Let's Be Present

Here I am again telling you the story of my newly found interest in the spiritual side of the human beings!

After I finished reading Many Lives, Many Masters by Dr. Brian Weiss, still kind of dizzied by the surprising story, another book came to my hands. This time it was The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Ekhart Tolle (funny I mentioned this to a colleague at work only to discover that he had also read the same book, several times!)

People not familiar with spirituality and non religious folks like me can be put off by Tolle's way of expressing himself. But if one looks beyond the form then I think this book indeed has value and actually many people consider it a great book.

I am among the most common human beings that have trouble being present in the Now. My mind too often fantasizes with the future. Also the past pops in, although much less. I've been observing myself since I started reading the book only to confirm how undisciplined my mind is, how much it apparently dislikes being fully in the Now. Tolle insists in his book the past and future are not real and that focusing on them only creates unhappiness. The present moment holds the key to liberation form our unhappiness. 

Tolle asks us to observe our thoughts and observe our emotions and be conscious of them; also he urges us to not identify with our minds. Tolle says "The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as your unobserved mind runs your life". 

The recipe Tolle gives us to free ourselves from the mind is to be present on the Now, to end the delusion of time, to escape from the trap of time. Furthermore, he tells us that present-moment awareness creates a gap in the stream of mind and in the past-future continuum and that true creativity can only come to this world through this gap. 

I personally find some of these concepts totally fascinating. For the time being, I keep on reminding myself to come back to the present whenever I realize my mind is drifting to the future or the past..I have no personal experience with the "gap" (yet)

My next read, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra reiterates the benefits of being present in the Now. It will be the subject of my next post.

All the Light we Cannot See

So many books have been written about World War II. I'm not particularly fond of books around war themes and yet, only in the last couple of years, I've probably read more than five novels that use WWII as the scenario for their plot (The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak  The Storyteller, by Jody Picoult; Winter of the World, by Ken Follett; Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, just to name a few).

All the Light we Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, is the title of the last novel I've read and its plot is also set during WWII. I agree with many people that has written reviews about this book that it is a beautiful novel. It is also terrible, and sad as all war books usually are.

In today's extremely interconnected world, in which data communications are ever present, for business and entertainment alike, it almost strikes odd to read a book in which the radio plays a central role in communicating people, for good as well as for bad.

If you are in the mood for a book set on WWII German occupied France this is an original story that you'll likely enjoy.

Thinking Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, summarizes the research that he has done over the past forty years; beginning with his work with Amos Tversky.

What Kahneman, through numerous experiments, comes to demonstrate, is that human beings are intuitive thinkers and that human intuition is imperfect. There’s a large part of the book dedicated to explain the many ways our thinking is biased and how humans make irrational choices.

I studied Economics in the early 80s. Although much of what I studied is buried is some rather inaccessible part of my brain, I still remember a couple of assumptions often at the core of much of what we were taught:  one was that “consumers are rational and make rational choices”, the other was the idea that ”consumers are risk averse”. I never felt quite comfortable with the first (this book proves that my intuition was at least correct that time)

Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel prize in Economics in 2002. Over the last recent decades his research has had a major influence in the area of Behavioral Economics. One key contribution is the demonstration that human beings do make choices that are not rational and this leads to real world results that significantly differ from theoretical predictions based on economics models.

Our “fast thinking” (system 1) is effortless, is an intuitive thinking and is actually the one that takes control most of the time. Our “slow thinking” (system 2) is the one we use to resolve complicated problems; it is effortful, requires attention and, interestingly,  happens to be slept most of the time and is “lazy”, often endorsing what comes from our intuitive selves (without realizing it). Our system 1 is, as Kahneman puts it “a machine for jumping to conclusions” even if there is very little evidence to sustain them and, consequently, our conclusions are sometimes wrong; especially when having to make choices in situations where there is a high degree of uncertainty.

Three interesting features of fast thinking are largely discussed in the book:

• People make decisions in a rather “narrow way”, focusing a lot on the immediate emotional reaction to an outcome rather than to long term consequences
• People are much more sensitive to potential losses than to potential gains, this tends to makes people unreasonably risk averse
• People tend to be optimistic and overconfident, and this leads people to take unreasonable risks

Thinking Fast and Slow is a long book, to read it takes time and patience. It is, I promise, a healthy exercise for our System 2. I found the time invested in it both enjoyable and instructive. 

If you’d rather read some serious review before trying the book itself there’s plenty available in the internet. Lastly, if you do not have much time but are ready to spend an hour having the author walking you through some of the main themes of the book here’s a video for you. Enjoy!