Speaker 1: Your freedom doesn't do you much good if you don't
Speaker 1: also have some discipline and also have some technique, And
Speaker 1: your technique doesn't do you much good unless you also
Speaker 1: have some freedom. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time,
Speaker 1: great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.
Speaker 1: Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
Speaker 1: you think ring true. And yet for many of us,
Speaker 1: our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 1: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 1: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 1: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 1: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 1: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 1: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 1: the right direction, how they feed are good Wolf, thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Steven Nachmanovich.
Speaker 1: He performs and teaches internationally as an improvisational violinist and
Speaker 1: at the intersections of music, dance, theater, and multimedia arts.
Speaker 1: Stephen has presented master classes and workshops at Juilliard and
Speaker 1: many conservatories and Universities. Today, Stephen and Eric discuss his
Speaker 1: new book, The Art of Is, which is a philosophical
Speaker 1: meditation on living, living fully, living in the present. Hi Stephen,
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show. Hi Eric, it's a pleasure to
Speaker 1: be with you. I am happy to have you on
Speaker 1: you and I've been battling technical difficulties for the last
Speaker 1: close to thirty minutes here, but I think we are
Speaker 1: in good shape. Now. We're going to discuss your book,
Speaker 1: which is called The Art of Is, improvising as a
Speaker 1: way of life, which we have been doing here. But
Speaker 1: before we get into that, we're going to start like
Speaker 1: we always do, with the parable. There is a grandfather
Speaker 1: who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there
Speaker 1: are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle.
Speaker 1: One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
Speaker 1: and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 1: the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second,
Speaker 1: and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do well. The art of is
Speaker 1: is an exploration of the creative process, and especially the
Speaker 1: social dimensions of the creative process. And creativity just sounds
Speaker 1: absolutely wonderful, and people think we need more of it,
Speaker 1: and to be able to improvise sounds wonderful. But there
Speaker 1: have been through out history, and very recently in our
Speaker 1: own time, people who are skilled at improvisation, who are demogogues,
Speaker 1: who are operating from a point of view of greed, hate,
Speaker 1: and delusion, and who may have the skills to sway
Speaker 1: millions of people. So creativity is absolutely worthless without an
Speaker 1: ethical foundation in many ways. I mean, it's interesting that
Speaker 1: you and I get to talk to each other now
Speaker 1: with your preoccupation with the story of the two wolves,
Speaker 1: because really that's the theme of the entire book, is
Speaker 1: the ethics of creativity and what we can do for
Speaker 1: each other. Yeah, what I really loved about the book
Speaker 1: there were a bunch of different things in it that
Speaker 1: really spoke to me, and some of it was exactly
Speaker 1: like you said, sort of the communal aspects of creativity.
Speaker 1: What that means but also the deep interweaving of topic
Speaker 1: that is near and dear to my heart, which is Buddhism,
Speaker 1: along with the subject of creativity. And so I thought
Speaker 1: we'd start by talking about improvisation in general and by
Speaker 1: its nature. We're going to be talking about improvisation in
Speaker 1: a musical sense. Often you're a musician, I'm a musician,
Speaker 1: so there's going to be some of that. I want
Speaker 1: to also make sure that we're talking about improvisation and
Speaker 1: creativity as it comes to leading a good life, because
Speaker 1: that's really what we what we focus on here. So
Speaker 1: as we talk about creativity and all that, I'll keep
Speaker 1: trying to sort of steer us back to general application.
Speaker 1: But let's talk about improvisation. Why it's so important to you.
Speaker 1: It's really been a huge pillar of your career. Yes, well,
Speaker 1: I'm an improvisational violinist and I sort of fell into
Speaker 1: in my twenties becoming an improviser not knowing where I
Speaker 1: was going. And I've been trained as a violinist since
Speaker 1: I was a kid. Music it was not going to
Speaker 1: be my profession, though I had a very deep love
Speaker 1: of music and d a series of events in my
Speaker 1: twenties I became more and more and more interested in
Speaker 1: the creative process across all fields, you know, poetry, art, mechanics, craftsmanship, dance.
Speaker 1: And later in my twenties, when I really had become
Speaker 1: an improvisational violinist and started giving concerts both myself and
Speaker 1: with other musicians and with dancers and theater people and others,
Speaker 1: I got to spend time with you Hooti Manulin, who
Speaker 1: is one of the great violinists of the twentie century,
Speaker 1: and he became a kind of mentor of mine, and
Speaker 1: he told me that I should really write a book
Speaker 1: about improvisation, meaning how do you, as a classically trained
Speaker 1: musician who's always been miilion with music as dots on
Speaker 1: a piece of paper, get to abandon the dots and
Speaker 1: simply play. And that actually became my first book on
Speaker 1: this subject, which was Free Play, which was published in
Speaker 1: And as I started writing about this, I very quickly
Speaker 1: realized that it really is not about music. It's not
Speaker 1: about any particular art form. It's about all art forms.
Speaker 1: In the template for improvisation is simply conversation. You know,
Speaker 1: we all have conversations every day. We don't write down
Speaker 1: what we're going to say before we say it. We
Speaker 1: are lucid, we're interesting, We pause for our partner and
Speaker 1: give our partner a chance to say something. And so
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of rules of interface and improvisational art
Speaker 1: that appears simply in the act of conversation, and even
Speaker 1: very composed art books and so forth. They always begin
Speaker 1: in those moments when you're dudeling on a napkin. You
Speaker 1: know where something comes to you, Where does it come from? Well,
Speaker 1: that's a good question, but it comes to you, and
Speaker 1: you do something with it. And perhaps, if you're doing
Speaker 1: a more composed art form, you will then edit that
Speaker 1: work and maybe edited hundreds of times until it comes
Speaker 1: out right. But the act of editing is also kind
Speaker 1: of improvisational. In order to edit a piece of writing,
Speaker 1: or edit a tape or piece of written music or painting,
Speaker 1: you have to have a certain quality of freedom and ruthlessness.
Speaker 1: You have to have the courage and ruthlessness to cross
Speaker 1: out a line that you really enjoyed writing. So improvisation
Speaker 1: is the root of all human creativity, and really of
Speaker 1: all human interaction. Cooking, cleaning, having conversations, playing with our children,
Speaker 1: playing with our friends. These are all forms of improvisation.
Speaker 1: So if somebody gets up on a stage and plays
Speaker 1: an instrument, that's wonderful, but it's simply an extension of
Speaker 1: what we all do. You use an example in the
Speaker 1: book fairly early on that I thought was really interesting,
Speaker 1: and you basically described merging onto a freeway as a
Speaker 1: type of improvisation. Say a little bit more about that. Well,
Speaker 1: it's a freeway fairly close to where I live here
Speaker 1: in Charlottesville, Virginia, and uh, it's what they call emerge lane,
Speaker 1: meaning that you're driving on the freeway, there's an exit
Speaker 1: and an entrance right next to each other, and they're
Speaker 1: kind of merging into each other. So in principle, it
Speaker 1: would be very easy to have accidents all the time
Speaker 1: because people are coming on and coming off on the
Speaker 1: same spot. But the fact is accidents happened very rarely
Speaker 1: because we are paying attention to each other. And it's
Speaker 1: a really interesting case for me. I mean, traffic is
Speaker 1: a great example of structured improvisation because we're all driving
Speaker 1: cars in different directions for different goals, with our own
Speaker 1: personal lives and our own personal errands, and yet we're
Speaker 1: able to pay attention to each other. Most of the time.
Speaker 1: I mean, accidents happened, but they're fortunately fairly rare, and
Speaker 1: we're able to have courtesy for each other. Now, the
Speaker 1: interesting thing about when I mentioned that episode on the
Speaker 1: freeway in the Art of Is what I was thinking
Speaker 1: there was is that, let's say, if you're an actor
Speaker 1: on stage or a musician on stage, we can improvise
Speaker 1: with each other with no prior plans and no rules
Speaker 1: and nothing written down. But we're also paying exquisitely mindful
Speaker 1: attention to each other, looking at the expression and the
Speaker 1: other person's eyes, and looking at body language and feeling breath,
Speaker 1: and these are all the subtle signals that we're playing
Speaker 1: off as we improvised together. But with traffic, you are
Speaker 1: communicating with another human being through the momentum and acceleration
Speaker 1: and deceleration of these very large, fast moving blunt and objects.
Speaker 1: And yet we still managed to have these subtle communications
Speaker 1: with each other, and we're still able to improvise our
Speaker 1: pathway through the traffic of that freeway. Yeah. I thought
Speaker 1: that was just a really good example of a day
Speaker 1: to day improvisation should we do. I also love tying
Speaker 1: it back to conversation. You say in the book that
Speaker 1: those of us who gravitate towards improvisational music do so
Speaker 1: because we enjoy relating to other human beings as equals.
Speaker 1: That is the core of the experience for me, exactly now.
Speaker 1: In classical music, I spend a lot of time working
Speaker 1: with classical musicians in universities and other settings, and the
Speaker 1: fact is that classically trained musicians are actually incredibly subtle
Speaker 1: and free artists who are able to communicate with each
Speaker 1: other in these wonderful ways. But let's say this set
Speaker 1: up of a concert is that you've got three levels.
Speaker 1: You have the audience which sits there quietly looking up
Speaker 1: at the stage. You have the musicians on stage, who
Speaker 1: are highly trained, highly skilled people who have worked for
Speaker 1: years to be able to present this music. But they
Speaker 1: are being the conduits for the third level, which is
Speaker 1: the often dead composer who's sitting up behind them in
Speaker 1: the ethers. And the composer in this system has access
Speaker 1: to this godlike creative process, and the musicians become the
Speaker 1: vehicles for it. So what interests me about improvisational music
Speaker 1: is that those levels collapse into one, and that we're
Speaker 1: all together in this depending on each other. You know,
Speaker 1: there's no score, there's no plan. It is listening. You know.
Speaker 1: If you can't have a score and a plan and
Speaker 1: a set of instructions or a syllabus, what you have
Speaker 1: is listening to each other, and that means respecting each other.
Speaker 1: So improvisation in that sense of musicians or other artists
Speaker 1: working together is a kind of template for democracy. It's
Speaker 1: a kind of template for people listening to each other,
Speaker 1: paying attention, engaging in give and take, and also stepping
Speaker 1: out of each other's way. You know, even in a
Speaker 1: extremely composed situation where the drink courget is playing Beethoven,
Speaker 1: chamber musicians know that if you can't hear what your
Speaker 1: partner is playing, then you're playing too loud. And just
Speaker 1: like conversation, right, conversation works when we relate to each
Speaker 1: other as equals. When we don't, we're not really having conversation.
Speaker 1: Were we are talking at each other? Right? Okay? And
Speaker 1: Matt brings us back to your two wolves and to
Speaker 1: the ethical question that we discussed at the beginning, Because
Speaker 1: the essence of the improvisational situation is this business of
Speaker 1: partnership or democracy or whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 1: If one partner chooses to dominate the scene, or to
Speaker 1: simply be clever or to appear talented, then that kind
Speaker 1: of breaks the spell. And so that ethical dimension of
Speaker 1: improvisation is present in all of our daily encounters. And
Speaker 1: we've all experienced these things, you know, We've all experienced
Speaker 1: a conversation with a friend where you suddenly realize, oh,
Speaker 1: I just stepped on you. You know, you wanted to
Speaker 1: say something that was really important and I just ignored
Speaker 1: it and I stepped on you, you know. And for
Speaker 1: people to have the honesty to realize that means that
Speaker 1: there's a basis for the friendship, and that's part of
Speaker 1: provisational teaching. Also, you mentioned that improvising was an interest
Speaker 1: of yours, and then as you begin to study Buddhism,
Speaker 1: you begin to get interested in the other imps, impermanence
Speaker 1: and imperfection and how those are all related. Yes, well,
Speaker 1: that's a huge theme of the book, of course, because um,
Speaker 1: I mean, the fundamental teachings of Buddhism are about impermanence.
Speaker 1: They're about the impermanence. I'm sitting here and talking to
Speaker 1: you through a computer, and we're now listening to a
Speaker 1: telephone ringing in the background. And if this were another
Speaker 1: kind of conversation, we would consider that telephone to be
Speaker 1: a disturbance or noise that we want to get rid of.
Speaker 1: But in the improvisational situation and the art of is
Speaker 1: the telephone is ringing, and that's part of the environment.
Speaker 1: And if you're a musician, that's a sound, and that's
Speaker 1: the sound that you can react to and interact with.
Speaker 1: And so nothing is outside the scope of your creativity. Okay.
Speaker 1: In Buddhist teaching and practice, we're aware of the interconnectedness,
Speaker 1: the interdependence of ourselves with all beings and all things.
Speaker 1: So the telephone that just rang, or the computer that's
Speaker 1: mediating there is a computer in front of me and
Speaker 1: another computer in front of you, and we both have
Speaker 1: microphones and cables and all that stuff. Okay, So those
Speaker 1: objects from a certain point of view seemed to be
Speaker 1: just solid objects. But the aluminum in the computer came
Speaker 1: from somewhere. It was mined from somewhere. The plastic came
Speaker 1: from somewhere. You know, you can try to trace the
Speaker 1: plastic all the way back to the trees of the
Speaker 1: dinosaur age. The decayed and fell into swamps and gradually
Speaker 1: became petroleum and so forth. So there's a long story
Speaker 1: to that plastic. The circuit boards inside the computer and
Speaker 1: inside the microphone were constructed not only using copper that
Speaker 1: was mined from somewhere, they were constructed using various rare
Speaker 1: earth elements that were mined, possibly by child labor in Africa,
Speaker 1: and processed in China and shipped over here to the
Speaker 1: United States. So actually, this solid computer, the it's in
Speaker 1: front of me, contains a million stories. It contains infinitely
Speaker 1: many stories, biology, physics, chemistry, history, labor relations, the family
Speaker 1: relations of the people whose work all went into the
Speaker 1: plastic and the aluminum and the wiring and so forth.
Speaker 1: So Buddhism talks about emptiness of inherent existence. So when
Speaker 1: Western people hear the word emptiness, we get all freaked
Speaker 1: out because we think that it talks it's some kind
Speaker 1: of nihilism or saying things don't exist. But what it's
Speaker 1: really saying is that this computer which I can tap
Speaker 1: on and it makes a noise and it's hard, so
Speaker 1: it's there. But this computer is full of these millions
Speaker 1: of many stories. The only thing that's empty of is
Speaker 1: in existence and inherent existence all by itself. And similarly,
Speaker 1: you and I, we are not existing as individuals bounded
Speaker 1: by a skin, even though that's part of our story.
Speaker 1: We're interdependent with a very very very large world and
Speaker 1: a vast amount of stories that went into making us
Speaker 1: and will die on the computer, will disappear into a
Speaker 1: garbage heap somewhere, and all of this will recycle. So
Speaker 1: when you play a piece of music that lasts for
Speaker 1: five minutes and that didn't exist five minutes ago, sometimes
Speaker 1: when people ask me to define improvisation, I say, I
Speaker 1: play music that's less than five minutes old. So you're
Speaker 1: exercising impermanence, and you're inviting anybody who hears you play
Speaker 1: to participate in that impermanence. Now, when the phone rang
Speaker 1: a few minutes ago, where you had a phone ring
Speaker 1: earlier in our conversation, again, in another kind of context,
Speaker 1: that would be snipped out of the recording because it's
Speaker 1: noise or a disturbance or something like that. Chris is
Speaker 1: going to try, well, good luck, because it's now, it's
Speaker 1: now the subject of our conversation. That's got to be
Speaker 1: in there. He's pretty good at that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: God bless him. But so that's imperfection. The telephone ringing
Speaker 1: is an imperfection. Okay, Now, if you and I are
Speaker 1: having a conversation and we're really juicy and into it,
Speaker 1: and then there's the imperfection of a phone ringing or
Speaker 1: a truck driving by or some kind of noise, and
Speaker 1: you say, oh, can you take that again? Well, you
Speaker 1: can't take it again. You can't take it again because
Speaker 1: it's never the same. So to participate in the three
Speaker 1: amps of improvising, impermanence, and imperfection means living in the
Speaker 1: world where the phone is bringing living in the world
Speaker 1: where the trucks are driving by and disturbing our conversation.
Speaker 1: Living in the world where we understand that global warming
Speaker 1: is taking place and is going to disrupt our civilization.
Speaker 1: And that's why I call the book the art of is.
Speaker 1: You say at one point in the book, interruption means
Speaker 1: having your concentration spoiled. But nothing can spoil your concentration
Speaker 1: if every change that comes into your sensorium is part
Speaker 1: of the game. Yes, yes, you make it all part
Speaker 1: of what we do. I want to circle back just
Speaker 1: a little bit to the nature of altruism and of
Speaker 1: viewing each other as equals because you do something interesting
Speaker 1: in the book One of the things that most people
Speaker 1: probably know about improvisation, if they know about improv theater,
Speaker 1: is they've probably heard the phrase yes and right. Your
Speaker 1: partner says something and you just go yes and But
Speaker 1: you use a term in the book and I don't
Speaker 1: know if you were borrowing it from somebody else, I
Speaker 1: don't remember, but you talked about reframing that under the
Speaker 1: idea of chivalry, and I thought that was really fascinating.
Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about that. Sure, well, it
Speaker 1: was actually Keith Johnston. He was a British actor and
Speaker 1: director who in the nineteen fifties was director of the
Speaker 1: big West End Theaters in London, and then he moved
Speaker 1: to Calgary, Alberta and founded the Loose Moose Improvisational Theater
Speaker 1: here and he's been doing theater sports ever since, which
Speaker 1: is improvisational theater played as a competitive sport, started between
Speaker 1: Canadian cities and it's now all over the world. And
Speaker 1: he used chivalry. It was actually the yes and meme
Speaker 1: and improvisational theater really started from his teaching. But he
Speaker 1: uses the word chivalry, which I like because it's a
Speaker 1: kind of old fashioned word yes and has become a
Speaker 1: little bit overused now and a little bit too much
Speaker 1: of a slogan, even though what it represents is really
Speaker 1: really important. Uh. And I kind of like the idea
Speaker 1: of going back to formally obsolete words that can be
Speaker 1: shined up and reused again since they've been out of
Speaker 1: style for a while. In fact, in the place in
Speaker 1: the book where I talk about chivalry, I also bring
Speaker 1: up the man named dil Close in Chicago, and he
Speaker 1: trained Bill Murray and you know half the actors that
Speaker 1: you can think of now who are out in the world,
Speaker 1: and Dell Close to his students that your job as
Speaker 1: an improviser is not to come up with a clever line.
Speaker 1: Your job as an improviser is to make your partners
Speaker 1: shitty line sound good. Yeah. My favorite improvisational partner is Chris,
Speaker 1: who's also the editor, and that's his job is to
Speaker 1: make my terrible lines. Although we play music together too,
Speaker 1: and it's actually he serves the same purpose. He makes
Speaker 1: my stuff sound great. Yeah. Yeah, I love that idea
Speaker 1: of sort of just tying it back again to it's
Speaker 1: about this relationship. What you were just saying a couple
Speaker 1: of minutes agos we were talking about emptiness, we kind
Speaker 1: of moved on pretty quickly from a really deep topic
Speaker 1: that we may circle back to and is one of
Speaker 1: my favorite topics. But even that emptiness, what we're talking
Speaker 1: about his relationship, and what we're talking about is context.
Speaker 1: My a mentor in this life was the anthropologist and
Speaker 1: philosopher biologist Gregory Bateson, who died in and context was
Speaker 1: perhaps the most important word in Gregory's work. Behavioral scientists, psychologists, sociologists,
Speaker 1: all those people used to talk about something called behavior
Speaker 1: as though you could watch a rat running around in
Speaker 1: a maze and quantify its learning curves and so forth,
Speaker 1: and Gregory really discovered how to make it clear that
Speaker 1: context is the one thing that's really important there in learning,
Speaker 1: you know, so that even at the level of the
Speaker 1: rat and the learning experiment, you know, the rat may
Speaker 1: learn that it gets an electric shock by turning left
Speaker 1: in the maze. That may stop the rat from turning left,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't stop the rat from exploring, because exploration
Speaker 1: is the context, it's not the behavior. One of the
Speaker 1: things that was really really important in my young life
Speaker 1: when I was a college student and later I guess
Speaker 1: through now is play is understanding what play is. And
Speaker 1: this was actually the thing that brought me together with
Speaker 1: Gregory first, because he had written a great deal about play.
Speaker 1: Play isn't a game. Play isn't what you do, it's
Speaker 1: how you do it. It's the context. You know. The
Speaker 1: dog comes up to you with his mouth open and
Speaker 1: its teeth showing, but his tail is wagging, and so
Speaker 1: you give him your hand to put in his mouth
Speaker 1: because you know he's play. You know. So the tail
Speaker 1: is classifying. The tail is setting of the context for
Speaker 1: the mouth, you know. And we have all these kinds
Speaker 1: of subtle things that are context markers for the message.
Speaker 1: This is play. Okay. People are now really interested in
Speaker 1: computer technology and so called artificial intelligence, because computers can
Speaker 1: be programmed to beat you or me in chess, even
Speaker 1: if we were really fantastic chess players. But a computer
Speaker 1: can be programmed with the rules of chess and to
Speaker 1: perform millions of moves per second and work out how
Speaker 1: to beat you or me. But a computer can't play chess.
Speaker 1: Because a computer can't play, a computer can't take pleasure.
Speaker 1: If you and I are playing chess and you make
Speaker 1: a really clever move that really screws me up, I
Speaker 1: can enjoy your move because we're playing. So play is
Speaker 1: a huge part of this. You know, you play music,
Speaker 1: you play plays in the theater, you play with paints
Speaker 1: when you're painting. But would it be safe to say
Speaker 1: that in that case that you can play music because
Speaker 1: that spirit of play, it does not get brought in automatically.
Speaker 1: That's correct, okay. You know, Picasso and other artists have
Speaker 1: talked about how as an adult artist you have to
Speaker 1: recover what you lost as a child. Now, if you're
Speaker 1: a child who draws really well, and then you go
Speaker 1: to art school and then you learn how the masters
Speaker 1: did it, and then you learn what your teachers are
Speaker 1: telling you, it's possible to lose some of that pleasure
Speaker 1: you had of mucking around with paints and getting dirty,
Speaker 1: and some of that loss of pleasure may be really
Speaker 1: worthwhile because you're learning some rules of the game, and
Speaker 1: you're learning some techniques that can be really great to know.
Speaker 1: But then once you know those techniques, you have to
Speaker 1: be able to drop that and get back to being
Speaker 1: a child and playing with some innocence again. But you're
Speaker 1: playing with innocence and experience. The artists who really move
Speaker 1: us are playing with their experience and our experience of
Speaker 1: having suffered, of having lost our innocence, of having had
Speaker 1: hard things happened to us in our life. But through
Speaker 1: images and words and music and architecture and storytelling, myth
Speaker 1: and dream and other forms, we begin to play with
Speaker 1: those stories again. So there's this balancing teeter totter that's
Speaker 1: always going on between innocence and experience, between freedom and form,
Speaker 1: between discipline and freedom. You know, your freedom doesn't do
Speaker 1: you much good if you don't also have some discipline
Speaker 1: and also have some technique, And your technique doesn't do
Speaker 1: you much good unless you also have some freedom. So
Speaker 1: we're constantly wiggling around over that balance point. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: say this is slightly different, but but encapsulates it a
Speaker 1: little bit. Which is art is the act of balancing,
Speaker 1: knowing what to prepare, what to leave to the moment,
Speaker 1: and the wisdom to know the difference. You know, and
Speaker 1: I think all those things you just said, those two opposites.
Speaker 1: It's always sort of knowing at which time do we
Speaker 1: need more of this or more of that, and being
Speaker 1: able to move freely between them is so critical. I
Speaker 1: teach this program called Spiritual Habits, and in it, one
Speaker 1: of the principles is the middle way right, which doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily mean you just always pick the average right. You
Speaker 1: may have to pull from both sides, both extremes. But
Speaker 1: but if you end up stuck on one side or
Speaker 1: the other, then the thing either becomes sort of dead
Speaker 1: or it just spins out of control. Right, Well, we're
Speaker 1: both sitting in chairs at the moment talking to each other.
Speaker 1: And sitting in a chair means, you know, if I
Speaker 1: telt slightly over to the right, then my muscles on
Speaker 1: the left know how to pull me back up. And
Speaker 1: if I did, if I then told slightly to the left,
Speaker 1: my muscles on the right no how to pick me up.
Speaker 1: And we're actually doing this constantly, millisecond by milliseconds. So
Speaker 1: the middle way of just sitting up straight in a
Speaker 1: chair is actually a million movements, you know. And again
Speaker 1: back to the example of driving. If you're holding the
Speaker 1: steering wheel and driving forward, you're actually constantly wiggling the
Speaker 1: steering wheel back and forth a little bit, because you're
Speaker 1: always a little bit to the right and now correct
Speaker 1: to the left, a little bit to the left, and
Speaker 1: now correct to the right. So we're steering, okay, And
Speaker 1: steering means a constant dynamic change and balancing act. Now,
Speaker 1: the thing that we don't do when we're driving is
Speaker 1: we don't, you know, slap yourself in the face and say,
Speaker 1: oh damn it, I was too far to the right.
Speaker 1: Oh damn it, I was too far to the left,
Speaker 1: you know, because you'd kill yourself in five seconds if
Speaker 1: you did that. You just accept the balance and the
Speaker 1: constant mistakes. The great twelfth century zen master Dogan said,
Speaker 1: life is one continuous mistake. I do a lot of
Speaker 1: one on one coaching with people, and we're talking about
Speaker 1: maintaining in a lot of cases of behavior for a
Speaker 1: long period of time. I want exercise to become part
Speaker 1: of my life, right. I always want to do it.
Speaker 1: And I always talk about the fact that like we're
Speaker 1: always getting off track, something always comes up. We always
Speaker 1: get off track. It's about how quickly do we get
Speaker 1: back on track. How do we sort of, like you said,
Speaker 1: sort of just smooth that out. And you had a
Speaker 1: line in the book I was headed to, which is
Speaker 1: that self correction is a lot easier without the added
Speaker 1: burden of guilty. And what I see happen in people
Speaker 1: all lot is we get off track and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden the voice starts about, oh, well, I knew
Speaker 1: I couldn't stick with it. I'm no good and and
Speaker 1: I always just say the most important thing is just
Speaker 1: get back on track with the minimum amount of drama,
Speaker 1: like drop all that noise, because that noise just drags
Speaker 1: us further off and just back. Only you use that
Speaker 1: line self correction is easier without the burden of guilt.
Speaker 1: When you were talking about what's the gentleman's name, wonder,
Speaker 1: what's his first name? L Wonder? Yeah, he says positive feedback.
Speaker 1: Only tell me a little bit about that, so I'll wonder.
Speaker 1: He's an old, old old friend of mine from Berkeley.
Speaker 1: That is, he's from New York. We knew each other
Speaker 1: when we both lived in Berkeley. He now lives in Australia.
Speaker 1: I now live in Charlotte's Field, Virginia. He was an
Speaker 1: extraordinary dancer and became a kind of guru of dance,
Speaker 1: theater improvisation, movement improvisation, creating theater with body and voice.
Speaker 1: So he talks about this wonderful example of the one
Speaker 1: year old child who's just learning to walk first day.
Speaker 1: And I was there with both of my sons when
Speaker 1: they were one year old. And did this. And we've
Speaker 1: all been with children are loved ones at this moment.
Speaker 1: So what does the kid do when he's walking? The
Speaker 1: kid is actually you know, if he's walking from here
Speaker 1: to there across a distance of six ft, he or
Speaker 1: she is falling down ten times. You know, he or
Speaker 1: she is falling down, getting up, falling down, getting up
Speaker 1: and makes it across the six ft distance. And what
Speaker 1: do the people around this child do. They're applauding and
Speaker 1: just screaming with delight and how wonderful this is. They
Speaker 1: aren't saying, now and insert the child's name. Um, next
Speaker 1: time you walk, if you lift your knees higher and
Speaker 1: hold your back straight, or you'll walk even better. They
Speaker 1: aren't saying that because they know when the child falls down,
Speaker 1: the child knows that they fell down. You know, they
Speaker 1: don't need us to tell them that they fell down.
Speaker 1: They just thrive on the approbation of our congratulating them
Speaker 1: and loving them unconditionally. And you know, similarly, when musicians
Speaker 1: play a tone that's out of tune, whatever that means
Speaker 1: in that particular context, they know it. You know, they
Speaker 1: don't need a teacher to wrap them on the fingers
Speaker 1: and say no no, No, What they do need is
Speaker 1: a teacher who will identify what was interesting about that
Speaker 1: performance and help them amplify that. And the thing is,
Speaker 1: when people fall down and make mistakes, we know it,
Speaker 1: you know, and we usually do a pretty good job
Speaker 1: of kicking ourselves. We don't need the teacher to kick
Speaker 1: us two. We just need the teacher to be a witness.
Speaker 1: You know. That doesn't mean you don't pretend that the
Speaker 1: person didn't make a mistake. It doesn't mean that you're
Speaker 1: sort of glossing over and everything is fine, But you're
Speaker 1: trusting that the person knows what happened and that they
Speaker 1: have the ability to correct themselves, just as our muscles
Speaker 1: have the ability to pull us back up when we
Speaker 1: lean over. The mistake doesn't become the focus of everything.
Speaker 1: There are other things that can be focused on. And
Speaker 1: you know, this is so important in how we parent,
Speaker 1: how we teach all that, but it's also so important
Speaker 1: and how we work with it ourselves, because we've internalized
Speaker 1: so many of those voices so well now, right, And
Speaker 1: I just loved that line. Self correction is a lot
Speaker 1: easier without the burden of guilt, right, because guilt and
Speaker 1: recrimination and the self criticism. It shuts down our ability
Speaker 1: to learn, you know, and that's what we need if
Speaker 1: we're going to improve anything. We have to be able
Speaker 1: to learn. That's the entire game. When harshness gets introduced
Speaker 1: into the equation, whether from ourselves or others, are learning
Speaker 1: is impeded. Let's switch now and talk back again to
Speaker 1: um your mentor Bates and something that he was fond
Speaker 1: of saying that he got from another friend of his,
Speaker 1: Anatole Holt, which is stamp out nouns. I love this.
Speaker 1: Let's let's talk about the idea stamp out nouns. Yes,
Speaker 1: Gregory was very fond of saying that, and it's almost
Speaker 1: a mantra that we can remember and use all the time.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean, I mean you and I are having
Speaker 1: a conversation in English, not Navajo or some other language.
Speaker 1: And English and most Western languages are based on lots
Speaker 1: of nouns, and we can use them and that's fine,
Speaker 1: but we also have to not take them too seriously.
Speaker 1: So it's really before when we talked about emptiness and impermanence,
Speaker 1: we talked about this solid object, the computer that's sitting
Speaker 1: in front of me, and how it's really a network
Speaker 1: of stories, and it's a network of change, and it's
Speaker 1: just temporarily a solid object. So we say the noun computer,
Speaker 1: and we treat it as a thing, and it temporarily
Speaker 1: certainly is thing. But by using names, we kind of
Speaker 1: stamp onto our minds the idea of permanence, and you know,
Speaker 1: not just of permanence, but the idea that we don't
Speaker 1: have to explore this thing any further. So if I
Speaker 1: look at the computer and I say it's a computer,
Speaker 1: and I can say what brand it is and something else,
Speaker 1: I can then move on. My eyes can gloss over it,
Speaker 1: and they might not see the interesting whatever that I
Speaker 1: could learn from investigating the computer more deeply. So, in
Speaker 1: a sense, names often are They don't have to be,
Speaker 1: but they very very often are a way of stopping investigation.
Speaker 1: And I to talk about improvisation as a tool for
Speaker 1: investigating reality. And certainly what we acquire in art making
Speaker 1: or in looking at art or enjoying art is taking
Speaker 1: things or taking patterns or sounds that are used as
Speaker 1: seeing and hearing and investigating them more deeply. So to
Speaker 1: use names as a way to stop investigation is kind
Speaker 1: of an unfortunate development that flows out of the blessing
Speaker 1: of language that we have, and you know, our wonderful
Speaker 1: capacity to name things and understand them. So we have
Speaker 1: to take our understandings as provisional and as contingent and temporary.
Speaker 1: You tell a story in the book you reference Ronald Reagan,
Speaker 1: when he was writing for governor of California, he famously said,
Speaker 1: if you've seen one redwood tree, you've seen them all.
Speaker 1: And you go on, well, I'll just let you take
Speaker 1: it from there, because I thought this was a great
Speaker 1: example of the points that we've been talking about here. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Well the idea, of course, what Reagan was really doing
Speaker 1: was trying to indemnify his industrialist friends and contributors for
Speaker 1: chopping down redwood forests. Okay, so he said, well, if
Speaker 1: you see one tree, you've seen them all, you know,
Speaker 1: and that means it's just a name. One redwood tree
Speaker 1: is the same as another. But of course we all know,
Speaker 1: all of us who have been to the Redwoods or
Speaker 1: to any forest of any kind, knows that every tree
Speaker 1: is different from every other tree, and there's something to
Speaker 1: learn from the community of organisms, that that tree is
Speaker 1: a story for, you know, and the intercommunication of that
Speaker 1: tree with the rest of creation. Of course, the reduction
Speaker 1: to absurdity, as they say in mathematics, of cutting down
Speaker 1: all the redwood trees so that we can temporarily have
Speaker 1: some more profits for a few companies, is that the
Speaker 1: ecology gets destroyed and the other organisms whose lives are
Speaker 1: linked to those trees get destroyed, and there's a cascade
Speaker 1: of destruction which ultimately, of course comes back on us,
Speaker 1: as we're seeing in the catastrophic fires in California and
Speaker 1: Australia and Spain and Portugal last year and Siberia, you know,
Speaker 1: all over the world. So to say that you know
Speaker 1: what something is because you know its name, which is
Speaker 1: really what Ronald Reagan was saying, falsifies reality and it
Speaker 1: impoverishes reality. It leads to an impoverished world. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: love it you say that from his limited point of view,
Speaker 1: he was right because as soon as you put the
Speaker 1: label tree on a natural phenomenon, you begin to see
Speaker 1: the name and not the thing itself, you know. And
Speaker 1: so that's our challenge is to be able to see
Speaker 1: past the labels that we've put on things. I've been
Speaker 1: very into zen study and practice, and I love, you know,
Speaker 1: form is emptiness. Emptiness is form right, it's both these things.
Speaker 1: We talked about the computer and it's this collection of
Speaker 1: stories and it's an object sitting on my desk that
Speaker 1: performs a certain function, you know, And so labels can
Speaker 1: be enormously useful in our brain can use these things like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I don't have to investigate everything that's around me all
Speaker 1: the time, or I would just implode. But you've got
Speaker 1: to be able to move between these things. You've gotta
Speaker 1: be able to move between form an emptiness emptiness in
Speaker 1: form We've got to be able to move between. We
Speaker 1: see the label, and that's functional, and how do we
Speaker 1: not see the label so we can get back to
Speaker 1: the freshness of seeing the thing itself exactly put your
Speaker 1: finger right on it and others. In text, the sander
Speaker 1: Kite talks about form an emptiness like the foot before
Speaker 1: and the foot behind walking. Those two feet are constantly
Speaker 1: changing places and propelling each other forward, and you need
Speaker 1: both views, you know, you need to be able to
Speaker 1: Going back to the example of driving in traffic, you
Speaker 1: need to be able to focus on a certain set
Speaker 1: of things when you're driving so that you can drive safely,
Speaker 1: which means seeing things as things and seeing a truck
Speaker 1: as a truck. But you also need in your life
Speaker 1: to be able to widen your focus and see the
Speaker 1: connections between the truck and a million other things, you know,
Speaker 1: what they called the ten thousand Things and nooism, you know,
Speaker 1: So you need both. You know, just as in any
Speaker 1: music or any other art form, you need form and
Speaker 1: you need freedom. And even if you're doing a new
Speaker 1: kind of music that breaks all the former rules, you're
Speaker 1: still doing something and it's going to have some rules,
Speaker 1: you know, the rules that you make up or the
Speaker 1: rules that come from the structure of your body. So
Speaker 1: we're constantly vibrating between form and freedom, form and freedom.
Speaker 1: So balance is really that could have been another title
Speaker 1: of the book. Yeah, I'm gonna read another section from
Speaker 1: your book, and it's it's going to cause me to
Speaker 1: do a couple of terrible pronunciations because I always get
Speaker 1: them wrong. But it's Heraclitus and Easiastices. Did I get
Speaker 1: that right? Heri Clydas, Yeah, well, Heracleidas, it could be
Speaker 1: who knows. I never met him, So let's say Heracleidas
Speaker 1: if you want. And Ecclesiastes. I'm amazed I got Eclesiastes,
Speaker 1: because I always so here it is, this is a
Speaker 1: great little section. Ecclesiastes said there's nothing new under the sun,
Speaker 1: that every event is part of cycles that have repeated forever.
Speaker 1: Heracleidas said, you can't step in the same river twice.
Speaker 1: Everything changes, nothing repeats. Both were right. Rub those two
Speaker 1: perspectives together, like rubbing your hands together. Pattern and change
Speaker 1: move as a pair, like the foot before and the
Speaker 1: foot behind in walking, and you just reference that foot
Speaker 1: before and behind. But I love how in this section
Speaker 1: you're talking about with improvisation. Yes there's something new, but
Speaker 1: there's always the element of the old too. You've got both,
Speaker 1: yes exactly. You mentioned that you know when you play
Speaker 1: music it sort of sounds like you, and that if
Speaker 1: we look at artists like Jane Austen or James Joyce
Speaker 1: or John Lennon or Georgia O'Keeffe, you say, any creative
Speaker 1: person we can think of, no matter how prolific, had
Speaker 1: five or six elements that recombine and interplay in their
Speaker 1: work and by which we know them exactly. We may
Speaker 1: be doing new improvised art or avant garde art or
Speaker 1: whatever you want to call it, but you don't have
Speaker 1: to be afraid of sounding old, because that which is
Speaker 1: old has influenced you. You know, I often talk about
Speaker 1: being the origin. You know, the word original is often
Speaker 1: mistaken to mean doing something that's all new, that nobody
Speaker 1: else has ever thought of in the entire history of
Speaker 1: the world. But that isn't it. Original means you are
Speaker 1: the origin. So of course we all took geometry in school,
Speaker 1: and you know, here on your body there's the X
Speaker 1: axis and the y axis and they crossed at the origin.
Speaker 1: And for you, as a human being, the origin is
Speaker 1: right here in your body. And if you have read
Speaker 1: Jane Austen and Virginia Wolf, if you've read Charles Bukowski,
Speaker 1: whatever avant garde poet and you're interested in, if you've
Speaker 1: read bo Wolf, there's a woman who's I'm forgetting her name.
Speaker 1: I just started the book. There's a wonderful new translation
Speaker 1: of Bao Wolf that just came out that's really hip
Speaker 1: and wonderful. Everything that you've read is in you. Everything
Speaker 1: that you didn't like is in you. Books that you
Speaker 1: didn't like, music that you didn't like, you've still imbibed them,
Speaker 1: and you had a bad reaction to them. And you
Speaker 1: criticize them. You know, read an article by somebody that
Speaker 1: you disagree with, and you walk around the street inwardly
Speaker 1: reciting your disagreements with that person. Well, that is part
Speaker 1: of you now. So when you have adjusted all those
Speaker 1: influences that they're now in your belly, what comes from
Speaker 1: you is original because you are the origin, including everything
Speaker 1: that you've learned, everything that you've absorbed, all the skills
Speaker 1: you have. So improvising doesn't mean doing something brand new
Speaker 1: that's never been done before. It means doing something that's
Speaker 1: really entirely from you, and really entirely from your interactions
Speaker 1: with your partners, all of whom have the same or
Speaker 1: somewhat different relationships to history and culture and all the
Speaker 1: things that they've absorbed. So of course five thousand year
Speaker 1: old stuff is going to appear in your improvisations, right right, Well,
Speaker 1: I think that is a wonderful place for us to
Speaker 1: wrap up. You and I are going to talk a
Speaker 1: little bit more in the post show conversation about being
Speaker 1: stuck or sticky, how we move out of being stuck,
Speaker 1: and then we're also gonna talk a little bit more
Speaker 1: about this idea of what it means to live life
Speaker 1: as a verb or to stamp out nouns. What that
Speaker 1: means more in our in our lives and listeners. If
Speaker 1: you're interested in the post show conversation, you can get
Speaker 1: access to all the post show conversation add free episodes,
Speaker 1: a weekly episode I Do call to teaching, a song
Speaker 1: and a poem, and lots of other great things by
Speaker 1: going to One You Feed dot net slash joint. Stephen,
Speaker 1: thank you so much. This has been a really enjoyable
Speaker 1: conversation and I really enjoyed the book a lot. Also,
Speaker 1: thank you so much. It's been a pleasure for me.
Speaker 1: If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
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