books from 2018

Booklist for 2018

Several, or a few, people have been asking me to just make a list of the books that I read recently.  I guess I have been proselytizing a bit too much.  These same people have said, my God, how did you do it? How did you utterly transform your life in just a few short months, and how did you add twenty pounds of muscle why simultaneously dropping to a BMI of 4.  Because I’m full of shit!  I don’t even know if that’s a good BMI, and my life is only partially transformed.  But, this much is true.  I am at peace most of the time. I got here because I have incredible friends and supportive family, and I listened more than I have ever been required.  And, I read, and applied lessons, and took notes, and talked, and debated, and argued, and advised, and lectured.  Point being—I didn’t any of this on my own.  So, if you want to read what I’ve been ranting about at various times this year, or if you read my blog posts and thought “what the hell is he talking about?” it may be herein, or it may be that I have no idea what I was talking about.

Learned Optimism—Martin Seligman.  If you had psych 101, he is the guy that did the learned helpless experiments with the dogs.  The dogs can’t predict when they are shocked, they can’t leave the situation, so they learn to be helpless and no longer try to leave the situation even when there is a clear exit.  Poor dogs, right?  What psych 101 did not tell you is that they reconditioned the dogs and they regained the lost capacity.  Seligman is later challenged by a colleague who argues that he is onto something much bigger, a theory of learned optimism. Yes, the research now supports that optimism can be learned, and there are certain techniques to enhance it.  He also wrote a book called The Optimistic Child.   Why you should read it?  Depression might be a preventable condition with proper guidance.  The diagnosis of depression is stunningly consistent with the descriptions of the behavior observed in learned helplessness conditions.

Why Buddhism is True—Richard Wright.  Evolutionary psychologist persuasively argues that certain aspects of the philosophy of Buddhism are true in the sense that there is scientific evidence to support them.  Mindfulness meditation has been demonstrated to be effective in regulating emotions and stress.  Cognitive psychology has revealed that there is a massive amount of illusion that is generated by the mind for specific purposes—namely to protect us.  But, this is a condition that the mind has been provided as an evolutionary adaptation that served a particular purpose at a specific point in time.  We needed to make decisions that would protect our offspring and to procure resources.  Emotions serve the purpose of helping us to evaluate threats in this area and respond accordingly.  We no longer live in conditions where our survival literally depended on these instincts.  If you were part of a hunter gatherer tribe and you offended people taking their possessions, they kicked you out of the group, and that was a death sentence.  Today if you offend the group, they say mean stuff on Facebook, and it hurts (because we have the same biology) but you still can go to the store and not starve.  I could go on and on about this book.  It connected a whole bunch of thoughts in ways I had never thought of.  It set me on my course for further study in Buddhism.

The Way of Zen—Alan Watts.  Absolutely, the best place to start if you have any interest in knowing more about Zen.  He traces the path out of Mahayana Buddhism through China, where it intermingled with Taoism to produce Zen.  Zen becomes an export to Japan where it takes its own distinct shape.

An Outline of Mahayana Buddhism—Beatrice Lane Suzuki.  Distinguishes the two main sects of early Buddhism, Hinayana and Mahayana, the small and large vehicles.  Mahayana was an expansion of the Buddhist teaching that places the mind at the center, with less emphasis on the strict interpretations of text and custom, to arrive at the essence of the teaching. This is not my area of expertise by any means, but it strikes me as similar to the gnostic tradition in Christianity.  The Mahayana tradition also dispels the critique that Buddhism is self-centered and not fundamentally concerned with the salvation of others.  The Mahayana tradition takes the position that no one is to enter final enlightenment (nirvana) without first ushering in all sentient beings.  It is fundamentally concerned with the suffering of all beings.

An Outline of Zen Buddhism—D. T. Suzuki.  Very similar to the Alan Watts book, though slightly more in depth treatment.  It’s very good, I just can’t think of anything at the moment to distinguish it from the other book.

Drive—Daniel Pink.  Related to my professional development and dissertation, but it is popular material and worth reading.  Pink traces the development of about 20 years of social psychology material on motivation, extrapolates from the work of Ryan and Deci, Carol Dweck, the guy that wrote Flow (I can’t spell his name) and various business leaders.  This is distilled into three core themes that Pink believes drive employee motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose.  Good luck finding a job that gives you all three.  Personal opinion.

Zen in the Art of Archery—I forget, some German guy.  I could now care less.  I remember reading the book and for the first 50 pages it was ok at best.  Then the last two chapters nailed it.  Yesterday a Jewish friend tells me that the guy was actually a Nazi.  And so off to Wikipedia.  And, yeah apparently you can spend years learning Zen and end up being a Nazi.  Not that this should be considered shortcoming of Zen, plenty of German Christians managed to reconcile their beliefs.  I actually don’t recommend this book.  It’s seventy some pages and really nowhere near as informative as the others.

Zen and the Birds of Appetite—Thomas Merton.  Read if you are burning to have a much deeper exploration of Zen and how it parallels and contrasts with Christianity.  Thomas Merton is that rare scholar who can almost effortlessly translate heavy theological concepts into something accessible.  This book entirely changed my understanding of the “fall of man” and the condition of “separateness” that results from knowledge.  The Buddhists hold that the separation of the world into objects, creates a dualism, that in turn creates all of our suffering.  There is a series of debates in the latter chapters that are a correspondence between Merton and Suzuki.

Mindset—Carol Dweck.  I am still reading it.  The first several chapters were revealing.  I have a ton of Carol Dweck’s work but have not read enough of it.  I started reading Mindset, just to have a more superficial grasp on her theory.  There is nothing terribly complicated here, it’s almost intuitive.  What is revealing is how pervasive it can be, and how it shapes behaviors that can remain entrenched for years.  I am still in the section on business leaders, but I can’t help but think of the lines in an earlier chapter—“I could have been…”  I spent forty years of my life with way too much of that mindset.

The Art of Loving—Erich Fromm.  The psychoanalyst that finally strikes the proper balance, in more ways than just the sexes.  It is dated, there are comments that could still be regarded as sexist, there is a painfully out of date comment on homosexuality.  But, there are arguments about how capitalism has shaped our present notions of love, that make it still relevant today, quite possibly even more relevant. There are painful takeaways. There is the recognition that so much of what we believe about love, is relative to our specific time and place, painfully removed from a much richer history, painfully underdeveloped and then spent or traded away as a commodity. Love is an art.  It is born of process, as in any art.  Like other mindsets we learn when it grows.  Where it is not growing, it is not love. Love and growth are iterative, and byproduct of each other.  If you don’t believe me look at your child’s picture from year to year.