:04:00.002-07:00

Chapter 10 -- Positional Play and the Center

I remember my younger years where I would spend anywhere from two to five hours a day looking over chess games. I wanted to become a good chess player for the sake of being a good chess player, and I figured that the more time I spent in front of a chess board the faster this would happen. Not only was my motivation incorrect (for "good" is an abstract idea that can only be defined in relation to other people), but I was also wrong about my assumption that gain would naturally be associated with the pain of hours of study.

The problem was that I was not studying chess -- I was just looking at it. I would review and memorize hundreds of games (I did so for each and every game from Bronstein's classic, International Zürich Chess Tournament 1953). According to my calculations, since such a task was difficult and painful, it must also be rewarding. I often became frustrated when I would lose to other casual players. Inside my head I thought, "I am actually better than this guy, I have studied so much more than him, and as such, I am above him." When I would lose I would enter into a fit of anger and frustration and decide the factors which had led to my loss were outside of my control: "I am so much better than him, but I just blundered! It's not my fault!", or "That guy has no idea what he was doing... I just let him get lucky."

I find it funny that most of my progress in chess has merely been the result of me maturing emotionally. I have learned the importance of taking responsibility for my circumstances, and I have also recognized the truth that "whatever should be already is." When I blunder, I blundered because that is what I should have done -- according to my level of focus and discipline, the happening was a natural result of the causes over which I am in control. These realizations alone have caused me to progress significantly in chess.

I don't think it is until now that I am actually starting to benefit from studying like I had before imagined. As I study Nimzo and his illustrated games, I realize that progress is not linear, and that it consists of steps. I do not absorb chess ability by simply looking at games. Rather, I can start out with a question or a topic which I hope to see applied. As I study games and notes, I can try to learn to recognize this topic or concept, and thus become able to detect it more easily. I can Ask how this interfaces with other concepts with which I am familiar. If I review positions, moves, or games without being conscious of my purpose, then nothing but wasted time will be the result. It would seem that progress is a series of "aha!" moments, and until the moment is reached, no progress has been attained (all of that memorizing did give me good calculation abilities, however).

Nimzo's detail of positional play is meant to be the application of the elements which he has already discussed. He believes that a firm grasp of these fundamental elements are necessary before one can start to tackle the problem of positional play. He lays out the "toxic weeds which choke a proper understanding of positional play" as: 1. The obsession to be forever doing something 2. The overrating of the principle of the accumulation of small advantages. In his own words, "Positional moves as I conceive them, are in general neither threatening nor defensive ones, but rather moves designed to give our position security in the wider sense, and to this end it is necessary for our pieces to establish contact with the enemy's strategically important points or our own." He shows how the weak player can only conceive of attacking or defending moves, and thus will only plan on such moves during his calculations. Nimzo holds that positional play is a matter of following principle in a way to strengthen the integrity of one's position as a whole.

Nimzo doesn't discount the concept of accumulating small advantages, but says that it is entirely subordinate to the principle of safeguarding key points. Two important advantages to such a strategy are discussed: 1. Safeguarding and overprotecting key points will normally limit your opponent's possibilities 2. The pieces used to overprotect a key point will normally be rewarded by enhanced activity from their posts. Overprotecting a key point with pieces is a good way to ensure that these pieces will be active participants in the game. This normally applies to strong points, for if the pieces are engaged in the protection of a weak point, they very well may end up becoming passive defenders (see section on Elements of Endgame Play).

"...neither attack nor defense is, in my opinion, a matter properly pertaining to positional play, which is instead an energetic and systematic application of prophylactic measures."

Study notes to the chess book, My System, by Aron Nimzowitsch

2009-05-08T10:04:00.001-07:00

Chapter 9 -- The Pawn Chain

I think that some while ago I had read this chapter on the pawn chain, and I was therefore surprised to discover how little I knew about it. Nimzo defines the pawn chain as the series of white and black pawns that are linked together in a way such that none of them can moved forward. An example of this is when white has pawns on d4 and e5, and black has pawns on e6 and d5. The base of black's pawn chain would be e6 (not f7, because f7 is lacking a white counterpart to actually be part of the black & white chain).

Nimzo declares that the real character of a pawn chain is that of a blockade, and that the essential question is that of mobility and freedom. In the above example of a pawn chain, Nimzo says that the e6 pawn can become the target because it is the base of the pawn chain. This is done by playing f2-f4-f5, and exchanging on e6 (f5-f6 is also another idea) and then attacking e6 using the principles discussed in the chapters on open files and enveloping attacks.

The fact that the pawn chain really comes down to a blockade problem is significant. Operations against the enemy's portion of the pawn change really come down to freeing operations. These are carried out by attacking the base of the enemy's portion of the pawn chain, and when this is done the base will have changed to another pawn, and the process is repeated.

Study notes to the chess book, My System, by Aron Nimzowitsch

2009-05-08T10:03:00.002-07:00

Chapter 8 -- Discovered Check

Discovered check is more tactical than it is position, and I actually skipped this chapter. I may come back to it later.

Study notes to the chess book, My System, by Aron Nimzowitsch

2009-05-08T10:03:00.001-07:00

Chapter 7 -- The Pin

Nimzo states that for him, the pin is not just a short tactical motif, but rather an important strategical element of the game.

1. Play against a pinned piece

While a pinned piece is normally immobile, its immobility should be made as certain as possible. The attack on the pinned piece can then proceed by building up pressure against, and attempting to eliminate or shut out the defenders (much like the battle against a blockaded point). Another similarity to the siege on a blockade is the idea of exchanging the pinned piece for another which may be more pinned (fully pinned as opposed to half pinned). This idea often utilized the exchange sacrifice.

2. The problem of unpinning

(a) The Question --
The question refers to the immediate challenge of the pinning piece. This most often occurs when a bishop pins a knight to a queen or king. If a bishop on g5 is pinning the knight on f6, forcing the question would mean playing 1...h6 2. Bh4 g5. Thus, the pin would be broken. Forcing the question can be good if the bishop who now is on g3 will bite on the center pawns (granite) without activity, and when the center seems that it will not be opened by the bishop's fellow pawns. If, however, the center can be broken open, the bishop will often become a powerful piece. Forcing the question also weakens the kingside (in this example) and may thus invite attacking operations against the king. It is often true that a compact and immobile center will make for a tenable defensive of the kingside, so when deciding whether or not to force the question, the liquidity of the center is the most important variable.

(b) Ignoring the threat --
The threat that we are speaking of is often a threat to disorganize the pawns by attacking the pinned piece twice so that a pawn must recapture. Ignoring this threat means ignoring the potential disadvantages of such disorganized pawns. This normally tenable when you expect to be able to follow up with play in the center, for play in the center is the correct defensive to an attack on one of your wings (which your weak pawns on the wing may very well invite).

(c) Bringing up the reserves in order to effect the unpinning by peaceful means --
This usually means blocking the pin (with a move like Be7) or bringing a knight to g6 so that after ...h6, the bishop does not have the h4 square. This motif can of course be transposed to many positions.

(d) Maneuvering while retaining the possibilities of utilizing (a), (b), and (c). I suppose that this means that one will continue play, keeping all of these three options available, and choosing one of them when the opportune moment presents itself. Nimzo says that this strategy is difficult and makes great demands on our technical skill. He shows a game he played against Capablanca where Capa successfully maneuvered until the right moment came to break the pin, and ended up in a better endgame. Capablanca, however, seems to make things look easier than they really are.

Study notes to the chess book, My System, by Aron Nimzowitsch

2009-05-08T10:02:00.001-07:00

Chapter 6 -- The Elements of Endgame Strategy

This chapter dealt with the actual elements of which endgame strategy consists. The elements are:

1. Centralization

Centralization is most commonly important for the King (in endgames) but applies to all of the pieces in general. The centralization of the queen is a substantial advantage because of her powerful scope. The centralized king must often utilize shields or bridges (i.e. Lucena position) to retain his central advantage. Most pieces in general should strive for centralized positions. The advantage of a centralized placement is that the piece may be transferred to either wing with ease. Thus, the original advantage (centralization) is only an advantage in that it provides for a convenient exchange for another advantage as soon as the opportune moment presents it self.

2. Active/Aggressive vs Passive/Defensive pieces

This principle applies most heavily to rooks. A passive/defensive rook is one whose mobility is limited by his duty to protect his fellow pawns. As Nimzo puts it, "The weakness of the defending Rook lies in its deficient elasticity in the direction of the other wing, and further, in this too, that the enemy King wins greater maneuvering freedom (as a rule he is afraid of Rooks, but when the cat's away, etc!)."

When/how is a rook to be considered active or passive? The general rule is that the rook should be behind the passed pawn (regardless of whose it is). If the rook is behind the passed pawn, it is likely that it will be an active/attacking Rook. This rule of course varies greatly, and sometimes flank attacks are to be preferred, especially when the rook also cuts off the king or occupies the 7th rank.

These principles apply to the other pieces, but not as much. The weakness of the knight as a defensive piece can be highlighted by the fact that as soon as it moves it will not longer be defending the same point (this is not true for other pieces). Thus, a knight can often fall prey to the zugzwang motif. The bishop, on the other hand, can move and still defend the same point, and thus is rarely caught in this same snare (but this does not mean that a Bishop can't find itself classified as a passive or defensive one!). The awareness of these ideas can help make endgame planning much clearer.

3. Combined advance/play

"Combined paly forms 80 per cent of the whole of endgame technique, and the details which we have treated, such as centralization, bridge building, the shelter, hole stopping, are all subordinate to one end, combined play." Combined play could be illustrated as the grouping of pieces around a pawn so that it forms a self-sustaining pass, and the gradual advance of that mass. Nimzo calls this centralization as well, and thus shows that centralization (thus defined) can take place on the wing, as long as it is around a pawn.

4. Utilization/Materialization of files

"...operations in a file are in the middlegame active, in the endgame meditative, even contemplative." This goes along with the Aggressive rook vs the defensive rook. In the middlegame a file should be utilized as soon as possible by an invasion into the 7th or 8th ranks, followed by possible enveloping attacks or marauding expeditions. In the endgame, however, the mere control of a file will have such influence that the advantages will present themselves. "The moral application of this for the student may be thus formulated. If in the endgame a file is in your permanent possession, do not worry about an eventual breakthrough point, this will come of itself, almost without any assistance on your part."

Study notes to the chess book, My System, by Aron Nimzowitsch

2009-05-08T10:01:00.002-07:00

Chapter 5 -- Exchanging

This was a pretty short chapter. I had already recognized that aimless exchanges plagued most novices (myself included). This chapter helped me recognize that most exchanges should be justified with a specific objective or goal in sight. Sometimes an exchange is justified in order to remove a defender (Nimzo has a pretty broad definition of a defender). Other times it is the initiation or part of a strategic or tactical continuation. In both of these case, the end objective of the exchange must be clearly identified.

Another simpler exchange is the exchange for the sake of tempo. Sometimes it is better to exchange rather than lose a tempo by retreating. Sometimes exchanging can allow you to reach certain ends without having to spend tempo. Also, in the opening it can make sense to exchange a piece for an enemy piece that has already moved several times, or when you will recapture the exchanged piece by making a developmental move.

Study notes to the chess book, My System, by Aron Nimzowitsch

2009-05-08T10:01:00.001-07:00

Chapter 4 -- The Passed Pawn

Nimzo starts by demonstrating the fact that any uncompromised pawn majority should be able to create a passed pawn. A pawn majority can represent potential energy that can eventually be put into motion. Nimzo shows that the advantage of a passed pawn is its enhanced ability to march forward.

The disadvantage of a passed pawn is that it can often be blockaded. Nimzo shows that passed pawns must be blockaded, and that doing so normally offers other advantages to the blockading side. Targeting the square in front of the pawn is not enough -- we must securely blockade it by physically putting a piece on that square. This is because when a pawn is blockaded it will normally hamper the mobility its fellow pieces, whereas if its expansion is met with the possibility of capture (if there is no piece on next square but this square is attacked my many enemy pieces) then the pawn can sacrifice itself to open up mobility for its fellow pieces. Nimzo says that the passed pawn is a dangerous criminal that must be kept under lock and key, and that mere police surveillance is not enough. The next reason for blockading a passed pawn is that the blockading piece will normally enjoy extra benefits, namely that it is immune from frontal attacks because it can use the enemy pawn as a shield. Nimzo goes on to discuss some of the details of blockading, specifically the elasticity of the blockading piece (the piece's ability to take a short leave but promptly return to its post), the strength of the blockade (how many pieces exert influence on the blockading square), and the possibility of trading blockading pieces. Nimzo says that while all of these are important, the player should focus on the mere strength of the blockade (pointing as many pieces as possible at the blockade) and that elasticity and flexibility will naturally result.

In order to attack a blockade, one key strategy is to induce your opponent to replace his ideal blockader with a another one. This can be done by making an exchange on the blockaded square, thus forcing your opponent to recapture with a piece that is not well-suited as a blockader. It can also be done by driving away the blockading piece, but this possibility is somewhat rare.

I am impressed with Nimzo's theory of the enveloping attack. Nimzo states that "The theory of the opposition is in its want of clarity only to be described as obscure, whereas the truth is so clear. The attacking King fights to get into the lead, his opponent strives to prevent this with the aid of the 'reserve blockade point.'" Nimzo shows that the principle of opposition is incomplete and inferior to the principle of the enveloping attack, and it is the king's ability to execute an enveloping attack that will determine his progress.

Nimzo goes on to explore more detail regarding the passed pawn themselves. The ideal situation for passed pawns are to be accompanied by another passed pawn on the same rank. This is ideal, but since they must advance, as soon as one pawn advances the ideal is temporarily lost (since they are no longer on the same rank and can thus be blockaded). Careful finesse is thus required to ensure that the pawns can avoid the potential of being blockaded and return to their ideal position as soon as possible. Other advantages that passed pawns may enjoy are being protected by a fellow pawn and being an outside passed pawn. The former advantage makes the passed pawn immune from the enemy king, for if the enemy king were to attack the passed pawn's defender, the passed pawn could quite possibly make a dash for the queening square (this is especially relevant when there are only kings and pawns on the board). The outside passed pawn is also an interesting advantage. When the endgame comes down to just kings and pawns, the further away from the center a passed pawn is generally means that at the opportune moment it can march forth as a decoy. The enemy king will be forced to displace itself from the center. If both sides enjoy this advantage of having an outside passed pawn, the side whose pawn is furthest from the center generally has the winning chances (if both kings are centralized and other aspects of the position are relatively equal).

An important question regarding the passed pawn is: When should it advance? The passed pawn has some special dynamics to it, but it also suffers from some unique weaknesses, and these weaknesses often become more obvious with each advance the pawn makes. What are the justifications of advancing a passed pawn? After all, the pawn's ability to advance is what gives it potential venom, and thus it is important to understand all of the motives of advancing the pawn.
1. When the advance will help protect/attack important points. This is often true for points deeper into enemy territory. Also, when the passed pawn is able to get closer to the queening square without increased probability of being blockaded or attacked
2. When the advance of the pawn clears the way for his fellow pieces or even his own monarch.
3. When the advance serves as a decoy, normally forcing the enemy king to decentralize himself.

The art of handling a passed pawn (for both sides) is quite intriguing. It seems that the following motives for advancing a passed pawn are already placed in order of importance.

The games that accompany this chapter deal with successful blockading missions. These games illustrate Nimzo's arguments for his theory that blockading passed pawns is an essential endeavor (for the advantages it offers as well as the suppression of the other side's potential advantages and piece play).

Study notes to the chess book, My System, by Aron Nimzowitsch

2009-05-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

Chapters 2 & 3 -- Open Files, Outposts, and the 7th and 8th Ranks

Before I makes notes specific to the material in both of these chapters, I want to reinforce my realization of the true nature of relative advantages. An advantage is generally only an advantage in that it provides for the eventual creation of new advantages. The creation of these new advantages is often done by forfeiting the original advantage. It would seem that while entering into a technical winning endgame is the final goal, the conversion of one advantage into another is a pattern that must be repeated many times before reaching this goal. This applies to open files and the 7th and 8th ranks.

Nimzo defines an open file as one in which you have no pawns. A rook my also utilize a file by transporting itself in front of one of your pawns. Outposts are squares on an open file and are generally protected by a pawn as well. An outpost can be converted into another advantage when the piece (like a knight) is chased from the outpost by an enemy pawn advance, an advance which will most likely create a new weakness or target of attack in the enemy camp. Also, if your outposted knight is exchanged, it is possible to re-capture with a pawn, thus yielding a new open file. Nimzo gives the general rule that outposts in the center (the c, d, e, and f files) should be occupied by a minor piece, while outposts on the edges (the a, b, g, and h files) should generally be occupied by heavy pieces (a rook or a queen). These outposts offer the immediate advantage of cramping your opponents game and giving your outposted piece a strong say in the events of the game, and the eventual conversion of the outpost will provide new advantages. It seems that chess is a game that flows, and the strong player will be able to influence the flow of conversion so that he will obtain the most favorable advantages. I suppose that this is different from my tendency (and that of most amateurs) to try to force the conversion of an advantage into an immediate win. If a player has a strong grip on the flow of the game, then there is no need to force issues, and if his opponent attempts to do so, the flow will dictate who will emerge triumphant, and thus he who indisputably controls the flow of the game need not fear a forced resolution.

Nimzo teaches that a common and ideal conversion of the possession and/or control of an open file is the eventual invasion into the 7th and/or 8th ranks. While this is not necessarily always true, it is such a common pattern in converting the file into another advantage that it could be considered a rule of the open file. Possession of the 7th and/or 8th files generally yield their fruits by a conversion into an enveloping attack or a straightforward "marauding attack" with the subsequent gain of material. When the possession of the 7th and 8th ranks is not immediately obtainable, open files and/or control of ranks can be used to target a specific point or pawn, where the possession of such a point will signal the conversion of the one advantage into another (if the target was a pawn, then the result will normally be the gain of the pawn. If the target was a point, then other advantages must have been gained to justify that point as a proper target of attack).

Another way that an open file can be utilized for a rook is to give the rook newfound mobility by lifting it up several ranks so that it may utilize other files along its new rank. An example is to move the rook from h1 to f1 then to f4 and eventually to a4, and thus finding power on the a file which had before been closed to the rook by a pawn on a2.

I believe that the mindset of fighting for advantages not to bring an immediate resolution to the game, but to provide for opportunities to convert these advantages into new ones, is absolutely necessarily in order to understand positional play. I think that this is often overlooked by the over-generalization of advantages. When one breaks down ideas into their most fundamental concepts, it becomes clear how one concept leads to another, and that it is normally ideal to follow them in proper order.

Study notes to the chess book, My System, by Aron Nimzowitsch

2009-04-16T14:54:00.000-07:00

Chapter 1 -- Development and the pawn center

The chapter starts off by explaining the basic ideas of development. Getting the pieces out should be the first objective. I then learned how pawns must play a role in this, for if you don't use center pawns as part of your development, the opposing side's pawns can push my pieces around . Thus this was the main object of the center and control of the center: to limit pawn mobility and to not lose tempos by having your pieces chased by your opponent's pawns. It is interesting how the very basic ideas of tempo and getting your pieces out are the fundamental reasons that control of the center is important. While this chapter is focusing on the center, Nimzo began by explaining the more fundamental ideas, so that the importance of the center could eventually be clear.

In the last part of the chapter, Nimzo discusses on how to deal with an enemy pawn in the center. The pawn is a threat in that it can advance at any time. He says that there are two courses of action: 1. Execute it by exchange or 2. Limit its mobility by restraint. Exchanging it seems to be ideal when your position will enjoy an advantage in development after the exchange. While this is an advantage, it is only such if I know how to use my development to execute further strategical plans. Extra development in and of itself is not an advantage, but is an opportunity to create advantages by correct play. I realize that I must understand this, and I also realize that in the past I haven't understood this, for whenever I found myself leading in development I had thought that I had a natural advantage and that the win would produce itself automatically. These positions usually ended up equal and I generally became frustrated.

The second course of action against a center pawn who has the potential to advance is to restrain it. I like this strategy, and it normally involves attacking the square in front of the pawn with another pawn, a rook, and a knight. A critical thing to note is that once this restrain is ideally setup, that it limits your opponent's ability to execute plans (mainly when the restrained pawn is a center pawn, otherwise the restraint could be a mute point). In game 2 in the appendix there is a very nice game where Nimzo restrains the white e4 pawn. The interesting thing is that like development, restraint is a relative advantage in that it allows a player to execute further strategies. In this game, because Nimzo's position was cramped, he exchanged a piece prior to setting up the restraint, and then slowly prepared an f5 push. After the f5 push was executed, the position was equal with solid drawing expectations for Nimzo. Nimzo, however, tried to win and ended up losing because his pawn majority on the queenside became frozen while white's kingside pawn majority was potentially mobile. This difference allowed white to win, which is another very powerful idea.

I have learned that development and restraint are tools, and not ends in and of themselves. For me this is a monumental realization and I believe it will allow me to be more flexible in my play and better utilize these principles.

Reflections from the June 2008 National Open

2009-03-27T15:12:00.000-07:00

This was written shortly after the June 2008 National Open

As I watched an 11 yr old chess master, I asked, "what is it that these artists have that other players don't?" As I thought upon this, I realized that it wasn't what they had, but what they didn't have. They had clarity, which was a result of not having obstacles. Progress is often a process of taking away and refining, not one of adding to and building. An obstacle to clarity is holding on to one point of view. If one constantly adapts new points of view, he will gain clarity. I see this in chess because once a player thinks that he knows what he is doing then his progress comes to an abrupt halt - he is holding on to one vantage point and his vision is obstructed. He can try to add knowledge and skill, but because he doesn't know that skill and understanding depend on one's ability to adopt new vantage points, he does not get any better.

A consumer sees the world as naturally bad and sees the government as a means to create the ideal world. A producer or one who loves light and freedom sees the world as naturally ideal and sees the government as only a force to stop unprincipled force. Likewise, many see themselves as depraved and weak beings, and they hope that through study and work they can better themselves. Some, however, see themselves as children of God and thus they also see themselves as gods, and they have faith that by study and work they will remove obstacles that block light and remembrance and clarity. I believe that I am a god, capable of talking with God my Father.

Watching that 11 year old who was rated almost 2400 taught me this. What does he not have that I do? He is a student of every position; he is a listener who observes truth as it is relayed to him through the rapid flow of vantage points. He studies and works for understanding. I on the other hand would approach each position intent on justifying my point of view, holding on to these obstacles to clarity.

Intelligence would thus be defined as pattern recognition, and as one is open to shifting vantage points he can observe and recognize the eternal principles in application in all vantage points. The more clarity one has, the easier it'll be to see the patterns of principle, and this person will be more and more powerful.

In my last chess tournament I played a 16 year old who was rated 2400. I think a young artist can help us pay more attention simply because he is young. These things could be learned from observing any artist, but the unusual youth makes us curious helps us decide to pay attention. A young age also demonstrates how it is not about accumulating experience and stuff, but more about letting yourself study and follow truth. In my game with the 16 year old, I got into a position where I had some potential advantages, and as the position developed, I insisted that my position was better. As I attempted to defend my point of view that I was in a better position, his knights artistically maneuvered along the kingside, poking and probing until my entire position collapsed. Like most weak players, I excused the loss to the idea that I had just made sloppy mistakes at the end of the game. Later on during the tournament I asked the 16 year old about the game and asked him about my advantages. he seemed to find it hard to talk but quickly explained how my potential for advantage disappeared as the position shifted. I realized that the point of view that I had been holding on to had severely obstructed my clarity.